The Long Shadow (46 page)

‘Annika? Can you come into my office for a moment?’

The editor-in-chief, Anders Schyman, was standing in the doorway to his glass box.

‘What?’ Annika said. ‘Right now?’

‘Preferably.’

‘Sure,’ she said, logging out of the network to avoid having her password changed, a nightmare that seemed to be the new game among night editors with too little to do. She left her jacket on top of her bag on a spare table, and followed him inside the box.

‘Close the door.’

She slid it shut. ‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

‘Sit down,’ he said, pointing at a chair.

Annika remained standing, and didn’t say anything. Schyman sat down behind his desk. ‘How do you think it’s working, you being a reporter?’

She looked at him intently, trying to work out what he wanted. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s quite fun. It’s not exactly rocket science, not with Patrik at the news desk.’

‘I’ve received a number of worrying reports about the way you treat your colleagues,’ he said.

Annika stiffened.

‘Patrik says you come and go as you please. You can’t behave like that. He has a responsibility to me and the management team, and he has to be able to rely on you being at work during the hours you’re paid for.’

She folded her arms. ‘He’s been in here telling tales,’ she said. ‘He’s annoyed because I didn’t rush back to his little notes quickly enough.’

‘Patrik’s not the only one who’s fed up with your attitude. One of the temp photographers called me in tears when you were in Spain on that job about the Costa Cocaine. She said you’d abandoned her outside a conference centre, gone off with some man and not come back to the hotel all night. Then you went around by yourself, taking your own pictures, instead of working with her.’

Annika took a deep breath. ‘Nothing I wanted was “photogenic” enough so she refused point blank to get her camera out. And I had my hands full. I couldn’t sit there holding Lotta’s hand, listening to her telling me how clever she’d been in Tehran.’

The editor-in-chief raised a hand. ‘She’s been getting great reviews for her exhibition at Kulturhuset,’ he said, ‘so she can’t be completely without talent.’

‘Those were the pictures she was running round taking instead of doing her job,’ Annika said.

Schyman’s elbows landed heavily on the desk. ‘You have to think about the way you act,’ he said. ‘Your behaviour towards Patrik has been terrible ever since his first day as head of news. Almost as bad as some of the others were towards you when you were head of crime. Patrik doesn’t want you on his shift any more, and I can’t say I blame him. So I’ve agreed to transfer you.’

Annika wanted to sit down, but stood where she was, paralysed. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Have you got any idea of where I can put you?’

‘Are you serious?’

Anders Schyman sighed. ‘Are you interested in a freelance contract?’

She gasped. ‘What the fuck is this? Are you
firing
me?’

The editor-in-chief got up, squeezed round his desk, pulled out one of the visitors’ chairs and said, ‘Sit down.’

Annika sat. The chair was lower than she’d expected and she jarred the base of her spine as she landed.

‘Can you see how Patrik might have had trouble handling you?’

Her instinct was to argue, pointing out Patrik’s overhasty decisions and journalistic incompetence, his superficial judgements about news and his poor instincts, but instead she said nothing.

‘Do you want to work nights again?’ the editor-in-chief asked. ‘Or be a sub-editor? In charge of the letters page? Or something online? A news anchor on the web? How about that?’

How could she possibly be a problem? She managed to bring home all the news editors’ odd stories – she found missing children in forests and uncovered terrorists, Nobel killers and Yugoslavian Mafia gangs … ‘I think you’re being bloody ungrateful,’ she said. ‘You make it sound like I spend all day sitting around drinking coffee, but I bring in more stories than anyone else.’

‘I’m not questioning your competence, just your attitude.’

‘My
attitude
? Is that more important than the fact I come up with the goods? Haven’t you got enough yes-men around you?’

The editor-in-chief’s face darkened. ‘This isn’t a question of me wanting people who don’t contradict me—’

‘Of course it is. You’re just like every other male boss.
You want well-behaved girl reporters who are cute and friendly and always do whatever anyone tells them. And I’m never going to be like that.’

Silence descended on the room.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Annika asked. ‘Honestly?’

