Exposed (7 page)

The newsreader ended the broadcast just as he was driving past Rotebro, and he caught a glimpse of a large shopping centre down to his right. The minister waited for the shrill electric guitar that was the theme tune for
Studio Six
, but to his surprise it didn’t come. Instead the announcer introduced yet another programme presented by hysterical youngsters. Shit, of course, it was Saturday.
Studio Six
was only on Monday to Friday. Annoyed, he switched the radio off. At that moment his mobile phone rang. To judge by the sound, it was somewhere at the bottom of one of the cases on the back seat. He swore loudly and stuck his right arm through the gap between the seats. As the car wove erratically along the edge of the lane, he pushed his suitcase aside and got hold of the little overnight bag. A brand-new silver Mercedes honked angrily at him as it drove past.

‘Capitalist pig,’ the minister muttered.

He emptied the bag onto the passenger seat and found his mobile.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Hello, it’s Karina.’

His press secretary.

‘Where are you?’ she asked.

‘What do you want?’ he countered.

‘Svenska Dagbladet
want to know if this latest crisis in the Middle East peace talks poses any threat to the delivery of Saab fighter planes to Israel.’

‘They’re just fishing,’ the minister said. ‘We haven’t signed any contracts to deliver JAS fighters to Israel.’

‘That wasn’t what they meant,’ his press secretary said. ‘They want to know if the negotiations are under threat.’

‘The government doesn’t comment on any potential negotiations regarding the purchase of Swedish arms or military aircraft. There are often a number of protracted negotiations underway with a number of interested parties, and in only a relatively small number of cases do these result in substantial deals. So there is definitely no threat to any deliveries in this instance, because none were due to take place, as far as I am aware, anyway.’

The press secretary was making notes in silence.

‘Okay,’ she said when she was finished. ‘Have I got this right: the answer is no. No deliveries are threatened, because no contract has been signed.’

The minister rubbed his tired brow.

‘No, Karina,’ he said, ‘that’s not what I said at all. I certainly didn’t give no as the answer. It’s unanswerable. Because no deliveries are planned, they can’t be under threat. Saying no to the question means implicitly that some sort of delivery will be made.’

He could hear Karina’s breathing down the phone.

‘Maybe you should talk to the reporter yourself,’ she said.

Bloody hell, he really ought to give this useless woman the sack! She was utterly and completely incompetent.

‘No, Karina,’ he said. ‘It’s your responsibility to formulate an answer in such a way that my point is conveyed and the statement correct. What else do you think we’re paying you for?’

He ended the call before she had a chance to reply. Just to make sure, he switched the phone off and tossed it back in the bag.

The silence was deafening. Gradually those earlier noises crept back into the car, the whistling window, the hot tarmac, the air-conditioning. Annoyed, he pulled open the top two buttons of his shirt and switched on the radio again. He really didn’t want to listen to fake phone-calls on P3, and clicked at random to get one of the pre-programmed stations. He got Radio Rix, where an old hit from his youth was playing. The song triggered some sort of memory, but he couldn’t identify exactly what it was. Probably a girl. He resisted the urge to turn the radio off again. Anything was better than those repetitive noises.

It was going to be a long night.

The editorial team rolled in just before seven with the usual noise. Their boss, Jansson, had settled in opposite Spike at the newsdesk. Annika and Berit had been down to the staff canteen, known generally as ‘The Seven Rats’, where they had had beef stew.

The combination of the heavy food and the men’s loud laughter gave her stomach cramp. She hadn’t got anywhere. She hadn’t got hold of the junkie informant. The press spokesman was a miracle of affability and patience, but he didn’t know anything. She had spoken to him three times that afternoon. He didn’t know who the woman was, or where and how she died, and he didn’t know when he would find out. It was making Annika nervous and was probably contributing to her cramp.

She had to come up with a portrait of the woman; otherwise she’d lose her chance of the front cover.

‘Calm down,’ Berit said. ‘We’ll make it, just you see. And tomorrow’s another day. If we don’t have her name, then neither does anyone else.’

