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while she was alive?’
    Schyman regarded his news editor in silence for ten seconds.
    ‘Who’s doing what?’ he finally asked.
    In a somewhat agitated manner, Spike leafed through stacks of paper, his upper lip beaded with perspiration.
    ‘Like I said, Annika Bengtzon and Bertil are on their way to Flen, and Berit Hamrin is on her way from Öland. She was supposed to write a piece about kids boozing it up and causing Midsummer mayhem. We booked a photographer for the assignment and I’ve spent the better part of an hour on the phone with the guy. He’s pissed off now that the assignment’s been canned.’
    ‘It goes without saying that we’ll pay him anyway,’ Anders Schyman replied and extracted a newspaper from the mess on Spike’s desk.
    ‘All right, but the guy wasn’t doing it for the money, he was after a byline in the paper. I told him to shoot something anyway and send it over to us with details about the names and ages of the people in the photos.’
    ‘I’d like to see those pictures before we use them,’ the managing editor said. ‘We’ve had our fill of faked shots of trashing teens.’
    Spike went pink. Last year he had sent two reporters who weren’t on the regular staff to Öland, and they’d brought in some fabulous material. The only drawback was that the reporter and the photographer had been hitting the bottle as hard as anyone else, and they had forgotten to tell their new-found friends that they would be immortalized barfing, crying and defecating in the pages of Kvällspressen. The result of this episode had been that the Swedish Press Council found the paper guilty of unethical behaviour in five instances, and therefore liable for damages of more than SEK 150,000 to keep things out of court. Kvällspressen would have won in court, but the whole business was so sordid that it was better to buy out the Council and preserve whatever was left of the paper’s good name.
    ‘That’s why we sent Berit this year,’ Spike replied curtly and clicked on his computer screen. ‘I only said that crap about the photos to get that freelancer off my back.’
    ‘Just make sure that he doesn’t clog up the modem with five hundred useless pictures five minutes before deadline,’ Schyman countered drily and got up. ‘I want to talk to Bengtzon when she calls.’
    ‘ If she calls,’ Spike said. But by then Anders Schyman had already left the room.
    The holiday motorcade inched its way along Route 55. Rain was coming down in buckets and the car’s windshield wipers creaked. The slow monotonous pace charged the atmosphere in the Saab with tension, and the silence was oppressive. Annika tried to get comfortable, but the seat belt chafed and the seat itself was designed to support the small of a taller person’s back. She realized that her discomfort had nothing to do with the seat, really; her feelings of insecurity were the culprit. Her maternity leave was over and she had only worked a few weeks so far, but she could tell that the others were already questioning her presence on the crime-desk team.
    During her pregnancy, Annika had been posted to other departments – Women’s Issues and stupid trivia assignments. Despite feeling demoted and dismissed, she hadn’t raised a fuss. Naturally, she was fully aware of management’s attitude towards young women who got pregnant soon after being made a permanent staff member. She knew that in their eyes she had let them down, that she was seen as deadbeat, as using the system to get paid maternity leave and leave the paper in the lurch. Adding insult to injury, a very pregnant crime reporter was something to joke about. One, it was presumed that she went brain-dead as soon as one of her eggs had been fertilized, and two, she had to be punished for letting everyone down. She could still remember the bitter tears that she’d shed and how Thomas, unable to really understand, made clumsy attempts to comfort her.
    ‘You’ll feel better soon, you’ll