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grimaced.
    ‘I didn’t say he’d been arrested, he’s only been detained for questioning. Anyhow, he’s in good company. Barbara’s here too.’
    ‘Hanson? Damn it, Schyman ordered her to quit writing any more crap about Michelle Carlsson.’
    Annika felt slightly stupid; she didn’t know what Spike was referring to. To be honest, she hadn’t really kept up to date during her maternity leave, particularly when it came to Barbara Hanson’s nasty gossip columns. She changed the subject.
    ‘A total of twelve people have been detained for questioning.’
    ‘Who are they?’
    The news editor had apparently finished his meal. He burped and lit a cigarette.
    ‘Mostly people from the TV team, I suppose, but I’ll find out.’
    ‘We want their names and pictures,’ Spike said, and began composing headlines. ‘“Survivors of the castle bloodbath. One of them is a murderer – and then they were twelve . . .” Great stuff!’
    ‘Pure poetry,’ Annika remarked and hung up.
    ‘What do we do now?’ Bertil Strand asked.
    ‘Head for the parking lot,’ Annika replied.
    They crawled under the police tape at the end of the bridge and joined the rest of the media representatives.
    ‘How did you get in?’ one of their competitor’s reporters asked, a tall blond man in a wet leather jacket.
    ‘We hid in the grounds last night,’ Annika said and started to head for the Stables.
    She relaxed. Her body was starting to return to normal. The cramps in her arms had gone away and the knot in her stomach had relaxed. The water that had trickled down the back of her neck had been warmed up by her skin and she walked around a bit to limber up her stiff joints.
    A policeman in uniform came out from the Stables and fiddled with the lock. He hurried off in the direction of the castle without acknowledging the presence of the journalists. Annika followed his progress and felt some more rain trickle down the back of her neck. The ground was spongy and waterlogged, creating puddles at her feet. She stared at the surface: brown, spotty gravel and debris. It smelled musty and sour.
    Sweden , she thought. What a lousy country it is.
    Shocked at her thought, she focused on the positive aspects.
    Our ice-hockey team is good, at least when Peter Forsberg is on it, and the social welfare system is good, and the countryside. The countryside. Annika tried to make it out behind the pouring rain. All she could see were various smudgy shades of brown and grey. There were no mitigating circumstances on a day like this. She wiped her nose, forcing the sour smell to recede.
    Several people had made it to the scene before it had been sealed off. In addition to the competition she noticed there were representatives from the national broadcasting service; the local radio station, Radio Sörmland; the regional news show Öst-Nytt and her old paper, Katrineholms-Kuriren. Their cars were all more or less sloppily parked up by the Garden Wing. She pulled out a pad and a pen and looked over the cars in the lot.
    A golden Range Rover, the largest and most expensive SUV on the market. Annika jotted down the licence-plate number. She continued: a VW Polo, red, with a black soft top; a rusty Fiat Uno; a black sports car that looked pretty ritzy until she realized that it was a Chrysler; a green Volvo S40; a bronze-coloured Renault Clio with a ‘Jesus Lives’ sticker on the rear window; a blue BMW and a brown Saab 900 that had seen a good decade or two.
    Her cellphone was working – well, thank you, Mr Stenbeck – and she got hold of a guy at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Stockholm within a minute or two.
    ‘Could you run a few licence-plate numbers for me?’
    The giant SUV belonged to TV Plus; the German convertible was listed as belonging to Barbro Rosenberg, a resident of Solna; the Fiat belonged to a Hannah Persson, Katrineholm; the sporty Chrysler belonged to Build&Create in Jönköping; the Volvo was the property of a Karin Andersson,