The Bomber

'Oh, come on! We need each other. Let us have five minutes with the guys and get a picture of them inside the arena, and then we'll be happy.'

The officer gritted his teeth, turned around, and pushed his way through the workers to the entrance. He was probably going off to get his colleague. Annika saw she had to work fast.

'Okay, can we get a group picture?' she said and the men hesitantly slouched over to the small stand.

'I'm sorry, maybe you think we're pushy, but we're only trying to do our job. It's obviously important that Stefan's murderer is apprehended, and hopefully we can help,' Annika said while Henriksson started taking pictures.

'We'd like to express our sympathy for the loss of a workmate. It must be terrible to lose a colleague in this manner.'

The men said nothing.

'Is there anything anyone would like to tell us about Stefan?' she wondered.

The photographer arranged the group so that they sat on the stand, everyone turned toward him with a full view of the arena behind them. It would make a suggestive picture.

The men hesitated. No one wanted to say anything. They were all restrained, serious, dry-eyed; they were probably in some kind of shock.

'Stefan was our boss,' a man in worn overalls eventually said. 'He was a good man.'

The others muttered in agreement.

'What kind of work are you doing here?' Annika asked.

'We're fixing up the building, changing stuff for the Olympics: security, electricity, plumbing… Same at all the Games sites.'

'Stefan was your most senior boss?'

The men in the group started muttering again.

'Not really, he was our immediate boss,' the man in the overalls said. 'It's she, the blonde, who's the project manager.'

Annika raised her eyebrows. 'Beata Ekesjo?' she said in surprise. 'Is she the boss here?'

A few of the men gave a little laugh and glanced furtively at each other in mutual understanding: Yes, Beata was the boss. The sniggering was cheerless and sounded like snorting.

Poor cow, Annika thought. She can't be having an easy time with these guys.

For want of anything else to say, Annika then went on to ask if they'd known Christina Furhage. Now all the men were nodding appreciatively.

'Now, there was a woman and a half,' said the man in overalls. 'The way I see it, no one could have pulled this off except her.'

'Why do you think so?' Annika asked.

'She went around all the building sites and talked to the workers. No one could understand how she found the time to do it, but she insisted on meeting everyone and finding out how everything worked.'

The man fell silent. Annika tapped pensively with her pen against the pad.

'Will you go on working today?'

'We're talking to the police, but then I guess we'll go home. And we're holding a minute's silence for Stefan,' said the man in overalls.

The police officer returned together with two colleagues. They looked pretty uptight and were heading straight for the little group.

'Thanks a lot,' Annika said in a hushed voice and picked up Henriksson's bag that was next to her. Then she abruptly turned on her heel and started walking along the side of the building toward the open emergency exit. She heard the photographer jogging behind her.

'Hey, you!' the policeman called out.

'Thanks a million, we won't bother you any more now,' Annika called back, waving her hand but not slowing down.

She held the door open for Henriksson and then let go of it with a bang.

The photographer was silent while Annika drove back to the paper. It was still snowing, but they had full daylight now. The traffic was even heavier, Christmas shoppers having added to the usual flow. There were only three days left now.

'Where are you spending Christmas?' Annika said to break the silence.

'Are you going to use any of that stuff?' was Henriksson's reply.

Annika looked at him in surprise. 'Why?'

'Can you really use it when you just marched in like that?'

Annika gave a sigh. 'I'll talk to Schyman and explain what happened. I think we'll run a picture of the guys and let them say something about their minute's silence for Stefan Bjurling. It won't be much more than a caption. In the story next to it, I can quote what the police have said and that the questioning of the builders continues, as does the forensic investigation, blah, blah, blah- you know.'

'What about the woman?'

Annika chewed on her lip. 'I'm not using her. She was too unbalanced. She didn't have anything useful. I thought she wasn't all there. All that crap about fate.'

'I didn't hear all of it,' Henriksson said. 'Did she talk about evil and guilt all the time?'

Annika scratched her nose.

'More or less… That's why I won't use her. She was in the building when the bomb went off, but she had nothing to say about that. You heard her. I don't want to expose her, even though she wanted it. I don't think she's capable of judging what's best for her.'

'But you said it isn't up to us to decide who can cope with being written about in the paper,' Henriksson retorted.

'True, but it is up to us to judge whether a person is sound enough of mind to understand who we are and what we are saying. That woman was just too unhinged. She's not going in the paper. But I can say something about the project manager being in the building when the explosion took place and that she is completely devastated by Stefan's death and blames herself for it. But I don't think the paper should publish her name and picture.'

They drove in silence the rest of the way. Annika dropped Henriksson outside the main entrance before parking the car in the multistory car park.

* * *

Bertil Milander sat in front of the TV in his magnificent Art-Nouveau library, feeling his heart thumping in his chest. There was a murmur and trickle in his veins; his breath filled the room. He could feel he was falling asleep. The sound on the TV had been turned down to a soft whisper and reached him intermittently above the clamor of his body. Right now there were some women talking and laughing on TV, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. Some signs appeared with regular intervals on the screen, showing flags and telephone numbers next to different currencies. He didn't understand what it was all about. The sedatives were blurring everything. Now and then he gave a little sob.

'Christina,' he muttered and cried some more.

He must have nodded off, but suddenly he was wide awake. He recognized the smell and knew it meant danger. The warning signal had been so deeply ingrained in him that it reached him even through his drug-induced sleep. He struggled to get up from the leather couch. His blood pressure was low, which made him slightly dizzy. He got to his feet and held on to the back of the couch and tried to locate the smell. It came from the drawing room. He walked carefully, holding on to the bookcases until he could feel his blood pressure catching up.

His daughter was crouching in front of the tiled stove, feeding it with a rectangular piece of stiff paper.

'What are you doing?' Bertil Milander asked, confused.

The old stove didn't draw well and some of the smoke was puffing into the room.

'I'm clearing up,' said his daughter Lena.

The man went up to the young woman and sat down next to her on the floor.

'Are you making a fire?' he asked warily.