Without a Trace (Annika Bengtzon 10) Page 5

They hung up before she could say anything stupid.

  The newsdesk staff, plus sport and entertainment, had gathered in Schyman’s office for the usual ‘six meeting’ (it started at five o’clock, these days, but was still called the ‘six meeting’, which could sound rude to infantile ears) so the newsroom looked empty and abandoned in the greyish-white light of the computer screens.

  Valter followed her.

  ‘Berit’s on a job in Norway,’ Annika said, ‘so you can sit in her place.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had your own desks,’ Valter said, peering rather suspiciously at the desk and chair.

  ‘We don’t, but that one is Berit’s. Have you got a user-ID and password yet?’

  He put his rucksack on the desk and sat down tentatively. ‘Yes …’

  ‘Good. Call the Ministry of Justice and ask for their opinion on the Ingemar Lerberg case. There’s always some new investigation into threats against politicians to refer to. They won’t say anything, but check the statistics from the latest investigation and do your best to squeeze a general comment out of them. Make sure you call Lerberg either a “top politician” or a “national figure”, seeing as our leader column mentioned him in the speculation about the Christian Democrats getting a new party leader about a hundred years ago. And keep it under eighteen hundred keystrokes, including spaces.’

  The young man took off his jacket, ran his hands through his hair, pulled a laptop from his rucksack and hooked it up to the network. He seemed to pick things up quickly.

  She got her own computer out, logged in and wrote a short summary of Ingemar Lerberg’s political career. She described his passions and beliefs as honestly as she could, without leaving herself open to accusations of slander, and explained that in recent years he had concentrated on his family and business, as well as local politics in Nacka. She put together a piece for the online radio service, one minute and ten seconds, using some quotes from the party leadership.

  That left her with the most controversial part of her task: how to deal with Lerberg’s arms and legs, which, according to Bert Tingström – a not particularly impressive source – had been dislocated. And where was Nora, the victim’s wife?

  She called the press spokesperson at Nacka Police, followed by the head of media at National Crime. They talked to her in person and were very professional, but neither would confirm either a missing person or any specific type of injury. Not that she had expected them to. After a moment’s hesitation she decided to call Commissioner Q, now head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit at National Crime.

  ‘Annika,’ he said, ‘I’m disappointed in you. I was expecting you to ring this morning.’

  ‘I’m a big girl now,’ she said. ‘I can manage fine without you. Besides, you’re so important, these days, that it takes me a while to pluck up the courage to disturb you.’

  ‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Is Nora missing?’ she asked.

  ‘We don’t know where she is, but “missing” is too strong a word.’

  ‘Are you trying to find her?’

  ‘Negative. Not in an organized way.’

  ‘But you have been looking for her? To tell her what’s happened to her husband?’

  Q sighed. She had manoeuvred him into the position where she wanted him.

  ‘Yes, we have been looking for her. No, we haven’t found her.’

  She swallowed. ‘I’ve heard that Ingemar Lerberg’s arms and legs were dislocated. Have I been correctly informed?’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know precisely what his injuries are,’ the commissioner said. ‘We’ve had someone up at Intensive Care, but I haven’t spoken to her yet.’

  ‘Is Nina Hoffman working for you now?’ Annika asked. ‘I saw her out at Solsidan.’

  Q sighed again. ‘If you’re so smart,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you can put together this article without my help.’

  He hung up. She bit her lip. It would have been good to get the information confirmed, but at least she had a named source to refer to. Bert Tingström hadn’t asked to remain anonymous, and his remarks were recorded.

  She pulled up her video clip from Solsidan and reworked it. It would have been useful to have video footage of the people inside the room, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She dug out an archive photograph of Tingström and played the quote of him describing the injuries over it, taking care to make clear that this was his information rather than the paper’s. It was a little clumsy, but it worked. Then she updated the news report, adding a few more details, and made sure she included the dog’s age. Finally she wrote a short piece about Nora Lerberg, who appeared to have vanished without a trace. She quoted Q, the prosecutor and the press spokesperson in Nacka as saying they had tried without success to get hold of her, but that she wasn’t the subject of an official search. It wasn’t great, but it would do.

