Exposed (8 page)

The man’s voice was calm and low. He took her by the hand.

‘Are you ready?’

Patricia nodded. The bitch opened the door. A cool draught swept out of the room inside. She breathed in the smell, expecting it to reek of corpses and death. But there was nothing. The air was fresh and clean. She took a cautious step inside. The floor was stone, shiny, grey-brown, the walls pure white, plastered, a little uneven. Two electric radiators hung on the far wall. She lifted her eyes. An uplighter hung from the ceiling. Twelve glowing bulbs spread a smooth light over the room. It reminded her of a chapel. Two candelabra, tall, wooden. They weren’t lit, but Patricia could still make out the smell of wax. Between them stood the mortuary trolley.

‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to,’ the man said. ‘We can ask her parents to come, or her boyfriend. The only problem is that that would take time. The killer’s already got a head start. Whoever did this can’t be allowed to get away with it.’

She gulped. Behind the trolley hung a large blue tapestry. It covered the whole of the back entrance. She stared into the blue of it, trying to make out a pattern.

‘Okay, I’ll do it, then,’ she said.

The man, still holding her hand, pulled her slowly over to the trolley. She was lying under a sheet. Her hands were raised above her head.

‘Now Anya’s going to lift the sheet slowly from her face. I’ll be right beside you the whole time.’

Anya was the bitch.

She saw movement from the corner of her eye, the white cloth being pulled down, the faint movement in the air. She let go of the blue tapestry and let her eyes fall to the trolley.

It’s true, she thought. She looks okay. She’s dead, but she isn’t disgusting. She just looks a bit surprised, like she didn’t really know what had happened.

‘Josie,’ Patricia whispered.

‘Is this your friend?’ the man asked.

She nodded. Her tears poured out; there was nothing she could do to stop them. She reached out a hand to stroke Josefin’s hair, but stopped herself.

‘Josie, what have they done to you?’

‘Are you quite sure?’

She closed her eyes and nodded.

‘Oh, God,’ she said.

She put a hand to her mouth and screwed her eyes tight shut.

‘So you can confirm that this is your flatmate, Josefin Liljeberg? You’re one hundred per cent sure?’

She nodded and turned away – away from Josie, away from death, away from the blueness hanging behind the trolley.

‘I want to get out of here,’ she said quietly. ‘Get me out of here.’

The man put his arm round her shoulders and pulled her towards him, stroking her hair. She was crying helplessly now, soaking his nasty tropical shirt.

‘We’d like to search the flat properly tonight,’ he said. ‘It would be good if you could be there.’

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and shook her head.

‘I have to go to work,’ she said. ‘With Josie gone I’ll have even more to do. They’ll be missing me already.’

He looked hard at her.

‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’

She nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The press release rolled out of the fax machine at 21.12. Because the press section of the Stockholm Police always sent their communiqués to the editorial secretary, Eva-Britt Qvist, who didn’t work weekends, no one noticed it. It wasn’t until the main news agency sent out an alert at 21.45 that Berit picked up the information.

‘Press conference in Police Headquarters at ten p.m.,’ she called to Annika as she hurried towards the picture desk.

Annika dropped her pen and notebook in her bag and headed for the exit. A sense of expectation was churning in her stomach: now she was about to find out. The uncertainty was making her nervous; she had never been to a press conference in Stockholm Police Headquarters before.

‘We have to shift the fax machine away from Eva-Britt’s desk,’ Berit said in the lift.

They squeezed into Bertil Strand’s Saab, just like before. Annika sat in the back again, in the same seat. She closed the door gently. As the photographer accelerated towards the Western Bridge she realized that she hadn’t shut the door properly. She quickly clicked down the lock and took a firm hold of the handle, hoping the driver wouldn’t notice anything.

‘Where are we heading?’ Bertil Strand wondered.

‘Kungsholmsgatan, the Falck entrance,’ Berit said.

‘What do you think they’re likely to say?’ Annika asked.

‘They’ve probably found out who she is and informed the relatives,’ Berit said.

‘Yes, but why call a press conference?’

