The Long Shadow Read online

  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.

  Also by Liza Marklund

  LIFETIME

  LAST WILL

  VANISHED

  THE BOMBER

  EXPOSED

  RED WOLF

  By Liza Marklund and James Patterson

  POSTCARD KILLERS

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2013

  Copyright © 2008 Liza Marklund

  Translation copyright © 2013 Neil Smith

  Published by agreement with Salomonsson Agency

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2013, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Transworld, a division of The Random House Group, London. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Marklund, Liza, 1962–

  The long shadow / Liza Marklund; translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith.

  (The Annika Bengtzon mystery series)

  Translation of: En plats i solen.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-35858-5

  I. Smith, Neil II. Title. III. Series: Marklund, Liza, 1962–. Annika Bengtzon mystery series.

  PT9876.23.A653P5313 2013 839.73′74 C2013-901517-5

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1: After New Year Monday, 3 January Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Tuesday, 4 January Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Wednesday, 5 January Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, 6 January Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Friday, 7 January Chapter 13

  Saturday, 8 January Chapter 14

  Part 2: After Easter Tuesday, 26 April Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday, 27 April Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Thursday, 28 April Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Friday, 29 April Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Saturday, 30 April Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 3: After Whitsun Tuesday, 14 June Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Wednesday, 15 June Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Thursday, 16 June Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue: After Midsummer

  Acknowledgements

  Part 1

  AFTER NEW YEAR

  Nueva Andalucía: 03.14

  The night was pitch-black. She could just make out the orange trees lining the road as black shadows on the edge of her vision. Three cats’ heads stuck up out of a rubbish bin, the headlights catching their eyes.

  The rain had stopped but the tarmac was still wet and shiny, reflecting the light from the streetlamps. She had the car window open and was listening to the wet hiss of the tyres on the road, the crickets chirping, the wind rustling the trees. The air was damp and chilly.

  It was as peaceful as could be.

  She braked and stopped uncertainly at a crossroads. Was this where she was supposed to turn left, or was it the next one? She was clutching the steering-wheel in a cramped ten-to-two grip. All this random building work – no town planning, no regulations and therefore no maps. Not even Google Earth had been able to help with the new districts.

  Well, this must be it. She recognized the golden knobs at the top of the gate to her right. Everything looked so different in the dark. She put the indicator on so that the truck behind her could see which way she was heading.

  The two vehicles were driving with dipped headlights. Anything else would have been impossible on such terrible roads. And a car with no lights would arouse more suspicion than one with headlights on. She swerved to avoid a large pothole in the middle of the road, then checked in the rear-view mirror that the driver following her did the same.

  The car’s headlights swept across the gateway at the edge of the estate, an overblown affair in black wrought iron with a pair of concrete lions on either side, and her shoulders relaxed. She tapped the code into the pad on the pillar below one of the lions, and the gates slid open. She peered up at the night sky.

  The clouds had rolled in from Africa during the afternoon and settled like a thick blanket over the whole coast. Somewhere behind them was a full moon. She noted that the wind was picking up and hoped they’d be finished before the cloud cover started to break.

  The roads inside the gates were, in marked contrast to those outside, smooth, with perfectly edged pavements and neatly trimmed hedges. She passed three turnings before she swung to the right and carried on down a slight hill.

  The villa was to the left, its terraces and pool facing south.

  She drove some ten metres past the house, parked by the pavement in front of a vacant plot and waited patiently as the truck driver pulled up behind her. Then she took her briefcase, locked the car, went to the truck and climbed up into the cab beside the two men.

  She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took out the syringes and attached the first needle. ‘Lean forward,’ she said to the first man. He groaned quietly and obeyed – there was barely room for his belly under the dashboard. She didn’t bother cleaning the area on his buttock, just stabbed the needle into the muscle. ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Start unloading.’

  She moved so that he could get out. Then she sat next to the driver.

  ‘And this is better than gas-masks?’ the driver asked, staring in some trepidation at the needle in her hand. He spoke relatively good Spanish but, of course, Romanian was also a Latin language.

  ‘I’ll be having one as well,’ she said.

  He unbuckled his belt, put his hands on the wheel and leaned forward so that she could get at his backside. ‘It stings,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

  Then she pulled up her skirt and stuck the last syringe into her thigh.

  ‘And you only want the safe?’ the man asked, as he opened the door and got out.