  She let out a silent sigh. ‘Valter Wennergren,’ she said. ‘Has anyone ever called you VW? Volkswagen?’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘Have you finished?’

  He pressed his keyboard and an email with the heading threatened politicians appeared on her screen: 1,780 characters, including spaces. The press spokesperson at the Ministry of Justice couldn’t comment on the specific case of Ingemar Lerberg, but said that the minister was following developments closely, and expressed regret at the increasing level of violence against elected representatives. That was followed by a summary of the current situation, using figures from the latest government investigation, as well as some slightly less-up-to-date statistics in the most recent report from the National Council for Crime Prevention.

  ‘Excellent,’ Annika said.

  When she had sent the whole lot off – the new video piece, the online radio item and the three articles – she stood up, pulled on her coat and packed away her laptop.

  She waved at Schyman in his glass box on the way out.

  Thomas Samuelsson stared at the computer screen in front of him. The Light of Truth. What pretentious irony. But whoever was behind it was good at expressing himself. (Why did he assume that the writer was male? He just did. The turn of phrase felt masculine.)

  He took a deep breath.

  Schyman deserved it. Thomas had only met him a few times, even though he worked so closely with Annika. Presumably he thought he was too important to associate with the families of his staff.

  Thomas got up and walked the short distance to the kitchen. His legs were heavy and his back felt stiff. His hand ached – the phantom hand that was no longer there. The prosthesis (the hook!) was heavy and unwieldy. He hadn’t made up his mind what sort he wanted yet. This latest version certainly wasn’t in the running, he knew that much.

  They had all lied to him. Not just Annika, although she was obviously the worst, but everyone else as well. His employers, not to mention the people in the health service.

  Oh, there are brilliant prosthetics, these days. Just wait till you see them! In a lot of ways a prosthetic hand actually works better than an ordinary hand. Have you ever considered that? You can open tins without an opener, lift hot things directly off the stove or barbecue. You can use it as a hammer, you don’t have to worry about corrosive acids, and you can hold a match until it’s burned right down …

  He opened the fridge door. There were chicken fillets and steak but he wasn’t particularly hungry.

  Telling Annika he had a lot to do at work hadn’t been quite true: he’d taken the week off sick. He just felt that things were getting on top of him, and his bosses in the Ministry of Justice were very understanding because they were conscious of the trauma he had suffered. Take all the time you neeeed, your job will be waiting for you when you feel like …

  That was the least they could do, Thomas thought, as he shut the fridge. He had risked life and limb for his work, and was now crippled for life and had lost his family. The least he could expect of his employers was that he should be allowed to keep his job. It wo
uld look bad if they tried to fire him. He could see the headline: ‘GOVERNMENT FIRES MUTILATED HERO’ …

  No, they’d never dare. They’d rather leave him mouldering in a corner at the taxpayers’ expense, somewhere in the main government offices at Rosenbad where no one else wanted to be, perhaps on the ground floor with a view of a brick wall on Fredsgatan.

  They had put him to work on money-laundering.

  Of all the dull, pointless areas of responsibility, Cramne, his hypocritical boss, had tasked him with looking into international financial crime. Again. He could still recall the man’s forced smile on his first day back at the department, before he knew that Annika had been fucking the undersecretary of state, and when he still believed the lies of the prosthetics industry, the claims that he would eventually be able to control the prosthesis by thought alone – Sweden was actually a world-leader in that area of research …

  ‘You’re the perfect choice,’ Cramne had said, ‘with your experience. Finance, international trade and security, great!’

  And when they had stood up and were about to shake hands afterwards, Cramne had hesitated: he hadn’t wanted to get it wrong and touch the metal fake, the hook.

