‘How’s Zine?’ Annika asked.
Amira’s beautiful face twitched. ‘He died,’ she said. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow. This way. There are some back stairs.’
She led them up the same narrow stone staircase that Annika and Ahmed had gone up the previous night. The lamps in the walls were much brighter now that the floodlights on the wall weren’t on. ‘The window in your room’s broken,’ she said to Annika.
‘I know. My bag’s in there. Can I go and get it?’
She nodded. ‘The door’s open. Suzette and I have prepared the big room for you. It’s much nicer, and it’s got lights. Here’s the bathroom.’ She gestured to a door beside her.
Annika and Nina glanced at each other, then stepped into the bedroom they would be sharing. Annika made sure the door was left ajar. No one locked it.
The room was certainly a lot bigger than her previous cell. It had two large beds, with lamps, a big desk, two armchairs and lights in the ceiling.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Nina said. She disappeared into the bathroom.
Annika put her things down on one of the beds and went out into the corridor, back to her former cell. When she opened the door, the floor was soaked. The french windows were swinging slowly in the wind. The mattress was hanging off the bed from when she had pulled off the sheets, but her bag was still on the end of it. She splashed through the water and picked it up. Beneath it was the white book with the black lettering on the cover.
A Place in the Sun, by Siv Hoffman.
She picked up the book and put it into her bag, then went back to the bedroom.
She left the door ajar, sat on the bed and checked her mobile. It must have been on the whole time, because the battery was low and she had three missed calls. Thomas, then Anders Schyman, then Thomas again.
She had two new voicemails. The first was from her editor-in-chief, and it was short and to the point: ‘I assume you didn’t send those articles from your sickbed. Call me.’
The second was from Thomas, slow and hesitant: ‘Hello, Annika, it’s me … Well, I know I said I’d call you … well, you know … but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Annika, I really have, and I was wondering … can you call me? Soon? When you get this. Call my mobile, that would be best. Okay. ‘Bye …’
She clicked to end the message and held the phone to her chest.
How strange he’d sounded. Surely nothing had happened to the children. He would have said if it had, wouldn’t he?
She sat still for a moment, listening, as the water ran in the shower. Quickly she closed the door, then sat on the bed again, took a few quick breaths and pressed ‘call’. ‘I got your message,’ she said quietly, when he answered.
‘Good, hi, thanks for getting back to me,’ he said, sounding very official. ‘Can you hold on a moment?’
‘Sure,’ Annika said.
The water stopped in the bathroom. There was a clatter at the other end of the line, then a door closing, and now there was an echo, as if Thomas had gone out into the stairwell.
‘Hello? Annika?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Listen, this isn’t a good time, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I really want to talk to you. Can we meet up?’
She cleared her throat and heard the toilet flush on the other side of the wall. ‘I’m not in Stockholm,’ she said. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘I think this is a big mistake,’ he said.
Annika closed her eyes. ‘What’s a mistake?’
‘The divorce,’ he said quietly.
She opened her eyes, then her mouth, but no words came out.
‘Annika?’
Nina came into the room with a towel round her hair and another wrapped round her body. ‘There’s not much hot water left,’ she said.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Away on a job,’ she said. ‘Your message sounded so urgent that I wanted to call straight away. Can I call you when I get back to Stockholm?’
‘Sure.’
They were silent.
Nina unrolled her turban and shook her hair loose. She put the wet towel over the armchair and stood in the middle of the room.
‘One last thing,’ Annika said. ‘Are you standing in the stairwell on Grev Turegatan?’
‘Er, yes. Why?’
She rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. So he was sitting at home, all cosy with his new partner, then, when his ex-wife called, he had crept out into the stairwell to tell her he regretted getting divorced. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
They hung up.
‘It didn’t help,’ Nina said. ‘I still feel just as filthy.’
She seemed as together as she always was.
Annika switched off her mobile: she didn’t have her charger with her and needed to save the battery. Then she reached for her bag and pulled out the white book. ‘Suzette found this in the library,’ she said. She went over to Nina’s bed and put it in front of her. ‘Have you seen it before?’
‘ “A Place in the Sun, by Siv Hoffman”,’ Nina read, as she picked it up. ‘What is it?’
‘Read it, especially the chapter entitled “Death on the Beach”. See if you think what it says could be true. I’m going to have a shower.’
The water was lukewarm, and she washed with some Wella shampoo she found on the shelf. She dried herself, put on her clean underwear, then went back into the bedroom, crossed to the french windows and looked out. Unlike her cell, this room faced away from the farmyard. The moon had risen over the hilly landscape, shimmering in the wetness of the leaves in the fields. Cannabis sativa. Since prehistoric times mankind had grown the plant, using it for rope, textiles, birdseed, a high-energy grain, a medicine and as a means of getting high. She turned back into the room as Nina closed the book, her head bowed.
‘What do you think?’ Annika asked. ‘Could it be true?’
Nina tossed the book to the end of the bed, as if it had scorched her. ‘No idea.’
‘And you’ve never seen it before?’
‘Mum didn’t have a copy, I’m sure.’
‘Even though she wrote it?’
‘I went through all her possessions when she died. There was no book like this among them.’
Annika picked it up. ‘If it’s true, I can’t imagine Astrid just left her copy sitting about on a bookshelf. Which means this must be Hannelore’s.’ She nodded to herself. ‘That would explain how it got here. David found the book and brought it with him.’ She leafed through it, and her eyes caught on the sentence ‘And she would float and dance over Gudagården like the blessed child she was, conceived without sin with the approbation of the Lord.’
‘How much do you really know about your mother’s childhood?’
