Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [79]
The layout and print quality of newspapers in the sixties was terrible, scratchy fonts and badly reproduced pictures. She was glad she hadn’t been working then.
But every age has its own ideals, she thought as she headed towards her glass room. You live in an age just as much as you do in a place, and the sixties wouldn’t have suited her.
Did the twenty-first century, though?
She heard the phone start to ring and lengthened her strides.
‘I heard you were trying to get hold of me,’ said Hans Blomberg, the archivist of the Norrland News.
‘Oh, I’m glad you called,’ Annika said, pulling the door shut behind her. ‘How are you?’
A brief moment of surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’
She sat down on her chair, surprised in turn that he sounded so nonplussed.
‘The receptionist said you were ill, I was worried.’
‘Ah, yes, the tenderness of women,’ Hans Blomberg said, sounding as Annika remembered him, and she had to smile, picturing him sitting there in his cardigan next to his battered desk with the noticeboard above it, the child’s drawing, the sign telling him to hold out until retirement.
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Annika stretched back in her chair.
‘No, no,’ the archivist said, ‘just the usual. I’m past my sell-by date, but I’m probably okay in the fridge for a few more days before they throw me out.’
Her smile faded as he spoke. The tone was cheerful but his frustration was obvious.
‘Ha,’ Annika said brightly, choosing to ignore the bitterness. ‘To me you’re like a vintage wine.’
‘Oh, it takes a Stockholm girl to appreciate a real man. What can I help you with, young lady?’
‘A general question of an even older vintage,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to find information about a young man from Sattajärvi who lived in Luleå at the end of the sixties, probably worked for the Church. His name’s Göran Nilsson.’
‘Is he dead?’ Hans Blomberg said, his pen scratching in the background.
‘I don’t think so,’ Annika said.
‘So we’ll leave the dear departed alone, then. What do you want to know?’
‘Anything. If he won a jitterbug competition, demonstrated against imperialism, robbed a bank, got married.’
‘Göran Nilsson? You couldn’t have picked a more common name, then?’
‘I’ve looked everywhere but haven’t come up with a thing,’ Annika said.
The archivist groaned loudly. Annika could see him gripping the desk and heaving himself out of his chair.
‘This might take a few minutes,’ he said, and that was the understatement of the day.
Annika had time to look through a few websites, read about all the detached houses for sale in the Stockholm region, and fall in love with a beautiful, newly built house on Vinterviksvägen in Djursholm for a measly 6.9 million. She went to get some coffee and spoke to Berit, then tried to ring Thomas’s mobile and left a message for Anne Snapphane before there was a noise on the line again.
‘Well, I’ve looked for easier things,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘Have you any idea how many Göran Nilssons there are in the archive?’
‘Seventy-two and a half,’ Annika said.
‘Exactly right,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘And the only one from Sattajärvi I could find was in the wedding announcements.’
Annika raised her eyebrows, feeling her mood slump.
‘The wedding announcements? What, the kind of thing ministers did in church when people got married back in the eighteen hundreds?’
‘Well,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘it was actually obligatory until nineteen seventy-three, but you’re right about the church connection. The banns had to be read in church for three Sundays in a row before a wedding, to keep everyone happy.’
‘So why did they put it in the paper?’
Hans Blomberg thought for a moment. ‘That’s just how it was in those days, there was a special column. The cutting is from the twenty-ninth of September nineteen sixty-nine; do you want me to read it out?’
‘Yes, please,’ Annika said.
‘Parish assistant Göran Nilsson, born in Sattajärvi, now of Luleå, and student Karina