Borderline (2 page)

Annika was so cold now that she was shaking. The cardboard star was moving gently in the window. A man went past down Selmedalsvägen on a bike.

She ransacked her bag for her mobile, then took a picture of the nursery school, nodded to the rookie and went back to the newspaper’s car.

*

The temperature had dropped significantly since it had stopped snowing. Her breath turned to ice on the windscreen and she had to sit there with the defroster on full blast for several minutes before she could drive off. She undid her boots and wiggled the toes of her left foot frantically in an attempt to get some feeling back into them.

Ellen and Kalle made their own way home from their afterschool club, these days. It was on the other side of Hantverkargatan, and was one of the reasons why Annika had never tried to find anywhere else to live, even though the three-room flat she rented was far too cramped.

The traffic eased slightly so she took her foot off the clutch and the car moved a few metres forward. Not even the Essinge motorway had seen a snowplough. She wasn’t sure if the drifts on the road were the result of climate change or the consequence of a policy decision by the city’s new right-wing council.

She sighed and pulled out her private mobile, pressed to redial the last number and listened to the crackle as the signal made its way through storms and satellites. There was a click on the line, no ringtone. ‘Hello, you’ve reached Thomas Samuelsson at the Department of Justice …’

Annoyed and slightly embarrassed, she clicked to end the call. Her husband hadn’t been answering his mobile since the evening before last. Every time she tried to get hold of him she heard that pompous message, which he insisted on keeping in English, even though they had been back from Washington for almost four months now. And the way he emphasized ‘Department of Justice’, Christ …

Her other mobile, the newspaper’s, rang somewhere deep in her bag. She dug it out without hurrying since the traffic wasn’t moving.

‘What the fuck are these pictures you’ve sent through?’ Patrik Nilsson, head of news on the printed edition, had evidently received the photos she’d taken with her mobile.

‘Dead mother. She’d just dropped her son off at nursery school and died on the way home, unknown how. I’d put a tenner on her being in the middle of a divorce and the kid’s father beating her to death.’

‘Looks like the root of a fallen tree. How did you get on with Ingvar?’

Ingvar?

‘
I
ngvar
K
amprad, from
E
lmtaryd
A
gunnaryd?’

She had to search her memory to remember the job she’d initially been sent out to cover. ‘No good,’ she said.

‘Sure?’

Patrik had got it into his head that the roof of the Ikea branch at Kungens Kurva, the biggest in the world, was about to collapse because of the amount of snow on it. Which would undeniably have been a great story if it had been true. The staff at the information desk had looked totally blank when Annika had asked if they were having problems with the roof. She’d told them they’d had a tip-off from a member of the public, and that it clearly wasn’t true. In fact the ‘tip-off’ had arisen during the eleven o’clock editorial meeting that morning, presumably somewhere inside Patrik Nilsson’s head. In other words, she’d been sent out to see if reality could somehow be adapted to fit the
Evening Post
’s requirements, which, in this particular instance, had turned out to be a fairly difficult task. The staff on the information desk had phoned someone in Maintenance at a head office somewhere, and he had guaranteed that the roof could cope with at least twenty-two metres of snow.

‘No broken roof,’ she said sardonically.

‘Yeah, but, what the hell, did you see it for yourself?’

‘Yep,’ she lied.

‘Not even any cracks?’

‘Nope.’

The traffic around her started to move. She put the car into first gear, slid on the snowy slush and was able to get up to almost twenty kilometres an hour. ‘What are we doing with the dead mother?’ she asked.

‘The tree root?’

‘The police seem pretty certain who she is – a neighbour called to report her missing during the day – but they probably won’t be releasing her name this evening.’

‘And she was found behind a nursery school?’ Patrik asked, with new interest in his voice. ‘By one of the kids?’

‘No,’ Annika said, moving up to second gear. ‘It was someone out skiing.’

‘You’re sure? Maybe one of the kids ran into her on a sledge. Maybe an arm got caught in the runners.’

‘The traffic’s moving now,’ Annika said. ‘I’ll be with you in a quarter of an hour.’

