The Bomber

by Liza Marklund

  The thought struck them both at the same time.

  ‘Unless …’

  ‘Do you think …?’

  They started to laugh. The idea of Christina Furhage as a closet lesbian was too absurd.

  ‘Maybe they snuck away to register their partnership,’ Berit said, making Annika laugh so much that she was squirming on her chair.

  Then they suddenly settled down again.

  ‘But what if it’s true? Could they have been having a relationship?’

  They carried on eating their salad as they mulled over the possibility.

  ‘Why not?’ Annika said. ‘Helena Starke was yelling that she knew Christina better than anyone.’

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean they were sleeping together.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Annika said. ‘But it just might.’

  One of the waitresses came over to their table.

  ‘Excuse me, but is one of you Annika Bengtzon?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Annika said.

  ‘They want you back upstairs. They’re saying the Bomber has struck again.’

  36

  The others were already gathered in the editor-in-chief’s office when Annika got back. No one looked up as she walked through the door, with pieces of sweetcorn stuck in her teeth, and her bag slung over her shoulder. The men were busy planning their strategy of how to squeeze everything they could out of the terrorism angle.

  ‘We’re way behind everyone else,’ Spike said, just a little too loudly. Annika got his point. She had found out the basics on her way up from the canteen. She sat at the far corner of the table, scraping the chair and getting her legs tangled, almost tumbling onto the floor. They all fell silent and waited.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and the word hung ambiguously in the air, taunting her.

  Oh hell, now they were going to make her pay! Only an hour ago she had sat here and forced through her line about the Bomber being out after Christina Furhage personally, and that there was no link whatsoever to the Olympics, then bang! Another explosion, at another Olympic venue.

  ‘Have we got anyone there?’ Schyman asked.

  ‘Patrik Nilsson’s on his way,’ Spike said, sounding very important. ‘He should get to Sätra Hall in ten minutes or so.’

  ‘Sätra Hall?’ Annika said in surprise. ‘I thought the blast was at one of the Olympic venues?’

  Spike looked condescendingly at her.

  ‘The Sätra Hall is actually an Olympic venue.’

  ‘What sport? A training camp for shot-putters?’

  Spike looked away.

  ‘No, the pole-vault.’

  ‘So where do we go with this?’ Anders Schyman interrupted. ‘We’ll have to try to recapitulate what the other media have done on terrorism over recent days, and make it sound as though we’ve been with them all along. Who wants to do that?’

  ‘Janet Ullman is on tonight, we can ask her to come in early,’ Ingvar Johansson said.

  Annika felt suddenly giddy, a feeling that threatened to pull her away from the table and drag her halfway up the wall. What a nightmare. How could she have been so wrong? Had the police been lying to her all along? She had staked her standing at the paper on her approach to this story. Was there any way she could stay on as head of the crime section after this?

  ‘We have to go out and check security in the other venues,’ Spike went on. ‘We’ll have to get extra people in, the other night crew …’

  The men were facing each other, their backs to Annika as she sat off in the corner. Their voices merged into a single cacophony, and she leaned back, trying to get some air. She was finished, she knew she was finished. How the hell could she even stay on at the paper after this?

  The meeting was short and to the point, and the others were unanimous. They all wanted to get back to their desks and run with the terrorism angle. Only Annika was left, sitting in her corner. She didn’t know how she was going to be able to leave without falling apart. She was on the verge of tears.

  Anders Schyman went and made a couple of calls from his desk; Annika heard his voice rise and fall. Then he came back and sat on the chair next to hers.

  ‘Annika,’ he said, trying to catch her eye. ‘Don’t worry, do you hear me? There’s no need to worry!’

  She turned away and blinked back the tears.

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ the editor-in-chief continued quietly. ‘That’s the oldest truth in the world. I was wrong as well; I thought exactly the same as you. Now things have happened that mean we have to think again. We have to make the best of the situation now, don’t we? We’re going to need you on this, Annika …’

  She took a deep breath and looked down at her lap.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, of course you are. But it feels terrible. I was so sure my theory was right …’

  ‘It may yet turn out to be right,’ Schyman said thoughtfully. ‘It’s unlikely, I suppose, but Christina Furhage may have had some personal connection to Sätra Hall.’

  Annika couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Not very likely!’ she said, smiling.

  The editor-in-chief put his hand on her shoulder and stood up.

  ‘Don’t let this break you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been right about everything else in this story.’

  She pulled a face and stood up as well.

  ‘How did we hear that there’d been another explosion? Did Leif ring?’

  ‘Yes, either him or Smoothy in Norrköping; it was one of them.’

  Schyman sank onto the chair behind his desk with a deep sigh.

  ‘Are you going out there tonight?’ he asked.

  Annika tucked her chair under the table and shook her head.

  ‘No, there’s no point. Patrik and Janet have it covered. I’ll get going early tomorrow morning instead.’

  ‘Okay. I think you should take some time off when this calms down. You earned practically a whole week off over this past weekend alone.’

  Annika smiled weakly.

  ‘Yes, I think perhaps I will.’

