Without a Trace (6 page)

The prosecutor didn’t answer, and Annika was struck by a flash of realization. ‘You don’t know where she is. She’s disappeared. Could the perpetrator have taken her? Has there been any ransom demand?’

Now the young man on the seat next to her was staring at her.

‘Not as far as I’m aware,’ the prosecutor said.

Her phone started to vibrate in her hand – another call waiting. She glanced at the screen: Thomas, her ex-husband. The prosecutor hung up and Annika clicked to answer him.

‘Hello, Thomas,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

Since he had got back from Somalia where he had been kidnapped, he hadn’t been in very good shape. She felt guilt wrench at her stomach. The kidnappers had amputated his left hand, and when he was finally discharged from hospital she had left him and moved in with his boss.

‘I’m in a lot of pain,’ Thomas said, ‘and I’ve got loads to do at work. Can you have the children this week?’

She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. ‘You know I can, but they’ll be disappointed. Especially Kalle.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Thomas, we’ve talked about this before …’

‘Can you or can’t you?’

She swallowed. ‘Sure. But that’ll mean they’re with me this week, then all next as well.’

‘It’s probably for the best.’

They hung up before she could say anything stupid.

The newsdesk staff, plus sport and entertainment, had gathered in Schyman’s office for the usual ‘six meeting’ (it started at five o’clock, these days, but was still called the ‘six meeting’, which could sound rude to infantile ears) so the newsroom looked empty and abandoned in the greyish-white light of the computer screens.

Valter followed her.

‘Berit’s on a job in Norway,’ Annika said, ‘so you can sit in her place.’

‘I didn’t think you had your own desks,’ Valter said, peering rather suspiciously at the desk and chair.

‘We don’t, but that one is Berit’s. Have you got a user-ID and password yet?’

He put his rucksack on the desk and sat down tentatively. ‘Yes …’

‘Good. Call the Ministry of Justice and ask for their opinion on the Ingemar Lerberg case. There’s always some new investigation into threats against politicians to refer to. They won’t say anything, but check the statistics from the latest investigation and do your best to squeeze a general comment out of them. Make sure you call Lerberg either a “top politician” or a “national figure”, seeing as our leader column mentioned him in the speculation about the Christian Democrats getting a new party leader about a hundred years ago. And keep it under eighteen hundred keystrokes, including spaces.’

The young man took off his jacket, ran his hands through his hair, pulled a laptop from his rucksack and hooked it up to the network. He seemed to pick things up quickly.

She got her own computer out, logged in and wrote a short summary of Ingemar Lerberg’s political career. She described his passions and beliefs as honestly as she could, without leaving herself open to accusations of slander, and explained that in recent years he had concentrated on his family and business, as well as local politics in Nacka. She put together a piece for the online radio service, one minute and ten seconds, using some quotes from the party leadership.

That left her with the most controversial part of her task: how to deal with Lerberg’s arms and legs, which, according to Bert Tingström – a not particularly impressive source – had been dislocated. And where was Nora, the victim’s wife?

She called the press spokesperson at Nacka Police, followed by the head of media at National Crime. They talked to her in person and were very professional, but neither would confirm either a missing person or any specific type of injury. Not that she had expected them to. After a moment’s hesitation she decided to call Commissioner Q, now head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit at National Crime.

‘Annika,’ he said, ‘I’m disappointed in you. I was expecting you to ring this morning.’

‘I’m a big girl now,’ she said. ‘I can manage fine without you. Besides, you’re so important, these days, that it takes me a while to pluck up the courage to disturb you.’

‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Is Nora missing?’ she asked.

‘We don’t know where she is, but “missing” is too strong a word.’

‘Are you trying to find her?’

‘Negative. Not in an organized way.’

‘But you have been looking for her? To tell her what’s happened to her husband?’

Q sighed. She had manoeuvred him into the position where she wanted him.

‘Yes, we have been looking for her. No, we haven’t found her.’

