Borderline Read Free Page A

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