Studio Sex

by Liza Marklund

  The man and the woman from the ambulance opened the back doors and pulled out a collapsible gurney. Calmly and methodically, they unfolded it, pushing the various clasps into place. Annika felt the hair on her arms stand on end. A puff of fizz from the Coke rose into her mouth and made her burp. They’ll roll out the body any moment now. She was ashamed of her morbid excitement.

  “Could you move to the side?” the woman with the gurney said.

  Annika looked down at the gurney rolling past. It shook as the wheels crunched over the uneven asphalt. On top of it lay a neatly folded bluish gray plastic sheet. The shroud, Annika thought, a cold thrill traveling up her spine.

  The man and the woman ducked under the cordon. The orange sign saying No Entry swung after them.

  The ambulance drivers reached the body. The men and the woman stood in a group discussing something. Annika felt the sun burn on the back of her arms.

  “Why is it taking so long?” she asked Berit in a stage whisper.

  Berit didn’t reply. Annika took up the Coke bottle and drank some.

  “Isn’t it horrible?” the woman from Sydsvenskan said.

  “Oh, yeah, it is,” Annika said.

  The ambulance people unfolded the plastic sheet and spread it over the gurney, its bluish gray, shiny surface flapping among the leaves. They lifted the young woman onto the gurney and wrapped her in the sheet. Annika suddenly felt tears come into her eyes. She saw the woman’s mute scream, her clouded eyes, the bruised breasts.

  I mustn’t start crying now, she thought, and stared hard at the worn gravestones. She tried to distinguish names or dates, but the inscriptions were in Hebrew. The delicate characters had almost been erased over time by the elements. All at once, everything went very quiet. Even the traffic down on Drottningholmsvägen stopped for a moment. The sunlight that filtered through the enormous crown of the lime trees was dancing across the granite.

  The cemetery was here before the city surrounding it. And the trees were here, smaller and frailer, when the dead were buried. But their leaves would have performed the same shadow play on the stone when these graves had just been dug.

  The gates were opening and the photographers got down to work. One of them pushed past Annika, jabbing an elbow so hard in her midriff that she lost her breath for a moment. Taken by surprise, she stumbled backward and lost sight of the gurney. She quickly moved farther away.

  Which direction is her head pointing? Annika found herself wondering. They wouldn’t roll her away feet first.

  The photographers accompanied the gurney alongside the cordon. All the camera motors were rattling out of time; the odd flash went off. Bertil Strand was jumping up and down behind his colleagues, alternately snapping away above their heads and in between them. Annika held on to the back door of the ambulance; the paintwork burned her fingers. The driver stopped five inches away from her, operating the various mechanisms of the car. Annika noticed that he was perspiring. She looked down at the plastic-covered body.

  I wonder if the sun has kept her warm, she thought.

  I wonder who she was.

  I wonder if she knew she was going to die.

  I wonder if she had time to be scared.

  All at once, tears were rolling down Annika’s face. She let go of the door, turned around, and took a few steps away. The ground was moving, she felt as if she was going to throw up.

  “It’s the smell. And the heat,” Berit said, suddenly at her side. She put her arm around Annika’s shoulders and pulled her away from the ambulance.

  Annika wiped away the tears.

  “Let’s go back to the paper,” Berit said.

  *

  Patricia woke up with a strange feeling of suffocation. There was no air in the room, she couldn’t breathe. She slowly became aware of her body on the mattress, naked and glistening. She lifted her left arm and the sweat trickled down her ribs and into her navel.

  Jesus Christ, she thought, I’ve got to have air! Water!

  For a moment she contemplated calling out to Josefin, but something made her change her mind. The apartment was completely quiet, so either Jossie was asleep or she’d gone out. Patricia groaned and rolled over, wondering what time it could be. Josefin’s black curtains shut out the daylight and made the room swim in a musty gloom. There was a smell of sweat and dust.

