Lifetime

by Liza Marklund

  She looked at the time. Eva-Britt Qvist’s big meeting had started, the meeting about their shared future. She stopped on the pavement, shutting her eyes against the greyness. People carried on streaming past her, bumping into her and muttering apologies for treading on her toes.

  One point of stillness, something to cling to. That was all she needed. A shape and a colour in the emptiness.

  20

  There was a great mass of people around the day-shift desk. Annika could see Eva-Britt Qvist’s spiked hair sticking up in the centre of the crowd, and presumed that she must have stood on the table in an effort to conjure up some enthusiasm. ‘This is about solidarity,’ she said, in a voice that was on the brink of cracking.

  Annika put her bag on Spike’s desk. ‘Have they been at it for long?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘A fucking eternity,’ the head of news said, without looking up from his morning paper. The Norrbotten Courier, she noted.

  ‘We have to stand up for each other!’ Eva-Britt Qvist cried. ‘This isn’t the time for soloists, but for the whole orchestra!’

  Scattered applause.

  ‘Don’t they use that metaphor every time?’ Annika said, opening a bottle of mineral water that happened to be sitting on the desk.

  Spike groaned and turned a page.

  ‘If we accept management’s demands to abandon the list dictated by employment regulations, our employers will be able to fire people as they choose. We can’t let management have their way! We have to stick together here!’

  ‘What exactly does the paper want?’ Annika asked, taking a swig from the bottle.

  ‘People to shut up and do some work,’ Spike said, pushing the newspaper into the recycling bin.

  ‘After all the hard work we’ve put into this paper! After all the times we’ve shown how dedicated we are, time after time after time! Through reorganizations and online launches and cutbacks, we’ve put up with all of that and struggled on, recognizing our responsibility to our readers …’

  An appreciative murmur ran through the crowd.

  ‘We have to show that we stand united in our struggle against management and their blinkered focus on profits. We have to come up with powerful counter-proposals. We in the union are today proposing a united, collective and aggressive strategy to show the bosses that we’re serious. We’re going to sign ourselves off sick!’

  Annika choked on a mouthful of mineral water.

  Sign ourselves off sick?

  She stared at Eva-Britt Qvist, who had raised her arms towards the ceiling as if she were expecting thunderous applause. ‘Sign ourselves off sick?’ she said. ‘Is she mad?’

  She put the water down on Spike’s desk.

  ‘We’ll show them what happens when none of us comes to work. We’ll make them see the consequences of failing to listen to their colleagues …’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Annika said, ‘she’s away with the fairies now.’

  A young girl in a suit, Ronja, shushed her.

  ‘What?’ Annika said. ‘Do you think it’s okay for everyone to go off sick at the same time?’

  Ronja turned her back and folded her arms.

  ‘No, seriously, tell me,’ Annika said. ‘Do you think it’s okay to exploit the social welfare system to take revenge on our employers?’

  There was now complete silence around them, as Annika’s last words filtered through the group.

  Eva-Britt Qvist had lost her thread. Her eyes rested on Annika, and she pointed a trembling finger at her. ‘Do you have something to say?’ she asked.

  Everyone turned towards Annika, whose heartbeat quickened. ‘Signing yourself off sick isn’t an aggressive strategy,’ she said. ‘Exploiting the social welfare system like that is actually against the law. False certification.’

  Two red marks had blossomed on Eva-Britt’s cheeks. ‘Solidarity!’ she cried. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  Annika shuffled uncomfortably, feeling her colleagues’ stares burn into her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what about our solidarity with anyone who’s really sick if we use their money just to cause trouble for Anders Schyman?’

  ‘Solidarity is when you unite in a collective,’ Eva-Britt Qvist bellowed. ‘It’s when you look towards something bigger than yourself – but that’s something you’ve never done!’

  Suddenly Annika was utterly incensed. She took a couple of steps forward and her throat tightened.

  For fuck’s sake, don’t start crying.

  ‘Okay,’ Emil the temp said beside her, ‘surely we can debate the subject? This is a meeting, after all.’

  ‘Everyone has to work together,’ Eva-Britt Qvist shrieked. ‘We’ve agreed on that!’

  Bloody hell! Annika thought. A temp with a bit of go in him! ‘Who’s agreed what?’ Annika said, to Eva-Britt Qvist. ‘You and who else? What about us, your fellow members?’

  ‘Annika’s got a point,’ she heard someone say behind her.

  ‘This is a collective action!’ Eva-Britt Qvist cried. ‘We have to stick together to get our demands through.’

  ‘What – firing people according to the “last in, first out” list?’ Annika said. ‘How is that fair?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Patrik Nilsson called.

  People were shuffling about now, considerably more animated than they had been just moments earlier.

  ‘We have to stick together!’ Eva-Britt Qvist croaked.

  ‘So that you keep your job,’ someone on the far side shouted. ‘What about us, then?’

  ‘Yes, exactly, what about us?’

  Annika took a few steps back, walked round Ronja and picked up her bag from the newsdesk. There was now so much noise that she couldn’t hear what Eva-Britt Qvist was saying. It would be a while before she could sit and work at the day shift’s desk again.