She left the car in the newspaper’s garage, then headed down the steps to the underground tunnels. There used to be four ways up to the office, but bomb threats and box-tickers had made sure that all but one were now blocked. The only way to avoid the caretakers was to go from the garage into the basement, then use the lift situated beyond the reception desk. She’d also have several run-ins with a former employee … admittedly, Tore Brandt had been fired after he was found to be selling black-market booze to the night editors, but the discomfort of having to walk past that long desk was still in her blood and she almost always used the basement entrance.

She had to wait several minutes for the lift. On the way up her stomach clenched, as it always did when she was on her way to the newsroom, a sort of expectant tension at what she might find when she got there.

She took a deep breath, then stepped out on to the stained carpet.

The open-plan office had been redesigned a couple more times during the three years she had spent as the paper’s Washington correspondent, to suit the new age’s demands for collaboration and flexibility. In the centre of the room the newsdesk floated like a luminous spaceship. It had reproduced: there was no longer just one but three. Like two half-moons, Print and Online sat with their backs to each other, staring at their screens. Berit Hamrin, Annika’s favourite colleague, called them the ‘Cheesy Wotsits’. The webcast unit was situated alongside, where the reception desk used to be. A dozen huge television screens above their heads showed flickering feeds from a mixture of online sites, text-TV and docusoaps. Marketing and Advertising were now part of Editorial, physically as well as in organizational terms. The screens around the dayshift reporters’ desk had been removed altogether.

In fact, everything was much the same, just closer together. The hundreds of fluorescent lights spread their indirect glow in the same flickering blue tone. Desks were covered with drifts of paper, heads lowered in concentration.

Her years in Washington felt like a story someone had told her or the remnants of a dream. Life was back to square one. This was precisely where she had started as a summer temp thirteen years ago, in charge of the tip-off phone-line, running errands, a dogsbody in the service of the news.

She was seized by weariness. She was still hearing about the same murders of women as she had that first summer, just despatched to cover them by different heads of news. She was back, even living in the same block, albeit in a different flat.

‘Have you eaten?’ she asked Berit, who was typing furiously on her laptop.

‘I got a sandwich,’ Berit replied, without looking away from the screen or slowing down.

Annika got out her own computer. Even her mechanical gestures were the same: plug in the socket, lift the screen, switch it on, log into the network. Berit’s hair was greyer now, and she’d got different glasses, but otherwise the world around Annika was the same as it had been the year she turned twenty-four. Then it had been the height of summer, and a young woman had been found dead behind a headstone in a cemetery. Now it was freezing winter and bodies were found in the forest behind a nursery school, in car parks or residential streets or … She frowned. ‘Berit,’ she said, ‘don’t you think rather a lot of women have been murdered in Stockholm this autumn? Outdoors, I mean.’

‘No more than usual,’ Berit said.

Annika logged into mediearkivet.se where much of the Swedish media stored their published articles and columns. She searched for ‘woman murdered stockholm’ since the beginning of August that year and got a number of hits. The texts weren’t full articles, just notes, most of them from the prestigious morning paper.

Towards the end of August a fifty-four-year-old woman had been found dead in a car park in Fisksätra outside Stockholm. She had been stabbed in the back. Her husband had once served a prison sentence for beating and threatening her. He had evidently been held for her murder, but released through lack of evidence. Because he had been picked up at once, the story had never made it beyond the ‘news in brief’ column of the paper’s Stockholm section. It was labelled a domestic tragedy and written off.

The next report came from the same section, published about a week later. A nineteen-year-old immigrant woman had been found murdered at a popular beach by a lake north of the city, Ullnäsjön. She had died from multiple stab wounds. Her fiancé, who also happened to be her cousin, was in custody charged with her murder. He denied any involvement.

And in the middle of October a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three had been found stabbed to death on a street in Hässelby. The woman’s ex-husband had been questioned on suspicion of murder, but it wasn’t clear from the report whether he had been taken into custody and charged or released.

There had been a number of murders in the home in other parts of the country, but the reports were even shorter.