  “It’s a bad omen,” Patricia had said when Josefin had come home with the thick, black material. “You can’t have black curtains. The windows will be wearing mourning— you’d stop the flow of positive energy.”

  Josefin was annoyed. “Then don’t have them!” she’d exclaimed. “Nobody’s forcing you. But I want my room dark. How the heck are we going to be able to work nights if we don’t get to sleep during the day? I bet you didn’t think of that!”

  Jossie got her way, of course. She usually did.

  Patricia sat up on the mattress with a sigh. The sheet underneath her was screwed up in a damp knot in the middle of the bed. Angrily, she tried to straighten it out.

  It’s Jossie’s turn to do the shopping, she thought, so I don’t suppose there’s anything in the fridge.

  She got out of bed and went to the bathroom. She borrowed Josefin’s bathrobe and returned to her own room to open the curtains. The light hit her like nails in the eyes and she quickly closed them again. Instead she opened one of the windows wide, wedging in a flowerpot so it wouldn’t slam shut. The air outside was even hotter than inside, but at least it didn’t smell.

  She slowly walked out to the kitchen, filled a big beer glass with tap water, and drank it greedily. The kitchen clock showed five to two. Patricia was pleased with herself. She hadn’t slept through the whole day, even though she’d worked until five this morning.

  She placed the glass on the kitchen counter, between an empty pizza box and three mugs with dried-out tea bags in them. Jossie was terrible at cleaning. Patricia sighed and cleared things away, throwing out the trash, doing the dishes, and wiping counters without thinking.

  She was just about to step in the shower when the phone rang.

  “Is Jossie there?”

  It was Joachim. Patricia straightened up and made an effort to seem alert.

  “I just got up, so I don’t know, actually. Maybe she’s sleeping.”

  “Be a darling and wake her up, will you?” Succinct but friendly.

  “En seguida, Joachim. Hang on a moment…”

  She tiptoed to the end of the hallway to Josefin’s room and knocked softly on the doorpost. There was no reply, so she opened the door slightly and peeked in. The bed was exactly as unmade as it had been the day before when Patricia had left for work. She hurried back to the phone.

  “No, I’m sorry, I think she’s gone out.”

  “Where to? Who is she seeing?”

  Patricia gave a nervous laughter. “Nobody— or you, maybe? I don’t know. It’s her turn to do the shopping…”

  “But she slept at home?”

  Patricia tried to sound indignant. “Of course she did! Where else?”

  “That’s exactly it, Titsie. Do you have any suggestions?”

  He hung up just as the anger started to surface in Patricia’s mind. She hated it when he called her that. He did it to humiliate her. He didn’t like her. He felt she stood between him and Josefin.

  Patricia slowly walked back to Josefin’s bedroom and took another peek inside. The bed really did look exactly as it had the night before, the cover on the floor to the left of the bed and Josefin’s red swimsuit on the pillow.

  Jossie had never come home last night.

  The realization made Patricia feel ill at ease.

  *

  The air in the main entrance of the newspaper hit them like a cold, wet towel. The damp glistened on the marble floor and made the bronze bust of the newspaper shine. Annika shuddered and felt her teeth give a rattle.

  Tore Brand, the porter, sat sulking in the glassed-in reception booth in the far left-hand corner. “You’re all right!” he s
houted as the small group passed him on their way to the elevators. “You can go outside and defrost now and then. This place is so damn cold that I’ve had to bring the car heater in so I don’t get frostbite!”

  Annika tried to smile but didn’t quite manage. Tore Brand hadn’t been allowed to take this year’s holiday until August, something he considered to be little less than harassment.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Annika said to the others. “You go on upstairs.”

  She rounded Tore Brand’s little cubicle and could smell that he’d smoked a cigarette on the sly again. After a moment’s hesitation she chose the disabled washroom before the ladies’. She didn’t want to be jostling in front of the sinks with a bunch of sweaty women.

