Exposed (22 page)

She stared at the bright spot of light in the door’s spyhole. Suddenly it went dark: someone was blocking the light. She looked right at the spyhole and tried to look pleasant. Still the door didn’t open. She rang again. The darkness vanished and the spyhole shone brightly again. Nothing happened. She rang a fourth time.

‘Hello?’ she called quietly through the letterbox. ‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m from the
Evening Post
. I’d like to ask you a few questions …’

Hessler started to shuffle down the stairs, his dog a few steps ahead of him.

She rang again.

‘Go away,’ said a voice from inside the flat.

Annika’s breathing quickened, and she realized that she really needed a pee.

‘It’ll only get worse if you don’t say anything,’ she said, and gulped.

‘Rubbish,’ the minister said.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

‘Could I use your toilet?’ she said.

‘What?’

She crossed her legs. Daniella’s weak coffee was about to burst her bladder.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I really need the toilet.’

The door opened.

‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ the minister said.

‘Where is it?’ Annika said.

He pointed at a pale green door on the left. She stumbled in and closed the door behind her, breathed out, flushed and washed her hands.

The flat was extremely light and unpleasantly hot. The rooms were all linked, so you could walk from the kitchen into the dining room, then into the living room and back to the hall.

‘Okay, you’re leaving now,’ the minister said from the doorway of the main room.

She looked at the man in front of her with curiosity. He seemed tired and pale, and was wearing a white shirt that he hadn’t bothered to button, and crumpled black trousers. His hair was a mess and he hadn’t shaved.

Good-looking, Annika thought. She smiled.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Needs must …’

The words hung ambiguously between them. He turned and went back into the room.

‘Close the door behind you,’ he said.

She followed him into the room.

‘I don’t believe you did it,’ she said.

‘How did you find me?’ he said.

‘Research,’ she said.

He sat down on the bed without replying. Annika stood in front of him.

‘But you did see something, didn’t you? That’s why they’re questioning you, isn’t it?’

The minister looked up at her with tired eyes.

‘There’s hardly anyone who knows where I live,’ he said. ‘How did you know you’d find me here?’

Annika looked hard at the man.

‘You’re hiding something, aren’t you? What is it that you aren’t able to say?’

The minister stood up quickly and walked right up to her.

‘You don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘Go, before I throw you out!’

Annika gulped, held up both hands and started to back away to the door.

‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘I’m going. Thanks for letting me use your bathroom …’

She left quickly, closing the door quietly behind her. She caught up with Hessler on the first floor.

‘What a marvellous summer!’ she said.

The minister buttoned his shirt. It was just as well to head off to Bergsgatan straight away. He sighed, sat down on the bed and tied his shoes.

They come up with some ridiculous tricks, he thought, with a wry glance at the door through which the reporter had just left. Needing the toilet, for heaven’s sake! He stood up, wondering if he ought to take a jacket. He picked out a light linen one just in case.

Anyway, how the hell had she managed to find him here? Not even Karina Björnlund knew where he lived when he was in Stockholm. She always called him on his mobile.

The phone rang – the landline rather than his mobile. He answered at once. There were only a handful of people who had the number.

‘How are you?’

His wife, sounding anxious. He sank onto the bed again, and to his own surprise, started to cry.

‘But, darling, whatever’s the matter!’

She started crying too.

‘Are you at Stina’s yet?’

‘We got here yesterday.’

He blew his nose.

‘I can’t say anything.’

‘Is there anything in it?’

He ran a hand over his forehead.

‘How can you even ask?’

‘What am I supposed to think?’

Betrayed, scared, suspicious.

‘Do you really think I could … kill someone?’

She hesitated. ‘Not of your own volition,’ she said.

‘But if …?’

‘There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for the party,’ she said in a resigned tone.

Q answered. Annika was momentarily delighted. It was short-lived, however.

‘I can’t say a thing,’ he said.

‘Is the minister really a suspect?’ Annika wondered, leaning back in her chair and putting her feet up on the desk.

