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In Vaxholm, he and Eleonor had been important members of the community, involved in the church and various societies. She was a bank manager and he had been employed by the local authorities as a chief financial officer.
    ‘All for a piece of tail,’ he told the wind.
    Then the pendulum of guilt swung back again, striking him with the same shattering force.
    Oh, Kalle , he thought. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.
    Turning his back on the sea, Thomas studied the children asleep in the shelter. They were fantastic, and they were his. His!
    Eleonor didn’t want to have children. He hadn’t really given it much thought until Annika had turned up on their doorstep that night right before Christmas, pregnant and weeping. How long ago was it? Three and a half years ago? Not longer than that?
    It felt like much longer. After that scene, he had only been back to the house once, accompanied by the movers. Eleonor had kept the house and he had put his share of the settlement into the stock market, into the Tech sector that his broker had so warmly recommended.
    ‘Don’t buy junk like that,’ Annika had said. ‘What’s the point of broadband connections when they can’t even make computers that work, for God’s sake?’
    Then she’d dropped her laptop on the floor and stomped on it.
    ‘Now that’s mature,’ he had told her. ‘Your analysis of the stock market is truly confidence-inspiring.’
    Of course, in the end she was right. A month later, the market took a nosedive, and his stocks took the worst beating of them all.
    Thomas moved out of the wind and noticed that he was cold and wet.
    And they hadn’t even passed Gåshaga yet.
    ‘Why isn’t the elevator working?’ Anders Schyman wheezed as he reached the fourth floor of the paper’s high-rise office building.
    Tore Brand regarded him with a sulky expression.
    ‘It’s the damp weather,’ he said. ‘The repairman will be here on Monday.’
    The managing editor tried to catch his breath, deciding that he wouldn’t broach the subject again until some other member of the maintenance staff was on duty.
    All on his lonesome, Spike was parked at his desk: feet up and the phone practically glued to his ear. He jerked in surprise when Schyman put 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