The Long Shadow (56 page)

A knock on the door made them jump. They looked quickly at each other.

‘Come in,’ Nina said.

The door opened and Suzette and Amira came into the bedroom.

‘Hello,’ Suzette said. ‘Can we come in?’

‘Sure,’ Annika said.

The girls stopped just inside the door.

‘Don’t you want to sit down?’ Annika said, gesturing towards the two armchairs.

They took one each. Nina adjusted her position on the bed.

‘Did you want anything in particular?’ Annika asked.

Amira nudged Suzette.

‘Fatima says I can go home now,’ Suzette said. ‘I don’t have to stay at the farm, because there’s no danger any more. But I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, and Fatima says I can if I want.’

Annika looked at her seriously. ‘Your mum back in Sweden has a right to know where you are.’

Suzette nodded. ‘I know. That’s why I want to tell them that they don’t have to look for me now. I don’t want to tell them exactly where I am, but I’d like to be able to send emails to Polly and call Mum …’ She took a deep breath and her eyes filled with tears. ‘I miss my mum,’ she said, ‘and I’d like to visit her, maybe next summer, when I’m grown-up. But I don’t want to live with her in that flat. I just want her to know that I’m okay, and that I’ll go back and visit …’

Annika remembered Polly’s message on Facebook, about Lenita selling the flat and throwing Suzette’s things away. ‘Would you like me to say all this in the paper?’ she asked.

The girl nodded.

‘Have you really thought through what it would mean, staying here? Will you be able to go to school?’

Suzette shuffled in the chair, annoyed. ‘Abbas is going to be the new foreman, taking over from Zine. I can go round with him and learn how to run the farm. It’ll be like being an apprentice.’

Annika moved to the edge of the bed. ‘Suzette,’ she said, ‘do you know what they grow on this farm?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘And you think it’s okay to train to become a hash farmer?’

Amira flew up from her chair. ‘My family’s grown hemp on this land for two hundred years,’ she said angrily. ‘Why should we stop, just because the European Commission says we should? They can’t make decisions about our lives.’ The girl had clenched her fists.

‘So you think it’s a good life, growing dope?’

‘I’m going to be an economist,’ Amira said. ‘My sister’s going to be a lawyer, and we’re going to help run the farm and Mum’s business.’

‘Do you think your dad would have wanted that?
You and Sabrina and Maryam working with this sort of thing?’

‘Maryam has a different dad,’ she said, ‘a bad man from Sweden who violated Mum. But my dad killed him and married Mum, and saved our family’s honour.’

Annika stared at the girl, thoughts racing through her head. ‘A different dad? Was his name Torsten?’

‘Dad did what was right for the family. He’d be really proud of me.’

Annika lowered her eyes. When she raised them again she turned to Suzette. ‘We’ll sit down together first thing in the morning, and work out exactly what we’re going to say in the article. And then I want to take a picture of you with your horse, so we can show that you’re fit and well.’

Suzette was smiling broadly.

Together the girls walked out of the room and closed the door behind them.

‘So you got your article,’ Nina said, and Annika couldn’t tell if there was resignation or sarcasm in her voice.

‘And everything goes on,’ Annika said.

The sky was grey as lead. The light that found its way through the banks of cloud was dull and filtered to the point where only a dubious sort of daylight remained.

Annika parked the newspaper’s Volvo beside the road. She switched off the engine, got out and stretched her back. She looked both ways along the deserted country road. This ought to be the right place.

Between Ekeby and Solvik, not far from Valla. On the same side of the railway line, on the road down towards Björkvik.

She gazed at the traditional red-painted houses that lay scattered across the landscape, wondering which had once been known as Gudagården. She squinted in the thin light, trying to see the lake. There it was. It was actually visible from the road. Spetebysjön, between Stensjön and Långhalsen, one of the thousands of lakes and waterways in Södermanland, her low-lying home province with its oaks and fences and meadows.