Anders Schyman bit his lower lip. ‘I’ve always defended you,’ he said. ‘Hell, I’ve gone further than that. I’ve gone into battle for you. The chairman of the board wanted to get rid of you, but I put my own job on the line to keep you.’

‘Oh, my heart bleeds,’ Annika said. ‘If the board ever gets to overrule you and starts hiring and firing staff, you’re finished as a boss, and you know it. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

Silence descended again.

‘Are you interested in what I’ve spent the day doing,’ Annika asked, ‘instead of following up Patrik’s little notes?’

Anders Schyman didn’t answer.

‘You remember the fatal gassing in Nueva Andalucía? The missing sixteen-year-old girl, Suzette Söderström?’

He nodded.

‘I think she’s alive. I think she’s being held prisoner on a farm in Morocco. I’ve been going round talking to people who might have information about that farm and where it might be, how she came to be there, who else might be there and—’

Schyman put his hands over his face and groaned. ‘Annika, Annika, Annika,’ he said. ‘There was a sabotage alarm out at the nuclear power station in Oskarshamn this afternoon, and we didn’t have a reporter we could send.’

‘I heard about that on the car radio,’ Annika said. ‘It turned out to be nothing. A welder who had a trace
of explosives on a plastic bag with an IFK Norrköping logo on it.’

‘But we didn’t know that to start with. The fact remains that we didn’t have a reporter to keep an eye on the story.’

Annika stared at him. ‘Well, that’s hardly
my
fault! I’m not the one who’s just got rid of half the staff!’

Anders Schyman stood up. ‘We aren’t going to get any further,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the rest of the week to think about where you want to be transferred.’

Annika remained seated, with a dizzying sense of freefall. Then she forced herself to get up, left the glass box and closed the door without looking back.

Patrik stared at her as she walked across the floor of the newsroom. Of course he knew what they had been discussing. He must be on top of the world.

She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, just went to her laptop and tried to hold back the tears burning inside her.

There were other places she could work. There had to be some other media company in Sweden that was willing to employ her. And she could manage without a job for a while, with the insurance money she was about to get. At the end of June she would finally be getting compensation for her burned-out house, six million kronor plus a quarter of a million for contents. Admittedly, Thomas would get half of that, but the plot would also be put up for sale and ought to bring in another couple of million. She’d checked online: there was only one vacant building-plot in the whole of Danderyd, and that was on the market for 4.4 million.

Maybe getting fired wasn’t such a tragedy after all.

Maybe it could be the start of something new, something good.

Maybe it would be a good idea to go freelance. Then
she could do exactly what she wanted without anyone else interfering …

But she wanted to feel she belonged somewhere. She wanted her own chair, her own pigeon-hole in the post-room.

She sat down, shut her eyes and took several deep breaths, then logged in and opened up the document she had been writing. She had reached Suzette’s email, and tried to re-create it from memory.

   You can’t tell anyone about this email. Not Mum, and not the police. There’s no internet at the farm so I haven’t been able to email. Fatima would be furious if she knew I was writing.

   I’m with Amira. I’ve been here since New Year. I’ve got my own horse, called Larache. He’s a mix of English and Arabian thoroughbred. Don’t tell Adde I’ve been in touch. You can answer this but I don’t know when I’ll read it. We only go places like Asilah, not very often.

   Big hug from suz

She read it through twice. It was ridiculous that the paper wasn’t interested in Suzette’s story. Why were girls with horses so boring? Besides, something bigger was going on underneath, something shady and out of reach, about Astrid and Siv and Hannelore and their families, something whose extent she was only just starting to appreciate.

‘What did Schyman want?’

Patrik was standing beside her, unable to conceal his triumph.

‘To wish me a happy birthday,’ Annika said. ‘You know perfectly well what he wanted. He told me you want to get rid of me.’

The head of news sat on her desk, on top of her notes. ‘You’re a good reporter, Annika,’ he said. ‘If only you could learn to—’

‘Spare us both,’ Annika said, grabbing her notepad. ‘I’d like to get on with what I was doing.’

Patrik got up reluctantly. ‘Shouldn’t you go home? Tomorrow’s another day.’