He laughed coarsely.

‘What an incredibly intelligent question. Did you come up with that all by yourself?’

‘There’s something odd about him,’ Annika said. ‘He’s scared of something getting out. What’s he hiding?’

The laughter faded away and was followed by a short silence.

‘Where do you get all your information from?’ the detective wondered.

‘I listen, watch, observe. He lives very close to the scene of the crime, for instance.’

‘So you’ve worked that out.’

‘But is it relevant?’

‘All the tenants of sixty-four Sankt Göransgatan have been questioned.’

‘It’s leasehold.’

‘What?’

‘They’re not tenants, they own their flats.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ the detective said.

‘Do you really think he did it?’

Q sighed. ‘It isn’t out of the question,’ he said.

Annika was lost for words.

‘But … what about the boyfriend? Joachim?’

‘He’s got an alibi.’

Annika leaned forward in her chair.

‘So it wasn’t …? But it looked like—’

‘It would be nice if you didn’t speculate so much in the bloody press,’ the policeman said. ‘Sometimes you really mess things up.’

Annika blew up. ‘That’s rich, coming from you! Who the hell was it who called a press conference at ten p.m. on Saturday night, just because you were so bloody keen to get the press involved? That’s a load of crap. And what do you mean, “mess things up”? There’s been more than one suspicious death in police custody. So don’t start accusing us of abusing our position!’

‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to crap like this,’ the policeman said, and hung up.

‘Hello?’ Annika shouted into the phone. ‘Hello? Fuck!’

She slammed the phone down, which made Spike look over at her in annoyance.

‘You’re sitting at my desk.’

A woman in a suit, somewhere in her thirties, was looking her up and down critically. Annika looked up, momentarily bewildered.

‘What?’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be off today?’

Annika swung her feet onto the floor, got up and held out her hand.

‘You must be Mariana,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Annika Bengtzon.’

The dragon in the suit had a ridiculously ‘refined’
posh surname, and was supposed to be very talented.

‘I’d be grateful if you could tidy up before you finish a shift. It isn’t nice to be confronted by this sort of thing every time I come back to work.’

‘I quite agree,’ Annika said. ‘I had to clear the bookshelf and the desk of your stuff when I got here on Wednesday.’

She quickly gathered together the notes she had laid out on the desk.

‘I’m going to get some food,’ she said curtly to the head of news, then picked up her bag and walked out.

By the lifts she bumped into Carl Wennergren. He was laughing at something he had just said with a couple of other summer temps. Annika had been wondering how she’d react when she next saw him. She’d been wondering what to say. Now she no longer had to wonder. She stopped, demonstratively in their way.

‘Can I talk to you?’ she said abruptly.

Carl Wennergren puffed out his chest and smiled a smile that lit up his suntanned face. His hair was still wet from his morning swim, his fringe hanging over his forehead.

‘Sure, darling,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

Annika walked down half a flight of the stairs. Carl Wennergren waved off his friends and followed her down, the picture of confidence and composure. She stood with her back to the wall on the small landing and stared angrily at her colleague.

‘I was made an offer on Monday,’ she said in a low voice. ‘A group calling themselves the Ninja Barbies wanted to sell me a scoop. For fifty thousand in cash they were going to let me tag along when they carried out some sort of attack on the police.’

She was staring intently at Carl Wennergren.

The young man had stopped smiling, and was blushing
furiously all the way to his ears. He narrowed his lips to a thin strip.

‘What do you mean?’ he said in a rather strangled voice.

‘How come you got that story in today’s paper?’

Carl Wennergren tossed his hair back.

‘What the hell has that got to do with you?’ he said. ‘Who put you in charge?’

She looked at him without replying. He turned, as if to go back upstairs. Annika didn’t move. After four steps he turned round and came back, coming to a halt just inches from Annika’s face.

‘I didn’t pay a single damn penny,’ he snarled. ‘What the hell do you think I am?’

‘I don’t think anything,’ she said, and noticed that her voice was shaking. ‘I just thought it was all a bit bloody peculiar.’

