The Bomber

by Liza Marklund

  ‘It sounds like you can forgive your grandmother, but not your mum,’ Annika said.

  ‘When did you get to be a fucking psychiatrist?’

  Annika held her hands up. ‘Sorry.’

  Lena looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘Okay,’ she eventually said, downing the last of the beer. ‘I’m going to sit here and get drunk. Do you want to join me in my search for oblivion?’

  Annika smiled weakly.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ she said, gathering up her things. She put on her coat and scarf, and hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. Then she stopped and said, ‘Who do you think killed your mother?’

  Lena’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ she said.

  ‘Did she know anyone by the name of Stefan Bjurling?’

  ‘The latest victim? Haven’t a clue. Just don’t write any more crap from now on,’ Lena Milander said, then demonstratively turned her head away.

  Annika took the hint, turned to the waitress and paid for their order, then walked out.

  51

  The woman walked into the ultra-modern entrance to the Evening Post, trying to look as though she belonged there. She was wearing a straight, calf-length woollen coat that shifted between turquoise and lilac depending on the light, and her hair was hidden under a brown beret. On her left shoulder she had a replica Chanel bag, and in her right hand she was carrying a leather briefcase. She was wearing gloves.

  As the outer doors slid shut behind her she stopped and looked round, her eyes fixing on the glassed-in reception desk in the left-hand corner. She adjusted the thin strap of her bag and set off towards the glass booth.

  One of the caretakers, Tore Brand, was sitting inside. He had stepped in while the usual receptionist went off for a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

  Tore Brand pressed the button to open the hatch when the woman had almost reached the desk. He adopted an official expression and asked curtly: ‘Yes?’

  The woman hoisted her bag up onto her shoulder once again and cleared her throat.

  ‘Yes, I’m looking for one of your reporters, an Annika Bengtzon. She works in—’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Tore Brad interrupted. ‘She’s not here.’

  The caretaker’s finger was about to press the button to close the hatch. The woman fingered the handle of the briefcase nervously.

  ‘I see, not here … When will she be back?’

  ‘Difficult to say,’ Tore Brand said. ‘She’s out on a job and you never know what might happen or how long it’s going to take.’

  He leaned forward and added confidentially, ‘This is a newspaper, you know.’

  The woman laughed in a slightly forced way.

  ‘Thanks, I know. But I’d really like to see Annika Bengtzon. There’s something I want to give her.’

  ‘I see. What?’ the caretaker asked curiously. ‘Is it anything I can pass on to her?’

  The woman took a step back.

  ‘It’s for Annika, no one else. We spoke yesterday, it’s quite important.’

  ‘If you want to leave any files or documents with me I’ll see that she gets them.’

  ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll come back another time.’

  ‘We get people bringing boxes full of stuff every day, leaflets and insurance offers and all sorts, and we take them all. If you want to leave anything with me I’ll take care of it.’

  The woman turned on her heel and almost ran for the door. Tore Brand shut the hatch, thinking how much he wanted a cigarette.

  Annika was forcing her way through the crowds of Christmas shoppers on Götgatan after leaving the Pelican when she suddenly realized that she was only a couple of blocks from where Helena Starke lived. Instead of fighting against the tide coming out of the underground station at Skanstull, she turned round and let herself be carried along with the flow.

  She slipped and slid her way along Ringvägen: they were just as bad at clearing the roads here as over on Kungsholmen. Her memory for numbers didn’t let her down as she typed in the door-code, and she was soon inside number 139. This time Helena Starke opened her door after just one short ring.

  ‘You don’t give up, do you?’ she said as the door opened.

  ‘Can I just ask a couple of questions?’ Annika implored.

  Helena Starke sighed loudly.

  ‘ What is it with you? What the hell do you want from me?’

  ‘Please, not here in the stairwell—’

  ‘I don’t care any more; I’m moving.’

  She yelled the last word so that anyone listening would hear. That would give them something to talk about.

  Annika glanced past the woman’s shoulder, and it certainly looked as though she was packing her belongings. Helena Starke shrugged.

  ‘Oh, come in then, but you’d better be quick. I’m leaving tonight.’

  Annika decided to get straight to the point.

  ‘I know you were lying about the boy, Olof, but that’s fine. I’m here to ask if it’s true that you were having a relationship with Christina Furhage.’

  ‘If I was, what the hell is it to do with you?’ Helena Starke said calmly.

  ‘Nothing, I’m just trying to piece everything together. So were you?’

  Helena Starke sighed.

  ‘If I say I was, it would end up on posters outside newsagents and kiosks all over the country tomorrow, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Annika said. ‘Christina’s sexuality had nothing to do with her public duties.’

  ‘Okay,’ Helena Starke said, almost amused by this. ‘In that case, yes. Happy now?’

  Annika was a little taken aback.

  ‘So what else do you want to ask?’ Helena Starke said sharply. ‘What we did when we fucked? If we used dildos or fingers? If Christina screamed when she came?’

  Annika lowered her eyes, feeling like an idiot. This really wasn’t any of her business.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t mean to be intrusive.’

