She vanished into the bathroom again; he heard water running, the sound of spitting. The sounds rolled into the hall and were amplified, growing until he had to put his hands over his ears.
She came out of the bathroom, in a pair of black tanga briefs, her large breasts swinging.
‘It may have been a devil of a meeting,’ she said, settling down next to him and putting her hand on the back of his neck, ‘but I don’t think this death has anything to do with the devil’s political views. I’m pretty sure you can all relax.’
He looked up at her, feeling her breast against his arm, realized he had tears in his eyes.
‘How can you know that?’
‘No one really knows anything at all yet,’ she said, ‘but there’s something bigger behind this than just the local council in Osthammar.’
She kissed him on the cheek, stroked the arm of his coat and stood up.
‘I’m buzzing like an idiot tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve drunk two hundred litres of coffee this evening.’
He let out a deep sigh. ‘Me too,’ he said.
‘You smell of smoke and drink as well,’ she said over her shoulder as she went into the bedroom.
‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘because the taxpayer was paying.’
She gave a flat little laugh.
‘Are you coming?’ she called.
Tuesday 17 November
27
The news boards shrieked out their bright yellow messages about serial killers and police hunts all the way along Fleminggatan, standing out like sunflowers against an iron-grey lawn in the morning light. Annika saw them flash past from the window of the bus and felt the same strange effect as usual – a fascination at having put something into the world that goes on and lives its own life. Her articles could reach hundreds of thousands of people whom she would never meet, her words could generate emotions and reactions that she would never know about.
The journey to work passed quickly, accompanied by the screaming sunflowers.
In the newspaper’s lobby, a whole wall was papered each morning with that day’s newsbills, forming an entire enthusiastic choir.
Up in the newsroom she noted a change in temperature as she sailed out. Her lowered head was met with reassuringly warm glances where she usually encountered blocks of ice. She was back on track, dominating that day’s paper, someone to be reckoned with. All the old stuff was forgotten because things were happening again, nineteen hours to deadline and she had the picture byline on page six.
She turned her back on her colleagues’ ingratiating glances and pushed the glass door of her office shut behind her with a bang.
She drummed her fingers in irritation as her computer slowly started up, then Googled ‘goran nilsson’ and got several hundred results.
There were so many Goran Nilssons in the world. She searched through the results and then turned instead to the Yellow Pages website to see how common the name really was, trying different districts at random. There were 73 in Blekinge alone, 55 in Boras, 205 in Stockholm and 46 in Norrbotten. Several thousand in the whole country, in other words.
She had to narrow the search somehow, add another word to the terms.
‘goran nilsson sattajarvi’. No results.
Bingo. Masses of hits, like Kristina
Then she tried to find pictures instead, ‘goran nilsson mao’.
Four results, small squares on the screen that she squinted at, leaning right forward. Two were logos for something she didn’t investigate further, one cultural revolutionary portrait of the Master himself on someone’s homepage, and finally a black-and-white picture of some young people in dated outfits. She looked closer, reading the description, clicked on the link and reached a homepage that someone had set up about their youth in Uppsala. There was a caption that put the picture in context.
She read the text twice, surprised at the slightly ridiculous religiosity it suggested. Then she stared at the young man on the far right, his shoulder hidden behind the man next to him, short hair, nondescript features, evidently not that tall. Dark eyes that were staring at a point to the left of the photographer.
She clicked back to the front page of the site and discovered that there were more photographs from Uppsala on the server, several from various demonstrations, but mostly from parties of one sort or another. She looked through all of them, but the dark young man named Goran Nilsson didn’t appear on any of the others.
Could it be him? Could he really have been an identifiable activist in the sixties, in which case he might well appear in various media from those days?
Archives like that were never available digitally; it was all envelopes of pictures and cuttings.
Her newspaper had the largest archive in the country. She grabbed the phone and asked the archivists to check if they had anything on a Goran Nilsson in Maoist groups at the end of the sixties. The woman who took her call showed little enthusiasm.
‘When do you need it?’
‘Yesterday,’ Annika said. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘When isn’t it?’
‘I’m sitting here waiting and can’t do anything until I hear from you.’
An almost inaudible sigh on the line. ‘I’ll do a quick check and see if I can find him in his own right. Reading through everything that was published on Maoism would take several weeks.’
Annika stood and looked out over the newsroom until she got an answer.
‘Sorry. No Goran Nilsson described as a Maoist. We’ve got a couple of hundred others though.’
‘Thanks for checking so quickly,’ Annika said.
What other archives were there from that period, in the places where Maoists were active? The university cities, she thought.
She scratched her head in irritation.
What about Lulea?
She had picked up the phone and dialled the
‘Hans Blomberg was off sick yesterday, I don’t know if he’ll be in today,’ the receptionist said, ready to disconnect her.
Annika suddenly felt an immediate and inexplicable fear. Good God, surely nothing could have happened to
