‘I’m going to be late tonight,’ he said. The words were familiar, expected, but this time they sounded strained, not as nonchalant as they usually did.
‘Why?’ she asked, looking blindly out at the newsroom.
‘A meeting of the working group,’ he said, following the familiar track. ‘I know it’s my turn to pick up the kids, but could you?’
She sat down and put her feet up on the desk, peering out at the dull floor of the newsroom, the endless day rolling ahead of her, until her eyes reached the caretaker’s booth.
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’ll get them. Has anything happened?’
His reply came a bit too late and a bit too loud. ‘No, nothing,’ he said. ‘What made you think that?’
She listened to the silence after his words.
‘Tell me what’s happened,’ she said quietly.
When he spoke his voice sounded harassed. ‘A woman rang about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘She and her husband filled in my questionnaire back in the spring. They were both councillors for the Centre Party, and now her husband has died. I’ve been on the phone ever since, trying to get the group together…’
Annika listened quietly, hearing her husband’s slightly strained breathing forming pulses on the line.
‘Why did she phone to tell you that?’
‘The project,’ he said. ‘They’d kept the papers we sent out about threats to politicians, and I was listed as the contact. She thinks her husband was murdered.’
Annika’s feet dropped to the floor.
‘Why does she think that?’
Thomas gave a deep sigh. ‘Annika, I don’t know if I can do this.’
‘Just tell me what happened.’ She spoke in the voice she used when the children were hysterical.
Another sigh. ‘Okay. Her husband was shot in the head with his civil defence rifle, sitting in an armchair. And that’s the problem, according to his wife, because it was her armchair. He never sat in it. If he was going to shoot himself, he would have done it in his own chair.’
Annika searched for a pen.
‘Where does she live?’
‘Do you think he could have been murdered? What do you think they’ll do to the project? Are they likely to shut us down? If they think we contributed in any way-’
‘Where does the woman live?’
He fell silent; a surprised sullenness hit her ear.
‘Huh?’
She bit her pen, hesitated and rattled it against her teeth.
‘That sounds a bit shallow,’ she said. ‘A man is dead and you’re worrying about your job.’
His reply came quick as a flash. ‘And what do you do whenever there’s a murder? All you do is moan about your bosses and your miserable colleagues.’
She held the pen still, then put it down on the desk, and there was a faint click in her left ear. She wondered if he had hung up on her.
‘Outside Osthammar,’ he said; ‘a little village in northern Uppland. They’re farmers. I don’t know how late I’m going to be – it depends on what we decide, and naturally on what the police say.’
She left his sense of grievance well alone.
‘Have you spoken to the police?’
‘To begin with they thought it was suicide, but as the wife objected they’re looking into it more closely.’
Annika put her feet back up on the desk.
‘Even if the man was killed,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean he was shot because he was a politician, if you get what I mean. He may have had debts, addictions, rejected children, mad neighbours, anything.’
‘I know,’ Thomas said curtly. ‘Don’t wait up.’
‘By the way,’ Annika said to the curtains, ‘what’s her name?’
A short, buzzing silence.
‘Who?’
‘The woman, of course; the wife who called you.’
‘I don’t want you getting involved with this.’
They had a silent stand-off, until Annika capitulated. ‘Your job isn’t on the line,’ she said. ‘If he was murdered then your project only becomes more important. If anyone’s going to end up in the shit it’s the politicians, because they should have started your work much earlier. With a bit of luck you can stop this sort of thing happening again.’
‘You reckon?’
‘You’re not the bad guys this time, trust me. Mind you, it might be helpful if it was me who wrote the article.’
Thomas was silent for several seconds, Annika could hear him breathing.
‘Gunnel Sandstrom,’ he said eventually. ‘The husband’s name was Kurt.’
22
Thomas hung up, beads of sweat on his brow. He had been on the brink of giving himself away.
When Annika had asked ‘her’ name, he had Sophia Grenborg’s name on the tip of his tongue; her shiny hair and smiling eyes, the sound of her heels clicking in his ears, her perfume in the room with him.
Sophia Grenborg, with her apartment on Ostermalm, in her family’s building.
His mother would like her; the thought ran through his head. She was actually not dissimilar to Eleonor. Not in appearance – Eleonor was tall and sinewy, Sophia was short and petite – but they had something else in common, an attitude, a seriousness, something deeply attractive that Annika didn’t have. He had once overheard Annika describing Eleonor as the sort of person you don’t mind having in your home, and there was something in that. Eleonor and Sophia moved effortlessly through office corridors and meeting rooms, glamorous salons and international hotel bars. Annika just got clumsy in situations like that, her clothes more dishevelled than usual, looking incredibly uncomfortable in her own skin. Whenever they went anywhere she just wanted to talk to the locals and eat in the bars where the locals ate, and wasn’t remotely interested in culture or the exclusive hotel pool.
He cleared his throat a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialled Sophia’s direct line at the Federation of County Councils.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’d love to come to the jazz club after the meeting.’
Annika picked one of the newspaper’s courtesy cars that had studded tyres, expecting ice on the narrow lanes of northern Uppland. The radio was tuned to one of the commercial stations.
In quarter of an hour she had crept seven hundred metres along the jam-packed Essinge motorway, and angrily retuned from the adrenalin-thumping pop music to P2. The news in Serbo-Croat turned into news in Arabic, then something she guessed might have been Somali. She listened to the rhythm of the foreign languages, searching for words she recognized, picking up the names of places, countries, a president.
The traffic started to move after the Jarva junction, and once she had passed Arlanda Airport it thinned out considerably. She put her foot down all the way to Uppsala, then turned off right towards Osthammar.
The agricultural landscape of Roslagen spread out around her, dark-brown soil in frostbitten furrows, islands of buildings, rust-red painted farmhouses and white-plastered barns. Communities she didn’t even know existed flew by, places with schools and supermarkets and health centres in obscurity, hotdog kiosks with curtains with abstract designs from IKEA, the occasional Christmas garland. The grey light erased the sharpness of her surroundings, and she switched on the windscreen wipers.
The road was gradually becoming narrower and more twisted the further north she got. She got stuck behind
