Vanished Read Free Page B

of ethics, driven by a undeniable belief in justice. She was fast, and she wrote well. Andshe showed definite signs of being a bulldozer, which was a great advantage for a tabloid reporter. If she couldn’t get round a problem she just rode over it.
    The board of the
Evening Post
consisted of nothing but white, heterosexual, middle-aged men with nice cars and a good income, the sort of men that the paper was built of and produced for. Anders Schyman suspected that Carl Wennergren reminded these men of themselves when they were younger, or rather he personified the illusion of their own youth.
    Eventually he had found a post as copy-editor to cover maternity leave on Jansson’s nightshift, which Annika had accepted. He had had to argue with the board before they would accept even this decision. Annika Bengtzon became the defining moment for him to exert his control over the paper. And it had come to a catastrophic end: a few days after her appointment the girl had killed her boyfriend.
    She’d hit him with an iron pipe, toppling him into a disused blast furnace in the old steelworks in Hälleforsnäs. Right from the start there was talk of self-defence, but Anders Schyman could still remember how he felt when he first heard, wanting the ground to swallow him up. Then the thought:
Talk about backing the wrong horse
. That evening she had called him at home, quiet, and in shock, to tell him that the rumours were true. She had been questioned and was under suspicion of manslaughter, but hadn’t been formally charged. She would be staying at a cottage in the forest for a few weeks until the police investigation was finished. She was wondering whether she still had a job at the
Evening Post
.
    He had told her how it was: the job was hers even if other people on the paper might regret the decision, and she wasn’t exactly a favourite with the union.Manslaughter suggested some form of accident. If she was found guilty of causing an accident in which someone lost their life, well, that would be regrettable, but still not grounds for dismissal. If she received a lengthy prison sentence then obviously there would be difficulties extending her appointment beyond maternity cover, she had to recognize that.
    When he got to this point she had started to cry. He had struggled against the impulse to yell at her about how monumentally careless she’d been, and for dragging him into the shit.
    ‘I won’t go to prison,’ she had whispered down the line. ‘It was him or me. He would have killed me if I hadn’t hit him. The prosecutor knows that.’
    She had started work with the nightshift as planned, paler and thinner than ever. She spoke to him occasionally, and to Jansson, Berit, Picture Pelle and a few others, but otherwise she kept to herself. According to Jansson she was doing a brilliant job at night, rewriting, adding text, checking facts, coming up with captions and writing front-page text, without ever making a fuss. The rumours died away, quicker than he had expected. The paper dealt with scandal and murder every day, and there were limits to the amount anyone could manage to gossip about a tragic and accidental death.
    The case of the deceased and abusive hockey player Sven Matsson from Hälleforsnäs wasn’t a great priority for the district court in Eskilstuna. The prosecution were calling for either manslaughter or causing another person’s death. The judgment came shortly before midsummer last year: Annika Bengtzon was found not guilty of manslaughter, but was found guilty of the lesser charge, and sentenced to a supervision order. For a while she was obliged to attend some sort of therapy as part of the sentence, but as far as he wasaware the whole thing had been legally concluded for a while now.
    The head-editor went back to his desk and opened the news agency website again, checking whether anything had appeared since he last looked. Sunday’s sports results were starting to come in, there was the aftermath of the