"Have you spoken to the police lately?"

Patricia stiffened. "No," she said.

"Do they know you're here?"

The woman got up and went over to the counter. "I don't think so."

Annika also got up. "Perhaps you should tell them. They might want to talk to you about something, and no one at the club knows you're staying here, right?"

"Please don't tell me what to do," Patricia replied curtly.

She turned her back and put a pan on the stove to heat water for the dishes.

Annika went back to the table and for a while sat watching the woman's back.

Well, go ahead and sulk, she thought, and went into her room.

The rain rattled hysterically on the windowsill. Will it never stop? Annika thought, and sank down on her bed. She lay on top of the bed without switching on the light. The room was dark and gray. She stared at the worn wallpaper, yellowed with a gray pattern.

It all has to come together somehow, she thought. Something happened just before the twenty-seventh of July that made the minister for foreign trade take a flight from Terminal 2 at Arlanda, so jittery and stressed-out that he didn't even notice his relatives calling out to him. Or he ignored them. The Social Democrats must have been in a real panic.

But it could have been something private, Annika suddenly realized. Maybe he wasn't on a government or party errand at all. Maybe he had a mistress somewhere.

Could it be that simple?

Then she remembered her grandmother.

Harpsund, she thought. If Christer Lundgren had committed a private indiscretion, the prime minister would never have let him use his summer residence as a hiding place. It had to be something political.

She stretched out on her back, put her hands behind her head, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. She heard the clatter of the crockery; Patricia was puttering about in the kitchen.

Structure, she mused. Sort through what you've got. Start at the beginning. Toss out everything that's wishful thinking- be logical. What actually did happen?

A minister resigns following suspicions of murder, and not just any murder- a sex murder in a cemetery. Suppose the man is innocent. Say he was somewhere completely different on the morning when the woman was raped and killed. Suppose he's got a watertight alibi.

Then why the hell doesn't he clear his name? His life is ruined; politically he's washed-up, socially he's poison.

There can only be one explanation, Annika thought. My first idea holds up: his alibi is even worse than the crime.

Okay, even worse- but for whom? For himself? Not likely. That would be close to impossible.

Only one alternative remains: worse for the party.

Right, so she'd reached a conclusion.

What about the rest? What could be worse for the party than having a minister suspected of murder in the middle of an election campaign?

She squirmed restlessly on the bed, turned on her side, and stared out into the room. She heard Patricia open the front door and walk down the stairs, probably to have a shower.

The realization came like a puff of wind in her brain.

Only the loss of power was worse. Christer Lundgren did something that night that would lead to the Social Democrats losing power if it came to light. It had to be something fundamental, something crucial. What could pull the rug out from under the governing party's feet?

Annika sat bolt upright. She remembered the words, played them back in her brain. She went out to the telephone in the living room, sat down on the couch with the phone on her lap. She closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths.

Anne Snapphane still talked to her even though she'd been thrown out. Berit Hamrin might also look on her as a colleague even if she'd stopped working there. If she didn't try, she'd never know.

Resolutely she dialed the number to the Kvallspressen switchboard. She spoke in a squeaky voice when she asked for Berit, not wanting the operator to recognize her.

"Annika, how nice to hear from you!" Berit said cordially. "How are things?"

Annika's heart slowed down.

"Thanks, I'm fine. I've been to Turkey for a couple of weeks. It was really interesting."

"Writing about the Kurds?" Berit thought like a journalist.

"No, just a vacation. Listen, I've got a couple of questions concerning IB. Do you have time to meet up for a chat?"

If Berit was surprised, she wasn't letting it show. "Yes, sure. When?"

"What are you doing tonight?"

They agreed to meet at the pizzeria near the paper in half an hour's time.

Patricia came back in, dressed in her sweat suit and with her hair wrapped in a towel.

"I'm going out for a while." Annika got to her feet.

"I forgot to tell you something. Sven said he was staying here for a few days."

Annika went over to the coatrack. "Are you working tonight?" she said as she put her coat on.

"Yeah, why?"

It was pouring rain. Annika's umbrella was twisted by the wind, so when she stumbled through the door of the restaurant, she was soaked to the skin. Berit was already there.

"How nice to see you." Berit smiled. "You're looking well."

Annika laughed and wriggled out of her wet coat. "Leaving Kvallspressen does wonders for one's health. What's it like these days?"

Berit sighed. "Bit of a mess, actually. Schyman is trying to give the paper an overhaul, but he's meeting a lot of resistance from the rest of the senior editors."

Annika shook her wet hair and pushed it back. "In what way?"

