The Final Word (2 page)

Berit sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to leave poor Rosa to fend for herself,’ she said, closing her laptop.

‘Are you heading back to the high-security courtroom?’

Berit was covering the trial of Ivar Berglund: he owned a company that sold wood and wood products, and had
been nicknamed ‘The Timberman’ in the tabloids. The case had just entered its second week at the Stockholm District Court. ‘The police officer who arrested him is due to give evidence. Do you know what the connection is between Berglund and that politician who was assaulted in Solsidan?’

Annika pulled her hair into a knot on top of her head. It wasn’t easy to keep track of the case. The unmarried fifty-five-year-old from Vidsel in Norrbotten was accused of murdering a homeless man in Nacka, and Annika had written the articles that had led to his arrest, then broken the news of it, which meant that the
Evening Post
had won the circulation war that day. Afterwards she had produced a long article about Berglund’s background, filmed his home and workshop, looked through the annual accounts of his business and talked to his customers and neighbours.

‘Nina Hoffman arrested him,’ Annika said. ‘We’ve talked about it a lot, and we can’t publish this, but she’s sure that the murder of the homeless man and the assault on Ingemar Lerberg were carried out by the same person. They were only a few days apart, and there are other connections too.’

‘There’s been nothing in the trial to suggest that,’ Berit said.

‘True,’ Annika said. ‘But the homeless man was acting as a front for Nora Lerberg’s Spanish businesses. The police found a child’s drawing at the murder scene in Nacka, and similar crayons were found in the Lerberg
children’s bedroom. The level of brutality in both cases was almost identical. There’s no proof, but that can’t all be coincidence. The two crimes are definitely linked.’

‘The case against Berglund is extremely thin,’ Berit said. ‘It’ll be interesting to see if they get a conviction.’

‘You saw Patrik’s dream scenario in the preliminary edition?’ Annika said.

The anticipated headline on the paper’s internal network read:

Berit picked up her bag and headed for the office manager’s desk.

Annika went back to the outline of the following day’s paper. There were optimistic predictions about other developments. Sweden’s National Day was approaching, and there was speculation that Princess Madeleine might drag herself across the Atlantic to take part in the celebrations at Skansen with the rest of the royal family. The prospective headline was ‘MADDE LETS SWEDEN DOWN’, as if the entire nation had been holding its breath in anticipation of the King’s youngest child leaving her Manhattan apartment to put on a badly fitting folk costume. A sports star was expected to speak out about a possible doping scandal, a heatwave was on its way, and the latest opinion poll was expected to show that the government would lose that autumn’s election.

‘Annika, can you do something on the heatwave?’

Patrik was hovering above her, and she glanced at the screen of her phone. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m meeting a prosecutor in a little while.’

He groaned theatrically and turned on his heel. He knew full well that she had been taken off regular news coverage but she couldn’t blame him for trying.

She shut down her laptop and gathered her things together.

Anders Schyman looked out across the newsroom with a sensation of vertigo. Through the glass wall he could see the newsdesk and Patrik Nilsson talking into two mobile phones at the same time, Sjölander hammering away at the next article about Princess Madeleine, and Annika Bengtzon on her way out with her bag slung over her shoulder. The scene was so painfully familiar, yet simultaneously so indescribably alien, and soon it would all be over.

He sank back heavily in his chair, and reached for the sheet of paper at the top of the pile closest to him: the minutes of the management committee meeting, held on Friday, 29 May. It was a date that would go down in history, because it marked the indisputable beginning of the end. The age of Gutenberg was over; the printed word had played out its role.

He got up and stood so close to the window that his breath misted the glass. Could he have done anything differently? Swedish journalism had developed hand in hand with the welfare state, the ‘People’s Home’, for almost a
century, the connection between power and the people. When one was falling apart, the other was bound to go the same way. Media researchers were claiming twenty years ago that ‘The 1990s could be seen as the end of an era: the era of the national welfare state and journalism.’

For a quarter of a century, the majority of his career, he had worked on borrowed time. It was no good crying over it: he could hardly rebuild the People’s Home single-handedly.

On impulse, he took a book off the shelf, Jan Ekecrantz and Tom Olsson’s
The Edited Society
, and read an underlined passage in the introduction, even though he knew it by heart:

He shut the book.

We live our lives as we live our days
, it had said on his
breakfast bill at the hotel in Oslo, where he had been at a seminar with the family who owned the paper. The words had hit him like a punch in the gut. A cold sweat had broken on his palms. How did he live his days? How had he lived his life? That day in Norway, in a windowless conference room, they had discussed the digitalization of the media; today, their hopes for tomorrow’s front page rested upon two women exchanging barely literate insults on social media that no one in their right mind would read.

He sat down again, his knees aching, and ran his fingers over the stacks of papers on his desk. Maybe he should have started his own business, built a house, had children, done something of lasting value. But he had done nothing like that: he had built for today, not the future; he had spent his entire working life defining and trying to explain the society he lived in, trying to make it better, fairer. He had his reputation, his role in media history. He was hardly likely to leave anything else behind.

He looked out at the newsroom. How was he going to do this? Throughout all his years at the paper he had worked ceaselessly on development, nurturing colleagues to fill the posts that were required to keep finances and headlines alike in the black. But the industry wasn’t the only thing that kept changing: time itself kept being redrawn, and there were no maps. He was navigating the jungle on adrenalin and instinct, doing his best to avoid chasms and landmines. He had managed to fashion a number of
colleagues into key figures within the organization, in news, sport, entertainment, online, arts and television. They had all had to define their own roles in the new, uncharted media landscape, and he was proud of them, of himself, and his capacity to see what was coming.