The main television news at 7.30 started with the crisis in the Middle East, and the US president’s appeal for new talks. The story seemed to go on for ever, and involved a satellite discussion with their Washington
correspondent. Long speeches in standard-issue official Swedish were illustrated by archive footage of the intifada.

Then the forest fires on Gotland, precisely the same order of stories as on the radio earlier. The aerial footage was undeniably striking. They spoke to the head of the team combating the fires, a fireman from Visby. Then there was some film of an improvised press conference, and Annika couldn’t help smiling when she saw Anne Snapphane forcing her way through to the front, holding her recorder in front of her. The item concluded with an anxious farmer, and Annika thought she recognized his voice from the radio.

After the fire there wasn’t much news to report. There was a feeble attempt at a story about the election campaign starting early. Annika had been under the impression that it had started six months ago. The Prime Minister, a Social Democrat, was shown walking hand in hand with his wife across the main square of his hometown in Södermanland, waving to the people around him. Annika smiled when she saw her old workplace flash past in the background. The Prime Minister made a brief statement about the article his former party secretary had written on the IB affair.

‘I don’t think this is a story we want to drag around with us,’ he said tiredly. ‘We need to get to the bottom of it, once and for all. If we conclude that an official inquiry is what’s needed, then that’s what we’ll do.’

Then they played a pre-recorded piece, by Swedish Television’s Russian correspondent, an extremely talented reporter. He had been to the Caucasus to report on one of those interminable bloody conflicts that had blown up in the old Soviet republics.

This is the good thing about the news drought in the
summer, Annika thought. You get to see a load of things on the news that otherwise never get covered.

There was an interview with the ageing president of the republic. To the reporter’s astonishment, he spoke Swedish.

‘I was posted to the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm between 1970 and 1973,’ he said in a strong accent.

‘Brilliant!’ Annika said in amazement.

The president was extremely concerned. Russia was supplying the rebels with weapons and ammunition, while he was suffering the effects of the UN arms embargo that had been imposed on his country. He had been the subject of repeated assassination attempts, and had a serious heart condition.

‘My country is suffering,’ he said in Swedish, staring into the camera. ‘Children are dying. This is not justice.’

God, some people have a terrible time, Annika thought as she went to get a cup of coffee. When she got back a short sequence of domestic news was running. A car accident in Enköping. The body of a young woman had been found in Kronoberg Park in Stockholm. The threat of a strike by air-traffic controllers had been averted now that the union had accepted the mediators’ final offer. The stories were quickly rattled through, as a commentary to some fairly generic images. A television cameraman had evidently been out to Kungsholmen, because they showed a few seconds of blue and white tape fluttering in the breeze in front of the thick greenery of the park. And that was it.

Annika sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy.

Patricia was freezing. She wrapped her arms around her chest and pulled her legs up onto the seat. The air-conditioning was blowing at floor level, bringing with it exhaust fumes and pollen. She sneezed.

‘Are you getting a cold?’ the man in the front seat asked. He was quite good-looking, but he was wearing a really hideous shirt. No style at all. But she liked older men, they weren’t usually so pushy.

‘No,’ she said crossly, ‘hay fever.’

‘We’re almost there,’ he said.

In the driver’s seat next to him sat a real bitch, one of those female police officers who thought she had to be tougher than all the men to get any respect. After greeting Patricia rather gruffly, she’d ignored her completely.

She looks down on me, Patricia thought. She thinks she’s better than me.

The bitch had driven down the Karlberg road and crossed Norra Stationsgatan. Usually only buses and taxis were allowed to do that, but the bitch obviously didn’t care. They passed beneath the Essinge motorway and entered the Karolinska Institute the back way. It was a whole collection of red-brick buildings in different styles, a city within a city. There was no one about: it was Saturday evening, after all. They passed the Scheele
Laboratory on the right, with the red-brick palace of the Tomteboda School up on the left. The bitch turned right and pulled up in a small car park. The man in the loud shirt got out and opened the door on her side of the car.

‘Can’t be opened from the inside,’ he said.

Patricia couldn’t move. She had her feet up on the seat, her knees pulled up to her chin, and her teeth were chattering.