She locked the car with a click of the remote, hung her bag on her shoulder and started to walk along a ditch towards the water.

The ground was soft and smelt of grass and cow-shit. The wet soaked into her trainers. She should have brought wellingtons.

She caught sight of the police forensics team and the cordon in the distance. The blue and white tape and the bright yellow tarpaulins were the only flashes of colour among all the grey-green. There were four officers, two digging and two checking the soil that was coming out.

Nina was standing some way from the cordon, wearing army-green rubber boots from Tretorn. A few curious onlookers from nearby farms had defied the grey weather to come and see what was going on.

‘Have they found anything?’ Annika asked.

Nina shook her head. She was staring implacably at the police officers who were digging soil and sand from the beach behind the oak tree. ‘How did you manage to get them out here?’ she asked.

‘I said I’d received a tip-off,’ Annika said, ‘and that the caller wanted to stay anonymous. They can’t do anything about that. They’re not even allowed to ask me who it was because that would be a breach of the constitution.’

‘I read your articles about Suzette.’

‘The constitution’s come in handy there as well. Her mother called me, in a complete state, demanding to know where she is.’

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘Is everything okay otherwise?’ Annika asked.

‘I’m on temporary secondment as a duty officer for the summer.’

‘Do you know if anyone’s heard anything from Carita Halling Gonzales?’

‘Not a sound.’

Annika took a step closer to her and lowered her voice. ‘Has anyone reported Filip Andersson missing?’

Nina’s shoulders stiffened. ‘A young man called from Gibraltar. Apparently Filip was supposed to be taking over some sort of law firm.’

Henry Hollister, Annika thought.

‘And his lawyer’s called twice, something about his claim for damages. I told him exactly what had happened, that Filip had contacted me to ask if I could speed up his passport application, but that I wasn’t able to help him. There’s been no official report that he’s disappeared.’

‘And the others?’

‘I don’t know.’

Annika looked out across the lake. ‘And Julia? How are she and Alexander?’

‘Alexander’s started back at nursery school. Apparently it’s going very well. He plays with his old friends as though nothing ever happened.’

‘What about his tantrums?’

‘They don’t happen as often now.’

They fell silent again.

In the end Annika cleared her throat. ‘Have you said anything to Julia? About Fatima?’

‘No,’ Nina said. ‘Moroccan marriages aren’t registered automatically by the Swedish authorities. It’s up to individuals to tell the tax office that they’re married, and David never did. But of course he was married, which invalidates his marriage to Julia. Which in turn means that she wouldn’t be counted as his next of kin.’

Annika tried to follow her train of thought.

‘And that would mean she isn’t entitled to his life insurance, which is all she’s got to live on.’

‘Precisely.’

Nina looked at her. ‘Didn’t the paper want to know where you’d been? When you met Suzette?’

Annika chuckled. ‘They don’t care where I’ve been. The only thing that interests them is where they can send me. They’ve just asked if I’d like to be the paper’s Washington correspondent.’

Nina raised her eyebrows. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Impressive.’

‘Not really,’ Annika said. ‘It’s mainly about getting me as far away from the newsroom as possible.’

‘How’s that going to work with the children?’ Nina asked. ‘Are you going to leave them in Sweden?’

Annika hunched her shoulders against the wind coming off the lake. ‘Thomas might come as well,’ she said. ‘It’s possible that the department will have a new policy proposal for him to—’

She was interrupted by cries and shouting from the beach. There was frenetic activity in the excavated pit. The officers were making calls on their mobiles and their radios were crackling.

The onlookers around them moved as one towards the cordon. Nina and Annika followed.

The two officers with the shovels had dug so deep that their heads were scarcely visible over the edge of the hole.

‘Could three young girls really have dug down that far in one night?’ Annika whispered.

‘They were used to hard physical labour,’ Nina said quietly. ‘Sowing and harvesting and gathering hay …’

‘Is it true, then?’ a man called. ‘Have you found a body down there?’