  Anders Schyman watched Annika Bengtzon fish a lunch coupon from her wallet and disappear in the direction of the canteen. He was sitting in an empty radio studio watching the union meeting through the open door.

  Eva-Britt Qvist was an even bigger disaster as union representative than he had imagined, and that was saying something.

  She’s not worth fighting for.

  He remembered the huge fuss when one of the papers in Småland had tried to get rid of an intransigent union boss a few years back. The man had made himself utterly impossible in his workplace. He’d opposed everything, refused to work repeatedly on the grounds that the tasks he was given were beneath him, claimed he was busy with investigative reporting when he was actually surfing the net for porn, and when he realized he was on the point of being sacked, he’d got himself elected as union boss. The paper’s management had still tried to get rid of him, with the result that the Swedish trade-union movement had lined up behind that one incompetent reporter. It ended with him being appointed an ombudsman at the headquarters of the Journalists’ Association on Vasagatan in the centre of Stockholm. The whole of media-Sweden had celebrated: what a victory!

  That the man left three months later, after his probationary period, was something that nobody had seen fit to report, apart from the Newspaper Publishers’ Association. Today he was driving a taxi in Sundbyberg.

  Playing to the gallery. That’s how it works. Let them have their headlines.

  Now they had had their big meeting. Now the masses were riled.

  He stretched his legs.

  The meeting had been interesting. It had revealed a couple of rebels he hadn’t noticed before. He had taken it for granted that Annika Bengtzon would oppose Eva-Britt Qvist’s imbecilic ideas, partly because she couldn’t stand the former editorial secretary, and partly because she reacted instinctively against rule-breaking (unless she or someone close to her was breaking them in which case it was fine).

  One advantage of having Eva-Britt Qvist in the post, from his point of view, was that she was a woman. She’d never have the same authority as a man. Her lack of success would be seen as her own personal failure, and the rest of the union committee w
ouldn’t be tainted.

  She’ll be easy to rationalize away when this is over. No one’s going to fight for her.

  After a long series of local negotiations, he and Eva-Britt Qvist had agreed a framework for the cutbacks. According to the agreement, members of the paper’s editorial management were excluded from consideration under most aspects of employment legislation, and would not be included in any lists relating to the cutbacks. Schyman had claimed that anything else would be unreasonable, and she had soon backed down.

  Maybe she was counting on becoming part of that group herself.

  No exceptions had been specified, and there was no attempt to define precisely what ‘editorial management’ meant, very little explanation at all, in fact.

  That new lad, Emil, and Patrik, of course. The young lads on the online edition, and the girls in Entertainment. They would all have to go, according to the union’s list.

  He sat and looked at the group of newsroom staff gradually breaking up into smaller groups before disappearing, each person going back to his or her work. Then he got up and headed back to his office.

  This is going to be the newspaper with the largest editorial management team in the world.

  The day shift’s desk was littered with coffee-cups, Coke cans and orange peel. Annika swept the rubbish into a large recycling bin and made an effort to block out the rest of the mess. She unpacked her laptop and logged in. She took out her notes from the previous evening, the jottings of phone calls she had made, the sheets of information she had dug out.

  The only question was: could any of this ever be used?

  There were all the people in the various companies, the forty-five-year-old who had been shot in the car park in Norrköping, the American serving a life sentence who had disappeared from Tidaholm after an accident …

  She paused when she got to her notes from her call to the officer in Tidaholm Prison. He had said that David Lindholm had been the American lifer’s trustee. Which other prisoners did David Lindholm have official links with? How do you find out that sort of thing? Would it be in the public domain?

  She couldn’t recall having thought about it before.

  She went into the website of the National Correctional Organization, checked their contact details, picked up the phone and dialled the number in Norrköping. She was put through to a lawyer who dealt with freedom-of-information requests.

  ‘This is covered by legislation guaranteeing confidentiality to those within the criminal justice system,’ the lawyer said. ‘It’s a matter of individual concern, which means that such dealings aren’t in the public domain.’

  ‘Is it possible to apply to see them?’ Annika wondered.

  The lawyer hesitated. ‘Yes, it’s possible. If we were to receive a request, we’d deal with it in the usual way.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here, at our national head office. We have access to all the information.’

  ‘So you think it might be possible to find out if someone has been a trustee and, if so, who for?’

  The lawyer was thinking out loud. ‘Well, we can’t give out any information that may harm an individual. But revealing whether or not someone is acting as a trustee could hardly be regarded as harmful. But it might be more sensitive if the person in question had served a prison sentence themselves and was now acting as a trustee. We’d have to judge each application on its own merits.’

  ‘Great,’ Annika said. ‘I’d like to make an application. How long will it take to get the answer, and who will I get it from?’

  ‘Decisions like that are usually dealt with by our clerical staff, so it shouldn’t take long. You’ll have an answer within a few days.’

  I want an answer NOW!

  Annika asked for the woman’s email address, thanked her and hung up. Then she composed a request to find out for whom David Lindholm had been a trustee or probation contact, going back as far as it was possible to check.

