The Long Shadow (42 page)

The legal firm’s waiting room was already stuffed with journalists, television cameras and radio transmitters, which surprised Annika. It had been fairly clear since last winter that Filip Andersson was going to be released. I suppose they’re here to get a look at him, she thought.

She forced her way through the room and found an empty chair next to the lavatories. The various sections of that day’s illustrious broadsheet lay on the arm. She sat down with a sigh and opened the culture section. She flicked through it without reading anything until she got to page four, where she was brought up short. The double-page spread was dominated by a review of a photography exhibition at Kulturhuset, entitled ‘The Other Side of the Costa del Sol’. The photographer, Lotta Svensson Bartholomeus, was praised for having ‘captured and sensitively documented the underbelly of the over-exploited Costa del Sol: the women on their way to market, craftsmen’s abandoned tools …’ The article was illustrated by a close-up of the plate-shears from the drug warehouse in La Campana.

Who’d have thought it, Annika mused, and put the paper down.

She looked straight ahead for a few minutes with a growing sense of unease in the pit of her stomach. Then she picked up the culture section again and studied the strange picture, remembering Lotta’s assertion that art was more real than journalism. There was something about this that she didn’t understand, that much was clear. How, in principle, could a broken pair of plate-shears on a warehouse floor be interesting? What was she missing? She lacked the capacity to see anything exceptional in it.

She folded that section of the paper into a hard little bundle and stuffed it under her chair, then got up and
waited until the doors to the conference room were opened. There was an immediate crush in the doorway. She heard Sven-Göran Olin urging everyone to calm down. She stayed where she was until most people had gone in, then went through the doors and stood just inside them.

Up at the front, by an ordinary table with three chairs on the other side, the photographers, television people and radio journalists were jostling for position. She could see Steven in the crush – he was much taller than all the others.

She tried to catch a glimpse of the exonerated murderer. He wasn’t there yet.

Her unease showed no sign of letting up.

Filip Andersson had been locked up for five years for a grotesque crime that he hadn’t committed. Was it possible to emerge from something like that in a healthy mental state, or did you have to be Nelson Mandela to cope with it?

She realized she was about to get an answer because a door at the far end of the room opened and Filip Andersson came in, dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt. The sporadic clicking of the photographers turned into a torrent, the television lamps came on, casting a blue sheen over the whole room, and reporters performed animated pieces to camera.

Andersson didn’t look at any of them. He sank onto one of the three chairs and stared ahead without blinking. Annika craned her neck to get a better view. He’d lost weight since they’d met in the visitors’ room in Kumla Prison last autumn. His hair had been cut, and he’d shaved. Sven-Göran Olin sat down beside him, and finally a young woman came in and sat on the chair at the end.

‘It is with great pleasure,’ the lawyer began, ‘that we have today received the decision of the Swedish Court of Appeal to exonerate Filip Andersson entirely of all three cases of murder on Sankt Paulsgatan.’

The camera clicking subsided slightly. The radio journalists sat down.

‘Filip Andersson has been locked up for over five years,’ the lawyer went on. ‘As I pointed out when the verdict of the City Court was announced, he was found guilty on very weak evidence on both occasions. Everyone involved in the case seemed to be mainly preoccupied with making things easy for themselves.’

By now there was complete silence in the room.

Annika looked at the man’s face for signs of emotion, relief, sadness, joy or bitterness, but she couldn’t identify anything. His face was utterly blank, his eyes staring fixedly at a point slightly above the heads of the crowd. His shoulders seemed broader – maybe he’d been exercising in anticipation of his release.

‘A judgment of this sort means that we have simultaneously more and less faith in the legal system,’ Sven-Göran Olin said. ‘That it is possible to raise an appeal and put things right in retrospect is positive. But at the same time it is very troubling that such miscarriages of justice can occur.’

You could have heard a pin drop. Annika studied her colleagues. They were all staring at Filip Andersson, their faces showing disappointment and uncertainty. What could they make of this in their papers?