Nina stood up and paced restlessly around the room. ‘What does anyone ever really know about their parents?’
‘How about when they were grown-up? Astrid and Hannelore and your mother?’
Nina sat down again. ‘Before I was born, Mum worked with Astrid on the Costa del Sol. I don’t know what she did there.’
Annika went back to her bed. She put the book on the floor.
‘I was three when Mum and I moved. I have no memories of the Costa del Sol. We ended up in Tenerife, in an artists’ collective where people made pots and painted sunsets and smoked grass. Mum called herself a poet …’ Nina stopped and let out a little laugh. ‘A poet, bloody hell …’
‘Your brother and sister, they didn’t go with you to Tenerife?’ Annika asked.
‘They stayed with Astrid in Marbella. They were both almost grown-up by then – Filip was twenty-two, Yvonne sixteen. Astrid paid for their education and they both became economists. I missed them.’ Nina pulled her hair into a ponytail, securing it with a rubber band. ‘I don’t know why we moved. Maybe Mum wanted to get away from Astrid or Astrid kicked her out.’
‘Why would Astrid have done that?’
Nina slumped slightly. �
��Mum had problems with various dependencies,’ she said. ‘She never got over them. Once we moved to Södermanland she stuck to drink, and meths towards the end, but she used drugs of one sort or another through the whole of her adult life.’
‘Did you ever meet Astrid?’
Nina thought for a moment. ‘She came to visit us in Tenerife a few times. But Mum talked about her quite a bit, and about Hannelore, always when she was drunk. All I know about Veronica, Astrid, David, Torsten and Hannelore comes from Mum’s drunken ramblings. She missed Astrid a lot.’
‘Did you see much of Hannelore?’
Nina shook her head. ‘Never.’
‘How involved was Hannelore in Astrid’s business dealings?’
‘Not much. She’s always been mentally unstable, but Torsten, her partner, acted as a kind of travelling salesman for the organization.’
‘For their drugs racket,’ Annika said. ‘That’s what it was, after all.’
They sat in silence for a while.
‘I read your article in the paper today,’ Nina said. ‘About the jet-set Swedish woman who murdered Astrid and her family.’
Annika straightened. ‘It was in the paper?’
‘There was hardly anything else – it was on loads of pages. Who is she?’
So the email hadn’t only arrived, it had fallen on fertile ground. ‘Carita Halling Gonzales, a very good actress. She fooled everyone around her, possibly even herself. No one’s that good at pretending. I’ve done a lot of thinking about her.’ Annika shuddered.
Silence descended, until Nina said, ‘I knew David had another family.’
Annika started. ‘What? You’ve known about it all these years?’
‘Yvonne told me, but I didn’t believe her.’ Nina was looking straight ahead. ‘It was more than five years ago now. I knew she was infatuated with David – it had been a kind of obsession since they were little. I asked her to leave Julia alone.’ She fingered her hair. ‘That was when she told me that David had another family, a wife and three daughters. He could have several wives, four, according to the Koran, but Yvonne considered that she was his first wife, even though they weren’t married. She was the one who’d got to him first. I thought she’d gone mad.’ Nina pushed her hair off her face. ‘So I broke off all contact. That was the last time I ever spoke to her.’
‘And then,’ Annika said, ‘some small-time crooks tried to get their hands on the drug-money. Was it Filip who murdered those people on Sankt Paulsgatan? Or was it Yvonne?’
Nina stood up and went to the window. ‘Does it matter? They’re both dead.’
Annika looked at her stiff back, her straight shoulders, the ponytail that had dried to a perfectly straight whip. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
Nina raised both arms and pressed her palms to her forehead hard. ‘Fucking bitch,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘She vanished into her hash-clouds, or the bottom of a bottle, and dumped it all on me.’
Annika waited, but Nina didn’t go on. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What did she dump on you?’
Nina’s stiff back seemed to relax slightly. ‘I grew up without my brother and sister, without any sense of belonging, but it was still up to me to make sure we all stuck together. She just grabbed me and left.’
‘Maybe she wanted to spare you from a place in the sun.’ Nina didn’t answer.
Annika picked the book up from the floor. ‘Do you know where Gudagården is?’
Nina swayed and grabbed the window-frame for support. ‘I grew up there. Mum inherited it. We moved there when Gunnar and Helga died – that was why we left Tenerife. Mum was the only heir. They’d written a will saying they wanted everything to go to the church, but it hadn’t been witnessed properly and was declared invalid.’
Annika waited in silence for her to go on.
‘Mum hated the farm,’ Nina said. ‘I could never understand why she didn’t sell it. It was always eating away at her from the inside.’
‘Is there a lake nearby?’
‘Spetebysjön is just below Gudagården. Or Solgården, as Mum renamed the farm. It’s between Ekeby and Solvik, not far from Valla.’
‘I know Valla,’ Annika said. ‘One of my school-friends lived there, on Häringevägen.’
‘The farm’s on the same side of the railway line, on the road down towards Björkvik.’
‘Now I know where it is,’ Annika said.
Nina looked out into the darkness. ‘Just below the farm there’s a lake with a little sandy beach next to a big oak,’ she said tonelessly. ‘It’s huge. But Mum used to say it was dangerous there, that there were strange currents and quicksand.’ She went over to the bed and picked up the book. ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Could this be true? Was that why I was never allowed to swim there?’
Annika put her hand on Nina’s arm. ‘There’s one way to find out,’ she said.
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 sh
e 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.
Epilogue
AFTER MIDSUMMER
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 lowlying 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.
The Long Shadow Page 44