  She smiled, leaned down over the briefcase and put two litre bottles of San Miguel in the little cubby-hole between the driver’s and the passengers’ seats.

  ‘Only the safe,’ she said. ‘Th
e rest is yours. Help yourselves.’

  The driver looked at the beer and laughed.

  The fat man had got his tools and the tubes out, and had put them beside the gate to the house. ‘And you can guarantee that this’ll knock them out?’ he wondered, regarding the canisters with a degree of suspicion. They didn’t look like they usually did. He peered up at the house as the full moon shone from a gap in the clouds. They needed to get going.

  She concentrated and tapped in the code to open the gate. The panel on the alarm turned green and the lock clicked. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It’s guaranteed to knock them out.’

  TT News Agency, 09.13

  URGENT

  ATTORNEY GENERAL DEMANDS JUDICIAL REVIEW OF TRIPLE-MURDER CASE

  STOCKHOLM (TT) On Monday, Attorney General Lilian Bergqvist will submit a request for the judicial review of the case against the so-called Axe Murderer, financier Filip Andersson, TT has learned.

  Filip Andersson was sentenced to life imprisonment for three brutal murders on Södermalm in Stockholm. He has always maintained his innocence.

  ‘In December last year, once the real murderer was killed, Filip Andersson was finally able to tell the truth,’ says his lawyer, Sven-Göran Olin. ‘Filip’s sister, Yvonne Nordin, carried out the murders.’

  Almost four years ago Filip Andersson was found guilty in both the City Court and Court of Appeal, and received the maximum sentence available for three counts of murder, blackmail, extortion and desecration of a grave. All three victims, two men and a woman, were mutilated during the attack.

  The evidence against Filip Andersson was regarded as weak even during the previous trials. He was convicted on the strength of a DNA trace from one of the victims on his trouser leg, a fingerprint on a door handle and an unpaid debt.

  The attorney general’s submission to the Court of Appeal will summarize the evidence the prosecutors are planning to present.

  (cont.)

  © TT News Agency and the author of the article

  The Princess in the Castle Among the Clouds

  The light was utterly white. It drifted through the rooms, like a stream, around chandeliers and curtains and stags’ heads. She could hear it whispering and giggling by the beams in the ceiling.

  It was so easy to breathe.

  In fact the air was so clear and pure that sometimes she became a feather, a silent pale-blue feather that swirled around in the white light on sunbeams and tapestries of hunting scenes.

  I said she was silent, didn’t I?

  Oh, she was silent, so silent, because the Führer mustn’t be disturbed.

  Everybody spoke quietly and respectfully in the castle among the clouds, and thick rugs on all the floors and stone staircases took away their whispering and hid it in a safe place.

  Her favourite place was die Halle, the room that was as big as an ocean, with windows looking out onto the clouds and the snow-capped mountain below.

  Sometimes she danced in die Halle, silently, of course, and lightly on her bare toes, with the sculptures and paintings and the dolls as her appreciative audience. Her dress, all that thin fabric, fluttered around her with a life of its own, and she jumped and twirled until her head was spinning. Yes, she was a princess, the Princess in the castle among the clouds, and she danced for the horses and the dead deer and all the beautiful wooden carvings on the ceiling. Nanna always tried to stop her, of course, but she ignored her. Nanna was just a grubby Landwirtmädchen who had no right to tell her what to do, because she was the Princess in the castle among the clouds.

  Once she danced right into the Führer.

  Nanna, the stupid woman, had run off crying because she had bitten her arm, and she had been able to dance for ages all on her own in die Halle, but the Führer wasn’t angry with her, not at all.

  He just caught her in his long arms, leaned over and put his hands on her shoulders. He had blue eyes, red-rimmed, but the Princess wasn’t looking at his eyes. Instead she was staring in delight at the hairs sticking out of his nose.

  She knew she had misbehaved.

  Now Mother would be cross!

  It was Nanna’s fault!

  ‘You’re a proper little Aryan, aren’t you?’ the Führer said, then touched one of her blonde ringlets, and she felt the force flowing out of him, just as Father had explained to Mother.

  ‘Am I blessed now?’ she said.

  He let go of her and walked away, towards the residential quarters, and Blondi trotted after him, her tail wagging. That was the last time she saw him.

  She wasn’t always in the castle among the clouds, of course.