  ‘No, but you were, weren’t you?’ Starke said. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Did you know Stefan Bjurling?’ Annika said, looking up again.

  ‘He was a real bastard,’ Starke said. ‘If anyone ever deserved to get their kidneys blown out, he did.’

  ‘Did Christina know him?’

  ‘She knew who he was.’

  Annika closed the door, which had been open since she came in.

  ‘Please, can you tell me what Christina was really like?’

  ‘Bloody hell, you’ve been filling the papers with articles about what she was like all week!’

  ‘I mean Christina the person, not the public façade.’

  Helena Starke leaned against the frame of the living-room door and looked at Annika with interest.

  ‘Why are you so keen to find out?’ she said.

  Annika breathed in through her nose. The flat really did smell awful.

  ‘Every time I talk to someone who knew Christina, the picture changes. I think you were the only person who was really close to her.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Helena Starke said. She turned and walked away, sitting down in the sofa in the small living room. Annika followed her in without being asked.

  ‘So who did know her, then?’

  ‘No one,’ Helena said. ‘Not even her. Sometimes she got scared by who she was, or rather the person she had become. Christina carried a lot of demons around with her.’

  Annika looked at the woman’s face, half turned away from her. The light from the hall was on her neck and her classical profile. Helena Starke was actually strikingly beautiful. The rest of the room was in darkness, and outside the traffic thundered along Ringvägen.

  ‘What form did those demons take?’ Annika asked quietly.

  Helena Starke sighed.

  ‘She had a hell of a life, from childhood onwards. She was extremely intelligent, but that never seemed to count for anything. People were always messing her about, and she de
alt with it by becoming cold and remote.’

  ‘What do you mean, messing her about?’

  ‘She was a real trail-blazer as a female manager in the private sector, in the banking industry and in the boardroom. People were always trying to bring her down, but they never succeeded.’

  ‘Well, maybe they did actually manage to anyway, in spite of everything,’ Annika said. ‘People sometimes crack, even though the exterior looks intact.’

  Helena Starke didn’t reply. She was staring blankly into the darkness. After a while she raised a hand to her eye to wipe something away.

  ‘Did people know that you … were together?’

  Helena Starke shook her head.

  ‘No, not a single person. There was probably gossip, but no one ever asked us straight out. Christina was frightened it would get out, so she changed her driver every eight weeks so they would never work out why she came here so often.’

  ‘Why was she worried about it? There are loads of people in public life who are open about their sexuality these days.’

  ‘It wasn’t just that,’ Helena Starke said. ‘Relationships of any sort weren’t allowed inside the Olympic office; Christina had brought in that rule. If our relationship became public, I’d have to leave. And she probably wouldn’t have been able to hang on as managing director if she was seen to have broken one of her own big rules.’

  Annika let the words sink in. Yet another thing that Christina Furhage was afraid of. She looked at Helena Starke’s lowered face in profile and realized the paradox. Christina Furhage had risked everything she had spent all her life fighting for, for the sake of this woman.

  ‘She was here that last night, wasn’t she?’

  Helena Starke nodded. ‘We took a taxi; I think Christina paid cash. I don’t really remember, but that’s what she usually did. I was really drunk, but I remember that Christina was angry. She didn’t like me drinking and smoking. We made love, fairly roughly, and then I went out like a light. When I woke up she was gone.’

  She stopped and thought for a moment.

  ‘Christina was already dead when I woke up,’ she said.

  ‘Do you remember her leaving?’

  The woman sighed into the darkness.

  ‘No, but the police say she got a call on her mobile at two fifty-three. She answered and spoke for three minutes. And that must have been after we finished fucking, because Christina could hardly have been on the phone while we were …’

  She turned to look at Annika with a wry smile.

  ‘Is it uncomfortable talking openly about what you felt?’ Annika said.

  Helena Starke shrugged. ‘When I fell in love with Christina I knew what to expect. It wasn’t easy, getting her to open up. It took more than a year.’ She gave a short little laugh.

  ‘Christina was really inexperienced. It was like she’d never enjoyed sex before, but once she realized it could be fun, she couldn’t get enough. I’ve never had such a wonderful lover.’

  Annika was feeling uncomfortable. This was none of her business. She didn’t want to think of them together, this beautiful forty-year-old making love to a sixty-year-old ice-maiden. She tried to shake off the image.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said simply.

  Helena Starke didn’t reply. Annika turned and started to walk to the door.

  ‘Where are you moving to?’ she said.

  ‘Los Angeles,’ Helena Starke said.

  Annika stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit sudden?’ she said.

  Helena Starke was peering round the door-frame, looking at her intently.

  ‘It wasn’t me who blew them up,’ she said.

  52

  Annika was back in the office again in time for the 4.45 news on the radio. The broadcast opened with a scoop, at least on their terms. They had got hold of the government proposal on regional politics that was due to be published at the end of January. The proposals didn’t seem particularly remarkable to Annika, but the next item was more interesting. They had received a copy of the preliminary report into the explosives used in the murder of Stefan Bjurling. The constituent parts were most probably the same as the ones used at the stadium: a high-density mixture of nitro-glycerine and nitro-glycol, but the dimensions and packaging were different. According to the radio report, the explosives were packed in small cardboard tubes with a diameter of 22 to 29 millimetres. The police were making no comment on the leak, merely saying that their technical analysis was far from complete.

