Prime Time (31 page)

Mouths twitched and shoulders shook. This was what they had found so amusing.

‘Would you like me to do it?’ Schyman asked coolly.

Spike sighed dramatically, removed the disk from the drive, and handed it to Carl Wennergren.

‘Then again, an issue like this should really be decided by the executive editor,’ Spike challenged.

Schyman stopped thinking and lunged.

‘That’s a load of bullshit,’ he roared and banged both hands on the news editor’s desk. ‘This isn’t some damn porno rag, and if you don’t know that you can leave at once.’

The agitated fluttering of Torstensson’s paper scratched the surface of the razor-sharp silence. Spike gaped and blinked a few times.

‘Hold your goddam horses,’ he said, removing his feet from his desk and turning away.

‘Wennergren,’ Schyman said. ‘My office.’

He waited until the reporter stood up. Then he forced himself to stride smoothly towards his office.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked as he closed the door behind Carl Wennergren.

‘I’m writing an article about Michelle Carlsson’s murder,’ Wennergren said in a somewhat less confident voice, one that held no trace of cockiness.

Anders Schyman stood in front of the young man and held Carl’s pale-eyed and evasive gaze with his own. The silence grew, and Carl Wennergren shifted his shoulders slightly.

‘What of it?’ he finally said. ‘I was there, wasn’t I? It’s a scoop. And I know a bunch of stuff that hasn’t been published yet.’

‘You are not going to write a single line,’ Schyman responded, unpleasantly aware of how tense he sounded. ‘As long as you are a special witness in a murder investigation, you aren’t going to cover the cause for this paper.’

‘I should be entitled to write about my own experiences. Barbara got to!’

A spark went off in Anders Schyman’s brain, igniting the volatile mass of thoughts that had expanded to dangerous proportions due to fatigue and stress.

‘Do you think this is some kind of goddamned kindergarten?’ he roared into the reporter’s face. ‘“Barbara got to …” Christ!’

He covered his eyes with his hands and turned away. He had lost control, lost some authority. Forcing himself to breathe calmly and think, he looked at the reporter again and noticed that the man’s nose and cheeks had gone pale.

‘Right now, Sjölander’s on a plane crossing the Atlantic,’ the managing editor said in a gravelly voice. ‘Tomorrow he will be able to interview you about your experience, as a witness, under the exact same conditions as the other witnesses. Naturally, the decision to be interviewed is yours. The resulting article is not under your jurisdiction. Have I made myself clear?’

Something had crumbled in Carl Wennergren’s gaze. His eyes had an expression that Anders Schyman had never seen before: an illusion had been shattered – Carl had gained a certain insight about life that had never entered his mind before.

‘What kind of interview?’ he managed to ask.

‘Our reporter tells all about the night of the murder at the castle,’ Schyman said, suddenly drained. He had to sit down.

‘That makes me sound like a real wuss,’ Carl Wennergren said.

‘Have you ever figured out how many articles you’ve written on a similar theme?’ Schyman asked.

The reporter stood by the door, started pulling the sliding doors open and paused.

Bristling with defiance and contempt, he turned to face Schyman.

‘Just for your information,’ he said, looking straight at the managing editor, ‘I saw Barbara by the bus right before three o’clock in the morning. She could very well have murdered Michelle. Would you like me to tell all about that as well?’

‘This paper’s computers are off limits to those pornographic pictures,’ Schyman said.

Carl Wennergren left the room, silently closing the sliding doors and then floating off towards the sea of people over by the news desk.

Anders Schyman held his wet socks in one hand and the scissors from his desk drawer in the other. Working methodically and keeping his hands out of sight, he cut the socks into thin ribbons.

Annika’s first thought when the children came in was that their features were so clear-cut. Their eyes were round: Kalle’s were glad to see her again, Ellen’s reflected a one-year-old’s sense of betrayal. Their bodies were so warm, so simultaneously hard and soft, and their scent was so distinctive. Sitting on the floor in the hall, she rocked them both with tears in her eyes.

