‘It’s nothing awful,’ Halenius said. ‘I’ve watched it. It’s pretty standard, short and concise. Nothing weird, nothing shocking. It was recorded yesterday, as you’ll see.’
Annika clutched the edge of the desk.
‘This is exactly what we’ve been expecting,’ he went on, crouching beside her. ‘Our kidnappers have clearly done the whole kidnapping course. They’ve done this before. Thomas has been sleeping outdoors or in very basic conditions for almost a week, and it shows. Don’t be alarmed by how unkempt he looks. The actual message is completely irrelevant. What matters is that he’s alive and seems reasonably okay. Do you want me to play it?’
She nodded.
The image flickered, a beam of light moved across it, and then a terrified face appeared on the screen.
Annika gasped. ‘God, what have they done to him?’ she said, pointing at his left eye. It was swollen shut, and his eyelid looked like a bright red cocktail sausage.
Halenius froze the image. ‘Looks like an insect bite,’ he said. ‘Could be a mosquito or some other flying pest. His face shows no sign of having been hit. You see he hasn’t been able to shave?’
Annika nodded again. She reached out her hand and touched the screen, stroking his cheek. ‘He’s wearing his gay shirt,’ she said. ‘He really did want to impress her.’
‘Shall I go on?’
‘Wait,’ Annika said.
She pushed the chair back and ran into the children’s room, grabbed the newspaper’s video-camera and hurried back into the bedroom.
‘Film me while I watch the video,’ she said to Halenius, passing him the camera. ‘Can you do that?’
He nodded. ‘Why?’
‘Three million reasons. Or shall I get the tripod?’
‘Give it here.’
She sat in front of the computer again, adjusted her hair, then stared into Thomas’s frightened eyes. His hair was dark with sweat, his face shiny, his eyes bloodshot and staring. In the background there was a dark brown wall, something stripy. Wallpaper? Damp?
‘He’s thinking about Daniel Pearl,’ Annika said. ‘He thinks they’re going to behead him. Have you switched the camera on?’
‘Er, I don’t really know how to …’
Annika took the camera and pressed play.
‘Just point and shoot,’ she said, then turned back to the computer.
She looked Thomas in the eye.
She thought, I’m doing this for us.
‘Sunday morning,’ she said, into thin air. ‘We’ve just received a video from the kidnappers, so-called
proof of life
, to show that my husband is still alive. I haven’t watched the film yet. I’m about to start it running.’
She clicked on the computer.
The picture shook slightly. Thomas was blinking against the harsh light shining into his face. He was glancing up to the right – perhaps someone was standing there, pointing a gun at him. He was holding a piece of paper. His wrists looked red and swollen.
‘Today is the twenty-seventh of November,’ he said in English. She turned the volume up to maximum: the sound was poor and she could hardly hear what he was saying. There was a lot of hissing and crackling, as if it were windy. She could hear the video-camera whirring beside her.
‘A French plane crashed into the Atlantic this morning,’ Thomas went on.
Halenius froze the picture. ‘The kidnappers don’t have access to any newspapers,’ he said. ‘That’s the commonest way to show that a hostage is alive at a particular moment. Instead they’ve got him to say something he couldn’t otherwise have known.’
‘Are you filming?’ Annika asked.
‘Course I am,’ Halenius said.
The video continued.
‘I’m well,’ Thomas said hoarsely. ‘I’m being treated well.’
Annika pointed to a mark on his forehead. ‘There’s something crawling there. I think it’s a spider.’
He moved the note and read in silence for a moment, while the spider made its way up to his hair.
‘I want to encourage all the governments of Europe to act on the demands of …’ he moved the note closer to his face and squinted against the bright light ‘… Fick … Fiqh Jihad, to act on their demands for openness and the distribution of resources. It is time for a new age.’
‘That’s the political message,’ Halenius muttered.
‘And I want to emphasize the importance of paying the ransom promptly. If Europe’s leaders don’t listen, I will die. If you don’t pay, I will die. Allah is great.’
He lowered the note and looked up from his squatting position to the right. The picture faded to black.
‘Someone’s standing there,’ Annika said, pointing to Thomas’s right side.