‘They haven’t got a single thing to go on,’ Berit said. ‘They need as much coverage in the media as they can get. It’s a matter of shaking a bit of life into their unpaid helpers, the general public, while the body is still fresh. And we’re the alarm clock.’

Annika gulped. She switched to hold the door handle with her other hand and looked out of the window. The evening looked cloudy and grey through the tinted glass. The neon signs of Fridhemsplan shone dully in the fading evening light.

‘Oh, to be sitting on a terrace with a glass of red,’ Bertil Strand said.

Neither of the women responded.

As they passed the park Annika could see the police tape fluttering. The photographer headed round the park, aiming for the Falck entrance at the top of Kungsholmsgatan.

‘It’s almost ironic,’ Berit said. ‘The largest concentration of police in the whole of Scandinavia is just two hundred metres from the scene of the murder.’

The brown-panelled mass of National Crime Headquarters loomed up to Annika’s right. She turned and looked at the park through the rear window. The green of the hill lay in shadow now, filling the window. All of a sudden she felt faint, caught between the building and the heavy greenery. She dug about in her bag and found a roll of strong English mints. She popped a couple in her mouth.

‘We’re just going to make it,’ Berit said.

Bertil Strand parked a bit too close to the junction, and Annika hurried to get out. Her wrist felt stiff after holding on to the door all the way there.

‘You look a bit pale,’ Berit said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ Annika said.

She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and headed for the entrance, chewing aggressively on the mints. A guard from Falck Security was standing by the door. They showed their press cards and went into a narrow space, where most of the floor area was taken up by a photocopier. Annika looked around curiously. Long corridors stretched off to the left and right.

‘Those are the departments for identification and fingerprinting,’ Berit whispered.

‘Straight ahead,’ the guard said.

The words ‘National Crime Department’ were printed in reverse in blue letters on the glass doors in front of them. Berit pushed them open. They found themselves in yet another corridor with beige, panelled walls. Some ten metres along they found the room for the press conference.

Bertil Strand sighed. ‘This is the worst room in the whole of Sweden for taking pictures in,’ he said. ‘You can’t even get a decent flash reflection off the ceiling. It’s all dark brown.’

‘Is that why press spokesmen always have red eyes?’ Annika asked with a smile.

The photographer groaned.

The room was fairly large, with an orange carpet and beige armchairs with a blue and brown pattern. A small group of journalists had gathered at the front of the room. Arne Påhlson and another reporter from the other evening paper were already there, talking to the police press spokesman. The detective in the Hawaiian shirt
wasn’t there. To her surprise, Annika saw that a radio news team had turned up, as well as reporters from the prestigious morning paper that shared a building with the
Evening Post
.

‘Murders always get taken more seriously when there’s a press conference,’ Berit whispered.

The room was oppressively hot, and Annika broke into a sweat again. They sat at the front seeing as there was no one from television there. The first few rows were usually occupied by television cameras and cables. The other evening paper’s reporters sat next to them, and Bertil Strand prepared his cameras. The press spokesman cleared his throat.

‘Well, welcome, everyone,’ he said, stepping onto the little platform at the front of the room. He sat down heavily behind a conference table, leafed through his papers and tapped the microphone in front of him.

‘So, we’ve invited you here this evening to tell you about a body that was discovered in central Stockholm at lunchtime today,’ he said, pushing his papers aside.

Annika was sitting next to Berit, and they were both taking notes. Bertil Strand was moving about somewhere to the left of them, looking for the right angles for his pictures.

‘We’ve received a lot of requests for information about the case over the course of the day, which is why we decided to call this somewhat impromptu press conference,’ he continued. ‘I thought I might run through some of the facts first, then I’ll be happy to talk to you individually. If that’s okay with you?’

The journalists nodded. The press spokesman picked up his notes again.

‘The emergency desk received notification about a
dead body at twelve forty-eight,’ he said. ‘The informant was a member of the public who happened to be walking past.’

Junkie, Annika wrote in her notebook.

The spokesman fell silent for a moment, before beginning again.

‘The dead body is that of a young woman. She has been identified as Hanna Josefin Liljeberg, nineteen years old, and a Stockholm resident. Her relatives have been informed.’