  She sighed and pushed the computer away.

  Oh dear. I’m treading water.

  Behind her she could hear Patrik Nilsson talking to Spike, sounding agitated – presumably something about the homeward-bound cop-killer. ‘It’s a fucking scandal,’ he roared.

  Spike muttered something.

  ‘My source is rock-solid. The government gave the Yanks something in return for Gabrielsson. We have to find out what it was. Landing rights for the CIA at Bromma?’

  Annika stood up. She didn’t want to hear any more.

  Please, dear proprietors, put us out of our misery and get rid of the people you’re going to get rid of, then let us get on with our work in peace.

  She went over to the coffee-machine and selected black coffee. She stood by one of the tables, thinking about Julia Lindholm’s diagnosis. Multiple personalities. Sounds like a bad film. Practically every murderer these days claimed to suffer from some sort of psychological disorder. If they didn’t hear voices, they were on anabolic steroids or blamed poor potty-training and broken toys when they were little. Everyone should feel sorry for the unemployed because they didn’t have jobs, sorry for people who had jobs because they suffered from stress, sorry for the young who’d never been given a chance, and sorry for the old who had never made the most of the chances they’d had.

  Wife-killers always felt really bad because they hadn’t been able to control their wives, not been allowed to fuck them whenever they felt like it and not been able to decide whom they talked to. All too often the courts actually showed a degree of understanding to the unfortunate wife-beaters, producing page after page to justify why they should be treated as leniently as possible. Often they managed to get the names of the victims wrong as well – Annika had uncovered several such instances. The murdered women were called Lundberg, Lundgren and Berglund more or less at random, while the poor murderer, who of course had beaten his wife to death in a nice, humane way, was sentenced to the shortest term permissible by law because he was so sad that she had ended their relationship. Ten years in some low-security institution with a herd of cows and nice lawns, and they were out after six and a half.

  And now Julia was supposed to have a split personality. How sorry should we feel for her?

  She tipped the rest of the coffee away and went back to her desk. Patrik Nilsson had left the newsdesk and was sitting at his place hammering away at his computer in the crime section, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  She did a Google search and found a site about dissociative personality disorders. She read that two different personalities could deny each other’s existence or reject each other, while they each identified the same body as their own.

  God, how weird! The things the human mind is capable of!

  ‘The sufferer switches between different personalities depending on circumstances and neither can remember what the other has done. In some cases the gap between them isn’t as pronounced and the sufferer can be aware of their different personalities but has a more complicated relationship with them.’

  So Julia could be aware of this other woman? That could actually be possible?

  She clicked to read more.

  Truly split personalities were extremely rare, she discovered. In total, there were something like a thousand known cases worldwide. Multiple personality disorders shouldn’t be confused with schizophrenia, which was often the case. ‘One reason for the misunderstanding is that the word schizophrenia literally means “split senses”. This, however, reflects changes in associations and logical reasoning. A schizophrenic person has only ONE personality, but his or her thoughts and actions can often appear extremely disorganized …’

  She picked up a pen and chewed the end.

  She ought to be able to write about this. All she needed was one other source who could confirm what Nina Hoffman had told her about the psychiatric report. Who would be able to spill the beans?

  The lawyer! He hadn’t seemed particularly blessed with intelligence.

  She looked up his name and number again: M
ats Lennström at the Kvarnstenen law firm.

  ‘Mr Lennström is in court until late this afternoon,’ the secretary chirruped.

  She hung up and called the prosecutors’ office, but Angela Nilsson wasn’t available. She called the National Board of Forensic Medicine, only to be told that they never commented on their reports.

  Which left Q, and she didn’t want to talk to him.

  Damn! Why couldn’t Lennström be in?

  She leaned over the computer, thinking. Who else might give her some gossip? About Julia, and about David? Was there anyone who had no interest in protecting David Lindholm?

  The people he betrayed. The ones he shopped. Those who’d got life because they’d trusted him.

  Names, she thought. Find their names and work out where they’re serving their time.

  She wrote a list on a piece of paper.

  The American to whom something had happened at Tidaholm: moved to Kumla, in the central province of Närke.

  The father who had taken hostages at a nursery in Malmö: now in Kumla.

  The axe murderer from Södermalm, the financier Filip Andersson: also in Kumla.

  Maybe it would be worth taking a trip to Närke, to visit a few criminals? But what the hell was the American’s name?

  She had the name of the man from Malmö, Ahmed Muhammad Svensson. Yes, that really was his name. It was there in black and white in the court report she had been sent.

  How the hell am I going to find the American?

  She picked up her pen and started jotting things down. What did she actually know?

  He was an American and he was serving a life sentence.

  That ought to reduce the options enough to make him easy to identify. There were currently 164 people serving a life sentence, 159 of them men. And it was hardly likely that many were American citizens. Because he had been tried within the Swedish judicial system, he would be in the public records.

  I need to identify the trial. What could he have been found guilty of?

  It had to be either murder, kidnapping, arson, posing a serious danger to the public, aggravated sabotage of some kind, or aggravated dissemination of poison or an infectious substance …