Vanished (28 page)

‘There’s no way you put that bullet in that poor girl’s brain,’ Anne went on. ‘By the time you met her, she was already up shit creek, right? You tried to help her, but it didn’t work out. So let’s talk about intent. Why did you send Aida to Paradise? To help her, obviously. Come on, Annika. You’re not guilty of anything here. Not in any way. Do you understand?’

Annika started crying again, sobbing softly in relief.

‘But she’s dead. I liked her.’

‘You’re entitled to grieve. You tried to help her and she died anyway. It stinks, but it’s not your fault.’

‘No,’ Annika whispered, ‘it’s not my fault.’

‘Are you all right?’ Anne asked. ‘Want me to come over? I have a kilo of chocolate I could bring along.’

Annika smiled into the receiver.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Whatever you say,’ Anne said. ‘Don’t think of me or of how I’m going to look after I stuff my face with a whole bag of chocolate! By the way, I might host a TV show.’

‘You? Why?’

‘Don’t sound so damn surprised. The host of
The Women’s Sofa
just landed a contract with another TV network, which must be the worst appointment choice of the year if you ask me. That means we need a new host a.s.a.p. and it will be either me or the queen of bimbos, Michelle Carlsson. Christ, I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it, so I’m going to stuff my face . . .’

After Anne hung up, the darkness was friendlier, the curtains’ breathing motion now abstract and irregular.

Not her fault. It stank, it was awful, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Too late. Too late for Aida from Bijelina.

Annika undressed in the darkness, leaving her clothes in a heap on the couch.

She slept dreamlessly.

MONDAY 5 NOVEMBER

A
lengthy buzz at the door woke Annika up. In a stupor, she got out of bed, got tangled in the duvet, wrapped it around her and went to the door.

‘This won’t do,’ the mailman admonished.

He held out a plastic bag full of junk.

Still dazed, Annika blinked uncomprehendingly at him and scratched one eyelid.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Tell your friends to use the appropriate materials when they mail things in the future. We can’t be fixing letters that fall apart like this.’

‘Is that for me?’ she asked sceptically.

‘Aren’t you Annika Bengtzon? Then here you go.’

He handed her the bag and a stack of window envelopes, every last one a bill.
What a great morning.

‘Thanks,’ Annika mumbled as she closed the door.

She let the duvet drop by the door and studied the bag: what the hell could this be? She held it up to the light to see better. A torn envelope, a wad of gum and a key ring? She tore open the plastic bag and poured its contents onto the coffee table. Poked gingerly at the envelope – yes, it was addressed to her, the handwriting was even but the words had obviously been jotted down in haste, probably while writing on an irregular surface. Something else had been written at the bottom:
The keys to Paradise.

Mia.

Annika sat down on the couch. The keys to Paradise. She picked up the envelope; it must have been a used one, the letter had been sent in great haste. She looked at the postmark: a town in Norrland.

Of course. Mia didn’t need the keys any longer. The family’d had to go to that house out in Järfälla. Annika had the address. Mia had given it to her. She went and got her bag and dumped out the contents; the same sanitary napkins and breath mints as before, a pad, a pen, a gold chain . . .

She paused. The gold chain. She sat down on the floor and picked it up. Aida’s gold chain with two charms; one a lily, the other a heart. Aida’s way of thanking Annika for saving her life.

And she died anyway
, Annika thought.
But it wasn’t my fault. I did what I could.

She pulled the chain over her head, arranging it around her neck. The metal was cold and heavy. Apart from her notepad, the rest of the contents went back in her bag. She brought the pad with her into the living room and flipped through its pages to find the address. A corner of one page was torn off; she had written down the address on it for the benefit of that bureaucrat guy, Thomas Samuelsson. Thomas who’d once played hockey and who was married to Mrs Samuelsson.

Annika got out the yellow pages and looked up the map of Järfälla.

The phone rang, making her jump.

‘How are you? Jansson tells me you weren’t feeling well and had to go home last night.’

It was Anders Schyman.

She swallowed.

‘I’m better,’ she said with some hesitation.

‘What happened, did you pass out?’

‘Kind of,’ she said.