‘Hey, Annika,’ Patrik said, looming above her. ‘Can you go and check out a fire in Sollentuna? Probably the start of the Christmas fire season, old dears getting a bit carried away with their Advent candles. Do an overview of how crap Swedes are at using fire-extinguishers and changing the batteries in their smoke alarms – could be a good consumer piece, “How to Stop Your Candles Killing You” …’

‘I’ve already got the dead mum outside the nursery school,’ Annika said.

Patrik blinked uncomprehendingly. ‘But that’s nothing,’ he said.

‘The fourth murder since I got back,’ she said, turning the laptop towards him. ‘All women, all from Stockholm, all stabbed. What if there’s a serial killer on the loose?’

The head of news looked suddenly uncertain. ‘Do you think so? How did this one die? Where was it again? Bredäng?’

‘Axelsberg. You saw the picture, what do you think?’

Patrik stared across the newsroom, clearly digging out the picture from somewhere in his brain. Then he snorted. ‘Serial killer? Wishful thinking!’ He turned on his heel and went off to talk to another reporter about his killer candles.

‘So you got that one,’ Berit said. ‘Mum with a young kid. Divorce? Reports of threatening behaviour that no one took seriously?’

‘Probably,’ Annika said. ‘The police haven’t released her name yet.’

Without her name, it was impossible to track down her address, and thereby her neighbour, which meant no background and no story, if she really had been murdered.

‘Something good?’ Annika asked, nodding towards what Berit was writing as she fished an orange out of her bag.

‘Do you remember Alain Thery? There was quite a bit written about him last autumn.’

Last autumn Annika had been immersed in the Tea Party movement and the American congressional elections. She shook her head.

‘French businessman, blown up on his yacht off Puerto Banús?’ Berit said, peering at her over her glasses.

Annika thought hard. Puerto Banús. White boats and blue sea … That was where she and Thomas had got back together, in the Hotel Pyr, a room overlooking the motorway. She had been covering the story of the Söderström family, killed in a gas-attack at their home, and Thomas had been living with Sophia Grenborg at the time, but was in Málaga for a conference, at which he’d been unfaithful to her with his wife.

‘A film’s been posted on YouTube,’ Berit said, ‘claiming that Alain Thery was Europe’s biggest slave trafficker. His whole business empire was a front for smuggling young people from Africa to Europe and exploiting them, in some cases until they died.’

‘Sounds like slander of the deceased,’ Annika said, throwing her orange peel into the paper recycling bin and eating a segment. It tasted bitter.

‘According to the film, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, and they’ve never been cheaper.’

‘That’s the sort of thing Thomas is busy with,’ Annika said, and ate another segment.

‘Frontex,’ Berit said.

Annika threw the rest of the orange into the bin. ‘Exactly. Frontex.’

Thomas and his fancy job.

‘I think it’s appalling,’ Berit said. ‘The whole Frontex project is an incredibly cynical experiment, a new Iron Curtain.’

Annika logged into Facebook and scrolled through her colleagues’ status updates.

‘The point,’ Berit went on, ‘is to exclude the world’s poor from the riches of Europe. And with a central organization in charge, individual governments can shrug off a whole load of criticism. When they chuck people out, they can just refer to Frontex and keep their own hands clean, like Pontius Pilate.’

Annika smiled at her. ‘And when you were young you were in the FNL and protested against the Vietnam War.’ Eva-Britt Qvist was looking forward to going to the theatre that evening; Patrik had eaten a thin-bread wrap forty-three minutes ago, and Picture-Pelle had posted a link to an
Evening Post
documentary that had been made in the summer of 1975.

‘Frontex’s latest idea is to get developing countries to close their borders themselves. All very practical. And in the developed world we, with our long-established freedoms, don’t have to deal with the issue. Gaddafi in Libya was given half a billion kronor by our very own EU commissioner to keep refugees from Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan in enormous concentration camps.’

‘True,’ Annika said. ‘That’s why Thomas is in Nairobi. They’re trying to get the Kenyans to close the border with Somalia.’ She got her mobile out and dialled his number again.

‘Didn’t you get a new phone?’ Berit wondered.