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alarmed.
    ‘Sorry,’ Annika said, feeling that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. Besides, her left wrist was aching badly.
    The man pulled himself together and let go of her. He stared at her for a few seconds.
    ‘You need to calm down. Seriously,’ he said as he got into his burgundy Volvo estate and drove off with a squeal of tyres.
    ‘Fuck,’ Annika said to herself. She blinked to get rid of the tears and squinted into the sunlight to make a note of the car’s police call number. She thought it said ‘1813’ on the side. Just to be sure, she memorized the number plate as well.
    Then she turned round, and saw that the whole group of reporters at the entrance was staring at her. She blushed bright red and bent over to gather together everything that had fallen out of her bag when she hit the detective: her A5 pad, a packet of chewing-gum, an almost empty bottle of Pepsi Max, and three sanitary pads in green plastic wrappers. Her pen was still in the bag. She pulled it out and quickly jotted down the car’s call number and registration in her pad.
    The journalists and photographers looked away and went back to chatting among themselves. Annika noted that Bertil Strand seemed to be organizing a trip to buy ice-creams.
    She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and slowlywalked over to her colleagues. They didn’t appear to pay her any attention at all. Apart from the reporter from the other evening paper – a middle-aged man whose picture always appeared next to his articles – she didn’t recognize any of them. There was a young woman holding recording equipment with the Radio Stockholm logo on it, two photographers from different picture agencies, the other paper’s photographer, and three reporters she couldn’t place. No television crew yet, there were only five minutes of local news on the main channel in the summer, and local news on the commercial channels was little more than someone just reading reports from the news agencies. Presumably the morning papers would run pictures from the agencies and base their articles on agency reports. There was no sign of the main radio news team, but she hadn’t really expected to see them there. One of her former colleagues at the
Katrineholm Courier
, who had spent a summer working with radio news, had once explained the way they worked.
    ‘We don’t cover murders and that sort of thing. We leave that to the tabloids. We’re not ambulance chasers.’
    Annika had realized that that statement said more about her colleague than it did about radio news, but sometimes she had to wonder. Why didn’t they regard a young woman’s life being snuffed out as a matter of public interest? She couldn’t understand that.
    The other people gathered behind the cordon were curious members of the public.
    She walked slowly away from the group. The police, both detectives and the forensics team, were busy inside the railings. There was no sign of an ambulance or hearse. She looked at her watch. Seventeen minutes past one. Twenty-five minutes since she got the tip-off fromCold Calls. She wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no point trying to talk to the police, they’d probably only get annoyed. She also guessed that they wouldn’t know anything yet – not the identity of the woman, or how she had died, or who might have done it.
    She headed towards the Drottningholm road. A small slice of shade had formed by the buildings on the western side of Kronobergsgatan, and she went over and leaned against one of the walls. It was rough, grey and hot. The temperature was only a degree or so cooler than out in the full sun, and the air was burning her throat. She was horribly thirsty, and fished the bottle of Pepsi from her bag. The cap had leaked, making the outside of the bottle sticky, and her fingers stuck to the label. Oh, this fucking heat!
    She drank the warm, flat liquid and hid the bottle between two bundles of newspapers waiting to be picked up for recycling in the