‘You’ve been looking tired lately,’ the deputy editor stated. ‘My guess is that you’ve been working too hard on that foundation story.’

‘But I haven’t—’ she started to say.

Schyman interrupted her: ‘Listen to me. Take sick leave for the next few days and we’ll see how you feel after that. Forget about Paradise, baby yourself instead. Isn’t your mother unwell too?’

‘My grandmother.’

‘Spend some time with her and I’ll see you the next time you’re on duty. Take care.’

A sensation of warmth spread through Annika’s stomach after Schyman hung up. People cared. She sighed and settled back into the couch. The prospect of free time didn’t feel ominous or threatening, it felt comfortable and pleasant.

She went into her bedroom and put on a sweatsuit. First a shower, and then she knew exactly what she was going to do.

Schyman had to be careful. It wouldn’t do to let the people he trusted and counted on fall apart. They would be useless to him if they got all burned out. Annika Bengtzon had to keep her wits about her a while longer.

He took a deep breath, the scent of cleansers filling his nostrils. Getting rid of that ratty old couch and having the place thoroughly cleaned had been a stroke of genius.

Feeling on top of things and at ease, Schyman leaned back and opened the paper. His sense of satisfaction deteriorated slightly as he read on. The front page story dealt with the spectacular murder at Sergelstorg, the young woman who had been shot in the head during a demonstration. The piece was illustrated by a large, somewhat blurry picture of the girl. She had been young and beautiful. There wasn’t anything controversial about going public with her name and picture, but the gruesome facts were described in too much detail. You didn’t really need to know that the semi-jacketed bullet had scrambled her brains before it got lodged in her nasal cavity. Schyman sighed. Oh well, no use in worrying about petty details like that.

The next spread featured the impending governmental crisis: the Social Democratic congress was scheduled to begin on Thursday and last a week, and the power struggle was in full swing. Carl Wennergren had continued to dig into the financial affairs of the female politician – it appeared that she hadn’t paid her day-care bills on time – and was rapidly approaching the point of no return with regard to ethics. The paper still hadn’t pursued the core issue:
why
the politician was being scrutinized at this particular time. It was a well-known fact that she was the nominating committee’s main choice for party secretary, which would mean that she was being groomed for the role of prime minister, and this made the bypassed middle-aged lard-asses want to go gunning for her. That was what Schyman wanted featured in the paper: a description of men in power and what they were willing to do to hang on to it. The names of the other nominees hadn’t leaked out to the press, even though people knew that three representatives would be leaving the executive committee, the elite group in power. Schyman had a hunch that the nominees might be controversial – it promised to be an exciting congress. Gossip had it that Christer Lundgren, the former Minister of Foreign Trade who had resigned after the Studio 69 scandal, was on his way back in from the cold. Personally, Schyman didn’t think this was likely: the scandal had been too great and it had never been fully cleared up – there were potentially explosive issues submerged beneath the surface. But the Minister of Culture, Karina Björnlund, could possibly be heading for a fall of her own. She had seriously proposed that the government should have the right to appoint and dismiss editors-in-chief and executive directors at media companies throughout Sweden. Somehow she had been kept on, and he knew why. Annika Bengtzon had told him the reason some two years previously.

The rest of the paper was rather thin. New stock-market tips – ‘Be a winner!’ – elicited a sigh. The centre spread featured an interview with a television celebrity who was about to switch networks. This change didn’t appear to be due to a conflict, just greed. Schyman sighed again. They hadn’t managed to dig up anything solid during the past week, something that would secure Monday’s edition while they waited for real life and a new week to get rolling.

Oh, what the hell, the printing department was in good shape, they were prepared. You shouldn’t overlook anything that came your way, no matter how insignificant it might be.

The pizza rested like a cheesy brick in Thomas’s stomach, making him feel slightly queasy. After lunch he shut himself in his office with the evening papers, skipping coffee.

There on his desk was the invoice from Paradise for a safe house during the months of November, December and January. Three hundred and twenty-two thousand kronor. Thomas knew that the Social Services budget couldn’t accommodate this. They would have to postpone the clean-up of a day-care centre with mould problems and give the money to that deceitful debt-dodger.

