Which direction is her head pointing? Annika found herself wondering. They wouldn't roll her away feet first.
The photographers accompanied the gurney alongside the cordon. All the camera motors were rattling out of time; the odd flash went off. Bertil Strand was jumping up and down behind his colleagues, alternately snapping away above their heads and in between them. Annika held on to the back door of the ambulance; the paintwork burned her fingers. The driver stopped five inches away from her, operating the various mechanisms of the car. Annika noticed that he was perspiring. She looked down at the plastic-covered body.
I wonder if the sun has kept her warm, she thought.
I wonder who she was.
I wonder if she knew she was going to die.
I wonder if she had time to be scared.
All at once, tears were rolling down Annika's face. She let go of the door, turned around, and took a few steps away. The ground was moving, she felt as if she was going to throw up.
"It's the smell. And the heat," Berit said, suddenly at her side. She put her arm around Annika's shoulders and pulled her away from the ambulance.
Annika wiped away the tears.
"Let's go back to the paper," Berit said.
Patricia woke up with a strange feeling of suffocation. There was no air in the room, she couldn't breathe. She slowly became aware of her body on the mattress, naked and glistening. She lifted her left arm and the sweat trickled down her ribs and into her navel.
Jesus Christ, she thought, I've got to have air! Water!
For a moment she contemplated calling out to Josefin, but something made her change her mind. The apartment was completely quiet, so either Jossie was asleep or she'd gone out. Patricia groaned and rolled over, wondering what time it could be. Josefin's black curtains shut out the daylight and made the room swim in a musty gloom. There was a smell of sweat and dust.
"It's a bad omen," Patricia had said when Josefin had come home with the thick, black material. "You can't have black curtains. The windows will be wearing mourning- you'd stop the flow of positive energy."
Josefin was annoyed. "Then don't have them!" she'd exclaimed. "Nobody's forcing you. But I want my room dark. How the heck are we going to be able to work nights if we don't get to sleep during the day? I bet you didn't think of that!"
Jossie got her way, of course. She usually did.
Patricia sat up on the mattress with a sigh. The sheet underneath her was screwed up in a damp knot in the middle of the bed. Angrily, she tried to straighten it out.
It's Jossie's turn to do the shopping, she thought, so I don't suppose there's anything in the fridge.
She got out of bed and went to the bathroom. She borrowed Josefin's bathrobe and returned to her own room to open the curtains. The light hit her like nails in the eyes and she quickly closed them again. Instead she opened one of the windows wide, wedging in a flowerpot so it wouldn't slam shut. The air outside was even hotter than inside, but at least it didn't smell.
She slowly walked out to the kitchen, filled a big beer glass with tap water, and drank it greedily. The kitchen clock showed five to two. Patricia was pleased with herself. She hadn't slept through the whole day, even though she'd worked until five this morning.
She placed the glass on the kitchen counter, between an empty pizza box and three mugs with dried-out tea bags in them. Jossie was terrible at cleaning. Patricia sighed and cleared things away, throwing out the trash, doing the dishes, and wiping counters without thinking.
She was just about to step in the shower when the phone rang.
"Is Jossie there?"
It was Joachim. Patricia straightened up and made an effort to seem alert.
"I just got up, so I don't know, actually. Maybe she's sleeping."
"Be a darling and wake her up, will you?" Succinct but friendly.
"En seguida, Joachim. Hang on a moment…"
She tiptoed to the end of the hallway to Josefin's room and knocked softly on the doorpost. There was no reply, so she opened the door slightly and peeked in. The bed was exactly as unmade as it had been the day before when Patricia had left for work. She hurried back to the phone.
"No, I'm sorry, I think she's gone out."
"Where to? Who is she seeing?"
Patricia gave a nervous laughter. "Nobody- or you, maybe? I don't know. It's her turn to do the shopping…"
"But she slept at home?"
Patricia tried to sound indignant. "Of course she did! Where else?"
"That's exactly it, Titsie. Do you have any suggestions?"
He hung up just as the anger started to surface in Patricia's mind. She hated it when he called her that. He did it to humiliate her. He didn't like her. He felt she stood between him and Josefin.
Patricia slowly walked back to Josefin's bedroom and took another peek inside. The bed really did look exactly as it had the night before, the cover on the floor to the left of the bed and Josefin's red swimsuit on the pillow.
Jossie had never come home last night.
The realization made Patricia feel ill at ease.
The air in the main entrance of the newspaper hit them like a cold, wet towel. The damp glistened on the marble floor and made the bronze bust of the newspaper shine. Annika shuddered and felt her teeth give a rattle.
Tore Brand, the porter, sat sulking in the glassed-in reception booth in the far left-hand corner. "You're all right!" he shouted as the small group passed him on their way to the elevators. "You can go outside and defrost now and then. This place is so damn cold that I've had to bring the car heater in so I don't get frostbite!"
Annika tried to smile but didn't quite manage. Tore Brand hadn't been allowed to take this year's holiday until August, something he considered to be little less than harassment.
"I'm going to the bathroom," Annika said to the others. "You go on upstairs."
She rounded Tore Brand's little cubicle and could smell that he'd smoked a cigarette on the sly again. After a moment's hesitation she chose the disabled washroom before the ladies'. She didn't want to be jostling in front of the sinks with a bunch of sweaty women.
Tore Brand's plaintive voice followed her into the washroom. She locked the door by turning the door handle upward and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked awful. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red. She opened the cold-water tap and, holding up her hair, bent forward and let the cold water run over her neck. The enamel of the sink was icy cold against her forehead. A rivulet of water trickled down her spine.
Why do I do this to myself? she thought. Why am I not lying on the grass by Pine Lake, reading Vogue?
She pushed the red button on the hand dryer, held out the neckband, and tried to dry her armpits. Without much success.
Anne Snapphane's desk was empty when Annika got back to the newsroom. Two mugs with dried-up coffee were on the desk, but the Coke was gone. Annika figured Anne had been sent out on a job.
Berit was talking to Spike over by the news desk. Annika flopped onto her chair and let the bag fall to the floor. She felt dizzy.
"So, how was it?" Spike called out.
Annika hastily dug out her pad and walked over to the desk.
"Young, naked, plastic tits," she said. "Lots of makeup. She'd been crying. No decomposition, so she can't have been there for very long. As far as I could see, her clothes weren't anywhere nearby." She looked up from her pad.
Spike gave her a nod of approval. "Well, I'll be damned… Any terrified neighbors?"
"A twenty-nine-year-old mother, Daniella, with a small child. She'll never cross the park at night again. 'It could have been me,' she said."
Spike took notes, nodding appreciatively. "Do they know who she is?"
Annika pressed her lips together and shook her head. "Not that we know."