  ‘Go home and get some sleep now, and let the boys out there deal with this tonight. They’re on a roll now.’

  The editor-in-chief picked up his phone, indicating that their conversation was over. She picked up her bag and left.

  37

  The newsroom was bubbling in that intense way it did when something big had happened. On the surface everything seemed calm, but the tension was clearly visible in the section heads’ alert eyes and the editors’ ramrod-straight backs. Words flew, short and concise, reporters and photographers marched purposefully towards the exit. Even the receptionists were caught up in it, their voices deeper and their fingers more focused as they flew over the keyboards. Usually Annika enjoyed the feeling, but today even crossing the floor felt difficult.

  Berit came to her rescue.

  ‘Annika! Come here, I’ve got something to tell you!’

  Berit had brought her salad with her, and was sitting in the radio room, the cubicle next to the crime desk that had access to every police channel in the Stockholm district, as well as one national channel. One wall was covered with built-in speakers, with individual circuit-breakers and volume controls. Berit had turned up the ones covering the southern suburbs and the central police district, the ones that could be expected to be involved in the explosion at Sätra Hall. Annika could only hear static and bleeping.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Berit said. ‘The police got there a minute or so ago. They started calling for a scrambled channel—’

  At that moment the chatter started again. The Stockholm police had two protected channels, usually known as ‘scrambled’. You could hear someone talking, but what they said was completely incomprehensible. It sounded like Donald Duck talking backwards. The scrambled channels were used very rarely, usually for drugs cases. The security services could also use them when they suspected that criminals had access to police radio.
There was a third possibility: that the information was so sensitive that it had to be kept secret for other reasons.

  ‘We have to get hold of scrambling equipment,’ Annika said. ‘We could be missing really important stuff like this.’

  The chatter died away and static took over on the other channels. Annika looked at the speakers. The eight police districts in Stockholm used two different radio systems, System 70 and System 80.

  The 70 contained all the channels from 79 megahertz and upwards, and the 80 started at 410 megahertz and took its name from the simple fact that it came into use in the 1980s. The idea was that everyone should have switched to the System 80 ten years ago, but the complete reorganization of police services in that time meant that the old system was still in use.

  Annika and Berit listened to the crackling and the electronic bleeps for another minute or so, until a male voice broke through the static on the southern suburban channel, 02.

  ‘Twenty-one ten here.’

  The numbers indicated that the call was from a radio car from Skärholmen.

  The response from central command on Kungsholmen came a second or so later.

  ‘Yes, twenty-one ten, over.’

  ‘We need an ambulance to the address, well, actually a police wagon—’

  The crackling took over again, as Annika and Berit looked at each other in silence. ‘Police wagon’ was a euphemism for a hearse. ‘The address’ was undoubtedly Sätra Hall, because there was nothing else going on in the southern district right now. The police often used phrases like that when they didn’t want to be too obvious over the radio, talking about ‘the address’ or ‘the location’, and suspects were referred to as ‘the object’.

  Central command responded: ‘Twenty-one ten, ambulance or police wagon, over?’

  Both Annika and Berit leaned forward together, the answer was crucial.

  ‘Ambulance, over.’

  ‘One dead, but not as bad as Furhage,’ Annika said.

  Berit nodded.

  ‘The head’s still on, even if the rest is badly messed up,’ she said.

  A policeman was only able to confirm death if the head had been severed from the body. So that was clearly not the case here, even if it was obvious that the person was dead. Otherwise the police wouldn’t have spoken of a police wagon – a hearse.

  Annika went out into the newsroom.

  ‘There’s evidently one fatality,’ she said.

  Everyone round the large nest of tables where the night-editors worked stopped and looked up.

  ‘Why do you think that?’ Spike said expressionlessly.

  ‘Police radio,’ Annika said. ‘I’ll call Patrik.’

  She turned on her heel and went into her office. Patrik answered immediately, he must have been holding his phone, as usual.

  ‘How does it look?’ Annika asked.

  ‘Bloody hell, there’s flashing lights everywhere,’ the reporter yelled.

  ‘Can you get in?’ Annika said, forcing herself not to shout.

  ‘No, not a chance,’ Patrik roared. ‘They’ve cordoned off the whole of Sätra sports centre.’

  ‘Any indication of fatalities?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Any indication of fatalities?’

  ‘Why are you shouting? No, no fatalities, there’s no ambulance, and no hearse.’

  ‘There’s one on its way, we heard it over the radio. Stay there, and give your report to Spike, I’m going home.’

  ‘What?’ he yelled through the receiver.

  ‘I’m going home now. Talk to Spike!’ Annika shouted back.

  ‘Okay!’

  Annika hung up. Berit was doubled up with laughter in the doorway.

  ‘No need to tell me who you were talking to,’ she said.

  38

  It was just after eight o’clock when she got home to the flat on Hantverkargatan. She had taken a taxi, and was struck by a strange sense of giddiness on the back seat.

  The taxi-driver was angry about something the paper had printed, and was going on about journalistic responsibility and political autocracy.