But there was one overriding role that he had not managed to reconstruct: his own, model 2.0. A publisher with freedom of speech in his very marrow, lack of respect in his heart, technology at the forefront of his mind. He hadn’t had time to do it: the days were too short, passed too quickly, and now it was too late.

There was so much time, until it was suddenly too late.

Objective, critical, informative journalism, the way everyone knew it, everyone active today, would be no more than a short parenthesis in the history of humankind, and he was at the helm while they headed straight for Hell.

The morning’s heavy rain had eased, leaving the streets dank and dark. The cold front was on its way north, and Mediterranean heat was due to reach central Sweden that afternoon. Annika could already feel the humidity on her skin. The traffic was moving like treacle so she ignored the buses and walked fast along the pavement.

She cut through Rålambshovsparken and into the labyrinth of streets and alleys that made up Kungsholmen. She could find her way without thinking: she would walk and walk and suddenly find herself somewhere without
being aware of how she had got there. The buildings leaned conspiratorially towards her, whispering a welcome. She had ended up among these streets when she had first arrived in Stockholm, in an unmodernized flat tucked away in a courtyard on Agnegatan, with just a cold tap and a bathroom in the basement of the adjacent building. And that building over there was where she had lived, in a magnificent apartment looking out on to Hantverkargatan, with Thomas when the children were young – they had held their wedding reception there. And Kungsholmen was where she had lived in a three-room flat after her divorce from Thomas.

And this was where Josefin Liljeberg had worked, and where she had died.

Annika crossed Hantverkargatan and saw Kronoberget rise behind the fire station, with its paths and lawns. The trees hadn’t yet developed the same shade of chlorophyll-heavy green that they’d had back then. The playground on Kronobergsgatan was full of people, mothers and children, a few fathers, the laughter and shouting triggering inside her a sadness for what had once been. She walked past the sandpits, climbing-frames and slides, and made her way up to the crown of the hill.

‘The Sex Killing in the Cemetery’ was how Josefin’s murder had been described, but that wasn’t really accurate.

She had been found in an old Jewish cemetery, located on the outskirts of the city in the eighteenth century but now incorporated into one of the largest parks in inner
Stockholm. And it wasn’t a sexually motivated killing: she had been strangled by her boyfriend.

Annika walked slowly to the cast-iron railings. The area had been restored in recent years. The abundant vegetation was gone, the toppled headstones raised. Two hundred and nine people lay there, she knew, the last buried in 1857. There was something magical about the place. The noise of the city faded away – it was like a hole through time. She put her hand on the railing, her fingers tracing the circles and curls, the stylized stars of David.

During that hot summer, Annika’s first on the paper as a temp, she had been manning the telephone tip-off line and this was her big break. She had insisted on being allowed to write about Josefin, her first articles under her own by-line. This was where the girl had been lying, just on the other side of the railings.
The barren greyness
of the rocks in the background, the silent greenery, the shadow-play of the leaves, the humidity and heat.
Annika had looked into her eyes, clouded and grey, listened to her soundless scream.

‘He got away with it,’ Annika whispered to Josefin. ‘He was sent to prison, but not for what he did to you. Maybe it’s too late now.’ Tears welled in her eyes. That had been the first truth she never wrote about, and there had been more over the years. So long ago, yet still so close. Sven had been alive that summer. She could feel his anger in the darkness around her, how upset he had been that she had taken a job in Stockholm, consciously seeking to get away from him.
Don’t you love me?
Insecurity and fear had gone hand in hand: how would her life turn out? she had wondered.

It had turned out like this, she thought, wiping her tears. I stayed here. This was where I was meant to be.

She let go of the railings, took out her little video-camera, and filmed the cemetery freehand (she hadn’t felt like lugging the tripod with her). She zoomed into the place where Josefin had been lying, then focused on the trees above. If necessary, she could always come back and do a piece to camera in front of the murder scene, but for the time being she couldn’t judge what to say. First she had to edit and structure her material. She turned her back on the cemetery, suddenly eager to get away.

She made her way down towards the Public Prosecution Authority on Kungsbron. The temperature was rising. The road smelt of tar.

Preliminary investigations were, in principle, always regarded as confidential, and this was true of Josefin’s murder, even if Annika had a good idea of what the file contained. It showed that Joachim, Josefin’s boyfriend, was probably guilty of her murder. Annika had requested to see the material, either in full or in part: information deemed unlikely to damage the investigation could, in exceptional cases, be released, even if no prosecution had ever been brought.

The wind was getting stronger and the clouds were breaking up. She quickened her pace.

Fifteen years had passed, but after the murder of Olof Palme the law had been changed so that murders never
fell under the statute of limitations. There was still time for justice to be done if new evidence emerged, if a witness suddenly decided to talk.

Her mobile rang, deep in her bag. She stopped and dug it out from among the ballpoint pens at the bottom. She glanced at the screen: Barbro, her mother. She took the call, a little warily.

‘Where are you?’ Barbro asked.

Annika looked around. The corner of Bergsgatan and Agnegatan, right next to Police Headquarters. ‘I’m at work – or, rather, I’m about to interview a prosecutor about a murder case.’

‘Is it that Timberman?’

‘No, this is different.’

‘Do you know where Birgitta is?’

Clouds were scudding across the sky. Darkness was curling in from the background. ‘I haven’t a clue. Why?’ Annika heard the anxiety in her own voice. What had she done wrong now?

‘When did you last hear from her?’

God, when could it have been? Annika brushed the hair from her forehead. ‘About a year ago, I think. She needed a babysitter for the weekend. She and Steven were going to look for work in Norway.’