‘They wanted to get their message out,’ Carl Wennergren snarled, ‘but they weren’t selling the scoop. No newspaper would be stupid enough to pay for a terrorist attack against the police; surely even you can work that out?’

‘So they let you have it for nothing,’ Annika said.

‘Exactly.’

Carl Wennergren spun round and went up the stairs, two steps at a time.

‘Did they wait till you’d got your camera ready before they set fire to the car?’ she called after him.

The reporter vanished into the newsroom without looking back.

Annika carried on down the stairs. Carl Wennergren might be right. There’d be no point in setting fire to cars if no one knew why they were doing it. The Ninja Barbies may just have given him a perfectly ordinary tip-off.

But he hadn’t known that they had already made the offer to her, she was sure of that. That really had stopped him in his tracks.

She walked out of the building, pretending not to hear Tore Brand’s whining.

It was hotter than ever. The sun was blazing down on the turning circle in front of the building and the tarmac was soft. She went over to the hotdog kiosk on Rålambsvägen and got something to eat, which she proceeded to eat standing up.

The early evening news on television had nothing about Josefin, the minister, or the Ninja Barbies in the opening headlines. Maybe they’d appear later in the broadcast, but no one at the
Evening Post
sat through the programme that long. All activity stopped when the electric guitar of the signature tune to
Studio Six
came on the radio at three minutes past six. Annika was sitting at Berit’s desk, staring at the radio.

‘The investigation into the murder of nineteen-year-old Josefin Liljeberg is becoming increasingly complex,’ the presenter announced over the noise of the guitar. ‘The young woman was actually a stripper in an infamous sex club. The Minister for Foreign Trade, Christer Lundgren, has been questioned again today. More debate and discussion of this in today’s edition of
Studio Six.’

Without looking up, Annika could feel people staring at her from over at the newsdesk. She could feel their hostility burning through the back of her blouse.

‘It’s Wednesday, first August. Welcome to Studio Six in Radio House in Stockholm,’ the presenter’s voice boomed.

‘So, Josefin Liljeberg was a stripper in the infamous sex club that took its name from this very programme, Studio Six. In most of the media, and the
Evening Post
in particular, she has been portrayed as an innocent family girl who dreamed of becoming a journalist and helping children in trouble. But the truth is completely different. This is a recording of the young woman in question.’

And they played a tape-recording. A young woman’s voice, trying to sound erotic, announced that anyone who was curious and who had a sense of adventure was very welcome to visit Studio Six, Stockholm’s hottest club. She gave the club’s opening hours, from 1 p.m. to 5 a.m. You could meet nice young ladies, offer them champagne, watch a show or a private viewing, or watch and buy erotic films.

Annika was having trouble breathing, and hid her face in her hands. She had had no idea that the voice was Josefin’s.

The programme ran through the details of the murder. The minister had been summoned to Bergsgatan again for more questioning. They played another recording, of a door slamming, then several reporters shouting questions at Christer Lundgren as he walked into Police Headquarters.

Annika stood up, put her bag on her shoulder and went out the back way. The stares directed at her back were pulling all the air from her lungs. She had to get some fresh air before she died.

Patricia had set her clock-radio to go off at 5.58 p.m. That meant she’d have time to pee and get some water before
Studio Six
began.

She had slept deeply and without dreaming, and felt almost drugged as she stumbled back to the mattress. She piled the pillows up against the wall.

She listened in the dark behind her black curtains. Josefin’s curtains.

The man on the radio was tearing Josefin to pieces, managing to spoil every crumb of truth and making Josefin out to be a bad person. Patricia was in tears.

It was so unfair. She turned the radio off and went into the kitchen. With trembling hands she made a pot of tea. Just as she was pouring the first cup the doorbell rang. It was the journalist.

‘Those bastards!’ Annika Bengtzon said, storming into the flat. ‘How the fuck can they make her out to be some sort of fucking prostitute? It doesn’t make any sense!’

Patricia wiped her tears.