Liza Marklund - The Bomber

"Do you need help?" her source said.

She sighed and felt that her tears were near. "I want to go home," was all she said.

"You have to go to the hospital for a check-up," he said.

"No," Annika said firmly, thinking of her soiled trousers. "I want to go past Hantverkargatan first. Where's Thomas? And the kids? Are they there?"

"Come on, I'll help you out. Everyone's fine. We're looking after them."

The man grabbed her around the waist and led her toward the exit. Annika realized something was missing.

"Hang on, my bag," she said, stopping. "I want my bag and the Powerbook."

The man said something to a uniformed policeman and someone handed Annika her bag.

"Is this your computer?" the policeman asked her.

Annika hesitated.

"Do I need to answer that right now?"

"No, it can wait. Let's get you home first."

They were approaching the exit and Annika glimpsed a wall of people in the dark outside the arena. Instinctively, she drew back.

"It's just police and medical personnel out there," the man next to her said.

At the same moment that she put her foot on the ground outside, a flash went off right in her face. For a second, she was blinded and heard herself cry out. The contours returned and she caught sight of the camera and the photographer. In two bounds, she reached him and decked him with a straight right.

"You bastard!" she screamed.

"Christ, Annika, what are you doing?" the photographer yelped.

It was Henriksson.

She asked the police to stop at a corner shop near her house and buy her some conditioner. Then she walked the two floors up to her apartment, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside the quiet hallway. It felt like another time, as if several years had gone by since she was here last. She pulled off all her clothes and dropped them on the floor. She took a towel from the toilet next door and wiped her stomach and bottom. She marched straight into the shower and spent a long time in there. She knew that Thomas was at the Grand Hotel. They'd come home when the children woke up.

She put on clean clothes. All the used ones, including the shoes and the coat, she put in a big black trash bag. She picked up the trash bag and went and threw it in the communal refuse room.

Now there was only one thing she had to do before she could lie down and sleep. She switched on Christina's computer; the battery was nearly dead. She got a disk and downloaded her own piece to it. She hesitated for a moment, but then she clicked on Christina's file, marked "Me."

There were seven documents, seven chapters that all began with one single word: Existence, Love, Humanity, Happiness, Lies, Evil, and Death.

Annika opened the first one and started reading.

She had spoken to everyone around Christina Furhage: her family, her lover, her colleagues, everyone who knew her. They had all contributed to the image of the Olympic supremo that Annika had formed in her mind.

At last, Christina was speaking for herself.

Late in June, exactly six months after the last explosion, Beata Ekesjö was convicted by the Stockholm City Court of three counts of murder, four counts of attempted murder, arson, the destruction of civic buildings, endangering the lives of the public, unlawful abduction, theft, and driving without a license. She did not utter one word during the trial.

Beata Ekesjö was sectioned under the Mental Health Act to indefinite detention in a secure unit, subject to Home Office conditions. The sentence was not appealed, and it came into effect three weeks later.

Hardly anyone noticed, but all through the five-week-long trial the defendant wore the same piece of jewelry. It was a cheap, old garnet brooch in gold and silver.

The story of how the constructional engineer Beata Ekesjö became the serial killer called "The Bomber" was never published.

This is a work of fiction. All similarities between the characters in the novel and any real living persons are entirely accidental.

The newspaper Kvällspressen doesn't exist. It has traits of various existing media companies but is wholly a product of the author's imagination.

All the places that the characters in the novel visit have, however, been rendered as they are or would have looked. This includes Victoria Olympic Stadium and the Olympic Village.