WE’LL BE IN TOUCH
“I’ll be damned,” he said, studying the copies. “It’s quicker to get hold of evidence through the media than through useless bloody Interpol. That’s unbelievable.”
She swallowed hard. So that was why he’d agreed to meet her, because she had access to information that the police hadn’t yet gotten hold of.
“What do you think about the handwriting?” she asked, trying to sound neutral. “Is it the same person?”
He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. She thought of last night, couldn’t help it. What had she been thinking?
“It’s impossible to tell with this lettering. Looks like it. Can I keep this?”
She nodded, unsure if she would be able to control her voice if she tried to say anything.
“You’ve heard about the Grand Hotel?” she finally managed to say.
“The press conference at two o’clock, yeah.”
He heaved his duffel bag onto his shoulder again.
She tried to smile.
“So at least you know where they are,” she said. “You don’t have to go to the ends of the earth after all.”
He stopped in the middle of what he was doing and looked at her, and she suddenly wanted the floor to swallow her up.
How could she be so clingy? She wasn’t that way - not ever - not even as a kid, especially not then.
“I’ve had a reply from the States,” he said. “From my contacts, those emails I sent from your computer.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“I’m on my way to Los Angeles right now,” he said, looking at his watch.
“My plane leaves in two hours.”
She felt like someone had just poured a bucket of ice cold water over her.
“You’re - Los Angeles? But…” She’d been about to say, “But what about me?”
She bit her cheek so hard she could taste blood.
She was acting like an idiot. She wanted to shrivel up, to be anywhere but here.
He looked at his watch again, hesitating. Then he took a step toward her and gave her a clumsy hug. The duffel bag was in the way and she got no contact with his body. How very fitting, she thought. The perfect ending for them.
“See you,” he said, turning around and walking quickly toward the express train to Arlanda.
She watched him go until he was swallowed up by the mass of people and disappeared in the crowd.
“See you.”
Chapter 93
CNN, SKY NEWS, AND BBC World were all broadcasting live from the Hall of Mirrors in the Grand Hotel. The overblown decor with its gold pillars, mirrored doors, and crystal chandeliers made Dessie think of Versailles or some other wedding-cake chвteau. Journalists and photographers and cameramen and radio reporters were all pushing and shoving to get the best places.
It was so crowded that the television people were standing shoulder to shoulder as they spoke to the cameras.
Usually she did all she could to avoid press conferences. There was something humiliating in all the pushing and shoving to get close, packed in with other reporters and turned into a babbling crowd. The hierarchy was ridiculously strict as well.
The television people always got to sit at the front. The bigger and noisier the channel, the closer their reporter got to the center of the action. Then came the radio reporters with their antennas, the news agencies, the national press, and then the specialist and local press. Researchers and editorial staff like her were let in only if there was room.
Today she decided to behave like Jacob, storming through everybody like an express train, quickly showing her press pass at the door and forcing her way into the back of the room, not taking no for an answer, not caring what anybody thought of her.
The room could hold five hundred, but the hotel management had limited the number to three hundred because of all the equipment needed for live television broadcasts.
She leaned back against the wall, craning her neck to see. What an absurd circus.
At the front of the room was a small, important-looking podium with metal steps on both sides.
The jungle of microphones shouted out the fact that this was where the siblings were going to proclaim their innocence to all the world. The level of sound in the room was rising steadily, like the tension in a stadium during the World Cup final.
Dessie closed her eyes.
She felt almost completely paralyzed inside. Events in the room were reaching her through a thick, toughened, glasslike material. It felt like that, anyway.
How could everything have gone so wrong? And so quickly. Her cell rang and she only noticed it because she was holding it in her hand.
It was Forsberg.
“How does it look? Did you manage to get inside? How close are you?”
“I thought this whole spectacle was going out live on seventeen channels,”
Dessie said. “Can’t you see for yourself?”
“They’re just showing a forest of microphones. I can’t tell anything. Have you seen Alexander Andersson?”
“I don’t think we’re in quite the same place,” Dessie said. “I’m standing right at the back.”
Forsberg took a deep breath.
“Is it true that you interviewed them?” he said. “While they were being held?”
She kept her eyes fixed on the podium. Something was happening in the front.
“Don’t believe everything you hear. They’re coming in now!”
The Hall of Mirrors exploded in a storm of flashbulbs and spotlights. From a door on the left Malcolm Rudolph walked into the room. He was wearing a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck and a pair of fashionably torn jeans.
His sister, Sylvia, was walking behind him, her billowing chestnut brown hair glittering in the flashing lights. She was dressed entirely in white.
“Shit,” Forsberg said in her ear. “She’s beautiful! How does she look in person?”
“I’ll call you later,” Dessie said, ending the call.
After Sylvia came a tall, thin woman whom Dessie recognized as Andrea Friederichs, their lawyer - their copyright lawyer.
The central characters stopped in front of the jungle of microphones and stood there for three long minutes so that they could be photographed properly. Then the lawyer leaned forward and said in the queen’s English: “If we could get started with this press conference…”
Chapter 94
THE RUDOLPHS’ MESSAGE TO the world was crystal clear: a miscarriage of justice had narrowly been avoided today.
This was repeated time after time during the forty-five-minute live broadcast.