She swallowed. ‘I’ve heard that Ingemar Lerberg’s arms and legs were dislocated. Have I been correctly informed?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know precisely what his injuries are,’ the commissioner said. ‘We’ve had someone up at Intensive Care, but I haven’t spoken to her yet.’

‘Is Nina Hoffman working for you now?’ Annika asked. ‘I saw her out at Solsidan.’

Q sighed again. ‘If you’re so smart,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you can put together this article without my help.’

He hung up. She bit her lip. It would have been good to get the information confirmed, but at least she had a named source to refer to. Bert Tingström hadn’t asked to remain anonymous, and his remarks were recorded.

She pulled up her video clip from Solsidan and reworked it. It would have been useful to have video footage of the people inside the room, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She dug out an archive photograph of Tingström and played the quote of him describing the injuries over it, taking care to make clear that this was his information rather than the paper’s. It was a little clumsy, but it worked. Then she updated the news report, adding a few more details, and made sure she included the dog’s age. Finally she wrote a short piece about Nora Lerberg, who appeared to have vanished without a trace. She quoted Q, the prosecutor and the press spokesperson in Nacka as saying they had tried without success to get hold of her, but that she wasn’t the subject of an official search. It wasn’t great, but it would do.

She let out a silent sigh. ‘Valter Wennergren,’ she said. ‘Has anyone ever called you VW? Volkswagen?’

He rolled his eyes.

‘Have you finished?’

He pressed his keyboard and an email with the heading threatened politicians appeared on her screen: 1,780 characters, including spaces. The press spokesperson at the Ministry of Justice couldn’t comment on the specific case of Ingemar Lerberg, but said that the minister was following developments closely, and expressed regret at the increasing level of violence against elected representatives. That was followed by a summary of the current situation, using figures from the latest government investigation, as well as some slightly less-up-to-date statistics in the most recent report from the National Council for Crime Prevention.

‘Excellent,’ Annika said.

When she had sent the whole lot off – the new video piece, the online radio item and the three articles – she stood up, pulled on her coat and packed away her laptop.

She waved at Schyman in his glass box on the way out.

Thomas Samuelsson stared at the computer screen in front of him. The Light of Truth. What pretentious irony. But whoever was behind it was good at expressing himself. (Why did he assume that the writer was male? He just did. The turn of phrase felt masculine.)

He took a deep breath.

Schyman deserved it. Thomas had only met him a few times, even though he worked so closely with Annika. Presumably he thought he was too important to associate with the families of his staff.

Thomas got up and walked the short distance to the kitchen. His legs were heavy and his back felt stiff. His hand ached – the phantom hand that was no longer there. The prosthesis (the hook!) was heavy and unwieldy. He hadn’t made up his mind what sort he wanted yet. This latest version certainly wasn’t in the running, he knew that much.

They had all lied to him. Not just Annika, although she was obviously the worst, but everyone else as well. His employers, not to mention the people in the health service.

Oh, there are brilliant prosthetics, these days. Just wait till you see them! In a lot of ways a prosthetic hand actually works better than an ordinary hand. Have you ever considered that? You can open tins without an opener, lift hot things directly off the stove or barbecue. You can use it as a hammer, you don’t have to worry about corrosive acids, and you can hold a match until it’s burned right down …

He opened the fridge door. There were chicken fillets and steak but he wasn’t particularly hungry.

Telling Annika he had a lot to do at work hadn’t been quite true: he’d taken the week off sick. He just felt that things were getting on top of him, and his bosses in the Ministry of Justice were very
understanding
because they were conscious of the
trauma
he had suffered. Take all the time you
neeeed
, your job will be waiting for you when you feel like …

That was the least they could do, Thomas thought, as he shut the fridge. He had risked life and limb for his work, and was now crippled for life and had lost his family. The least he could expect of his employers was that he should be allowed to keep his job. It would look bad if they tried to fire him. He could see the headline: ‘GOVERNMENT FIRES MUTILATED HERO’ …

No, they’d never dare. They’d rather leave him mouldering in a corner at the taxpayers’ expense, somewhere in the main government offices at Rosenbad where no one else wanted to be, perhaps on the ground floor with a view of a brick wall on Fredsgatan.

