The Long Shadow (51 page)

Annika waited five minutes, then the woman was back. ‘We’ll talk more tomorrow. You’ll stay here as our guest. Ahmed will show you to your room.’

She disappeared and the young man stood in the doorway. He handed Annika her bag, empty except for her toothbrush, notepad, pens and the change of underwear. They had taken her laptop, mobile phone and camera. ‘
Suivez-moi
,’ he said. Annika took her almost empty bag and followed him.

They walked through the dark hall to a stone staircase on the left-hand side. It led up steeply through the floors, and ended at a heavy wooden door. The young man pushed it open and they emerged into a poorly lit corridor.

‘
Allez
,’ he said, then followed her almost the entire length of the corridor. He stopped beside a narrow door on the left. ‘
Ici
,’ he said.

Annika stepped inside the room and felt the door close behind her.

She turned to ask how long she would be kept there, only to hear a key turn in the lock.

Wall-eye was a bit simple. People said his father had once hit him so hard across the face when he was little that his eye had been dislodged and one ear deafened, but that might just have been talk. He was among the first foster-children to arrive at Gudagården, and he never made much fuss.

He had just one weakness. He couldn’t stay away from the girls, especially not the Princess. He would hide among the reeds when they bathed, he creep up on them from behind and squeeze their breasts and backsides, then press up to them and rub himself against them.

The Troll Girl always had to keep an eye on him so he couldn’t get at the Princess.

The girls were thirteen and fourteen on the evening when the Princess didn’t manage to get away. He caught her on the beach where the reeds were at their thickest, ripped off her bathing-suit and put his hand over her mouth. He took her with such a frenzy that the violence and sand tore at her organs and left her drenched in blood.

The Troll Girl and the Angel had been to the local shop, to buy sugar and salt, and when they got back to the beach he was pulling on his trousers, facing away from them, towards the water. The Princess was lying, apparently lifeless, at his feet. The Troll Girl moved silently and, quick as lightning, quick as the weasel she was, she picked up a stone, ran up and hit him on the head. She didn’t stop hitting him. The Angel stood there, mouth open in a silent scream, as the Troll Girl hit him and hit him and hit him, until the blood stopped running and the grey sludge from his shattered skull lay strewn over the sand.

‘Get spades and bandages,’ she told the Angel, as she carried the Princess to the water to wash her.

And the Angel ran to Mother in the kitchen, with the
sugar and salt, and asked if they could sleep in the hayloft that night, and they could, and then she dragged the spades and the little crowbar all the way down to the lake, and she and the Troll Girl spent all that night digging a suitably narrow but deep grave behind the big oak-tree on the shore. First they cleared the dead leaves and twigs away, and the sand was soft and easy to dig, but the tree’s roots were hard as steel and the Angel had to fetch an axe. It was almost light by the time they had finished. The Princess had recovered a little and they all joined in to drag the limp body into the grave. One of Wall-eye’s shirt-sleeves got caught on a tree-root, so the Troll Girl had to clamber down into the grave and pull it loose. The corpse fell on top of her and the others had to help her climb out.

They shovelled the blood and brains in first, then filled the hole with roots, soil and sand. They scattered leaves and twigs over the top.

They sat and wept together, out of fear and exhaustion, in a tight huddle on the sand by the lake below Gudagården, and promised each other they would never tell.

The Princess was fourteen, and the Troll Girl was thirteen, and the Angel, she was only ten.

And for the three of us I have had this book printed, just the three copies, one each.

And all this, every single word, is true. Because the Angel is me.

Annika woke up with the sun shining in her face. It was oppressively hot in the little room. After hours of torment she had eventually managed to fall asleep with her clothes on, lying on the narrow bed that filled half of the floor.

She sat up wearily and squinted out at the sunlight. It was pouring in through a pair of small-paned french windows that weren’t shuttered. She got up to open them but they were locked. There was a pair of thin yellow curtains hanging on either side of the glass, and she pulled them closed in a vain attempt to shut out the heat.

