Vanished by Liza Marklund Page B

never wiped it up. Schyman sighed.
    ‘Well, if we could …’ Torstensson said, his eyes fluttering round the room. No one took any notice of him. Jansson drifted in, still half-asleep, his hair sticking out. He spilled coffee on the floor before taking a seat at the far end of the table. Sjölander was sitting next to him, talking into his mobile. Ingvar Johansson was leafing through a sheaf of printouts. Picture Pelle was standing there laughing at something the entertainment editor had said.
    ‘Okay,’ Schyman said. ‘Sit down, so we can get out of here sometime soon.’
    The chatter died away and someone switched off the radio. Sjölander ended his call, Jansson took a biscuit. Schyman himself remained standing.
    ‘Well, with the benefit of hindsight, it was absolutely right to go hard on the hurricane,’ Schyman said as the men settled into their seats. He held up a copy of Saturday’s paper in one hand as he leafed through the rest of the papers with the other.
    ‘We were best, from start to finish, and we deserved to be. We saw what was coming and we deployed our resources in a new way. All the different departments and teams worked together, and that gave us a strength that no one else could match.’
    He put the papers down. No one said anything. This was more controversial than it seemed. Each of these men was lord of his own domain. No one wanted to relinquish power and influence to anyone else. In extreme circumstances it sometimes happened that these bosses sat on their own news in order to stop any of the others muscling in on it. If they collaborated, power was shifted further up the hierarchy, to the level of the assistant editorial manager that the editor-in-chief wanted to introduce.
    He looked through the papers again, and sat down.
    ‘Our coverage of the handicapped boy also seems to have been a success, the local authority is evidently rethinking its decision and will now be giving him the help he’s entitled to.’
    There was a heavy silence. Only CNN and the air-conditioning carried on as usual. Anders Schyman knew that the others didn’t like going through old papers. That was old news, and today was a new day. You had to push ahead to move upwards, that was their motto. The head-editor didn’t agree. He believed that you had to learn from yesterday’s mistakes in order to avoid tomorrow’s, a fairly basic conclusion that they didn’t seem to have grasped.
    ‘What about our preparations for the Social Democrats’conference?’ Schyman asked, looking at the domestic editor.
    ‘Well, we’re well under way,’ the suit said, leaning forward as he clutched some sheets of paper. ‘Carl Wennergren has got a bloody good tip-off about one of the female ministers. It looks like she’s paid for her own personal shopping with her government card. Nappies and chocolate.’
    The men chortled. Typical, they could never be trusted to look after money! Nappies! And chocolate!
    Schyman was looking at the other man with a neutral expression.
    ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And what’s the story?’
    The laughter died away. The suit smiled uncertainly.
    ‘Personal shopping,’ he said. ‘She paid for personal shopping with her government card.’
    The others all nodded supportively, what a great story!
    ‘Okay,’ Schyman said. ‘We’ll have to go into this more closely. Where did the tip-off come from?’
    Low-level muttering broke out. You didn’t talk about that sort of thing. Schyman sighed.
    ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Surely you can see that someone’s out to get her! Find out who it is. Maybe that’s the real story – a power struggle within the Social Democrats, what they’re prepared to do to damage each other in advance of the conference. Anything else? What about parliament?’
    They carried on going through the work that was already underway within politics, entertainment, foreign news. They took notes and made comments, various positions were adopted, lines of attack were