Without a Trace (20 page)

‘His clothes?’

‘Assuming he wasn’t running about naked in the forest, the perpetrator took them with him.’

‘How long has he been hanging here?’

‘His associates at the shopping centre say he was with them yesterday, so he must have ended up here some time during the night.’

Nina looked up at the treetops. She thought the rain had eased slightly. ‘Was he one of your regulars?’

‘No, actually,’ Lundqvist said. ‘Kag kept himself together. The last time we had to get involved was when he went on a serious bender eight years ago. He drank, but he wasn’t a thief or a drug addict, and he wasn’t violent.’

She turned back to the man hanging in the tree, a well-behaved tramp. ‘Where did he live?’

‘This is where it gets a bit odd,’ Lundqvist said. ‘Kag doesn’t actually have any connection with Orminge. According to the files, he emigrated to Spain seven years ago.’

Nina spun round and stared at him.

‘There hasn’t been any official record of him in Sweden since then. He doesn’t get sickness benefit, no social support, no pension,’ Lundqvist went on.

‘But he used to hang around Orminge shopping centre. You’re sure about that?’

‘Apparently he rented a room somewhere, as a lodger, but his friends don’t know where. He bought his drink from the state-run off-licence, no moonshine or ethanol, and he got his lunch from the Orminge Grill every day. A thin-bread roll with two hotdogs, dressing and prawn salad.’

‘So he’s got money,’ Nina said.

Lundqvist sighed. ‘Whatever it was he did, he did it to the wrong people. They must have tortured him really badly. His nails have been pulled out, and this business with the ants is monstrous, isn’t it?’

Nina raised her chin. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

Smearing torture victims with honey and putting them on anthills was a tried and tested method in Africa, especially Angola. Apart from the fact that it was incredibly painful, La Barra also meant that the blood circulation to the legs was cut off. If the victim survived, their injuries often led to gangrene and amputation.

‘Lundqvist,’ Henriksson called, from beside the body. ‘Have you seen this?’

The police chief walked towards the pine tree and Nina followed him. They went round it to stand next to the forensics officer.

Something was sticking out of the victim’s rectum, something pale, difficult to see.

‘Shall I …?’

Lundqvist nodded.

The forensics officer took hold of the object with his gloved hand and pulled.

It was a sheet of paper, folded and rolled up. A few ants were running across its sticky surface. Henriksson unfolded it. A yellow sun in a blue sky, flowers on the ground, an animal, two large figures and three small ones, all smiling, the children holding lollipops.

‘A child’s drawing,’ Lundqvist said, bemused.

Mummy, Daddy, two brothers, a little sister, and a black dog.

‘It’s the Lerberg family,’ Nina said.

*

‘Are you quite sure that this is the reporter you want to involve in the matter?’

Chairman of the board Albert Wennergren was sitting in the visitor’s chair, his body language demonstrating extreme scepticism. Anders Schyman couldn’t tell if this was to do with the chair, the reporter, or perhaps the situation. ‘If you have any better suggestions, I’m all ears,’ he said.

That was unnecessary, but he couldn’t help himself.

And Wennergren’s doubts weren’t without a certain justification, not least if you could see Annika Bengtzon trudging towards the glass box they were sitting in, her hair in a messy plait down her back, her trousers wet with rain. She stopped and knocked on the door, even though they were staring right at her.

‘Come in,’ Schyman said, then gestured towards the sofa in the corner.

He walked round the desk and sat down in the armchair. Albert Wennergren stayed where he was, looking uncomfortable, as Annika shut the door behind her and remained standing in the middle of the floor. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘Do you know Albert Wennergren?’ Schyman asked.

The chairman of the board stood up and held out his hand. ‘I heard that you’re Valter’s mentor,’ he said, smiling slightly hesitantly.

Say something nice, now, for God’s sake, Schyman thought, but, of course, she didn’t.

‘Is this going to take long? I’ve got a lot to do.’

‘Have you read this morning’s papers?’ Schyman asked, trying to sound calm and business-like.

Annika turned to him. ‘Are you referring to Lerberg or the Light of Truth?’