Annika could feel her stomach lurch. Those cloudy eyes now had a name. She looked around surreptitiously to see how her colleagues were reacting. No one was showing any emotion.

‘Josefin had been strangled,’ the press spokesman said. ‘The time of death is as yet not one hundred per cent certain, but we believe it occurred between three o’clock and seven o’clock this morning.’

He hesitated before going on.

‘Examination of the body suggests that she was the victim of a sexual attack prior to death.’

The image flashed past in Annika’s head, breasts, eyes, screams. The spokesman looked up from the table and his notes.

‘We are going to need the public’s help to catch the madman who did this,’ he said tiredly. ‘We don’t have much to go on.’

Annika glanced at Berit; she had been right.

‘Our initial investigations indicate that the site where the body was found was also the site of the murder; there’s forensic evidence to support that theory. As far as we know, the last person to see Josefin alive, apart from the murderer, was her flatmate. They went their separate ways from the restaurant where they both worked shortly before five o’clock this morning, which
means that we can narrow the time of death down to a two-hour period.’

A few flashes went off. Annika assumed it was Bertil Strand.

‘So,’ the spokesman concluded, ‘between five o’clock and seven o’clock this morning Hanna Josefin Liljeberg was murdered in Kronoberg Park in Stockholm. Evidence from her body indicates that she was raped.’

He looked around his audience, his eyes settling on Annika. She gulped.

‘We’re interested in contacting everyone, I repeat, everyone, who was in the vicinity of Kronoberg Park, Parkgatan, Hantverkargatan or Sankt Göransgatan between five o’clock and seven o’clock this morning. We are happy to receive any information that might be of use. We have set up special phone-lines for the public to call. People can either talk to an operator or leave a message. Even if people think that their information isn’t important, it could be highly relevant to the broader picture of events. Which is why we are asking everyone who saw anything at all unusual at the time in question to contact us …’

He fell silent. Dust was hanging in the air. The dryness was irritating Annika’s throat.

The reporter from one of the morning broadsheets cleared his throat.

‘Do you have a suspect?’ he asked in an assured tone of voice.

Annika looked at him in surprise. Hadn’t he understood a thing?

‘No,’ the press spokesman replied amiably. ‘That’s why it’s so important that we hear from members of the public.’

The reporter took some notes.

‘What sort of forensic evidence do you have that
indicates that the murder was committed where the body was found?’ Arne Påhlson asked.

‘We can’t go into that at this point,’ the spokesman said.

The reporters asked several more semi-idiotic questions, but the press spokesman was unwilling to say anything more. Eventually the radio reporter asked if he could ask some questions by himself. The press conference broke up. It had lasted almost twenty minutes. Bertil Strand was leaning against a large black-and-white partition at the back of the room.

‘Do you want to wait until radio have finished with him, then talk to him afterwards?’ Annika asked.

‘I think we should split up,’ Berit said. ‘One of us can stay and talk to him while the other tries to find pictures of the girl.’

Annika nodded; that made sense.

‘I can go round to the duty desk of the crime unit and check the passport register,’ Berit said, ‘if you want to stay and talk to Gösta.’

‘Gösta?’

‘That’s his name. Are you staying, Bertil? I can get a taxi …’

After radio had finished Arne Påhlson took over. The second reporter from the other evening paper had vanished. Annika was willing to bet that Berit would bump into him when she was checking the passport register.

Arne Påhlson took his time, at least as much time as the press conference itself. At quarter to eleven everyone apart from Annika and Bertil had given up. The press spokesman was tired when Annika finally sat down with him in one corner of the empty room.

‘Do you find this difficult?’ Annika asked.

Gösta looked at her in surprise. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You must get to see so much crap. How do you do it?’

‘It’s not so bad. Did you have any questions?’

Annika leafed back a few pages in her notebook.

‘I saw the girl up in the park,’ she said calmly, almost in passing. ‘She wasn’t wearing any clothes, and I couldn’t see any clothes nearby. Either she climbed into the cemetery naked or else her clothes are somewhere else. Have you found them?’