  No one expected him to achieve anything. No one had said anything, but he could feel it. They clearly thought his intelligence had been based in his left hand, not to mention his desire to participate in human conversation and boules tournaments. No one invited him along any more. Not just because of the terrible weather and the fact that no boules matches had been arranged: even if they had been, he knew they wouldn’t have asked him. They stared at him in the corridor and whispered behind his back. The skinny female secretaries who used to give him the come-on now concentrated on their computer screens whenever he walked past.

  He contemplated making himself a sandwich. But he would have to hold the bread with his hook, and he didn’t like using it.

  He walked back into the living room and stared at the meagre furnishings: the sofa, the computer desk, the rug. All of it from Ikea. Cheap and lacking in style. They had belonged to Annika. He hated the flat. It was cramped, just two bedrooms, and far too light. It was on the top floor of a corner building on Kungsholmen – Annika had got hold of it through her contact in the police force when she and Thomas had been living apart. After she had let him down (deceived him, tricked him, abandoned him), she had transferred the tenancy to him and moved out, dumping the worthless contents of the flat on him, not just the furniture but the crockery, books and DVDs as well. And he no longer had any savings. Annika had given all their money to the bastards who had kidnapped him in Somalia, so now he was sitting in a birdcage near the sky, hating every minute of it.

  He sat down at the computer. The Light of Truth was actually very interesting.

  He refreshed the page. Eight new comments had been added since he’d last looked.

  He leaned back in his chair.

  Might it be possible to have that arsehole at the Evening Post fired? That would be brilliant.

  His spirits lifted. He felt light and fluid again, his breathing quickening. He hunched over the keyboard, hesitated for just a moment, then logged in under his usual alias: ‘Gregorius’, after the tragic character in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel Doctor Glas (cuckolded by his wife, murdered by his doctor). He never deployed Gregorius at work, oh, no. He might not be a computer genius, but he wasn’t a fool either. After all, he had lived with a tabloid bitch for ten years, so he’d learned a thing or two about how the media worked. No one would be able to trace Gregorius to an IP address at Rosenbad.

  The site’s administrator hadn’t opted to moderate comments, so they appeared immediately. He took a deep breath, and felt a glow of satisfaction spread out from his midriff.

  Gregorius:

  Anders Schyman is a hypocrite!!

  He stretched his back contentedly. Maybe he should make that sandwich after all.

  *

  Annika still wasn’t used to living on Södermalm. Coming home from work was still an intoxicating rush, from Medborgarplatsen Underground station, along Götgatan and Katarina Bangata to Södermannagatan to Jimmy’s – no, their shared flat. She breathed in the scent of tarmac and admired the façades of the buildings as she passed, hundred-year-old brick, with ochre stucco, and the trees. It had almost stopped raining now.

  Jimmy’s – their – rented apartment was on the third floor of a house built in 1897, six rooms plus kitchen, which he had acquired through his contacts in the trade-union movement. (Yes, a clear case of corruption, definitely worth a front-page exclusive in the Evening Post.) As he had added her name to the lease, which was as good as marriage without a prenuptial agreement, she was now an accomplice.

  The lights in the stairwell went on with a humming sound that spread up through the building. She ran up the steps, past the leaded windows looking out onto the courtyard, her heart thudding. Suddenly she was in front of the brass nameplate, shimmering in the glow of the low-energy bulb:

  HALENIUS SISULU

  BENGTZON SAMUELSSON

  Their surnames, and those of their children. The sight of it always made her pulse quicken. She unlocked the door and stepped into the hall, removed her jacket and kicked off her shoes. ‘Hello, everyone!’

  Kalle and Ellen came running out of the living room, gave her a quick hug, then disappeared back to their video game.

  Then Jimmy was there, his brown hair on end, wearing an apron and a pair of running shoes, holding a wooden spoon. She put her hands to his face. felt his unshaven cheek under her fingers as she kissed him on the lips. ‘Hello,’ she murmured.