"Schyman wants to set up new routines, have regular seminars about the direction of the paper."

"I get it. The others are in an uproar, whining that he's trying to turn Kvallspressen into Swedish Television, right?"

Berit nodded and smiled. "Exactly."

A waiter took their insignificant order, a coffee and a mineral water. He walked away unimpressed.

"So just how badly are the Social Democrats doing in the election campaign?" Annika wondered.

"Badly. They've fallen from forty-five percent in the opinion polls last spring to below thirty-five percent."

"Because of the IB affair or the strip-club business?"

"Probably a combination of both."

Both the glass and the cup were placed on the table with unnecessary force.

"Do you remember our talk about the IB archives?" Annika said when the waiter was gone.

"Of course. Why?"

"You thought the original foreign archive still exists. What exactly makes you think that?" Annika sipped at her mineral water.

Berit gave it some thought before answering. "Several reasons. People's political affiliations had been put on a register before, during the war. The practice was forbidden after the end of the war, and much later Minister for Defense Sven Andersson said that the wartime archives had 'disappeared.' In reality, they had been at the Defense Staff Headquarters' archive. This was made public a few years ago."

"So the Social Democrats have lied about vanished archives before."

"That's right. And then, a year or two later, Andersson said that the IB archives were destroyed back in 1969. The latest version is that they were burned just before the exposure of IB in 1973. But the destruction was never entered in any official records, either domestic or foreign."

"And if the records had been destroyed, it would have been documented?"

Berit drank some of her coffee and made a face. "Yuck, this isn't exactly freshly made. Yes, IB was a standard Swedish bureaucratic organization. There are a lot of their documents in the Defense Staff Headquarters' intelligence archive. Everything was entered in a daybook, including reports of destroyed documents. There isn't one about these archives, which probably means that they're still there."

"Anything else?"

Berit thought about it for a moment. "They've always maintained that the foreign and domestic archives were destroyed at the same time and that there are no copies. We know that at least half of that is untrue."

Annika looked closely at Berit. "How did you get the Speaker to admit to his dealings with IB?"

Berit rubbed her forehead and sighed. "The force of reason," she said coyly.

"Can you tell me?"

Berit sat in silence for a while. She put two lumps of sugar in her coffee and stirred it.

"The Speaker has always refused to admit that he knew Birger Elmer," she said in a low voice. "He claimed he hadn't even met him. But I know that's not true."

She fell silent; Annika waited.

"In the spring of 1966," Berit said at length, "the Speaker, Ingvar Carlsson, and Birger Elmer met in the Speaker's home in Nacka. The Speaker's wife was also present. They had dinner, and the conversation turned to the fact the Speaker and his wife didn't have any children. Elmer thought the two should adopt, which they later did. I told the Speaker I knew about this meeting, and that's when he began to talk."

Annika stared at Berit. "How the hell do you know that?"

"I can't tell you. You understand."

Annika leaned back in her chair. It was mind-boggling. Jesus H. Christ! Berit had to have a source within the party leadership.

Neither woman spoke for a long time. They could hear the rain thundering outside.

"Where were the archives held before they disappeared?" Annika asked eventually.

"The domestic archive was at twenty-four Grevgatan and the foreign one at fifty-six Valhallavagen. Why do you ask?"

Annika had taken out a pen and paper and was writing down the addresses. "Maybe it wasn't the Social Democrats themselves that made sure that the archives disappeared."

"How do you mean?"

Annika didn't reply and Berit crossed her arms. "Hardly anybody knew that the archives existed, let alone where they were kept."

Annika leaned forward. "The copy of the foreign archives was found in the incoming mail at the Defense Staff Headquarters, right?"

"Right. The parcel arrived at their printing and distribution office. It was registered, entered in the daybook, and classified. The documents were not considered secret."

"What day did they arrive?"

"Seventeenth of July."

"Where did they arrive from?"

"The official record didn't say. The sender was anonymous. It could have come from any dusty government department."

"But why would they want to be anonymous in this case?"

Berit shrugged. "Maybe they found the documents deep inside an old storeroom and didn't want to admit to having them all these years."

Annika groaned, yet another dead end.

They sat in silence for a while and looked at the other customers in the restaurant. A couple of men in overalls were having an evening pizza. Two women were noisily drinking beer.

"Where were the documents when you looked at them?" Annika wondered.

"They'd just arrived at the archives."

Annika smiled. "You've got friends everywhere."

Berit returned her smile. "Always be nice to telephone operators, secretaries, registry clerks, and archivists."

Annika emptied her glass. "And there was nothing that indicated where the documents came from?"