Exposed (48 page)

She sighed and took a deep breath.

‘Annika Sofia Bengtzon,’ she said.

He took his notebook out of his pocket.

‘What’s your date of birth?’

She looked into his eyes.

‘I’m twenty-four years, five months and twenty days old,’ she said.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘That’s very precise!’

‘I keep count in my diary,’ she said, and bowed her head over her dead cat.

‘Yes, hello, this is Karina Björnlund. I hope I’m not disturbing you?’

The Prime Minister sighed silently.

‘No, not at all. What can I do for you?’

‘Quite a lot, actually. As you’ll understand, this has been a very difficult period for me. In the middle of the election campaign and everything …’ She tailed off, and the Prime Minister waited for her to go on.

‘Well, of course I only spent eight months in the job,’ she said, ‘so my leaving package isn’t very generous.’

Yes, he couldn’t dispute that.

‘So I was wondering if I could possibly carry on working for the government. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve got a lot to contribute.’

The Prime Minister smiled. ‘I’m sure you have, Karina. Working at the eye of the hurricane changes us all. I’m sure you’ll find a good job before long. No one could possibly doubt your abilities and experience.’

‘Nor what I’ve learned.’

‘Absolutely. But you know that government ministers like to choose their own press secretaries themselves. I can’t promise anything.’

She giggled. ‘Of course you can. Everyone knows you
make the decisions. No one disagrees with anything you say. If they did, they’d be history.’

That’s actually true, he thought with amusement. Maybe she wasn’t that stupid after all.

‘Karina, I understand what you’re saying. Okay? You want to stay on, and I’m saying no. Can we agree on that?’

The woman was silent for a few seconds.

‘Well, if there was nothing else?’ the Prime Minister said, ready to hang up.

‘You really haven’t got it at all, have you?’ Karina Björnlund said quietly.

‘Sorry?’ He was starting to sound ever so slightly irritated now.

‘Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘This isn’t some damn negotiation. I’m telling you that I’ve learned things during these eight months that are impossible to put a value on. And I’m telling you that I’ve got a lot to offer, and that I want to carry on working for the government.’

The Prime Minister breathed quietly down the phone, his brain not quite joining the dots. How the hell …? What the fuck had she found out?

‘I suggest that you listen very bloody carefully,’ the woman said, ‘because I’m only saying this once. After this I never want to talk about it again. But I’m not the one who can make that decision.’

His mouth had gone completely dry.

‘You’re not even a Social Democrat,’ he said.

‘And what fucking difference does that make?’ she said.

Two Surprises in New Government

S
o the Prime Minister has finally presented his new government. The whole process has been shrouded in secrecy – there wasn’t a single leak before the new Cabinet was unveiled at Rosenbad yesterday.

‘Ministers are under severe pressure this time,’ a source told the
Evening Post
. ‘Anyone caught talking to the press in advance is out.’

Among the usual suspects there are two surprises. The new Minister for Foreign Trade, following Christer Lundgren, who was recently appointed head of Swedish Steel in Luleå, is the former head of social services in Katrineholm. He has no previous experience of national politics, but is believed to be a good friend of the Prime Minister.

The second surprise is, if anything, even more astonishing. Karina Björnlund, who is Christer Lundgren’s former press secretary, has been appointed as the new Minister for Culture.

‘The mass media have become far too commercialized,’ the new Culture Minister said in her first statement. ‘I want to set up a committee to look into the concentration of media ownership, to make sure that we retain a variety of media voices and avoid ending up with monopolies. The media have too much power, in my opinion.’

The question is, however: how many of their policies will Karina Björnlund and the rest of the new government be able to push through?

This autumn’s election saw the worst performance by the Social Democrats in modern times. They will need the support of at least two other parties if they are to stand any chance of getting their policies through parliament and onto the statute book.

Woman Found Guilty of Manslaughter

ESKILSTUNA: A twenty-five-year-old woman has been found guilty of manslaughter at Eskilstuna Magistrates’ Court, for causing the death of ice hockey player Sven Matsson in Hälleforsnäs last year. A probationary sentence was passed.

The prosecution had initially pursued a charge of murder, but the court agreed with the defence case. According to the judge’s statement, the victim’s abuse of the woman over many years had influenced the decision to apply the lesser charge of manslaughter. The act was also deemed to have been committed at least in part for reasons of self-defence.