‘Can you help me out with the stuff?’

Thomas’s voice was commanding and flat.

Annika hurriedly let go of the children and went to the elevator to drag in backpacks, the beach bag, the stroller, sleeping bags and blankets.

‘Dinner’s ready – it might be a little cold, though,’ she said, closing the door and feeling overwhelmed by the situation: her little kids, clinging to her legs, the man who came home, home to her, the life they shared.

Dinner was a bit tense; the children were over-tired and all wound up, and Thomas avoided meeting Annika’s gaze. By the time she had put the kids to bed, Thomas had parked himself on the couch to watch a movie on TV. She sat down next to him, close but still so very far away.

It wasn’t until they had gone to bed, and both of them were lying there staring up at the ceiling, that she could manage to talk to him.

‘How was it?’

He swallowed hard.

‘Well, they wondered why you hadn’t come along.’

‘How did your mother react?’

‘She’s not a narrow-minded person, you know,’ Thomas said. ‘She accepts Sverker, calls him her son-in-law, and that’s pretty impressive. People may gossip behind her back, but she holds her head high.’

Annika felt hot tears sting her eyes and swallowed to hold them back.

‘I know that,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you see how that makes things even worse? She’s not a snob or a bigot, she just doesn’t accept me. Do you know how much that hurts?’

Her tears spilled out, heavy and salty, and rolled down into her ears.

‘She’s disappointed, that’s all,’ Thomas said without looking at her. ‘Eleonor was the daughter she never had – they still call each other several times a week. But their relationship doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just let them do their thing.’

‘She feels sorry for you because you live with me,’ Annika said in a small voice as she stared at the ceiling.

Thomas snorted.

‘That’s bullshit. Her frame of reference is different, that’s all. A house is nicer than an apartment, being a chief financial officer for Social Services is better than doing research on welfare cases, and sure, being a banker is fancier than being a journalist. But let her have her opinions. After all, it’s a free country.’

He turned away, his back to her. Annika stared at his shoulders, her tears silently streaming down on to the pillowcase.

‘I want us to get married,’ she whispered.

He didn’t reply.

‘In church,’ she went on. ‘And I want to wear a white gown, and the kids can be our attendants …’

Thomas yanked off the covers, his back rigid and forbidding in the summer night, leaving her hurt and longing in their bedding.

‘Thomas! Please!’

Annika’s voice pierced the air, small and reedy, anxiously waiting for a response that didn’t come. She struggled to free herself from the damp tangle of bedding and followed him into the darkness before he switched on the kitchen lamp. She stood in the doorway, naked and shivering.

‘People can see you,’ Thomas said as he sat there in his robe at the table with a newspaper.

‘Why don’t you want to marry me?’

He looked up. His eyes were expressionless.

‘I’ve been married. Believe me, there’s no difference.’

‘It would make a difference to
me.
’

‘Why?’ he said, pushing back his chair. ‘Because you could publish a wedding picture in your home-town paper,
Katrineholms-Kuriren
?’

Annika stood there, blinking away the verbal slap in the face.

‘I do everything for you,’ she pleaded.

Thomas got up and walked towards her, fire and ice in his eyes. She backed away, another image intruding, another face approaching her. She heard the echo of her own voice, the words she’d said before, ‘I do everything for you’, and the approaching form with icy fire in his eyes.

‘You want a ring on your finger? Is that it? You can have a ring, we’ll buy one tomorrow.’

She turned away and ran, escaping through the darkness, panic like a piercing shriek in her left ear.

‘Annika.’

His voice behind her, tired, flat.

‘Annika, I’m sorry. Annie, come here.’

His arms around her shoulders, his breath on the back of her neck.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’

Annika’s eyes were wide open, hot and dry, and she stared blankly at the wall.

I’ve heard this before. This has happened to me before. I’ve been ever forgiving, forgiving, forgiving …

She twisted out of his arms, grabbed a duvet and a pillow and headed for the children’s room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘That’s none of your damn business!’