He gulped. ‘The latter. And this is going to take a while. You’re welcome to have a seat.’

She sat on the sofa, as Albert Wennergren turned his chair to face the little coffee-table.

‘The blogger’s managed to break through into the established media,’ she said. ‘You need to make some sort of comment.’

Schyman nodded. ‘I’ve dug out the documents about the house purchase, my tax returns for the years in question, my contract of employment with Swedish Television …’

She twisted on the sofa and held up a hand to stop him, but he raised his voice and went on.

‘… and I’m prepared to counter any accusation of bribery and lies. I can prove that—’

‘Schyman,’ she said. ‘I said a comment, not a declaration of war.’

He fell silent. The chairman of the board folded his arms and turned to her. ‘So what do you think he should say?’

Wonderful. Now they were talking about him in the third person, as if he wasn’t actually there. As if he were a problem that needed to be solved, a puppet to be jerked into action and set loose in the columns of other papers.

‘Think about it,’ she said, actually turning to look at him. ‘Don’t make the same mistake politicians do when they’re under pressure. You can’t defend yourself point by point – you’ll get bogged down in a mass of detail that will only give rise to more accusations and speculation.’

‘That’s not a bad point,’ Albert Wennergren said. ‘You can discuss the matter in more general terms, say that the accusations are entirely without foundation, then throw in the idea that the really interesting thing is the responsibility of publishers and the lawlessness of the internet.’

They couldn’t be serious, Schyman thought. His life was in danger, maybe not literally but metaphorically at least: someone was out to crush him and his professional reputation, and they thought he ought to enter an abstract debate about responsible publishing?

‘After all, we often hide behind phrases like “it has been claimed in social media” and “such and such a blogger says”, then write about personal attacks and rumours and cruel gossip all without so much as the blink of an eye,’ Annika said. ‘You could discuss that, couldn’t you?’

Was she having him on?

‘The point of any comment has to be to exonerate me,’ he said.

The reporter looked at him and bit her lip. ‘Do you remember Daniel Lee?’ she said. ‘The South Korean pop star?’

Schyman blinked several times. ‘The one who did “Gangnam Style”?’

Annika half closed her eyes, the way she did when she heard something really stupid. ‘This may come as a shock, but there’s more than one musician in Korea. “Gangnam Style” was by Psy.’

Albert Wennergren leaned towards the coffee-table, suddenly animated. ‘Daniel Lee, he was the singer in Epiq High, wasn’t he?’

Annika nodded. ‘The first Korean group to break the USA and have a number-one single.’

‘I’ve read about him,’ Wennergren said. ‘He’s extremely talented.’

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ she said, turning to Schyman. ‘In three and a half years he got a BA and an MA in English at Stanford University. He wrote short stories in English and Korean that became bestsellers, and he married a Korean film star.’

‘That’s right,’ Wennergren said enthusiastically. ‘And then there was that rumour, what was it again? That he’d lied about his education?’

‘A fifty-eight-year-old Korean in Chicago claimed that Daniel Lee’s qualifications were fake, using pretty much the same strategy as the Light of Truth. His hate blog attracted loads of followers.’

Schyman kept his expression neutral: how the hell did Wennergren know all this? Was everyone else really listening to Korean pop music?

Annika looked right at him. ‘Daniel Lee produced all his diplomas. His tutors and classmates all swore he was telling the truth, but none of it made any difference. Whenever he produced a document, they just said he’d forged it or stolen someone else’s identity.’

‘Exactly,’ Wennergren said. ‘The vilification was completely bizarre.’

‘Daniel Lee couldn’t go out without being attacked. He left his record company, his brother got fired from his job, his mother was called a whore and told to leave Korea.’ She fell silent.

Schyman cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I – I don’t remember Daniel Lee.’

‘How about Barack Obama? Heard of him? There’s still a huge group on the internet who claim he’s not American. It doesn’t matter how much proof of his birth he provides.’

He felt his chest getting tighter.

‘You can’t beat conspiracy theorists,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Unless you can produce Viola Söderland, alive and kicking, on some live-broadcast news programme.’

