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his hand on his shoulder.
    ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said, slamming down the receiver.
    ‘Where’s Torstensson?’ Schyman asked.
    ‘With his family in the province of Dalarna, playing the fiddle. Ever see him gussied up for traditional folk music?’
    Spike grinned. The boys in the newsroom had absolutely no respect for their editor-in-chief. Schyman knew it was of secondary importance. As long as the boys could push Torstensson around, make him do their bidding, the man would stay on the job.
    Schyman sat down facing the news-desk editor and leaned back. He knew that the boys respected his know-how and experience, but that was of little consequence as long as he didn’t have the executive power.
    Suddenly Annika Bengtzon’s name for the newsroom editors popped into his head. ‘The Flannel Pack’, she called them, due to their virtually interchangeable dark-blue flannel jackets. He grinned.
    Then he cleared his throat.
    ‘So what do we do about poor Miss Carlsson?’
    ‘Annika Bengtzon was supposed to call me around noon, but she hasn’t.’
    Schyman raised his hands in a gesture of impatience.
    ‘Who’s she riding with?’
    ‘Bertil. They left not long after ten.’
    ‘Then I bet they’ve hardly passed the city limits. The traffic is unbelievable.’
    ‘Damn right,’ Spike exclaimed. He lived in Solna and drove his company car four kilometres to work every day. ‘Now that would be something to start a crusade about.’
    Schyman stifled a sigh.
    ‘You’re aware that Michelle Carlsson had filed two court cases against us for defamation of character, aren’t you?’
    ‘So what?’ Spike countered. ‘Are we supposed to hold back at a time like this because some broad was a legal disaster 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,’