‘Can I stop filming now?’
‘Just a bit more,’ Annika said, and turned towards Halenius. She felt oddly strengthened by the camera lens, as if she’d been sucked through the black hole and found herself in a parallel reality where the outcome wasn’t in the hands of crazy Somali kidnappers but in hers. Her own capacity to focus and concentrate made all the difference.
‘He says he’s being treated well,’ she said quietly, ‘but I don’t believe him. They forced him to say that. I think he’s having a terrible time.’ She looked at Halenius. ‘Now you can stop.’
He lowered the camera. Annika switched it off.
‘The British are going to analyse the film,’ Halenius said. ‘They try to uncover things you can’t see or hear at first, background noises, details in the image, that sort of thing.’
‘When did it arrive?’ Annika asked.
‘Eleven twenty-seven. Twenty minutes ago. I watched it, forwarded it to the Brits, then came to get you.’
She put the camera down. ‘I’m going to pick up the children,’ she said.
* * *
The eleven o’clock meeting was drawing to a close. The atmosphere had been a bit too euphoric for Schyman’s taste, too much backslapping, too many bad jokes, but that was what happened when people thought they’d done something big, and by that he didn’t mean in-depth analysis of global events or natural disasters, but the type of thing that was invented within the newsroom by the editors or during meetings like this. Of course the cause of the excitement was the increasingly real serial killer. Not because women were being murdered but because the paper had taken a guess and struck lucky. So far the other evening paper hadn’t caught on, but it was only a matter of time. On the other side of the city they would be tearing their hair out, trying desperately to find a way into the story without letting on that they’d been left standing at the starting gate.
‘Okay,’ he said, trying to sound stern. ‘Quick run-through. What are we leading with?’
In front of him sat Entertainment and Sport, Online and Net-TV, Op-ed and Features, the head of news and his deputy. He pointed at Entertainment.
‘The rumour that Benny Andersson is going to be the new boss of the Eurovision Song Contest,’ said the slight young woman, whose name he couldn’t for the life of him remember.
Schyman sighed inwardly. Why the hell would Benny from Abba want that job? Particularly when it had once been held by the
Evening Post
’s old sports editor.
He looked encouragingly at Hasse, from Sport.
‘Milan are against Juventus tonight, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic is playing, so something’s bound to happen.’
Vague, but okay.
‘News?’
Patrik straightened. ‘Apart from the serial killer, we’ve got an old boy who lay dead in his flat for three years without anyone noticing or missing him. And a tip-off that the minister of finance has just had his apartment renovated using black-market labour.’
He exchanged a high-five with his temporary deputy, a young star called Brutus, and Schyman knocked on the table. ‘We need to follow developments in the kidnapping in East Africa as well,’ he said.
Patrik groaned. ‘There’s nothing going on with that,’ he said. ‘They’re not letting anything slip, no pictures, no info. It’s completely dead.’
Schyman stood up and walked out of the meeting room, heading for his glass office.
The story of the murdered women was troubling him.
As soon as he’d got to work that morning, before he’d even managed to take his coat off, his phone had rung: it was the mother of one of the victims, Lena. She was angry, shocked, upset. She was crying but wasn’t hysterical, and spoke in a shaky voice, but she was clear and coherent.
‘This was no serial killer,’ she said. ‘It was Gustaf, the lazy bastard she was with. He’s been stalking her ever since she finished with him, and that was several months ago, July, the end of July …’
‘So you’re saying it was the girls’ father who—’
‘No, no, not Oscar. Lena always got on well with Oscar. This man came to see her at the clinic. He was on incapacity benefit, problems with his back. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He refused to accept that their relationship was over. What would she have seen in him? Just another expense, that’s all he was …’
‘Did he hit her?’ Schyman asked, because he had read up about women’s helplines.
‘He wouldn’t have dared,’ Lena’s mother said. ‘Lena would have had him locked up instantly. You didn’t mess with her.’
‘Did she report him to the police?’
‘What for?’
‘You said he’d been stalking her?’
The mother sniffed. ‘She shrugged it off, said he’d get tired, that it was nothing to worry about. And now look what’s happened!’