She was desperate to pee. She went over to the narrow door and tried the handle.

Locked.

She sat on the bed again, brushed some locks of sweaty hair from her forehead, and looked at the time. Half past six. She took off her jacket; the T-shirt under it was soaked with sweat.

Last night she hadn’t been able to find a light-switch and had had to feel her way to the bed, where she had curled up in the darkness. Now she could see why. There was no electric light in the room. One wall was taken up
by the bed she was sitting on, and the other by a large, solid wooden desk with a lantern and a box of matches on top. A rickety chair stood in front.

What sort of room was this? A guest room? A nursery? Servants’ quarters? Or was it a cell?

Right now it was definitely the latter.

She got to her feet, went to the door and banged on it as hard as she could with her right fist. ‘Let me out!’ she shouted in Swedish. ‘For fuck’s sake, I need to go to the toilet! Hello! Can you hear me?’

She stopped banging and put her ear to the door. All she could hear was her own heartbeat. She waited five minutes, then sat down on the bed again.

She had to pee. She’d just have to do it on the floor if that was the only option.

Then it occurred to her to look under the bed. Sure enough, there was an enamel pot under it. Almost exactly the same as the one her grandmother had kept at Lyckebo, her cottage in the woods near Hosjön, where there were no drains. She pulled it out and shrugged off her jeans. Afterwards she pushed it back under the bed, close to the wall.

She sat on the chair by the desk.

The house was silent.

Her grandmother had never met Kalle and Ellen. Her children had never peed in an enamel pot in a draughty cottage beside the waters of Hosjön. When she got the money from the insurance company she was going to buy a place in the forest in Södermanland.

She got up to bang on the door again, but stopped herself. They weren’t going to let her out just because she kept banging. And beating her hands to shreds wasn’t a particularly constructive thing to do.

Her bag was on the floor beside the desk. She picked it up and took out her notepad and a pen. She chewed the
pen and thought. The woman called Fatima knew Filip Andersson and that he’d been released from Kumla. Her questions about his passport meant she thought he was going somewhere. She hadn’t shown any surprise when Annika mentioned Suzette so the girl was here, or Fatima knew where she was being hidden.

The farm she was in was large and wealthy. The little she had seen of the buildings and walls was well maintained.

Annika got up and went to the french windows, drew the curtains and looked out.

She couldn’t see much, just the yard she had crossed the previous evening, the inside of the wall and the hillsides beyond. She was at the very top of the large house. To the right was the smaller building that presumably contained stables and outhouses.

Then she saw a young woman in a headscarf emerge from the outhouse, in the company of two young boys. Could that be Amira? She pressed her nose to the glass. No, this woman was much older: she must be more like twenty-five. She was holding one child in each hand and was walking towards the gate through which she herself had come the night before.

Outside the walls, as far as she could see, stretched vast fields of verdant vegetation. She couldn’t make out the shape of the leaves, but she was sure they weren’t potatoes. On Wikipedia she had read that
Cannabis sativa
was a hardy, fast-growing plant that could survive in most climates and at altitudes of up to three thousand metres above sea level. As far as the European market was concerned, most of it was grown among the Rif mountains of northern Morocco.

Annika recalled Knut Garen’s telling description of the rhythmic drumming that echoed through the Moroccan mountains in the autumn months, da-dunk,
da-dunk, as the pollen from the cannabis plants was beaten out between layers of fine cloth.

There was a rattle from the lock and the young man from the previous day appeared in the doorway with a gun. ‘
Suivez-moi.
’

She put her notepad and pen back into her bag and went with him.

‘
Laissez-le ici
.’

He wanted her to leave her bag. So she wasn’t going anywhere, and would be coming back here. Unless?

‘
Où allons-nous?
’ she asked. Where are we going? Her French really was pretty awful.

He didn’t answer.

‘
Qu’est-ce que vous faites maintenant?
’ What are you doing now?

‘
Ne vous inquiétez pas
,’ he said. No need for her to worry.