They had put him to work on money-laundering.

Of all the dull, pointless areas of responsibility, Cramne, his hypocritical boss, had tasked him with looking into international financial crime. Again. He could still recall the man’s forced smile on his first day back at the department, before he knew that Annika had been fucking the undersecretary of state, and when he still believed the lies of the prosthetics industry, the claims that he would eventually be able to control the prosthesis
by thought alone
– Sweden was actually a
world-leader
in that area of research …

‘You’re the perfect choice,’ Cramne had said, ‘with your experience. Finance, international trade and security, great!’

And when they had stood up and were about to shake hands afterwards, Cramne had hesitated: he hadn’t wanted to get it wrong and touch the metal fake, the hook.

No one expected him to achieve anything. No one had said anything, but he could feel it. They clearly thought his intelligence had been based in his left hand, not to mention his desire to participate in human conversation and boules tournaments. No one invited him along any more. Not just because of the terrible weather and the fact that no boules matches had been arranged: even if they had been, he knew they wouldn’t have asked him. They stared at him in the corridor and whispered behind his back. The skinny female secretaries who used to give him the come-on now concentrated on their computer screens whenever he walked past.

He contemplated making himself a sandwich. But he would have to hold the bread with his hook, and he didn’t like using it.

He walked back into the living room and stared at the meagre furnishings: the sofa, the computer desk, the rug. All of it from Ikea. Cheap and lacking in style. They had belonged to Annika. He hated the flat. It was cramped, just two bedrooms, and far too light. It was on the top floor of a corner building on Kungsholmen – Annika had got hold of it through her contact in the police force when she and Thomas had been living apart. After she had let him down (deceived him, tricked him, abandoned him), she had transferred the tenancy to him and moved out, dumping the worthless contents of the flat on him, not just the furniture but the crockery, books and DVDs as well. And he no longer had any savings. Annika had given all their money to the bastards who had kidnapped him in Somalia, so now he was sitting in a birdcage near the sky, hating every minute of it.

He sat down at the computer. The Light of Truth was actually very interesting.

He refreshed the page. Eight new comments had been added since he’d last looked.

He leaned back in his chair.

Might it be possible to have that arsehole at the
Evening Post
fired? That would be brilliant.

His spirits lifted. He felt light and fluid again, his breathing quickening. He hunched over the keyboard, hesitated for just a moment, then logged in under his usual alias: ‘Gregorius’, after the tragic character in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel
Doctor Glas
(cuckolded by his wife, murdered by his doctor). He never deployed Gregorius at work, oh, no. He might not be a computer genius, but he wasn’t a fool either. After all, he had lived with a tabloid bitch for ten years, so he’d learned a thing or two about how the media worked. No one would be able to trace Gregorius to an IP address at Rosenbad.

The site’s administrator hadn’t opted to moderate comments, so they appeared immediately. He took a deep breath, and felt a glow of satisfaction spread out from his midriff.

Gregorius:

Anders Schyman is a hypocrite!!

He stretched his back contentedly. Maybe he should make that sandwich after all.

*

Annika still wasn’t used to living on Södermalm. Coming home from work was still an intoxicating rush, from Medborgarplatsen Underground station, along Götgatan and Katarina Bangata to Södermannagatan to Jimmy’s – no, their
shared
flat. She breathed in the scent of tarmac and admired the façades of the buildings as she passed, hundred-year-old brick, with ochre stucco, and the trees. It had almost stopped raining now.

Jimmy’s –
their
– rented apartment was on the third floor of a house built in 1897, six rooms plus kitchen, which he had acquired through his contacts in the trade-union movement. (Yes, a clear case of corruption, definitely worth a front-page exclusive in the
Evening Post
.) As he had added her name to the lease, which was as good as marriage without a prenuptial agreement, she was now an accomplice.