Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [10]
Not true, she thought to herself, it depends on the quality of the material. She suppressed the thought and looked down at her lap.
‘I started out on the Katrineholm Post,’ she said, ‘so I know exactly what it’s like.’
The man stared at her, eyes wide open. ‘Then you must know Macke?’
‘On sport? Of course I do. He’s an institution.’
An out-of-control alcoholic even when I was there, Annika thought, smiling at Pekkari.
‘What did you have for Ekland?’ the man said, slurping his coffee.
‘A few historical summaries,’ she replied quickly. ‘Mostly archive material from the seventies, pictures and text.’
‘Must all be online,’ Pekkari said.
‘Not this.’
‘So you weren’t trying to get his story?’
The man’s eyes stared fixedly at her over the edge of the mug, and she calmly met his gaze.
‘I have many good qualities,’ she said, ‘but mind-reading isn’t one of them. Benny called me. How else would I know what he was up to?’
The editor took another lump of sugar, sucking on it thoughtfully as he drank his coffee.
‘You’re right,’ he said, once he had swallowed with an audible gulp. ‘What do you need?’
‘Help to get access to Benny’s articles on terrorism.’
‘Go down to the archive and talk to Hans.’
Every newspaper archive in the whole of Sweden looks like this, she thought, and Hans Blomberg looks like archivists have always looked. A dusty little man in a grey cardigan, glasses and a comb-over. Even his noticeboard contained the anticipated prerequisites: a child’s drawing of a yellow dinosaur, a noisy ‘Why aren’t I RICH instead of BEAUTIFUL?’ sign, and a calendar counting down to an unspecified goal with the words ‘NEARLY THERE!’
‘Benny was a stubborn bastard,’ the archivist said, sitting down heavily behind his computer. ‘Worse than a mule, never gave up. Wrote more than anyone else I’ve come across, sometimes at the expense of quality. You know the type?’
He looked at Annika over the rim of his glasses, and she couldn’t help smiling.
‘Not to speak ill of the dead,’ the man went on, conducting a slow waltz on the keyboard with his index finger, ‘but we might as well be honest.’
He batted his eyelashes at her.
‘His death seems to have affected people here badly,’ Annika said tentatively.
Hans Blomberg sighed. ‘He was the star reporter, the darling of the management team, the union’s hate-figure, you know? The boy who dances into the newsroom after one job and cries, “Get me a picture byline, because tonight I’m immortal!”’
Annika burst out laughing. She had actually seen someone do precisely that. She thought it might have been Carl Wennergren, one of the former newsroom morons.
‘Well then, young lady, what exactly are you looking for?’
‘Benny’s series about terrorism, especially the article on F21 that was published the other day.’
The archivist looked up, his eyes twinkling. ‘Aha. So a nice young girl like you is interested in dangerous things?’
‘Dear Uncle Blomberg,’ Annika said, ‘I’m married and I’ve got two children.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Feminists . . . Printouts or cuttings?’
‘Copies, preferably, if it isn’t too much bother,’ Annika said.
The man groaned and got up again.
‘This business with computers,’ he said, ‘everything was going to get so much easier, but it hasn’t. Twice the work, that’s what computers have meant.’
He disappeared in amongst the cabinets, muttering ‘T . . . T . . . terrorism . . .’, opening drawers and huffing and puffing.
‘Here you are,’ he said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. ‘Terrorism à la Ekland. You can sit over there. I’m here till six o’clock.’
Annika took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. On screen all the headings were the same size, all articles the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisy or subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were hoping to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number