‘The details of the abuse described over many years in the woman’s diary undoubtedly contributed to the outcome of this case,’ the woman’s lawyer said.

The woman herself did not wish to comment on the sentence.

‘She has made a whole new life for herself since this tragic event,’ her lawyer said. ‘She now lives in Stockholm, and was yesterday offered a permanent contract of employment, on the same day sentence was passed.’

(EC)

I spent the summer of 1994 working for the
Expressen
evening paper in Stockholm. Most people in Sweden probably remember the heatwave, and the fact that the national football team almost went all the way in the World Cup in America. My memories are dominated by completely different things. It was the sixth summer I had spent at
Expressen
, and it ended up being my last.

I had been on maternity leave following the birth of my third child, and when I returned I was one of very few permanent members of staff working during the heatwave. As a result, I ended up covering the story when it emerged that the head of the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees, Björn Rosengren, had visited a sex club, Tabu, three years earlier.

The story began that spring when
Dagens Nyheter
, one of the two big Stockholm broadsheets, published a long article on the club itself. A few days later this was followed up by an exclusive on the front page. During the course of his research the reporter, Peter Bratt, had uncovered a bill for 55,600 kronor, signed for by the head of the professional workers’ union, Björn Rosengren, and paid for using a union bank card. And now Rosengren had come forward to explain what had happened.

It was very embarrassing that he had been to a sex club, and extremely unfortunate that the union had paid, but everything had been sorted out in the end.

Björn Rosengren explained that on the evening of 3 September 1991 he had eaten dinner at Café Opera with an American businessman in the ventilation industry. After the meal the American wanted to go on somewhere, so they jumped into a taxi, and the driver had dropped them off at a nightclub called Tabu.

Björn Rosengren and the American ordered champagne. Three quarters of an hour after they arrived at the club, a naked woman came over to them, and that was when Björn Rosengren realized what sort of place it was, and he paid the bill and left.

It wasn’t until the following day that he realized that the club had cheated him. The bill should have been for 600 kronor, not 55,600. With the help of a lawyer, also named Björn Rosengren (what a coincidence!), he eventually negotiated the amount down to ‘below 10,000 kronor’, and paid with his own money.

No more was written about the story in the press. It looked like it was done and dusted.

Then several weeks later the other big evening paper,
Aftonbladet
, published an entirely different version of events during the night of 3 September 1991. They printed a photograph of a young, blonde Swedish woman with her back to the camera, a tie hanging down her back.

She said that she had been at Café Opera with a female American friend. After a while an American man came over and joined them, then a few minutes later Björn Rosengren came over as well. He was happy and drunk and gave her his tie. When the bar closed at three o’clock the four of them got into a huge white limousine and went on to the Tabu sex club. Björn Rosengren
fell down the stairs into the club, then vanished into one of the private rooms with a naked Asian girl. The women and the American man found the whole thing embarrassing and were driven home by the chauffeur, who then returned to pick up Björn.

The article was written by the reporter Bengt Michanek.

At
Expressen
our reaction was one of complete panic. We were way behind on the story, and I was given the job of trying to catch up and find something new. I went into my office and thought for a while. Either the young woman was lying, or Björn Rosengren was. It was as simple as that.

So who was in a position to confirm what had actually happened?

The staff at Café Opera obviously had no idea what had happened after they closed. Maybe the guy at the hotdog kiosk in Östermalm would remember a big white limo, but three years later? That was pretty unlikely, and he wouldn’t have known where they were going. The naked Asian girl would probably remember, but where was she? And how credible a witness was she?

Which left one person who must have been sober: the driver of the limo. And there ought to be some sort of receipt for payment of the trip. I started making some phone-calls, asking questions, trying to feel my way forward. To my surprise I got lucky almost straight away.

Björn Rosengren turned out to be a big customer of the limo company Freys Hyrverk. He spent up to quarter of a million kronor on limos each year, even though the union provided him with a car.

And I found out something else interesting: only three weeks after the now infamous night at Tabu, Freys Hyrverk went bust. I got hold of the official receiver at
his summer cottage down in Skåne and was told that there were no suspicions of tax evasion or anything else illegal concerning the bankruptcy, which meant that all documentation surrounding the case was in the public domain. They were gathering dust in a massive storage facility in South Hammarby Harbour.