Exposed (3 page)

‘Got it!’ Bertil Strand said. ‘We’ve got enough pictures to cover the story now.’

‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ the policeman with the tape shouted. ‘We’re cordoning off this area.’

A man in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts was walking towards them inside the cemetery.

‘Okay, it’s time for you to leave,’ he said.

Annika looked round, unsure of what to do. Bertil Strand was already heading towards the path that led to Sankt Göransgatan. The policemen in front of her and behind her both looked extremely annoyed. She realized she would have to move, otherwise the police would move her themselves. Instinctively, she shifted sideways to where Bertil Strand had taken his first pictures.

She peered through the black railings, and there was the young woman. Her eyes were staring right into Annika’s from a distance of just two metres away. They were clouded and grey. Her head was tilted back, her upper arms were pointing away from her body, and her lower arms sticking up above her head. One hand seemed to have been injured. Her mouth was open in a soundless scream, the lips black-brown. Her hair was moving slightly in the imperceptible breeze. She had a large bruise on her left breast, and the lower portion of her stomach looked eerily green.

Annika absorbed the whole image, crystal clear, just for a moment. The harsh greyness of the stone in the background, the subtle green of the plants, the shadows of the leaves, the dampness and heat, the repulsive smell.

Then the sheet appeared, turning the whole scene grey. They were covering up the railings, not the body.

‘Time to go,’ the policeman with the tape said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Such a bloody stereotype, Annika found herself thinking as she turned round.

Her mouth was completely dry, and she noticed that everything she heard seemed to come from a long way away. She moved, slightly unsteadily, towards where Berit and Bertil Strand were standing waiting behind the cordon. The photographer looked bored and unhappy, but Berit was almost smiling.

The policeman followed her, with his shoulder rubbing against her back. It had to be very hot having to wear a uniform like that on a day like this, Annika thought.

‘Did you see anything?’ Berit asked.

Annika nodded, and Berit jotted something down.

‘Did you manage to ask the detective in the Hawaiian shirt anything?’

Annika shook her head and crept under the length of tape with the obliging help of the policeman.

‘That’s a shame. Did he say anything that you happened to overhear?’

‘ “Okay, it’s time for you to leave”,’ Annika quoted, and Berit smiled.

‘How about you, are you okay?’ she asked, and Annika nodded.

‘Oh, I’m fine. She might well have been strangled, her eyes were popping out. She must have been trying to scream when she died, her mouth was wide open.’

‘Maybe someone heard her. We’ll talk to the neighbours later. Was she Swedish?’

Annika suddenly felt that she had to sit down.

‘I forgot to ask …’

Berit smiled again.

‘Blonde, dark, young, old?’

‘Twenty, tops. Long fair hair. Big breasts. Silicone, probably, or saline implants.’

Berit looked at her quizzically. She sank down into the grass with her legs crossed.

‘Her tits were standing straight up, even though she was on her back. And she had a scar in her armpit.’

Annika could feel her blood pressure plummeting. She lowered her head to her knees, taking several deep breaths.

‘Not a pretty sight, then?’ Berit said.

‘I’m okay,’ Annika said.

After a minute or so she felt better. The noises around her were overwhelming: the traffic thundering along the Drottningholm road, two sirens wailing out of sync, voices shouting, the clatter of cameras, a child crying.

Bertil Strand had joined the group of reporters gathering at the entrance to the cemetery, and was chatting to the photographer from the other evening paper.

‘Who’s doing what?’ Annika said.

Berit sat down next to Annika, looked down at her notes and started doodling.

‘We can probably assume this is a murder, can’t we? So to start with, we need an article about the event itself. This has happened, a young woman has been found murdered. When, where, how? We’ll have to get hold of the man who found her and talk to him. You got his name, didn’t you?’

‘He’s an addict. His friend gave a care-of address for the tip-off money.’

‘Try to get hold of him. The police emergency room will have the details of the call they received,’ Berit said, ticking off one of the things on her list.

‘Already done.’

