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to give the contract to Carl Wennergren, the son of one of the members of the board, a good-looking and wealthy guy with considerable gaps in his morals. He had shown disregard both for the truth and for the protection of his sources. For reasons that were beyond Schyman, this was considered honourable, or at least not controversial, by the rest of the senior editors.
    The management of the newspaper Kvällspressen was composed exclusively of white, heterosexual middle-aged men with a car and a steady income, the kind that both society and the paper were built on and for. Anders Schyman suspected that Carl Wennergren reminded these men of themselves as young men or, rather, personified their illusions about their own youth.
    Eventually, he found Annika a contract – which she accepted – covering maternity leave as a sub-editor on Jansson’s night team. He’d had to twist several arms in the management before they’d agreed to it. Annika Bengtzon became the issue he’d had to push through to prove his drive. It ended in disaster.
    A few days after the appointment was made public, the girl went and killed her boyfriend. She had hit him with an iron pipe so that he’d fallen into a disused furnace at the Hälleforsnäs works. The very first rumours to reach the paper had mentioned self-defence, but Schyman could still recall the feeling when he heard about it, wishing the ground could swallow him up; and then the thought: Talk about backing the wrong horse! She’d phoned him in the evening, reticent, still in shock, confirming that the rumours were true. She had been questioned and was suspected of manslaughter, but she hadn’t been arrested. She would be staying in a cottage in the woods for a couple of weeks until the police investigation was complete. She wanted to know whether she still had a job at the paper.
    Schyman had told her the truth: the contract was hers even though there were people at the paper who complained – she wasn’t the flavour of the day with the union representatives. Manslaughter meant some form of accident. If she were to be convicted of causing an accident where someone lost their life, it was unfortunate, but it didn’t constitute grounds for dismissal. But she had to understand that if she were to be sentenced to prison, it would make it difficult for her to get an extension of the contract.
    When he’d got that far, Annika had begun to cry. He had fought the instinct to shout at her, to criticize her for being so monumentally clumsy and dragging him down with her.
    ‘I won’t be sent to prison,’ she had whispered into the phone. ‘It was him or me. He would have killed me if I hadn’t hit him. The prosecutor knows that.’
    She had begun her work on the night team as planned, paler and thinner than ever before. From time to time she’d talk to him, to Jansson, Berit, Picture Pelle and a few others, but mostly she kept to herself. According to Jansson, she did a hell of a job rewriting, adding copy, checking facts, writing captions and front-page leads, never making a great fuss. The rumours died out, sooner than Schyman would have expected. The newspaper dealt with murder and scandal every day; there were limits to how long people had the energy to gossip about a tragic and unfortunate death.
    The case of the death of the abusive hockey-player Sven Matsson from Hälleforsnäs wasn’t given high priority by the Eskilstuna County Court. Annika was charged with justifiable homicide or involuntary manslaughter. The sentence had been passed the week before Midsummer last year. Annika Bengtzon was acquitted of justifiable homicide but convicted of the lesser charge and given a probational sentence. A period of counselling had been part of the probation, but as far as he knew, the matter was by now settled in the eyes of the court.
    The deputy editor returned to his desk and clicked on the list of cable copy again. He quickly scrolled through the last additions. The Sunday sports