Filip Andersson was pretty terrible in the role of victim. He didn’t have a cute family gathered round him with cake and children’s drawings, no beautiful wife holding his hand and gazing in gratitude at the cameras with tears in her eyes. He looked what he was: a slightly
overweight, unscrupulous financier who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was no way they’d be able to drum up much sympathy for him among their readers.

‘Since the chancellor of justice has rejected our application, today we will be submitting a claim for damages against the Swedish state,’ Sven-Göran Olin said. ‘Filip Andersson is claiming twelve million kronor, five million of which represent reparations for the suffering caused, and seven million his loss of income.’

The woman beside him stood up and started handing out printed documents, presumably copies of the claim.

There was murmuring in the room. A record-breaking claim for damages wasn’t going to make the public feel particularly sympathetic.

‘Filip Andersson, how does it feel to be free?’ a radio journalist shouted.

Sven-Göran Olin leaned towards the microphone again. ‘My client would prefer not to comment at the present time,’ he said.

‘So why’s he here, then?’ someone shouted angrily.

‘Olin forced him,’ someone replied. ‘He’s conducted the whole case
pro bono
, and this is the payoff.’

Annika didn’t think the lawyer was getting much return on his investment, although he hadn’t had to do a great deal. It had been her articles about Yvonne Nordin that had set the ball rolling, and the attorney general herself had requested the judicial review.

The woman distributing the documents had reached the back of the room, and handed one to Annika. Annika leaned towards her and whispered in her ear: ‘Can I have an exclusive interview with Filip? My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I wrote the articles about Yvonne Nordin which—’

‘Filip Andersson isn’t making any comment,’ the
woman said expressionlessly. ‘Not now, not to anyone.’

The other reporters were frowning at her as if she’d just tried to jump the queue in the Co-op.

She glanced anxiously at the time. If she couldn’t get any comment, the whole morning would have been wasted. It was impossible to write an article for the evening tabloids about a man who had nothing to say.

The journalists began to drift away. She stood aside and pretended not to see her colleagues as they streamed out into the hall. ‘If he wants that amount in damages, he could at least have the sense to speak out about those lost years,’ a woman in the crowd said, as she passed.

Filip Andersson got up. He was still pretty large. Annika slid to one side and made her way towards him along the wall. The young woman who had passed round the printouts opened the door at the end of the room. Sven-Göran Olin slipped out first. Filip Andersson began to walk towards the door.

‘Filip!’ Annika said in a loud voice. ‘Filip Andersson!’ He stopped in the doorway and turned. His gaze landed directly on her.

Did he recognize her? Surely he must – he couldn’t have received that many visitors in prison.

‘What are you going to do next?’ she asked loudly. ‘What are your plans?’

Incredibly slowly, he raised his left forefinger, then bent it several times, as if he were waving at her.

His left forefinger. Waving.

A shiver of terror ran down her spine.

Suddenly she was back in that alleyway again, in Yxsmedsgränd in Gamla stan, that Wednesday night after she’d visited him in Kumla Prison. She had been on her way home when two masked men had dragged
her into a doorway. One had leaned over her, and the eyes staring at her through the holes of the balaclava had been as pale as glass. The other had held the point of a knife a centimetre from her left eye.
Leave David in peace. It’s over. No more poking about
. Then they had grabbed her left hand, pulled off her glove. She felt again the terrible pain that had run from her hand up her arm and into her chest.
Next time we’ll cut your children instead
. The cold of the cobblestones against her cheek, her thundering heartbeat in her ears as she’d watched their heavy boots disappear down the alley.

She met Filip Andersson’s gaze, took a step back and unconsciously hid her left hand behind her back.

Filip Andersson saw the gesture and smiled, then turned and disappeared from the room in the same way as he had arrived.

Her hand was still burning as she headed back to the car. The scar on her index finger was throbbing again – she hadn’t noticed it since the coldest days of the previous winter. She put her hand into her jacket pocket and hunched her shoulders against the wind.

‘He doesn’t seem particularly humble,’ Steven said. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be, though, if you’d been locked up for five years when you were innocent.’

‘No one’s saying he’s innocent,’ Annika said. ‘The only thing the Court of Appeal has concluded is that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict him. There’s a huge difference.’