The social worker had handed him the invoice as he was going out to lunch with his colleagues.

‘This just arrived by fax,’ she had said in an icy voice, her eyes cold. She hadn’t forgotten that he had embarrassed her in front of a client.

Thomas had thanked her, more mortified than he cared to admit.

Now he stared at the invoice and mentally assessed which items he could scratch in order to make his budget.

What the hell
, he thought a second later and pushed the train of thought away.
It’s not my problem. The board okayed this crap, so they’ll have to clean up their own mess.

Thomas sighed, leaned back and picked up
Kvällspressen.
He opened it to the centre spread and found an extensive interview with a female TV show host who was going to switch networks.
So incredibly uninteresting
, he thought and returned to the front pages. There was a picture of the person who’d died at Sergelstorg last Saturday, the Kurdish woman who had been murdered in the middle of a demonstration. Boy, she was young. He let his gaze wander to the caption:
Aida Begovic from Bijelina, Bosnia.

For a few seconds, his brain froze. Then he threw down the paper and grabbed the invoice from the Paradise Foundation. It had today’s date on it, 5 November.

This can’t be possible
, he thought. He yanked open a desk drawer, the one at the bottom, and unearthed every last piece of information he had about the case. And leafed through them. He was right.

Aida Begovic from Bijelina, Bosnia.

Rage left him breathless. His field of vision had a reddish tinge to it, spreading from top to bottom. That bitch . . . She had the gall to charge for the protection of a woman who had been murdered!

Thomas dumped the papers on his desk. Somewhere in there was a scrap of paper with an address on it. It fluttered down on the desk when he shook the stack of printouts from the Sollentuna Debt Enforcement Agency, the scrap of paper torn from Annika Bengtzon’s large notepad. He stuffed the invoice and the address into the inside breast pocket of his jacket, put on his coat and left.

Annika got off the train at Jakobsberg, clutching page eighteen from the map section of the
Yellow Pages.
The wind was biting cold, the damp lacerating her skin. Boxy brown 1960s buildings, a school, a salon, a church. Checking the map, she saw that she should head north-west. A pedestrian underpass took her under the Viksjöleden highway and she grabbed a burger at Emil’s Fast Food.

Nervousness exploded in her system as she left the fast-food joint. Her mouth felt coated with the aftermath of greasy-spoon dining, the burger resting uneasily inside her, giving her heartburn. She was about to take the law into her own hands.

She contemplated the houses, so colourless and indistinct in the haze.

I don’t have to do this
, Annika thought.
I’m on sick leave. Paradise can wait.

Deliberating with herself she stared at the houses.

I could go and take a look
, she figured.
Just because I’m checking the place out from the outside doesn’t mean I have to go in.

Relieved to have postponed the decision, she went to the neighbourhood evidently known as Olovslund. It didn’t appear to be a product of civic planning, the layout had no uniformity to it. The houses were all different, built during different periods and in different styles: Victorian houses, an old farmhouse, plain cheaply built boxes dating from the 1930s, sprawling modern piles of white brick and dark brown wood. The area had developed along the slopes of a substantial ridge and many of the streets had names describing their location:
Höjdvägen
,
Hill Crest Lane;
Släntvägen
, Hillside Lane;
Brantvägen
, Incline Lane. Other streets were named after seasons and months: she passed
Höstvägen
, Autumn Lane, and
Novembervägen
, November Lane.

I wonder how well people know each other in an area like this
, Annika thought.
Not all that well
, she reckoned.

Finally she came to the right street and walked slowly up the steep gravelly asphalt road with unkempt gutters, the keyring rattling in her pocket, feeling like it was burning a hole through the lining.

The house was near the crest of the ridge, on its northern face. Annika stood next to the driveway and studied it carefully. The garden was hilly and neglected – last summer’s brown and decaying leaves lay scattered between patches of snow. Large boulders partially obstructed the view. The house itself was from the 1940s, possibly the early 1950s; two storeys high and coated with pale grey-brown stucco that might have been white originally but was now deteriorating. No curtains, no lamps, no lights anywhere. The windows looked like gaps in a row of bad teeth.