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at six o’clock.’
    He spun round on his chair, picked up the phone and dialled a number. Berit shut her notepad and went over to her desk.
    ‘I’ve got the cuttings,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘We can go through them together.’
    Annika took a chair from the next desk. Berit pulled out a bundle of yellowing files from an envelope marked ‘Eva murder’. Evidently it had happened before the paper’s files were computerized.
    ‘Anything more than ten years old only exists in hard copy,’ Berit said.
    Annika picked up one file. The paper felt stiff and brittle. She glanced through it. The typeface of the headline looked spiky and old-fashioned, and the print quality wasn’t good. A black-and-white picture of the north side of the park stretched across four columns.
    ‘I was right,’ Berit said. ‘She was on her way up that flight of steps, and halfway up she met someone on their way down. And that was as far as she got. The case was never solved.’
    They sat on either side of Berit’s desk, immersed in the old articles. Annika noted that Berit had written a lot of them. The murder of young Eva was very similar to the new case.
    One warm summer’s evening twelve years before, Eva had been on her way up the steep slope at the end of Inedalsgatan. She was found right next to the seventieth step, half naked and strangled.
    There were a lot of articles right after the event, at the top of their pages, with big pictures. There were reports from the murder inquiry and the coroner’s findings, interviews with neighbours and friends, one article entitled, L EAVE US ALONE . It was about Eva’s parents, pleading, their arms round each other as they stared at the camera. There were articles about senseless violence, violence against women, violence against young people, a memorial ceremony in Kungsholmen Church, and the mountain of flowers left at the scene.
    Why don’t I remember any of this? Annika wondered. I was old enough to have been aware of what was going on.
    As time passed, the number of articles dwindled. The pictures got smaller, and they slowly crept down the page. A short piece three and a half years after the murder announced that someone had been taken in for questioning, then released. After that there was nothing.
    But now Eva was back in the news again, twelve years later. The similarities were striking.
    ‘So what do we do with all this?’ Annika asked.
    ‘A short reference piece, that’s all,’ Berit said. ‘There’snot much more we can do right now. We’ll write up what we’ve got – you take your young mum and I’ll take Eva. By the time we’ve done that, the crime unit ought to be up to speed and we can start phoning round.’
    ‘So are we in a rush?’ Annika asked.
    ‘Not particularly.’ Berit smiled. ‘The final deadline for copy isn’t until four forty-five tomorrow morning. But it would be good it we were ready before that, and we’re off to a good start.’
    ‘What will they do with these two articles in the paper?’
    Berit shrugged. ‘They may not even get in, you can never tell. It depends what else is happening round the world and how much space there is.’
    Annika nodded. The number of pages in the paper often determined which articles got in. That was certainly the case on the
Katrineholm Courier
, where she usually worked. In the middle of summer, management often cut back on paper, partly because July was such a bad month for advertising, but also because very little ever happened then. The number of pages always rose or fell in fours, because there were four pages on each print-plate.
    ‘I reckon this will end up quite far back in the paper,’ Berit said. ‘First there’ll be the report of the murder, and what the police are doing. Then a spread of the girl and who she was, assuming we get a name in time. Then the reminder of the Eva murder, your scared mother, and maybe a final article about Stockholm, a city gripped by fear. That’s my guess,