“I need to speak to my boss,” said Rebecka.
“Are you staying?” asked Sanna.
“For a while,” replied Rebecka in a strangled voice.
Sanna’s expression softened.
“That’s all I’m asking,” she said. “And how long can it take-after all, I’m innocent. You don’t believe I did it, do you?”
An image of Sanna walking along in the middle of the night, the bloodstained knife in her hand illuminated by the street lamps, formed in Rebecka’s head.
But then, why did she go back? she thought. Why would she have taken Lova and Sara to the church to “find” him?
“Of course not,” she said.
Case number, total hours. Case number, total hours. Case number, total hours.
Maria Taube sat in her office at the law firm Meijer & Ditzinger filling in her weekly time sheet. It looked good, she decided, when she added up the number of debited hours in the box at the bottom. Forty-two. It was impossible to make Mans happy, but at least he wouldn’t be unhappy. She’d worked more than seventy hours this week in order to be able to debit forty-two. She closed her eyes and flipped down the back of her chair. The waistband of her skirt was cutting into her stomach.
I must start doing some exercise, she thought. Not just sit on my backside in front of the computer, comfort eating. It’s Tuesday morning. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Four days left until Saturday. Then I’ll do some exercise. And sleep. Unplug the phone and go to bed early.
The rain pattered against the window, sending her to sleep. Just as her body had decided to give in and rest for a little while, just as her muscles relaxed, the telephone rang. It was like being woken up by a kick in the head. She sat bolt upright and grabbed the receiver. It was Rebecka Martinsson.
“Hi, kid!” exclaimed Maria cheerfully. “Hang on a minute.”
She rolled her chair away from the table and kicked the office door shut.
“At last!” she said when she picked up the phone again. “I’ve been trying to ring you like mad.”
“I know,” replied Rebecka. “I’ve got hundreds of messages on my phone, but I haven’t even started listening to them. It’s been locked in the car, and… no, I haven’t got the energy to tell you the whole miserable story. I assume one or two might be from Mans Wenngren, who’s presumably absolutely furious?”
“Mmm, well, I’m not going to lie to you. The partners have had a breakfast meeting about what was on the news. They’re not very happy about Channel 4 showing pictures of the office and talking about angry lawyers. They’re buzzing about like bees today.”
Rebecka leaned against the steering wheel and took a deep breath. There was a painful lump in her throat that made it difficult to say anything. Outside, Virku, Sara and Lova were playing with a rug that was hanging on the line. She hoped it belonged to Sanna and not one of the neighbors.
“Okay,” she said after a while. “Is there any point in speaking to Mans, or does he just want my resignation on his desk?”
“God, no. You’ve got to talk to him. As I understand it, most of the other partners wanted to talk about how to get rid of you, but that wasn’t on Mans’ agenda at all. So you’ve still got a job.”
“Cleaning the toilets and serving coffee?”
“Wearing nothing but a thong. No, seriously, Mans seems to have really stuck up for you. But it was just a misunderstanding, wasn’t it, you acting as lawyer for the Paradise Boy’s sister? You were just with her as a friend, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but something’s just happened and…”
The car window had misted up, and Rebecka rubbed at it with her hand. Sara and Lova were standing on top of a pile of snow talking to each other. There was no sign of Virku. Where had she got to?
“I need to discuss this with Mans,” she said, “because I can’t talk for much longer. Can you put me through?”
'Okay, but don’t let on you know anything about the meeting.'
“No, no-how did you find all this out anyway?”
“Sonia told me. She was sitting in.”
Sonia Berg was one of the secretaries who had been at Meijer & Ditzinger the longest. Her finest attribute was the ability to remain as silent as the grave about the firm’s affairs. Plenty of people had tried to pump her for information, and had been met with her particular cocktail of unwillingness, irritation and well-simulated incomprehension as to what the person wanted. At secret meetings-for example, to do with mergers-it was always Sonia who took the minutes.
“You’re unbelievable,” said Rebecka, impressed. “Can you get water out of stones as well?”
“Getting water out of stones was the foundation course. Getting Sonia to talk is advanced plus. But don’t talk to me about impossible tricks. What have you done to Mans? Given a voodoo doll a lobotomy or something? If I’d been on TV flattening journalists, I’d be staked out in his torture chamber experiencing my last agonizing twenty- four hours in this life.”
Rebecka laughed mirthlessly.
“Working for him in the near future is going to be a bit like that. Can you put me through?”
“Sure, but I’m warning you, he might have stuck up for you, but he’s not happy.”
Rebecka wound up the window and shouted to Sara and Lova, “Where’s Virku? Sara, go and find her and stay where I can see you. We’re going soon.
“Is he ever happy?” she said into the phone.
“Is who ever happy?”
Mans Wenngren’s chilly voice could be heard at the other end.
“Oh, hi,” said Rebecka, trying to pull herself together. “Er, it’s Rebecka.”
“I see” was all he said.
She could hear him breathing hard through his nose. He had no intention of making it easy for her, that much was clear.
“I just wanted to explain that it was a misunderstanding, this idea that I was acting for Sanna Strandgard.”
Silence.
“I see,” drawled Mans after a while. “Is that all?”
“No…”
Come on, thought Rebecka, giving herself a pep talk. Don’t get upset. Just say what has to be said and hang up. Things can’t get any worse.
“The police have found a knife and Viktor Strandgard’s Bible in Sanna Strandgard’s flat,” she said. “They’ve detained Sanna as a murder suspect; they’ve just driven off with her. I’m standing outside her flat at the moment. They’re just sealing it off. I’m going to take her daughters to school and day care.”
The irritated breathing at the other end of the phone stopped, and Rebecka permitted herself a pause before she went on.
“She wants me to defend her, refuses to have anybody else, and I can’t say no. So I’ll be staying up here for the time being.”
“You’ve got a bloody nerve,” exclaimed Mans Wenngren. “You go behind my back. Embarrass the firm on television and all over the papers. And now you’re intending to take on a case outside the terms of your employment. It’s a competitive act, and grounds for dismissal, you do know that?”
“Mans, don’t you understand, I want to take the case as a member of the firm,” said Rebecka agitatedly. “But I’m not asking for permission. I can’t back out of this. And I can do it-I mean, how difficult can it be? I’ll sit in on a few interviews, there probably won’t be too many. She doesn’t know anything and she can’t remember anything. They’ve found the murder weapon-if it was the knife-and Viktor’s Bible in her flat. She was in the church just after it happened. There isn’t a hope in hell of anybody getting her off if it gets to court. If they do decide to prosecute, which is not what I expect, I hope somebody who specializes in criminal law would back me up-Bengt-Olov Falk or Goran Carlstrom. There’ll be a lot of press interest, and some publicity on the criminal side would be good for the firm-you know that. It might be company law and tax cases that bring in the big money, but it’s the big crime cases that make a firm well known in the papers and on TV.”