  ‘Hello, you.’

  She pressed up to him.

  ‘You’ll mess up your clothes,’ he muttered into her mouth. ‘I’ve spilled some sauce on the apron.’ But he put a hand to the base of her spine and drew her to him.

  She kissed him again.

  ‘When’s food ready?’

  Jimmy let go of her abruptly. His daughter, Serena, was standing right next to them. Her eyes were cold and black. ‘In a quarter of an hour. Do you want to help Annika lay the table?’

  She turned away and went back to her room.

  Jimmy disappeared into the kitchen. Annika followed him and put the things she had bought on the way home in the freezer, then laid the table in the dining room, six places.

  ‘Could you get the water?’ Jimmy said, as he brought in the casserole dish and a frying-pan.

  She carried two jugs to the table.

  ‘Will you call the kids?’ she asked, feeling a pang of cowardice.

  Serena and her twin brother Jacob lived with Jimmy all the time. Their mother, Angela Sisulu, worked for the South African government and lived in Johannesburg. She had been awarded her PhD while she was working part-time as a model, and was the cause of Annika’s huge inferiority complex.

  Kalle and Ellen came into the dining room, and Kalle hovered close to Annika so he could be next to her. She sat at the table and started to ladle the stew onto the children’s plates. Neither Serena nor Jacob looked at her as they took their seats. Serena identified strongly with her mother: she had the same cornrow plaits, and wore the same colourful cotton blouses. She was chatty and talkative with everyone but Annika. Annika wasn’t allowed to touch her, help with her hair, do her coat up or give her a goodnight hug. Jacob looked a lot like Jimmy, and his hair was an unruly mess, just like his dad’s. He was quieter, more uncertain than his sister and a little easier to reach.

  Jimmy sat down opposite Annika and spooned some of the stew onto his own plate. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Good and bad things about today. Kalle, you start.’

  Kalle took his time chewing the food in his mouth, then put his knife and fork down. ‘I scored a goal when we played football during the lunch break. But Adam in 5B tackled me and pushed me over in the mud.’

  Kalle’s accounts of school life always revolved around his friends and what they had done or not done to him, around arguments and confessions, and how oth
ers perceived him.

  ‘The next Zlatan,’ Jimmy said, giving the boy a high five. ‘Jacob?’

  ‘We got our maths tests back, and I got them all right. In geography we had to write an essay about the different ways people live and the conditions of life in different parts of the world, but I’d already done that so I was allowed to have a go on Google Earth instead.’

  Annika kept her expression neutral: it seemed so odd to hear a ten-year-old express himself like that. He never presented any bad experiences at the dinner table, just validation-seeking successes. He and Jimmy high-fived as well.

  Serena dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. ‘We did a dress rehearsal of the musical. Neo hasn’t learned his lines and Liam messed up the guitar part.’ She sighed.

  Ellen thought for a moment before she spoke. ‘We had a lovely lunch – pancakes and strawberry jam.’

  Ellen rarely had anything negative to report, but Annika was fairly sure that wasn’t because she was fishing for praise. She knew that the glass was half full while Kalle and Serena assumed it would soon be empty.

  ‘We managed to get a new piece of proposed legislation through Parliament, to increase control of the financial sector,’ Jimmy said. ‘And on the way home I stepped in a puddle and one of my shoes got soaked through.’

  Ellen giggled.

  Annika wasn’t sure if she approved of Jimmy’s bureaucratic accounts of government work at the dinner table. Maybe it was good for the children to become acquainted with the vocabulary so they grasped that working life was complicated and full of responsibility, but there was also the possibility that it would make them arrogant. She didn’t know which was more likely.

  Jimmy looked at her encouragingly. She put down her knife and fork. ‘The good thing is that I got a new work colleague today. He’s a young man who’s going to be doing practical experience on the paper over the summer, and I’m going to be his supervisor. The bad bit was getting stuck in a traffic jam inside a tunnel for almost an hour.’