The Long Shadow

by Liza Marklund

  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.

  30

  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.’

  She seemed so grown-up. ‘And now you think she’s got in touch?’ Annika said.

  Polly nodded. ‘Do you want anything? I can go and get it.’

  Annika took out her purse and handed Polly a hundred-kronor note. ‘Just a glass of water for me, please.’

  The girl went off to the counter, which was actually a rusty metal table. Annika watched her. She must be sixteen, maybe seventeen, but seemed older. She returned with a glass of water, ice and lemon, and a cup of green tea for herself. She looked rather apologetic. ‘I know it was a bit silly of me,’ she said. ‘What I said last time.’

  Annika arched an eyebrow.

  ‘When I asked if you thought there was email in Heaven. Of course there isn’t, I know that. I suppose I was just hoping …’ She struggled onto a stool. She wasn’t particularly tall, about the same height as Annika. ‘This time I know it’s for real. Suz is alive,’ she said, calm and focused.

  ‘Have
you got your computer with you?’ Annika asked.

  Polly pulled a laptop out of her rucksack. ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a student council meeting.’

  She started the laptop up, logged in, did a bit of clicking, then turned the screen towards Annika. It was covered with a picture of a smiling, black-haired girl hugging a chestnut horse. ‘There’s free Wi-Fi here,’ Polly said. ‘Hang on, I’ll log in.’

  ‘That’s a lovely picture of Suzette,’ Annika said.

  ‘The horse’s name is Sultan – he was her favourite. The riding-school’s sold him now.’

  The screen flickered and a hotmail page appeared below Windows Live. A banner at the top advertised some science magazine. Immediately below that, on the right-hand side, she saw the email address for Gunnar Larsson. The darker blue marker on the left was highlighting ‘sent’. There were two messages. They had been sent to Polly’s yahoo address, the first at the end of March, and the second at 14.37 the previous day, 13 June.

  ‘So this is Gunnar Larsson’s email account,’ Annika said. ‘The one you and Suzette set up to send dirty messages to girls in your class.’

  Polly nodded. ‘We deleted all the messages after Gunnar left,’ she said, shamefaced.

  ‘But you kept the account?’

  ‘We didn’t know how to close it down.’

  Annika clicked on the first message, from March.

  Empty.

  Then she clicked on the one from the day before.

  Hi Polly, you cant tell anyone about this email. You cant say anything to mum and DEFINITELY NOT the police. Theres no internet at the farm so i havent been able to email. Im at an internet cafe now. They dont know where i am, and Fatima would be furious if she knew I was writing.

  Im with Amira. Ive been here since new year. Ive got my own horse called Larache. Hes lovely, a mix of English and Arabian thoroughbred. Is Adde with anyone else? Dont tell Adde ive been in touch. You can answer this but I dont know when ill read it. We only go places like Asilah, but not very often.

  Big hug from suz

  Annika read the message twice. Evidently it had been written on a fairly basic keyboard, without any Swedish characters. Asilah sounded like a place … It seemed vaguely familiar. Where had she heard its name before?

  ‘Do you think it’s genuine?’ she asked. ‘Is this how Suzette usually expresses herself?’

  Polly took a sip of her green tea and nodded. ‘She always writes big hug, and Suz with a small s.’

  ‘Who are the people she mentions? Fatima, Amira and Adde?’

  A shadow passed quickly over Polly’s face, unless Annika was imagining it.

  ‘Amira’s Suz’s best friend. That’s what she used to say, as if those of us here at home didn’t count. I think Fatima’s her mother. Adde is Suz’s boyfriend. Well, maybe not boyfriend, they weren’t really together. It was mostly that Suz had a crush on him. Adde’s always got loads of girls …’

  ‘What about Amira?’ Annika asked. ‘How come she’s Suz’s best friend?’

  ‘Her summer friend. Suz spent a lot of time on their farm when she was little. They’re the same age.’

  ‘Where? In Spain?’

  Polly shook her head. ‘Morocco. They’ve got a farm there.’

  ‘Do you know where it is? The place she mentions, Asilah?’

  Polly shrugged and pushed her cup aside.

  ‘But how do they talk to each other?’ Annika asked. ‘They speak French and Arabic in Morocco, and Suzette couldn’t really speak English, could she?’

  Polly looked indignant. ‘Of course she can speak English.’

  ‘Does she speak English with Amira?’

  Polly shook her head and turned the laptop round to face her.

  ‘Swedish, obviously.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Annika said. ‘Can I forward this to my own email?’

  Polly hesitated. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I promised to tell you if she got in touch. I have to go now.’

  ‘They speak Swedish to each other? How come?’

  ‘Amira’s half Swedish, isn’t she? Her dad’s from Sweden. Her surname’s Lindholm.’

  All the noise around Annika faded. ‘Lindholm?’ she said. ‘Her dad’s surname is Lindholm? Do you know what his first name is?’

  Polly put her laptop back in her rucksack and shrugged again. ‘No idea. I don’t think he lives on the farm.’

  ‘Could his name be David? Do you know if he was a policeman?’