One of the police officers who had been checking the excavated soil came over to the onlookers. ‘It looks like we’ve found human remains.’

‘Who is it?’ an old woman asked from a distance.

‘We don’t yet know what sex the body is, or how long it’s been here. It’ll be up to the forensics team and the pathologist to work that out.’

‘Could it be my brother?’ the woman cried. ‘Could it be Sigfrid Englund?’

The police officer went to her. ‘Was he reported missing?’

‘He’s been missing since 1953, when he was twenty-one years old. He was raised as a foster-child on a neighbouring farm.’

Annika began to head back towards the car.

Nina hurried after her. ‘Aren’t you going to write about this?’

‘I’ll leave that to the local paper,’ Annika replied.

This is fiction. All events and characters depicted are entirely the creation of my possibly somewhat morbid imagination.

But, as in all my novels, the events, physical locations, and laws and regulations are often, but not always, grounded in reality. As a result, I have, as usual, conducted some research.

I would therefore like to thank the people I bothered with numerous hypothetical questions. Their titles below refer to the positions they held at the time of my investigation.

For information about the European drugs trade, and how narcotics are smuggled and distributed, I would like to thank Rolf M. Øyen, police attaché at the Norwegian Embassy in Madrid and also Nordic liaison officer for Malaga, as well as Detective Inspector Göran Karlsson and Detective Superintendent Jan Magnusson of the regional narcotics unit in Stockholm. I would also like to thank the drug-squad officers working undercover whose names I can’t reveal here: I’ve thanked them in person.

Kent Madstedt, Chief District Prosecutor at the Financial Crime Authority in Stockholm, for explaining how money-laundering and financial crimes are carried out in Europe.

Joakim Caryll of the information department of Stockholm Police, for help with contacts.

Hampus Lilja, judge referee to the Supreme Court, for information about how decisions are reached regarding applications for a retrial.

Fredrik Berg from the Office of the Prosecutor General, and public relations officer for the Public Prosecution Authority, for help with the procedures and formulations used in decisions of the Prosecutor General.

Anders Sjöberg, Detective Inspector for Interpol in Stockholm, for information about the criteria for international alerts via Interpol, both for missing people and suspects.

Anna Block Mazoyer, counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Rabat, Morocco, for information about registers covering people and property in Morocco.

I would like to thank Peter Rönnerfalk, chief medical officer at Stockholm County Council, for ongoing help with a whole range of things, but in this instance particularly for information about narcotic gases, naloxone and fatal doses of morphine.

Thomas Bodström, of course, chair of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Justice, for proofreading and discussions on judicial and political matters.

Anna Rönnerfalk, psychiatric nurse, for help with the diagnosis and symptoms of patients suffering severe mental stress.

Niclas Salomonsson, my agent, and his staff at Salomonsson Agency in Stockholm.

Emma Buckley, my British editor, all the dedicated staff at Transworld Publishers and of course Neil Smith, who translated it all into English.

Tove Alsterdal, my editor, obviously, who has been involved the whole way through, from start to finish, as always. Thank you for being there.

And, always, Micke Aspberg, my love throughout all these years, for everything else.

Any mistakes or errors which have crept in are entirely my own.

Liza Marklund
is an author, publisher, journalist, columnist, and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Her crime novels featuring the relentless reporter Annika Bengtzon instantly became an international hit, and Marklund’s books have sold over 15 million copies in 30 languages to date. She has achieved the unique feat of being a number one bestseller in all five Nordic countries, as well as the USA.

She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the inaugural Petrona award for best Scandinavian crime novel of the year 2013 for
Last Will
, as well as a nomination for the Glass Key for best Scandinavian crime novel.

Neil Smith
studied Scandinavian Studies at University College London, and lived in Stockholm for several years. He now lives in Norfolk.

LIFETIME

LAST WILL

VANISHED

THE BOMBER

EXPOSED

RED WOLF

POSTCARD KILLERS

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THE LONG SHADOW
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552161961 (B format)
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409043461