MONDAY, 25 JUNE

T
he complex housing the Securities Register Centre was located on a street behind Sergels torg, one that used to be known for its hookers. It was a metal and glass structure from the 1970s, filled with mirrors and ornate concrete walls. Annika paused as she entered the building and closed her umbrella. The fastidiously official atmosphere made her uncomfortable; it clashed with the reason she was there. She wasn’t here as a journalist – she was a snoop, a secret agent, possibly even a traitor.

Slightly nervous, she took the escalator upstairs. On the second floor she encountered an artificial garden, the glass ceiling floating some twenty metres overhead. There were mosaic fountains and marble floors, and a footbridge lined with white stylized lanterns was surrounded by brown stucco office buildings. Annika tried, unsuccessfully, to blink away the surrealistic haze in her mind and stared at the glass sky instead, detecting rivulets of rain, sensing the moisture.

It’s only a standard procedure, nothing to make a fuss about.

The reception desk was on the right-hand side of the lobby. With a fixed smile on her face, she introduced herself. Her name, her personal ID number, the ID card serial number, and the date were noted in a large ledger. While the receptionist was busy writing this down, Annika glanced at the names of the previous visitors, recognizing a reporter from the financial paper
Veckans
Affärer.

‘The computers are over there, on the right. Let me know if you need any assistance.’

Two Philips flat-screens were humming with eternity’s journey through the universe, and Annika let her jacket, her bag and her umbrella drop to the floor between two chairs. She hit
enter
and a window with three small icons appeared. A click on
Share Register
produced a form to fill in: the issuer, a personal ID number or corporate registration number and the owner’s name.

She typed in Global Future as the issuer and Torstensson as the owner. A new window popped up next to the first one, with the heading ‘Search results for public ownership listing’.

No data accessed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to the receptionist. ‘I have a few questions about how to search the database.’

The woman leaned over and said something that Annika didn’t quite catch into the intercom.

Annika stared at the computer screen and, just for the heck of it, tried to see how many members of the family who owned
Kvällsposten
also had MTG shares, seeing as they were their competitor.

Three hits.

She smiled wryly.

‘You’re doing just fine,’ a man said behind her.

Annika’s heart lurched. The carpet was so thick that she hadn’t heard the guy approach.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘How does … this work?’

The man smiled at her. There was a gleam in his eye that made her cheeks grow hot.

‘The share register is updated every six months,’ he said. ‘The version you have here is a record of public ownership as per 31 December of last year.’

Annika blinked a few times. There really wasn’t anything underhand about her business apart from its objective.

‘How would I go about finding the exact date when a certain holding was sold?’ she asked.

‘That can’t be done,’ the man said, still smiling. ‘Transactions are reported on a semi-annual basis.’

‘So no one would know?’ she continued, feeling relieved but also obligated to pursue the matter.

‘Yes, someone would,’ he said. ‘We register all transactions that exceed five hundred lots. Three working days after the transaction, the changes will be on the record.’

‘Only that information isn’t available to the general public.’

His gaze remained locked on hers. It spoke a different language to the officialese issuing from his mouth.

‘We conduct analyses. It’s a service we provide for reconciliation companies and certain foreign issuers so that they will be able to analyse the ownership structure of their company. Among other things, they can observe daily updates with regard to the directly registered shareholders.’

Annika looked down.

‘They can pay to see who buys and sells their stocks?’

‘That’s right, they can observe the registration process here.’

‘But I wouldn’t be able to obtain that service?’

She stole a glance at the guy and saw him shake his head. Then she took in his thick mane of hair, broad shoulders and khaki slacks.

‘Okay,’ she said to his shoes. ‘Say that I would like to find out exactly when a certain individual sold their holding of a particular company last summer or last fall, how would I do that?’

Annika met his gaze again, feeling shy and surprised by the warmth.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

She smiled back.

‘I’m the kind of girl who likes to find out things for herself,’ she said.

‘I bet you are,’ the man said, grinning. His teeth were white and a tiny bit crooked. ‘You could always contact the company. I doubt that they would tell you, but you never know.’