  When they were in Obersalzburg she, Father and Mother lived in the Hotel Zum Türken with the other officers’ families. Mother called it the Turk: ‘Why are we stuck in the Turk while the Goebbels family stay up at Berghof?’

  Mother often spoke of the apartment, the one on Friedrichstrasse, which had been bombed to ruins by die verdammten Verbündeten, the damned Allies. ‘It was lucky for us that one of us is still thinking rationally,’ she would say, looking sharply at Father, because Father hadn’t wanted to evacuate: he had thought it was a betrayal of the Führer, a sign of loss of faith, but Mother had insisted. She had emptied the apartment and arranged for all their belongings to be taken by train to the house in Adlerhorst.

  As the Russians got closer Mother ordered a car from the Party and sent the Princess and Nanna and three trunks with her beautiful dolls and dresses to Harvestehuder Weg.

  The Princess didn’t wanted to go. She wanted to stay in Adlerhorst; she wanted to go to the castle.

  But Mother put a label round her neck and was very abrupt, and her face was red as she gave her an awkward farewell kiss that the Princess wiped away at once. The car door slammed.

  They never made it to Harvestehuder Weg.

  They were stopped outside a town that she didn’t know the name of, and the soldiers took her things and dragged Nanna off with them into the woods, and they shot the chauffeur in the head, getting blood and stuff on the Princess’s coat.

  All she had left when she got to Gudagården was her coat and dress, and her doll Anna. Onkel Gunnar and Tante Helga’s address, Gudagården in Södermanland, Schweden, was on the label tied round her neck, and that was where the Princess was sent when there was no one left to look after her.

  I don’t remember anything myself, but I’ve been told.

  How Onkel Gunnar put the rich kid’s clothes and the doll in a pile in the courtyard, poured paraffin over them and lit a fire that would echo through the decades.

  ‘The sinner must burn in Hell,’ he was supposed to have said, and that might well be true.

  Monday, 3 January

  1

  Annika Bengtzon poked her head through the editor-in-chief’s half-open door and knocked on the wooden frame. Anders Schyman was standing with his back to her, sorting through piles of paper spread across his desk and all over the floor. He turned, saw the expectant look on her face and gestured towards a chair. ‘Close the door and sit down,’ he said, sinking onto his own chair. It creaked ominously.

  She glanced suspiciously at the pile of paper by her feet, noting what appeared to be a plan of the newsroom. ‘Don’t say we’re going to rearrange everything again,’ she said, as she sat down.

  ‘I’ve got a question for you,’ Schyman said. ‘How do you see your future here on the paper?’

  Annika met his gaze. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll get straight to the point. Do you want to be lead editor?’

  Her throat tightened. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then looked down at her hands on her lap.

  ‘You’d be in charge of all news coverage throughout the day. Five days on, five days off. Coordinate sport and entertainment with the editorials, opinion pieces and news. Make the final decision about what to put on the front page. You’d have to sort out the set-up of the various departments with their respective bosses. No web stuff or any of that crap. You’d sit in on mana
gement meetings and would be able to influence budgetary decisions and marketing strategies. I’d want you to start as soon as possible.’

  Lead editor was a huge deal: she’d be the second most powerful person on the paper, just below the editor-inchief, and head of all the subsidiary departments. She’d be in charge of the news editors, entertainment editors, the head of sport and all the other little potentates who considered themselves important.

  ‘I have to restructure,’ Schyman said, when she didn’t respond. ‘I need to be able to rely on the people who are directly answerable to me.’

  She was still looking down at her hands. His voice was going over her head, bouncing off the wall and hitting the back of her neck.

  ‘Are you interested?’

  ‘No,’ Annika said.

  ‘I’ll double your salary.’

  ‘I’ve tried having money,’ she said. ‘It’s nowhere near as much fun as people say.’

  The editor-in-chief got up and went over to the window. ‘This time last year we were under threat of closure,’ he said. ‘Did you know that?’ He glanced over his shoulder to see her reaction. She continued to play with her grandmother’s emerald ring on the forefinger of her left hand.

  ‘We managed to turn the ship round,’ Schyman said, facing the newsroom that stretched out in front of him on the other side of the glass. ‘I think it’s going to work, but I don’t know how long I’ll be staying.’

  He looked at her. She moved her head and let her gaze slip past him, out towards the newsroom. ‘I don’t want your job,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not offering you my job. I’m offering you the position of lead editor.’

  ‘What about Berit? She could do it.’