She was crying inconsolably. Schyman listened. Distraught people didn’t affect him much. Maybe empathy eroded over time: an occupational injury caused by too many years’ chasing and holding people to account, exploiting and exposing them.
‘We’re only reporting the suspicions of the police,’ he said. ‘Obviously their investigations will look into all the possibilities. If this man is guilty –’
‘His name’s Gustaf.’
‘– then it’s likely he’ll be arrested and charged, and if it’s someone else, they’ll be convicted instead.’
The mother blew her nose. ‘Do you believe that?’
‘Almost all murder cases get solved,’ Schyman said, in a confident tone, hoping he was right.
And with that they had hung up, but the sense of unease still hadn’t left him.
What if all these murdered women were just ordinary, humdrum stories? The statistics certainly pointed in that direction. The victim, the weapon, modus operandi, motive: husband no longer in control of his wife kills her with a breadknife, inside or in the immediate vicinity of her home. He didn’t need Annika Bengtzon there, banging on about press ethics, to feel his own doubts growing.
For some reason he had in his head a quote from one of Sweden’s best-known and most controversial political scientists, Stig-Björn Ljunggren: ‘One of the most common complaints in politics is that the media distort reality. It’s a litany that assumes that the role of the media should be to function as some sort of mirror to society. This is a false assumption. The media are part of an experience industry whose purpose is to entertain rather than inform us … Their role is not to reflect reality, but to dramatize it.’
He looked at the time. If he left now, he would get home just as his wife returned from her break.
The drive had been cleared and the yard sanded. Annika parked next to the farmhouse, turned the engine off and sat in the car for a minute or so. Out on the frozen lake, far off to the south, she could see three dots: one large and two smaller. She hoped they’d managed to catch some perch. They could fry them in butter, and eat them with crispbread. Delicious, but a nightmare to fillet.
She went up to the porch and knocked. There was no bell.
She turned to look out over the lake again.
Berit and Thord had sold their house in Täby and bought the farm after their children had left home. Annika knew there had been another reason for the move: Berit had had an affair with Superintendent Q, and it had been a last-ditch attempt to save the marriage. It had evidently worked.
Berit opened the door. ‘What are you standing out here for? Why didn’t you just come in?’
Annika smiled wanly. ‘Too urban?’
‘They’re still out fishing. You’ll be eating perch for the next week. Coffee?’
‘Yes, please,’ Annika said, stepping inside the large farmhouse kitchen. It looked like something out of
Country Living
or
Homes and Gardens
: stripped pine tiles on the floor, a wood-burning stove, wood panel-ling, a drop-leaf table, grandfather clock, an Ilve gas hob and a fridge with an ice-maker.
She sat at the table and watched Berit as she dealt with the coffee percolator. She was wearing the same sort of clothes she wore at work, black trousers, a blouse and a cardigan. Her movements were calm and precise, economical, not calculated to impress.
‘You never pretend to be anything but yourself,’ Annika said. ‘You’re always … complete.’
Berit stopped what she was doing with the coffee scoop in mid-air. ‘I do, you know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I pretend to be different. But not usually at work, these days. I’ve grown out of that.’
She tipped the coffee into the percolator, switched it on and sat down at the table with two clean mugs.
On the table lay that day’s papers, the
Evening Post
and its rival, and the two big morning papers with their huge Sunday supplements. Annika ran her fingers over them but couldn’t bring herself to open one.
‘We’ve received a video,’ she said quietly. ‘
Proof of life
. He looked like shit.’ She closed her eyes and saw his face before her, his swollen eye, terrified expression, hair dark with sweat. Her hands shook and she felt herself starting to panic –
If Europe’s leaders don’t listen
,
I will die, if you don’t pay, I will die
, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do.
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘oh, God …’
Berit came round the table, pulled up a chair beside her and took her in her arms, holding her tight. ‘This will pass,’ she said. ‘One day this will all be over. You’re going to cope.’
Annika forced herself to breathe normally. ‘It’s so awful,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so impotent.’
Berit handed her a piece of kitchen roll, and she blew her nose loudly.
‘I can just about imagine it,’ Berit said, ‘but I can’t say I really understand what it feels like.’