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that. He only did it to humiliate her. He didn’t like the fact that she came between him and Josefin.
    Patricia went slowly back to Josefin’s bedroom and peered in. The bed looked exactly as it had the previous evening, the duvet on the floor to the left of the bed, and Josefin’s red bathing suit on the pillow.
    Josie hadn’t come home last night.
    The realization made her very uneasy.

5
    The air of the newspaper’s lobby hit the staff like a cold, wet flannel. The moisture in the air was making the marble floor shine, as well as the bronze bust of the paper’s founder. Annika shivered as her teeth began to chatter. Behind the glass of the receptionist’s booth, Tore Brand, one of the caretakers, was in a bad mood.
    ‘It’s all right for you,’ he called as the little group went towards the lifts. ‘You can go outside and thaw every now and then. It’s so cold in here that I’ve had to bring in one of the car-heaters to stop my feet freezing.’
    Annika tried to smile, but couldn’t summon up the energy. Unlike most people, Tore Brand was having to wait until August for his holiday this year, and he seemed to regard this as a personal insult.
    ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ Annika said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
    As she went past Tore Brand’s little booth she could tell he had been smoking on duty again. After a moment’s hesitation, she went into the disabled toilet rather than the ladies’. She wanted to be alone, not to have to jostle with other sweaty women at the hand-basins.
    Tore Brand’s complaints followed her into the toilet. She locked the door and looked at her reflection in themirror. She really did look terrible. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red. She turned the mixer tap to cold, bent over, pulled up her hair and let the cold water run over her neck. The porcelain was ice-cold against her forehead. A trickle of water ran down her spine.
    Why on earth am I doing this? she thought. Why aren’t I lying in the sun by a lake up in Norrbotten reading a trashy magazine?
    She pressed the red button on the dryer and held the neck of her top open, trying to dry her armpits. It didn’t really work.
    Anne Snapphane’s chair was empty when Annika got back to the newsroom. There were two dirty mugs on her desk, but the Coca-Cola had gone. Annika assumed that Anne had been sent out on a job.
    Berit was talking to Spike over by the newsdesk. Annika sank onto her chair and let her bag fall to the floor. She felt dizzy and exhausted.
    ‘Well, how was it?’ Spike called, looking at her expectantly.
    Annika struggled to pull out her notepad and went over to him.
    ‘Young, naked, plastic tits,’ she said. ‘A lot of make-up. She’d been crying. No signs of decomposition, so she couldn’t have been there long. No clothes nearby, as far as I could tell.’
    She looked up from her pad. Spike was nodding encouragingly.
    ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Any terrified neighbours?’
    ‘One twenty-nine-year-old mum called Daniella. She’s never walking through the park at night again. She said: “It could have been me”.’
    Spike was making notes, nodding approvingly.
    ‘Do they know who she is?’
    Annika pressed her lips together and shook her head. ‘Not as far as we know.’
    ‘We’ll just have to hope they release her name sometime this evening. You didn’t see anything else – anything that might give an idea of where she lived, anything like that?’
    ‘What, like the address tattooed on her forehead, you mean? Sorry …’
    Annika smiled, but Spike didn’t respond.
    ‘Okay. Berit, you take the police hunt for the killer, who the girl was, and check out the relatives. Annika, you do the scared mum and check the cuttings about the old murder.’
    ‘I think we’ll have to do a lot of this together,’ Berit said. ‘Annika has information from the scene that I haven’t got.’
    ‘Do what you want. I need you to brief me on how far you’ve got before I go to the handover meeting