  Tore Brand’s plaintive voice followed her into the washroom. She locked the door by turning the door handle upward and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked awful. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red. She opened the cold-water tap and, holding up her hair, bent forward and let the cold water run over her neck. The enamel of the sink was icy cold against her forehead. A rivulet of water trickled down her spine.

  Why do I do this to myself? she thought. Why am I not lying on the grass by Pine Lake, reading Vogue?

  She pushed the red button on the hand dryer, held out the neckband, and tried to dry her armpits. Without much success.

  *

  Anne Snapphane’s desk was empty when Annika got back to the newsroom. Two mugs with dried-up coffee were on the desk, but the Coke was gone. Annika figured Anne had been sent out on a job.

  Berit was talking to Spike over by the news desk. Annika flopped onto her chair and let the bag fall to the floor. She felt dizzy.

  “So, how was it?” Spike called out.

  Annika hastily dug out her pad and walked over to the desk.

  “Young, naked, plastic tits,” she said. “Lots of makeup. She’d been crying. No decomposition, so she can’t have been there for very long. As far as I could see, her clothes weren’t anywhere nearby.” She looked up from her pad.

  Spike gave her a nod of approval. “Well, I’ll be damned…. Any terrified neighbors?”

  “A twenty-nine-year-old mother, Daniella, with a small child. She’ll never cross the park at night again. ‘It could have been me,’ she said.”

  Spike took notes, nodding appreciatively. “Do they know who she is?”

  Annika pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Not that we know.”

  “Let’s hope they release her name during the evening. You didn’t see anything that indicated where she lived?”

  “Her address tattooed on the forehead, you mean? Sorry…”

  Annika made a smile that Spike did not return.

  “Okay, Berit, you do the police hunt for the killer, who the girl was— check with her family. Annika, you do the scared mother and check the cuttings on the old murder.”

  “We’ll probably be working together a bit,” Berit said. “Annika has information from the crime scene that I don’t have.”

  “Do whatever you like,” he said. “I want a report on how far you’ve got before I go to the handover at six.”

  He swiveled round in his chair, lifted the receiver, and dialed a number.

  Berit closed her pad and walked over to her desk. “I’ve got the cuttings,” she said over her shoulder. “We could go through them together.”

  Annika borrowed a chair from the next desk. Berit took out a heap of yellowed sheets from an envelope marked “Eva Murder.” The killing had obviously taken place before the newspaper was computerized.

  “Anything that’s more than ten years old you’ll find only in the paper archive,” Berit said.

  Annika picked up a folded sheet, the paper feeling stiff and brittle. She ran her eyes over the page. The typeface of the headline seemed straggly and old-fashioned. A four-column black-and-white photo showed the north side of the park.

  “I was right,” Berit said. “She was climbing the steps and somewhere halfway up she met someone going down. She didn’t get any farther. The murder was never solved.”

  They sat down on opposite sides of Berit’s desk and became absorbed in the old stories. Berit had written several of them. The murder of young Eva really was similar to today’s.

  A warm summer night twelve years ago, Eva had been climbing the steep hill that was a continuation of Inedalsgatan. She was found next to the seventeenth step, half-naked and strangled.

  For a few days the stories were both numerous and long, with big pictures high up on the page. There were reports of the murder investigation and summaries of the autopsy report; interviews with neighbors and friends; and a piece with the headline “Leave Us in Peace.” Eva’s parents were pleading with someone for something, holding each other and gazing earnestly into the camera. There were public rallies against violence— violence against women and violence on the streets. A memorial service was held in the Kungsholm Church, and a mountain of flowers collected at the murder scene.

  Strange that I can’t remember any of this, Annika thought. I was old enough to understand things like that.

  As time went by the stories became shorter. The pictures shrank and ended up farther down on the page. Three and a half years after the murder, a short item reported the police bringing someone in for questioning but subsequently releasing him. After that it went quiet.

  Now Eva was newsworthy again, twelve years after her death. The comparison was inevitable.

