Postcard killers

Chapter 93

CNN, SKY NEWS, and BBC World were al broadcasting live from the Hal of Mirrors in the Grand Hotel. The overblown decor with its gold pil ars, mirrored doors, and crystal chandeliers made Dessie think of Versail es or some other wedding-cake chateau. Journalists and photographers and cameramen and radio reporters were al pushing and shoving to get the best places.

It was so crowded that the television people were standing shoulder to shoulder as they spoke to the cameras.

Usual y she did al she could to avoid press conferences.

There was something humiliating in al the pushing and shoving to get close, packed in with other reporters and turned into a babbling crowd.

The hierarchy was ridiculously strict as wel.

The television people always got to sit at the front. The bigger and noisier the channel, the closer their reporter got to the center of the action. 123 Then came the radio reporters with their antennas, the news agencies, the national press, and then the specialist and local press. Researchers and editorial staff like her were let in only if there was room.

Today she decided to behave like Jacob, storming through everybody like an express train, quickly showing her press pass at the door and forcing her way into the back of the room, not taking no for an answer, not caring what anybody thought of her.

The room could hold five hundred, but the hotel management had limited the number to three hundred because of al the equipment needed for live television broadcasts.

She leaned back against the wal, craning her neck to see. What an absurd circus.

At the front of the room was a smal, important-looking podium with metal steps on both sides.

The jungle of microphones shouted out the fact that this was where the siblings were going to proclaim their innocence to al the world.

The level of sound in the room was rising steadily, like the tension in a stadium during the World Cup final.

Dessie closed her eyes.

She felt almost completely paralyzed inside. Events in the room were reaching her through a thick, toughened, glasslike material. It felt like that, anyway.

How could everything have gone so wrong? And so quickly.

Her cel rang and she only noticed it because she was holding it in her hand.

It was Forsberg.

"How does it look? Did you manage to get inside? How close are you?"

"I thought this whole spectacle was going out live on seventeen channels,"

Dessie said. "Can't you see for yourself?"

"They're just showing a forest of microphones. I can't tel anything. Have you seen Alexander Andersson?"

"I don't think we're in quite the same place," Dessie said. "I'm standing right at the back."

Forsberg took a deep breath.

"Is it true that you interviewed them?" he said. "While they were being held?"

She kept her eyes fixed on the podium. Something was happening in the front.

"Don't believe everything you hear. They're coming in now!"

The Hal of Mirrors exploded in a storm of flashbulbs and spotlights.

From a door on the left Malcolm Rudolph walked into the room. He was wearing a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck and a pair of fashionably torn jeans.

His sister, Sylvia, was walking behind him, her bil owing chestnut brown hair glittering in the flashing lights. She was dressed entirely in white.

"Shit," Forsberg said in her ear. "She's beautiful! How does she look in person?"

"I'l cal you later," Dessie said, ending the cal.

After Sylvia came a tal, thin woman whom Dessie recognized as Andrea Friederichs, their lawyer – their copyright lawyer.

The central characters stopped in front of the jungle of microphones and stood there for three long minutes so that they could be photographed properly.

Then the lawyer leaned forward and said in the queen's English: "If we could get started with this press conference…"