Schyman nodded. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘I want to move you from normal reporting for a while so you can devote your time to investigating Viola Söderland,’ he said.

She stared at him blankly. ‘You mean find her? Alive? To prove that you were right?’

That wasn’t quite how he would have put it but …

‘You didn’t manage to get hold of her at the time, when it all happened, but you think I can find her? Now? Eighteen years later?’

He could hear that it sounded a little … difficult.

She turned to Wennergren. ‘What do you think of this idea?’

‘It could be worth a try.’

Her eyes narrowed again. Wennergren looked at his watch and squirmed on his chair.

‘So you think this is okay?’ she said. ‘Using the paper’s resources in this way?’

Schyman’s heart sank.

Wennergren smiled rather warily, then put his hands on the armrests and stood up. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a meeting, so I shall have to leave you.’ He turned to Schyman. ‘Let’s talk again this evening, shall we?’ He faced Annika.

‘I’ve heard so much about you – it was very nice to meet you,’ he said.

She stood up and shook his hand, seeming surprised.

Schyman shut his eyes and rested his head on his hands.

Annika looked at her editor-in-chief and tried to figure out what was going on. He was hunched up with his head in his hands, and he looked terrible, scruffy and unshaven. She thought she remembered him wearing the same clothes yesterday.

‘What was Wennergren doing here?’ she asked. ‘One crazy blogger is hardly a matter for the board, is it?’

Schyman let out a deep sigh. He sat up and leaned back in his chair. ‘We were supposed to be announcing my retirement as editor-in-chief on Friday,’ he said. ‘But that’s out of the question now. The mob would think they’d won, and that would be my legacy. That I had to resign because of an accusation on a blog.’

‘Retirement? Why would you want to do that? You’ve got several years left until you collect your pension, surely?’

He looked close to tears. ‘I honestly don’t think I can bear much more of this,’ he said.

He shut his eyes. She gazed at him, in his dirty shirt, the most important boss in the Swedish media (well, print-media, anyway). He had huge power in the mass media but that didn’t mean he was immune to his own weapons. Quite the reverse, perhaps. She’d seen it plenty of times: journalists were the most sensitive professional group going when it came to being called into question publicly, and the tougher the reporter, the more touchy they were. Criticizing a critic led to a chorus of indignation. Accusing an editor of impropriety was a thousand times worse than accusing a politician or a bank director of the same thing.

She shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to use her as a tool to clear his name, and evidently he had the blessing of the board to do so. When she thought about it, it was probably a sensible idea: allowing him to resign in disgrace would have had ominous consequences for the
Evening Post
as a brand.

She cleared her throat quietly. ‘I’ve seen the documentary twice,’ she said. ‘First when it was broadcast on SVT – I must have been in my late teens – and again at the College of Journalism. Have you got a copy of it?’

He sighed again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve looked, but I can’t find it.’

She waited, but he didn’t say any more. In the end she got up and fetched a pen from his desk, took a sheet of paper from his printer, put the paper on the coffee-table and sat on the edge of the sofa.

‘Let’s take it from the beginning,’ she said. ‘In the programme you declared that Viola Söderland disappeared of her own free will, didn’t you? What was that based on? I want every last detail.’

He shrugged his shoulders reluctantly. ‘“Declared” is probably putting it too strongly …’

She decided to be patient.

‘It was all incredibly well planned,’ he said eventually. ‘Viola spent at least a year preparing her flight.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘She changed her surname to her mother’s maiden name a year before she disappeared, and started to use her middle name. Viola Söderland became Harriet Johansson.’

She wrote
Viola Söderland – Harriet Johansson
. ‘That could have been just a coincidence?’

Schyman sat up straighter on his chair and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She started using her new identity. Among other things, she bought a used car, privately, as Harriet Johansson from a man in Skärholmen. She paid cash and offered to send in the change-of-ownership forms, but never did. That meant the purchase was never registered, the former owner still listed as the official owner of the vehicle.’

Annika made notes. ‘I don’t remember that. Was the original owner in the television programme?’

Schyman stroked his stubble. ‘I met him three times and he stuck to his story. But he didn’t want to be filmed. An actor read his statement.’