  “So what do we do with this?” Annika wondered.

  “Just a short summary,” Berit replied. “There’s not much else we can do. I’ll type out what we’ve got— you do your mother and I’ll do Eva. By the time we’ve done that, Krim ought to be on the case and then we can start making some calls.”

  “Are we in a hurry?” Annika asked.

  Berit smiled. “Not really. Deadline isn’t until four forty-five A.M. But it would be good if we finished a bit before, and this is a good start.”

  “What’ll happen to our stories in the paper?”

  Berit shrugged. “Maybe they won’t get printed at all. You never know. It depends on what’s going on in the world and on how much paper we’ve got.”

  Annika nodded. The number of pages in the paper often determined whether a story would be printed. It was the same at Katrineholms-Kuriren, the provincial paper were she normally worked. In the middle of the summer, the management would economize on paper, partly because ad revenue went down in July, partly because nothing much happened. The number of pages always went up or down by four, as there were four pages to a printing plate.

  “I have a feeling this may get quite high priority,” Berit said. “First the news event of the murder itself, the police hunt, and then a spread on the girl, who she was. After that they’ll have the recap of the Eva murder, your frightened mother, and last, possibly, a piece on ‘Stockholm, City of Fear.’ That’s my guess.”

  Annika leafed through the cuttings. “How long have you worked here, Berit?”

  Berit sighed and gave a faint smile. “It’ll be twenty-five years soon. I was about your age when I came here.”

  “Have you been on the crime desk all this time?”

  “Christ, no! I started out with animals and cooking. Then, in the early eighties, I was a political reporter. It was the thing to have women in such positions at the time. Then I had a stint on the foreign desk, and now I’m here.”

  “Where have you liked it the best?”

  “I enjoy writing the most— doing the research and finding my way through something. I like it a lot at the crime desk. I can do my own thing, pretty much. I often dig out my own stuff. Pass me those cuttings, will you? Thanks.”

  Annika stood up and walked over to her desk. Anne Snapphane hadn’t returned. The place seemed empty and quiet when she was gone.

  Annika’s Mac had gone into some kind of power-saving state; the loud sound when it restarted made her jump. She quickly wrote what Daniella Hermansson had said to
her: intro, body text, and a caption. Then she filed her copy into the list of stories held on the newsroom server. That’s it! Great!

  She was just off to get some coffee when her phone rang. It was Anne Snapphane.

  “I’m at Visby Airport!” she shouted. “Was it a murder in the park?”

  “You bet,” Annika said. “Naked and strangled. What are you doing on Gotland?”

  “Forest fire. The whole island’s going up.”

  “The whole island? Or just nearly all of it?”

  “Details. I’ll be away until tomorrow, maybe longer. Can you feed the cats?”

  “Haven’t you got rid of them yet?” Annika said tartly.

  Anne ignored her. “Can you change the cat litter as well?”

  “Sure…”

  They hung up.

  Why can I never say no? Annika thought, and sighed. She went to the cafeteria and bought coffee and a can of mineral water. With the coffee in one hand and the water in the other, she restlessly paced the newsroom. The air-conditioning didn’t quite make it all the way up here, so the air wasn’t much cooler than outside. Spike was on the phone, of course, two big patches of sweat in his armpits. Bertil Strand stood over by the picture desk talking to Pelle Oscarsson, the picture editor. She went up to them.

  “Are those the photos from Kronoberg Park?”

  Oscarsson double-clicked on an icon on his big screen. The deep green of the park filled the entire surface. The harsh sunlight put flecks all over the scene. Granite gravestones floated between the wrought-iron bars. A woman’s whole leg could be discerned at the center of the picture.

  “It’s good. Disturbing,” Annika said spontaneously.

  “Wait until you see this one,” Picture Pelle said, and clicked again.

  Annika recoiled as the clouded eyes of the woman met her own.

  “These are the first few pics,” Bertil Strand said. “Lucky I moved, wasn’t it?”