  The girl was pulling her rucksack back on now. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.

  ‘Of course you can,’ Annika said.

  ‘Don’t say anything about this to anyone. Promise.’

  Annika looked at the serious young woman with the blonde hair, so different from the heavily made-up, black-haired girl on Facebook. ‘I won’t say anything,’ she said. ‘And I won’t write anything either. I promise.’

  They shook hands, then Polly disappeared out of the door.

  Annika gave her two minutes, then followed her. She left the noise of the hellish café behind her with a sigh of relief.

  Suzette was alive; she was on a farm somewhere in the Moroccan countryside, where there was a girl of the same age whose surname was Lindholm.

  She stopped on the street, fished out her mobile, called International Directory Enquiries and asked to be put through to the Swedish Embassy in Rabat, Morocco.

  An automated answerphone message clicked in. A long harangue in French mostly explained the opening hours for the visa section, and telephone times for other business. Annika had trouble keeping up – her French was almost as bad as her Spanish – but it was already too late to get any information that day. She’d have to try again tomorrow.

  She looked towards Kungsholmen. She ought to go back to the paper and tell them that Filip Andersson wasn’t talking. People were sweeping past her, bumping into her, catching her bag, standing on her toes, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying to lunch or the dry-cleaner or a meeting. Buses squealed and cars splashed through muddy puddles.

  She looked towards Hamngatan. Writing up that worthless press conference would take thirty seconds. She raised her mobile and dialled Julia Lindholm’s home number on Bondegatan.

  She and Alexander were in, and Annika was more than welcome to pay them a visit.

  Their flat was on the third floor of a rather dull 1960s block. The stairwell was dark and smelt musty. The only thing that looked new was the sign saying LINDHOLM on the letterbox. The police must have smashed the old one when they broke into the flat after David was murdered, Annika thought.

  She rang the bell and heard a distant ding-dong echo on the other side of the wall.

  ‘Welcome,’ Julia said, throwing the door wide. ‘How lovely of you to come and see us! Isn’t it, Alexander?’

  The boy, who had grown at a phenomenal rate during the spring, was standing in the doorway to his room. He didn’t answer.

  Annika dropped her bag in the hall and hung her jacket on a hook. Then she went over to Alexander and crouched beside him. ‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said. ‘Is it nice being able to play in your own room again?’

  He went into it and closed the door.

  ‘He’ll start back at his old nursery school next week,’ Julia said. ‘The therapists have decided he’s ready. Have you been here before?’

  Annika shook her head.

  ‘There’s not much to see, but my parents have redecorated and made it nice while Alexander and I were at Lejongården. This is the kitchen.’

  She gestured towards a very ordinary sixties-style kitchen with painted cupboards and a scratched stainless-steel worktop.

  ‘It suits the building well,’ Annika said.

  ‘Yes, doesn’t it? I really like it. And here’s the living room …’

  It had oak parquet-flooring, a television and windows facing in two directions. ‘We haven’t got a balcony,’ Julia said, ‘which is a bit of a shame. It’s really the only thing I wish was different. My
bedroom …’ She opened the door to the room where her husband had been murdered. The bed was neatly made. The curtains were open. If David had done errands for the Mafia in return for money, he hadn’t spent it on his home, Annika thought.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Julia said. ‘How can I sleep in here?’

  Annika took a deep breath and was about to protest, but breathed out instead.

  ‘He’s gone, but we’re still here. There’s no way round that,’ Julia said. ‘Have you had lunch?’

  Annika shook her head.

  ‘I was thinking of doing meatballs and mashed potato. Frozen meatballs and instant mash, but it does the job. Would you like some?’

  ‘Thanks, yes.’

  They went back out into the hall. Annika could hear banging from inside Alexander’s room.

  ‘He’s decided to build a flying saucer,’ Julia said. ‘The therapists say I should let him do what he wants.’

  Annika sat down at the kitchen table while Julia got out a packet of powdered potato and a bag of meatballs. ‘How’s he getting on?’ Annika asked.

  Julia took a while to answer. ‘He isn’t the same boy as before, although I don’t really know what I was expecting. After all, he was a whole year younger then.’ She stopped, holding a spatula in front of her face. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t really matter. I’m just so grateful that I’ve got him back.’ She went back to the meatballs. They were soon sizzling in a frying-pan with some melted margarine. The sound was soothing and homely, the kitchen freshly painted and tidy, and Julia was humming bits of an unidentifiable song.

  This ought to feel nice, Annika thought, but something about it jars. The irregular banging sounds coming from the boy’s room, perhaps, or possibly the Spartan furnishings. Maybe it was just the echo of all David’s lies. He had never been under cover on the Costa del Sol. But there was no such thing as ghosts.

  ‘How are you managing financially?’ she asked, trying not to sound too intrusive.

  ‘The flat’s freehold, and we inherited that, but there were no savings. David had life insurance, payable to those he left behind, and that’s me, Alexander and Hannelore, of course. It was actually quite a lot of money, so that’s what we’re living off at the moment.’