  Well, Patrik can take care of that, Annika thought, making a note in her pad.

  There was nothing else of interest to her in the news so she switched off the radio and started making phone-calls. The builders who worked with Stefan Bjurling ought to be home by now. She checked the caption to the picture accompanying her own article, then dialled Directory Inquiries. Several of the men had very common names, like Sven Andersson, which made them impossible to track down, but five of them were sufficiently unusual to save her dialling fifty different numbers to find the right person. Someone answered the fourth number she called.

  ‘Yes, I had my camera with me,’ Herman Ösel, one of the plumbers, said.

  ‘Do you remember if you took any pictures of Christina Furhage?’

  ‘Definitely, yes I did.’

  Annika felt her heart start to beat faster.

  ‘Did you take any pictures of Stefan Bjurling?’

  ‘Well, not of him on his own, but I think he was in one of the pictures with Christina Furhage.’

  Incredible, what a stroke of luck, Annika thought.

  ‘But you’re not sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I haven’t uploaded them yet. I thought I’d take a few pictures of the grandchildren over Christmas …’

  ‘Herman, do you think you might be able to email those pictures over to me at the Evening Post? And if there were any pictures that we might want to publish, do you think you might be interested in selling them to us?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’

  Annika quietly took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s like this, you see,’ she said. ‘At the Evening Post we think it’s really important that the bomber who killed Christina Furhage and Stefan Bjurling is caught and put in prison. It’s important to everyone, Christina and Stefan’s families and the people they worked with, but also the whole country, the whole world even. The Games are under threat, we have to realize that. And the best way to spread information and influence the way people think is for the mass media to do the socially responsible thing. For us at the Evening Post, that means writing about the victims and the work the police are doing, but it also means working on our own journalistic stories. Like talking to people who worked with the victims, for instance. That’s why I was wondering if we could publish a picture of Christina and Stefan together, if you’ve got a picture like that …’

  Her throat was dry after this little speech, but it seemed to have worked.

  ‘Well, I suppose that would be okay. How do we go about it?’

  Annika gave the man her email address and hung up.

  Tore Brand looked up from his desk as Annika was leaving. ‘By the way, someone was looking for you earlier today,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, who?’

  ‘She didn’t say. She wanted to give you something.’

  ‘Really? What?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me that either. She said she’d come back another time.’

  Annika smiled, groaning to herself. The caretakers really had to learn to take more information than that. One day it could turn out to be really important.

  She went back to her office via Patrik’s desk, but he was out. She’d have to call him on his mobile to arrange a meeting before the six o’clock editorial conference. As she passed Eva-Britt Qvist’s desk she heard the phone in her office start to ring. She ran the last few steps. It was Thomas.

  ‘When will you be home?’

  ‘I don’t know. I
expect I’ll be late. Somewhere around nine, I should think.’

  ‘I have to get back to work; we’ve got a meeting at six.’

  Annika could feel herself getting annoyed.

  ‘At six o’clock? But I’m at work! That’s when we have our meeting! Why didn’t you call earlier?’

  Thomas sounded calm, but Annika could tell from his voice that he was getting angry as well.

  ‘Radio news have somehow managed to get hold of the government’s proposal about regional politics, and it’s like a bomb has gone off at the Association. Several politicians involved in the inquiry are on their way already. You have to see that I’ve got to be there, surely?’

  Annika took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Fuck, fuck, she had to go home.

  ‘We agreed that I’d work late Monday and Wednesday, and you’d have Tuesday and Thursday,’ she said. ‘I’ve kept my part of the bargain. My job is just as important as yours.’

  Thomas started pleading instead.

  ‘Darling, please,’ he said. ‘I know you’re right. But I have to go back in. This is a damage limitation meeting, it shouldn’t take long. I’ve got dinner ready – if you can come home and eat with the kids, I’ll be back as soon as the meeting’s over. We should be done by eight, there’s not really that much to say. You can go back to work once I’m home again.’

  She sighed, shutting her eyes, pressing one hand to her forehead.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a taxi right away.’

  She went out to tell Ingvar Johansson about Herman Ösel’s picture, but he wasn’t at his desk. At the picture desk Pelle was on the phone, so she stood there waving in front of his face.

  ‘What is it?’ he said crossly, holding the receiver to his shoulder.

  ‘We’re getting some pictures from Vallentuna, of Christina Furhage and Stefan Bjurling together. Print some copies off once they come through. I have to go now, but I’ll be back around eight, okay?’

  Pelle nodded and went back to his phone-call.

  She didn’t bother calling for a taxi, just took one in the queue at the taxi rank on Rålambshovsvägen. She could feel the stress growing into a big lump in her stomach, until she started having trouble breathing. She really didn’t need this right now.