They went down a different staircase, first Annika, then the young man with the gun. It was a much broader flight of stairs than the one they had come up the previous evening. It was covered with thick carpet, and led down to the first floor of the house. They were in a large stone hall with doors in three directions, all of them closed and barred. The doors and walls were all dark and richly ornamented – there was even some gilding. Heavy stone and bronze statues stood in various alcoves. In place of the fourth wall, a well of light reached from the ground floor all the way up to the eaves. The staircase carried on downwards: she could see to the front door she had come through the night before.

The young man stopped outside a large pair of double-doors on the left-hand side, opened one and ushered her in. She noted that there was a large key in the lock. She heard the door close behind her, then the click of the lock.

She was in a library. The walls were covered with built-in bookcases that held masses of books, leather-bound and modern. There was both Arabic and Latin lettering on the spines.

There was no other way out.

She went over to the three windows and tried opening them, one after the other. They were all locked.

She stopped in the middle of the floor, between two upholstered sofas in blood-red leather. Beside her was an ornate marble-topped table with a solid bronze ashtray on it. She kicked the table, hurting her toe.

In one corner there was an old table with four chairs and a tray laid with breakfast for one. They weren’t going to let her starve. She went to the table and looked suspiciously at the food. She recognized pitta bread, and the vegetables alongside it, but the hummus in the middle looked dodgy. She sat down, picked up the fork, tasted it and decided it was actually pretty good. It was flavoured with garlic and parsley. She ate everything, washing it down with sweetened tea.

She had just finished the tea when the lock rattled.

Her stomach lurched. She didn’t want to go back to the stifling cell upstairs.

But it wasn’t the young man with the gun. It was a slender girl with big eyes and jet-black hair. Annika gasped.

‘Ha!’ the girl said. ‘I’m starting to understand the language. I thought they said they were going to give you breakfast in the library, and I was right.’ She closed the door carefully behind her and leaned against it, her eyes shining with curiosity. ‘Is it true that you work for a newspaper?’

Annika nodded. ‘And you’re Suzette?’

The girl smiled broadly. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and trainers. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Annika studied the sixteen-year-old. She was clearly happy and healthy, didn’t seem to have been suffering. ‘I wanted to see if you were here. A lot of people are looking for you.’

Her face darkened. ‘No one cares,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

‘Your mum’s really worried about you.’

The girl walked away from the door and threw herself onto one of the leather sofas. ‘She only cares about her pathetic job. I just got in the way, and I cost too much money.’

She half lay on the sofa with one leg dangling over the armrest. Annika sat in silence and waited for the girl’s curiosity to build up again.

‘No one knows I’m here. How did you know?’

Suzette was evidently aware that she was being kept hidden. She probably wasn’t supposed to be in the library.

‘The most important question is probably
why
you’re here,’ Annika said. ‘And how you got here.’

Suzette shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Do you want to interview me?’

‘If you want to be interviewed.’

‘Ha!’ She threw her head back. ‘Fatima would never agree to that. I’m not allowed to tell anyone where I am.’

‘Why not?’ Annika asked. ‘Are you a prisoner?’

Suzette picked at her fingernails, but she was still smiling. ‘Fatima came to get me,’ she said. ‘She told me to tell everyone I was going somewhere else, and then we came here.’

Whatever the reason the girl was being kept out of the way, it didn’t seem to be anything that bothered her: that much was abundantly clear. What she was saying was probably true. Francis, the tennis coach, had said that Suzette was too disorganized to plan any sort of disappearing act.

‘But you didn’t have your passport with you,’ Annika said.

Suzette sat up on the sofa, annoyed, dropping her trainers to the floor. ‘Fatima’s got her own boats, hasn’t she? She doesn’t have to go through Passport Control. She uses her own private harbour.’

Is that so? Annika thought. ‘And you’ve been here ever since?’

The girl nodded.

‘Do you want to be here?’

She stopped nodding and sat still. ‘You know what happened?’ she asked, her eyes filling with tears. ‘The gas?’