‘Good. Then we need to get hold of a policeman who’s prepared to talk. Their press spokesman never says anything off the record. Did that Hawaiian detective give his name?’

‘Nope.’

‘That’s a shame. Try to find out. I’ve never seen him before; he might well be new in violent crime. Then we need to find out when she died, and why. And if they have any suspects, what’s next for the investigation, the whole police angle.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said, making notes in her own pad.

‘God, it’s hot. Has it ever been this hot in Stockholm before?’ Berit said, wiping the sweat from her brow.

‘No idea,’ Annika said. ‘I only moved here seven weeks ago.’

Berit took a tissue from her bag and dabbed at her forehead.

‘Right, then we’ve got the victim,’ she said. ‘Who was she? Who identified her? Presumably there’s a devastated family somewhere in Sweden – we need to think about whether or not to contact them. We need pictures of the girl when she was alive. Do you think she was over eighteen?’

Annika thought for a moment, remembering the breast enlargements.

‘Yes, probably.’

‘So there should be pictures of her from her school graduation. All kids stay on through high school these days. And there are always pictures of them wearing their graduation caps. What do her friends have to say? Did she have a boyfriend?’

Annika made some more notes.

‘Then there’s the neighbours’ reactions,’ Berit went on. ‘We’re right in the middle of Stockholm – there are more than three hundred thousand women living in the
vicinity. A crime like this has implications for everyone’s security. What impact will it have on nightlife, on the image of the city? Well, that’s probably two articles. If you take the neighbours, I’ll take the rest.’

Annika nodded without looking up.

‘And then there’s one last aspect,’ Berit said, dropping her pad to her lap. ‘There was an almost identical case to this one just a hundred metres or so away, twelve or thirteen years ago.’

Annika looked up in surprise.

‘If I remember rightly, a young woman was raped and murdered on some steps on the north side of the park,’ Berit said thoughtfully. ‘The killer was never caught.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Annika said. ‘So it could be the same bloke?’

Berit shrugged. ‘Probably not. But we’ll have to mention the other murder. A lot of people are bound to remember it. The woman was raped, then strangled.’

Annika gulped. ‘God, this is a terrible job really, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yes, it really is,’ Berit said. ‘But it’ll be a lot easier if you manage to get hold of our Hawaiian detective before he leaves the park.’

She pointed towards Sankt Göransgatan, where the man in the Hawaiian shirt had just left the cemetery. He was walking towards a car parked on the corner of Kronobergsgatan. Annika flew up, grabbed her bag and rushed down towards the road. She could see the reporter from the other paper trying to talk to the detective, but he simply brushed him aside.

Just then Annika stumbled on the kerb of a path and almost fell. Unable to slow down, she careered down the steep slope towards the street. There was nothing she could do to stop herself crashing into the back of the
Hawaiian detective, who was thrown onto the bonnet of his car.

‘What the hell!’ he yelled, grabbing Annika’s arms in a vicelike grip.

‘Sorry,’ she squeaked. ‘I couldn’t help it. I lost my balance.’

‘What the hell are you playing at? Are you mad?’

The man was shaken, and not a little alarmed.

‘Sorry,’ Annika said, feeling that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. Besides, her left wrist was aching badly.

The man pulled himself together and let go of her. He stared at her for a few seconds.

‘You need to calm down. Seriously,’ he said as he got into his burgundy Volvo estate and drove off with a squeal of tyres.

‘Fuck,’ Annika said to herself. She blinked to get rid of the tears and squinted into the sunlight to make a note of the car’s police call number. She thought it said ‘1813’ on the side. Just to be sure, she memorized the number plate as well.

Then she turned round, and saw that the whole group of reporters at the entrance was staring at her. She blushed bright red and bent over to gather together everything that had fallen out of her bag when she hit the detective: her A5 pad, a packet of chewing-gum, an almost empty bottle of Pepsi Max, and three sanitary pads in green plastic wrappers. Her pen was still in the bag. She pulled it out and quickly jotted down the car’s call number and registration in her pad.

The journalists and photographers looked away and went back to chatting among themselves. Annika noted that Bertil Strand seemed to be organizing a trip to buy ice-creams.