Steven fell silent again.

I’m too hard on temps, she thought. It serves me right that they don’t want to work with me.

‘I’m not going back to the newsroom,’ she said, trying
to sound a bit gentler. ‘You’ll have to take a taxi, I’m afraid.’ He didn’t seem upset. Probably glad to get shot of me, she thought, as she paid 260 kronor for another two hours. She’d leave the car where it was as there were no parking spaces on Drottninggatan.

Polly hadn’t arrived when Annika clambered onto an extremely high bar-stool next to a table with a rolled-steel top and LED lights. She tried to order a
caffé latte
from a waitress with a silver stud in her nose, but the girl snapped that it was self-service. Not that trendy, then. She decided to skip the latte.

The place reminded her of the inside of a factory in some futuristic horror film. There were rusty lumps of iron on the walls for decoration, many of them wrapped in loops of multi-coloured neon. The coffee machine hissed, and she could hear a dishwasher in the kitchen, with the clatter of crockery. The music throbbing from the speakers made the German industrial metal of Rammstein sound like singalong Euro-pop.

Her finger ached. It could hardly have been a coincidence. He had waved to her with the same finger that had been cut on the night after she had met him in prison.

She put her hand back into her pocket.

The café was filling – it was getting towards lunchtime. A surprising number of the customers seemed to be civil servants from the government ministries and office blocks in the city centre, to judge by their conservative appearance: white shirts and dark trousers,
exactly like Filip Andersson at the press conference.

She shivered.

If Filip Andersson had ordered the knife attack that evening, he had been quick off the mark. It hadn’t been more than a few hours after her visit to him in Kumla. He must have been extremely keen to stop her snooping about in David Lindholm’s past. Why? The two men had run a business together. David had had an affair with his sister, and got her pregnant. He had been Filip Andersson’s trustee at Kumla, which involved providing support and acting as middleman for lifers.

There was obviously something she wasn’t supposed to find out, something she didn’t already know. David had had a lot of dark sides.

Annika remembered Nina Hoffman’s description of how he had treated Julia. David Lindholm had kept his wife locked in their apartment for up to a week at a time. On other occasions he had thrown her out naked into the stairwell, until she had become so ill that she’d had to go to A&E. He was notoriously unfaithful, disappeared for weeks without saying where he had been, shouted at her, calling her a whore and a slut …

What if Polly didn’t show up? She drummed the fingers of her right hand on the metal tabletop.

David had been an extremely contradictory character. While he had been a pig of a husband, he had somehow become one of Sweden’s most famous and respected police officers. She knew he had been violent, from the investigations into complaints made against him at the start of his career in the police. She remembered Timmo Koivisto, a former drug addict she had met at the Vårtuna rehab centre: he had told her that David had smashed his head into a lavatory wall, leaving him with permanent injuries. Timmo Koivisto had been a dealer right at the bottom of the food-chain. He had
supported his own habit by ripping off his employers and cutting the gear with icing sugar, then charging extra and pocketing the difference.

‘Why did he do it? Why did David beat you up like that?’ Annika had asked.

‘They wanted to show me that I could never get away,’ Timmo Koivisto had said. ‘Wherever I went, they would find me.’

And who were ‘they’? Annika had asked. Was he talking about some sort of drugs Mafia?

‘That’s one way of describing them,’ he had replied.

She looked around the nightmarish décor. She was in the right place, wasn’t she?

To make sure, she took out her notepad and checked. Yes, this was it.

David Lindholm, drugs Mafia, the murders in Sankt Paulsgatan, Filip Andersson arranging for her finger to be damaged …

‘Annika?’

She looked up and saw a blonde girl with a rucksack and padded jacket standing next to the table. ‘Polly?’

The girl sat down opposite and shrugged off her rucksack. ‘I know,’ she said, leaning across the table so Annika could hear her. ‘I don’t look like my picture on Facebook any more. I’ve thought about changing it, but for some reason I don’t want to. We took our pictures together, Suzette and me, and if I change it, it’ll be like another bit of her vanishing.’