She made a decision. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she said, ‘so I won’t be coming in at all tomorrow. I need to see the doctor – it’s probably streptococcus.’

He looked at her sceptically, but said nothing and went back to his desk.

Annika clicked to close the Word document and went onto the net instead. There were flights from Stockholm to Málaga every morning. There were boats between Algeciras and Tangier all the time: she’d discovered that from the adverts along the Costa del Sol motorways. There was bound to be some way of getting from Tangier to Asilah – Morocco couldn’t be that big.

She went onto Google Maps and typed in
asilah morocco
. A couple of seconds later she was staring at a satellite image of a town on the Atlantic coast of north Africa. It was probably fifty or sixty kilometres from Tangier. She took a couple of quick breaths and glanced over at Schyman’s glass box. It was dark: he must have gone home without her noticing.

She hesitated for a second or two, then went to the booking page for the early-morning flight to Málaga. There were a few seats left on the plane, departing at six forty-five.

The Angel hit the ground with a thud once the Troll Girl and the Princess had disappeared. She was confined to bed with a fever and strange blisters on her hands, and was prescribed liniment for her chest and the prayers of the congregation.

Father and the farm workers searched the surrounding area for three days and three nights. Then the runaways were reported to the Child Welfare Commission. The girls were officially declared missing, but not Wall-eye. He was no longer a ward, since he had come of age the previous month.

The silence at Gudagården was extensive. Father took on the task of retribution, and mortified his own flesh in penance, as well as that of the farm workers. This wasn’t well received. People had tolerated him beating the foster-children, but adult farmhands didn’t take kindly to being whipped by their master.

Soon Father and the Angel were left to deal with the sowing and reaping on their own. Despite Father’s prayers for the Lord’s assistance, they didn’t manage to lift the potatoes before the first frost.

Not a word was heard from the runaways, so Father took in more foster-children. He didn’t want any more girls who would run away, just boys of working age. And he got the worst ones, the ones no one else wanted, and he whipped the exhortations of the Lord God into them until their backs bled. Then he worked them until they couldn’t even think of dissent. He no longer searched for any who ran away, merely left them to the Lord’s Mercy and the Flames of Hell.

The Angel was fourteen when Gregorius came to the farm. He was very different from all the other boys because he was dark, thin and quietly spoken; he never started fights
and he wasn’t boastful or noisy. He smiled his strange smile and inspired respect among the gang of boys, possibly even fear. Those who chose to pick on him woke up with strange injuries or had peculiar accidents.

The Angel was drawn to him like a moth to a flame and, like a careless insect, her wings were burned so badly that she was never able to fly again.

She was fifteen years and eight months old when Mother realized she was pregnant, and by that time Gregorius had been gone from the farm many weeks. Father beat her legs, back and crotch to shreds, intending to whip the sin out of her wicked body, but all he succeeded in doing was giving her scars that stayed with her for the rest of her life. Then she was locked away in the loft where the Troll Girl and Princess had been made to sleep, beneath the frost-engraved glass of the attic window. And, like her predecessors, she climbed over the roof tiles and down the fire ladder as soon as her wounds had healed enough for her to run.

She made her way to the road under cover of darkness, through the village and out onto the main highway. Early that morning she got a lift with a lorry-driver who was going all the way to Gnesta. He asked what a little girl like her was doing out on the road so early in the morning. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, and he said he wouldn’t say anything if he could be a bit friendly with her. And, of course, the damage was already done so she saw no real harm in letting him have his way.

Her wounds stung when he took her, and she felt the earth close above her head, never to open again.

He drove her to Mölnbo. From there she got a lift on a milk-truck that was on its way to Södertälje.

By then it was evening and she was very hungry.

She spent the night in a hollow next to the railway track, shivering like a dog, but she knew that there wasn’t far left to go because the Troll Girl had told her about her
mother. She had been out on licence for a long time, and she wanted to take care of her daughter, but the Child Welfare Commission had said no: they thought it was better for the Troll Girl to be raised in the Righteousness and Discipline of the Lord at Gudagården.