This isn’t happening, she thought. It’s just a whole series of nasty coincidences, nothing more than that. Positive thoughts, positive thoughts …

The air was so heavy that she was having trouble getting it down to her lungs. It got stuck somewhere in her throat, swelling and solidifying, suffocating her.

‘I can’t do this,’ she said. ‘What if it isn’t her?’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ the man said. ‘I realize this must be very difficult for you. Come on, let me help you out. Do you want anything to drink?’

She shook her head and took the hand he was holding out to her. She stumbled onto the tarmac on unsteady legs. The bitch had started walking down a narrow path, her heavy shoes crunching on the gravel.

‘I feel sick,’ Patricia said.

‘Here, have some chewing-gum,’ the man said.

Without saying anything she held out her hand and took a piece from the packet.

‘It’s just down here,’ the man said.

They passed a sign with a red arrow saying,
95:7 Forensic laboratory: mortuary
.

She chewed hard on the gum. They were walking through trees, limes and maples. A gentle breeze was rustling the leaves, maybe the heat was about to lift at last.

The first thing she caught sight of was the long canopy
roof. It stuck out from the bunker-like building like a vast peaked cap. It was yet another red-brick building, its door dark grey iron, heavy and forbidding.

STOCKHOLM MORTUARY, she read in gilded lettering under the canopy, then, in slightly smaller letters:
Entrance for next of kin. Identification deposition
.

The plastic entry phone had seen better days. The man pressed a chrome button and a low voice responded. The man said something.

Patricia turned away from the door and looked back towards the car park. She had a vague feeling that the ground was moving, like slow waves on a huge ocean. The sun had disappeared behind Tomteboda School, and beneath the canopy the daylight had almost vanished. Straight ahead of her lay the Medical School, a dull, red-brick building from the sixties. The air seemed to be getting thicker, and the chewing-gum was getting bigger and bigger in her mouth. A bird was singing somewhere in the bushes, its sound reaching her through some sort of filter. She could feel her jaw muscles clenching.

‘We can go in.’

The man put his hand on her arm and she had to turn round. The door was open. Another man was standing in the doorway, smiling cautiously at her.

‘This way; please come through,’ he said.

The lump in her throat rose, settling at the back of her tongue, and she swallowed hard.

‘I just have to get rid of my chewing-gum,’ she said.

‘There’s a bathroom in here,’ he said.

The bitch and the man in the shirt let her go in first. The room was small. It reminded her of a dentist’s waiting room: the little grey sofa to the left, a birch-wood coffee table, four chrome chairs with blue-striped covers, an abstract picture on the wall, just three colours, grey, brown, blue. A mirror on the right. Cloakroom straight
in front, toilet. She headed in that direction with an unpleasant feeling of not quite touching the floor.

Are you here, Josefin?

Can you feel that I’m here?

Inside the toilet she locked the door and threw her chewing-gum in the bin. The woven basket was empty and the gum stuck to the plastic lining just below the rim. She tried to push it further down, but it stuck to her finger. There were no plastic cups so she drank directly from the tap. This is a mortuary, after all, she thought. They must be pretty hot on hygiene.

She took several deep breaths through her nose, then went out. They were waiting for her. They were standing next to another door, between the mirror and the exit.

‘I want you to know that this will probably feel pretty tough,’ the man said. ‘The girl in here hasn’t been washed since she was found. She’s also lying in the same position we found her in.’

Patricia swallowed once more.

‘How did she die?’

‘She was strangled. She was found in Kronoberg Park on Kungsholmen just after lunchtime today.’

Patricia put her hand to her mouth, her eyes opened wide and filled with tears.

‘We usually cut through the park on our way home from work,’ she whispered.

‘It’s not certain that this girl is your friend,’ the man said. ‘I need you to be as relaxed as you can and have a good look at her. You’ll be okay.’

‘Is there … much blood?’

‘No, not at all. She’s in a reasonable state. The body has started to dry out, which is why the face looks a little sunken. Her skin and lips are discoloured, but not too badly. She’s not going to scare you.’