  ‘Talk to one of the editors; I just clean the stairs,’ Annika said, leaning her head back and shutting her eyes. The giddiness was growing into a real sense of illness as the car wove through the traffic on Norr Mälarstrand.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Thomas asked as he came into the hall with a tea-towel in one hand.

  She gave a deep sigh.

  ‘I just feel a bit dizzy,’ she said, brushing the hair from her face with both hands. Her hair felt really greasy, she would have to wash it tomorrow morning. ‘Is there any food left?’

  ‘Didn’t you eat at work?’

  ‘Half a salad, then stuff happened …’

  ‘There’s some left – pork chop and roast potatoes.’

  Thomas threw the towel across his shoulder and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘Are the children asleep?’

  ‘They went off an hour ago. They were worn out. I’m worried Ellen might be coming down with something. Did she seem tired this morning?’

  Annika thought back.

  ‘No, not really. A bit clingy, maybe, so I carried her to the bus.’

  ‘I can’t take time off now,’ Thomas said. ‘If she gets ill you’ll have to look after her.’

  Annika felt her anger welling up.

  ‘I can’t be away from work at the moment, surely you can see that? There was another Olympic killing tonight, haven’t you heard the news?’

  Thomas turned round.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘No, I heard the news on the radio this afternoon, but they didn’t say anything about a new murder.’

  Annika went into the kitchen. It looked like a bomb had hit it. Her plate of dinner was waiting for her on the table. Thomas had dished up potatoes, pork chop, cream sauce, fried mushrooms and lettuce salad for her. Beside her glass stood a bottle of weak beer that would have been ice-cold a couple of hours ago. She put the plate in the microwave and set it for three minutes.

  ‘The lettuce will be disgusting,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I’ve been wrong all along,’ Annika said. ‘I forced the paper to drop the terrorism angle because I had other information from the police. It looks like I fell for an almighty red herring, because there was an explosion at Sätra Hall tonight.’

  Thomas sat down at the table and tossed the tea-towel onto the draining-board.

  ‘The sports hall? There’s hardly any room for spectators there. They can’t use that as an Olympic venue, can they?’

  Annika poured herself a glass of water and hung up the tea-towel.

  ‘Don’t leave this here, it’s soaking wet. Every damn sports hall in the city seems to have something to do with the Olympics. There are evidently more than a hundred venues that are involved one way or another, either as actual competition venues or as training centres and warm-up tracks.’

  The microwave let out three little bleeps to indicate it was finished. Annika took the plate out and sat down opposite her husband. She ate greedily, without saying a word.

  ‘So how was your day?’ she asked, opening the lukewarm bottle of beer.

  Thomas sighed and stretched.

  ‘Well, I hope I’ll be ready for the planning meeting on the twenty-seventh, but it didn’t go well today. The phone never stops ringing. This regional issue keeps getting bigger, which is no bad thing, but sometimes there’s no time for anything but meetings and phone-calls.’

  ‘I can pick the kids up early tomorrow, so you might get a bit more done,’ Annika said, suddenly feeling guilty. She chewed a piece of pork: the microwave had made it really tough.

  ‘I thought I might sit down and go through one of the preliminary reports now. One of the young guys has put it together; he’s been working on it for months. It’s probably unreadable – things usually are when trainees have spent too long working on a text. Official Swedish can be completely impossible to read.’

  Annika smiled weakly. So
metimes her conscience gave her such a bad time. Not only was she an unbalanced head of section and a useless reporter, but she was a rotten wife and a hopeless mother, too.

  ‘You sit and read. I’ll clear up.’

  He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘The Christmas ham is in the oven. Take it out when it gets to seventy-five degrees.’

  Annika opened her eyes wide in surprise.

  ‘You found the meat thermometer?’ she said. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In the bathroom, next to the kids’ thermometer. I took Ellen’s temperature when we got home, and there it was. I think Kalle must have put it there. It’s the logical place for it, really. He swears blind he didn’t put it there, of course.’

  Annika pulled Thomas to her and kissed him properly.

  ‘I love you too,’ she said.

  Happiness

  Deep in the forest, past the barn and the swamp, lay a lake, Långtjärn. In early childhood it came to represent the end of the world, probably because that was where the grown-ups’ land stopped. I often heard it mentioned as a symbolic end point, and I imagined the lake as a bottomless hole full of darkness and terror.

  The day when I finally got permission to go up there alone, any thoughts of that sort vanished. Långtjärn was a wonderful place. The little lake was nestled in ancient forest, scarcely a kilometre long, just a couple of hundred metres wide, with glittering water and pine-strewn shores. It gave me a sense of innocence, of a new beginning. This was what the world looked like before human beings arrived.

  Evidently there had once been fish in the lake, because just beside the little stream running out from it a ramshackle little wooden shack lay among the trees. It had once been a fishing and hunting cabin, and it was a surprisingly ambitious building for what it was. It consisted of one single room, with an open fireplace in the far gable, a planed floor and a little window facing the water. The furniture consisted of two bunks, fixed to the walls, two rough stools, and a small table.