She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and slowly
walked over to her colleagues. They didn’t appear to pay her any attention at all. Apart from the reporter from the other evening paper – a middle-aged man whose picture always appeared next to his articles – she didn’t recognize any of them. There was a young woman holding recording equipment with the Radio Stockholm logo on it, two photographers from different picture agencies, the other paper’s photographer, and three reporters she couldn’t place. No television crew yet, there were only five minutes of local news on the main channel in the summer, and local news on the commercial channels was little more than someone just reading reports from the news agencies. Presumably the morning papers would run pictures from the agencies and base their articles on agency reports. There was no sign of the main radio news team, but she hadn’t really expected to see them there. One of her former colleagues at the
Katrineholm Courier
, who had spent a summer working with radio news, had once explained the way they worked.

‘We don’t cover murders and that sort of thing. We leave that to the tabloids. We’re not ambulance chasers.’

Annika had realized that that statement said more about her colleague than it did about radio news, but sometimes she had to wonder. Why didn’t they regard a young woman’s life being snuffed out as a matter of public interest? She couldn’t understand that.

The other people gathered behind the cordon were curious members of the public.

She walked slowly away from the group. The police, both detectives and the forensics team, were busy inside the railings. There was no sign of an ambulance or hearse. She looked at her watch. Seventeen minutes past one. Twenty-five minutes since she got the tip-off from
Cold Calls. She wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no point trying to talk to the police, they’d probably only get annoyed. She also guessed that they wouldn’t know anything yet – not the identity of the woman, or how she had died, or who might have done it.

She headed towards the Drottningholm road. A small slice of shade had formed by the buildings on the western side of Kronobergsgatan, and she went over and leaned against one of the walls. It was rough, grey and hot. The temperature was only a degree or so cooler than out in the full sun, and the air was burning her throat. She was horribly thirsty, and fished the bottle of Pepsi from her bag. The cap had leaked, making the outside of the bottle sticky, and her fingers stuck to the label. Oh, this fucking heat!

She drank the warm, flat liquid and hid the bottle between two bundles of newspapers waiting to be picked up for recycling in the nearest doorway.

The journalists over by the cordon had moved to the other side of the street. Presumably they were waiting for Bertil Strand to turn up with their ice-creams. For some reason the situation made her feel sick. A few metres away from them there were flies buzzing round a corpse while they were looking forward to ice-cream.

She looked across at the park. Steep, grass-covered hills and a lot of big deciduous trees. From her place in the shade she could see lime trees, beech, elm, ash and birch. Some were enormous, others newly planted. In amongst the gravestones were several gigantic trees, mostly limes.

I really need something else to drink, she thought.

She sat down on the pavement and leaned her head back. Something had to happen soon. She couldn’t just sit here.

The crowd of journalists was starting to thin out now. The girl from Radio Stockholm had left, but Bertil Strand had returned with the ice-creams. There was no sign of Berit Hamrin anywhere, and Annika wondered where she’d gone.

I’ll wait another five minutes, she thought. Then I’ll go and get a drink and start talking to the neighbours.

She tried to picture a map of Stockholm in her head, and work out exactly where she was. This was the very heart of Stockholm, the original city within the old tollgates. She looked towards the fire station to the south. In that direction lay Hantverkargatan, her street. She lived less than ten blocks from here, in a small building in the courtyard of a condemned property not far from Kungsholmstorg. Even so, she had never been up here before.

Beneath her was Fridhemsplan underground station. If she concentrated she could just make out the rumbling of the trains moving far below, their vibrations passing through concrete and asphalt. In front of her was a large, circular air vent from the tunnels, public toilets and a park bench. That could have been where the junkie who phoned Cold Calls was sitting in the sun while his mate
went off for a piss. But why wouldn’t he just have used the public toilets? Annika wondered.

She thought about this for few moments, and in the end she had to go and take a look at the toilets. As soon as she opened the door she understood why. The stench inside was quite unbearable. She backed away a couple of steps and let the door close.