Borderline Read Free

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