Vanished by Liza Marklund Page A

seat of the chair, the shower curtain, close to bursting from the pressure inside him.
    He sat on the edge of the bath, resting his forehead against the cold blade of the knife.
    She had been there, his source was reliable. So where the hell had she gone now? They’d be telling stories about him soon, the man who couldn’t get hold of the bitch. He should have forced his way in when he was here before, but he’d been unlucky, those bloody guests in the corridor, and that Swedish cow.
    He sat up straight.
    The Swedish woman, who the hell was she? He had never seen her before. She spoke without an accent, and she must have known Aida. Where from? And what was she doing here? How was she involved?
    Suddenly his mobile phone rang in his inside pocket. He flung his jacket open and pulled out the phone, his fingers stroking his gun in passing.
    ‘Molim?’
    Good news. Finally, some good news.
    He left the room and slid away from the hotel, not seen by anyone.
    Annika Bengtzon walked in without knocking, and slumped onto the old sofa without even noticing the smell.
    ‘I’ve had a tip-off that I want to run past you as soon as possible. Would now be okay?’
    She looked tired, almost ill.
    ‘It doesn’t look like I have much choice,’ Anders Schyman said irritably.
    She took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit wound up. I’ve just got back from a really nasty …’
    She shrugged off her coat.
    ‘Last night I went to see a woman called Rebecka. She runs a new organization, something called the Paradise Foundation. They help people who’ve been threatened to get a new life, mainly women and children. It sounded very exciting.’
    ‘How do they help?’
    ‘They erase them from every official register. She didn’t want to tell me exactly how they do it before I’d got the green light for publication.’
    Schyman was watching her. She was nervous.
    ‘We can’t give a guarantee like that until we know what the story’s about, you know that,’ he said. ‘Any organization of that sort would have to be checked incredibly carefully before we ran a story about it. This Rebecka could be anyone, a fraudster, a blackmailer, a murderer, anything.’
    She gave him a long look.
    ‘Do you think I should find out? I mean, do you think I …?’ She fell silent. He realized what she was after.
    ‘Meet her again and say that we’re interested. But I don’t want this to take time and effort away from your work here on the nightshift.’
    She got up from the sofa and sat down in one of the chairs by his desk.
    ‘You’ve got to get rid of that terrible sofa,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get someone to take it away?’
    She put her notebook down on the desk. He hesitated for a moment, then decided to be honest with her.
    ‘I know what you want. You want me to let you off the nightshift and let you be a reporter again.’
    He leaned back, and finished the thought.
    ‘And that isn’t possible right now.’
    ‘Why not?’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve been working nights for one year and three hundred and sixty-three days. I’ve been on a permanent contract since the court case. I’ve done my bit. I want to write. For real.’
    He suddenly felt incredibly tired.
I want to. I’m going to. Why can’t I?
Spoiled children, more than two hundred of them, all wanting to get their own way, all of them thinking that their articles or duties or pay-grade was the most important thing in the world. He couldn’t re-allocate her now, not ahead of the looming reorganization.
    ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘Now is not the time.’
    She looked at him carefully for several seconds, then nodded.
    ‘I get it,’ she said, and got up to leave, her coat and bag clasped to her chest in an untidy bundle.
    Anders Schyman sighed as she closed the door.
    The freshly polished floor shimmered, and the computer screens made the gloom vibrate. Ice-blue faces focusing all of their attention on the virtual world in