Without a Trace by Liza Marklund Page A

couldn’t have reporters looking like that when they were representing the newspaper in the city. She was wearing some sort of jacket, jeans and a creased top, and she obviously hadn’t washed her hair that morning.
    Annika pulled open the sliding door and poked her head into the room. ‘What?’
    ‘Come in and close the door behind you.’
    She stepped into his cubicle, shut the door and faced him. Now he came to think about it, there wasn’t much wrong with her clothes. They just looked a bit odd on her, as if she hadn’t put them on properly that morning. And the jeans were definitely too big for her.
    ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, trying to look relaxed.
    ‘The police have put out an alert for Nora Lerberg now,’ Annika said. ‘It’s a really weird case. I’m heading out there again in a while.’
    ‘I know Ingemar Lerberg pretty well. Or knew him, at least. We don’t have much contact any more. He’s a nice man.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Well, his political ideas might be a bit radical—’
    ‘That people with a BMI of over thirty should no longer be treated by the national health service, you mean? Or that libraries should stock only “authorized” books?’
    He stood up irritably. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked, twisting his computer so she could read it.
    She came over to his desk. ‘The Light of Truth. What is it?’
    ‘A blog,’ Schyman said, and pointed at his chair. ‘Sit down.’
    She did so, pulled herself close to the desk and read.
    ‘This is the second post,’ Schyman said. ‘He wrote one yesterday as well.’
    ‘So I see,’ she said.
    ‘He’s claiming that Viola Söderland is dead,’ Schyman said. ‘His sources are two of Viola’s former business partners. They were convicted of false accounting and defrauding creditors when Golden Spire went bankrupt, Linette Pettersson and Sven-Olof Witterfeldt, two really reliable witnesses … He claims I tricked my way to those two journalism awards, that I produced the documentary about Viola Söderland as a freelance commission for the insurance company so they wouldn’t have to pay out on her life insurance policy to the children. He writes that—’
    ‘Yes, I can see,’ she interrupted.
    ‘All the evidence suggested she was alive,’ he said. ‘Alive at the time, anyway. When I made the documentary. Perhaps she’s dead now, I don’t know …’ He reached for a printout of that day’s blog-post. There was a photograph taken from the hill on Vikingavägen, not of his house but only a few hundred metres away.
    ‘This is what Bosse was talking about,’ she said.
    He narrowed his eyes. ‘Who?’
    ‘On the other paper. Covers crime. He mentioned it yesterday, out at the crime scene in Solsidan.’
    Schyman felt anger rising: that was precisely the sort of thing he needed to know. He had to put a stop to it, and find out how far it was spreading. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
    She brushed a strand of hair off her forehead. ‘Like what? That someone said something nasty about you?’ She turned her attention to the text again. ‘There must be something wrong with whoever wrote this. “Without culture, morals, or any other lasting values, he infects our planet, using up air and space …” So your resignation isn’t enough for him. He thinks you ought to die?’
    His mouth dried. ‘I presume so.’
    ‘Why do you think it’s a man? The worst idiots can actually be women. Like Anne Snapphane, to take just one striking example.’
    She sounded very matter-of-fact, as if the blunt attacks on her in the media by her former best friend had had no effect on her at all. Schyman was fairly certain that they had.
    ‘What does he want?’ Annika asked, looking up at him. ‘What’s the point, assuming that there is one? Do you know? Or is this just another case of plain old envy?’
    He sank down on the visitor’s chair. ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand what’s so controversial about what I did. I made a