The Long Shadow Read online

  Lejongården was a dark, squat, single-storey building located on the shore of Lejondalssjön. It looked like a day-centre, or perhaps an old people’s home. A little playground was visible in the light from the porch. The water lay still and grey in the background.

  ‘I really do want to thank you,’ Julia had said on the phone.

  She adjusted her hair, switched off the engine and stepped out onto the gravel drive. At the porch she stopped to look out across the lake. A few naked birches shivered hesitantly along the shore, their branches as grey as the water. There was a wooded island a hundred metres or so out in the lake. In the distance she could just make out the faint rumble of the motorway.

  The door opened and a woman in a Norwegian-patterned cardigan and sheepskin slippers leaned out into the porch. ‘Annika Bengtzon? Hello, I’m Henrietta.’

  They shook hands. Henrietta? Should she know the woman?

  ‘Julia and Alexander are expecting you.’

  She stepped inside. There was a vague smell of damp. Pale linoleum floors, pink fibre-glass wallpaper, plastic skirting-boards. Straight ahead, behind a half-closed door, there was what looked like a meeting room. She could make out some brown plastic chairs around a veneered table, and heard someone laughing.

  ‘I’d like you to behave perfectly normally,’ Henrietta said, and Annika instantly felt herself tense. ‘This way.’ Henrietta led her down a narrow corridor with a row of doors to the right and windows facing the car park on the left.

  ‘This reminds me of the only time I ever went Inter-Railing,’ Annika said, hoping she sounded normal.

  Henrietta pretended not to hear her. She stopped at a door halfway along and knocked.

  There were no locks or room numbers, Annika noted. She had read on the home’s website that they tried to maintain ‘a cosy atmosphere to make people feel cared for and safe’.

  The door opened. A triangle of yellow light stretched out across the floor of the corridor. Henrietta took a step back. ‘Alexander’s baked a cake,’ she said, ushering Annika in. ‘Just let me know if you’d like me to take him out to play for a bit.’ She addressed this last remark inside the room.

  Annika paused in the doorway. The room was much bigger than she had expected, rectangular, with a large picture window at the far end, and a door leading out to a terrace. A double-bed and a small child’s bed stood next to each other just inside the door, and further in there was a sofa, a television and a table with four chairs.

  Julia Lindholm was sitting at the table, in a sweater whose sleeves were too long, her hair in a ponytail. Her son had his back to the door, and his arms were moving as though he was drawing frantically.

  Julia got up, ran over and hugged her hard. ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said, still holding Annika tightly.

  Annika, who had been holding out her hand, hugged her back awkwardly. The door closed behind her. ‘I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Not many people have been allowed to visit yet,’ Julia said, finally letting go and walking over to the sofa. ‘My parents were here for Christmas, and Nina’s visited us a few times, but I’ve said no to David’s silly mother. I don’t want her here. Have you ever met her?’

  ‘No.’ Annika let her bag and padded coat fall to the floor beside the sofa. She looked at the boy, could see his fragile profile behind his hair. He was drawing with thick crayons, firmly and intently. She moved closer, sank down beside him and tried to catch his gaze.

  ‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said. ‘My name’s Annika. What are you drawing?’

  The boy clenched his jaw and went on drawing with even greater concentration. The lines were thick and black.

  ‘David’s mother’s so confused,’ Julia said, ‘and it would be worse for her if we met at such a strange place as this. We’ll wait and see Grandma when we get home, won’t we, darling?’

  The boy didn’t react. The sheet of paper was covered with black stripes. Annika sat down next to Julia.

  ‘He’s not talking much yet,’ Julia said quietly. ‘They say it’s not serious, it’ll just take time.’

  ‘Does he say anything at all?’ Annika asked.

  Julia’s smile vanished. She shook her head.

  He spoke to me, Annika thought. That night. He said several things. Are there any more sweets? She’s horrid. She’s really horrid. I like the green ones.

  Julia went over to the window and stopped with her back to the room, Annika could see from her reflection that she was biting a fingernail. Suddenly she rushed to the phone on the wall next to the terrace door.

  ‘Henrietta, can you look after Alexander for a bit? … Right away. Thanks so much.’

  The silence when she hung up was electric. Annika’s mouth felt dry, and her fingers itched. She squeezed her hands in her lap and looked down at her grandmother’s emerald ring. A long minute passed before the carer, or whatever she was, came into the room, took Alexander by the hand and said, ‘Shall we go and watch a film, you and me? Finding Nemo?’ She turned to Annika. ‘It’s about a little-boy fish who gets lost when he’s with his dad but then finds his way home.’

  ‘Yes,’ Annika said. ‘I know.’

  The silence lingered once she and Julia were alone.

  ‘Well, as you know, I work for the Evening Post,’ Annika said, to break the silence. ‘Do you want me to write about you in the paper? About you and Alexander? About how things are for you here?’

  Julia bit her thumbnail. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Later, maybe. Yes, later. I want to explain, but right now my head’s in too much of a mess.’

  Annika waited quietly. She hadn’t been expecting Julia to want to talk about what had happened since her release, at least not this afternoon, but she had been hoping that she might want to at some point. For the media, crime stories always ended when the case was solved and the perpetrator convicted. Few people wrote about the consequences of crime, the victims’ long and difficult path back to a relatively normal life.

  ‘I’m so angry,’ Julia said, quietly, almost with surprise. ‘I’m absolutely furious with the whole world.’ Slowly she walked over to the table and sat down on Alexander’s chair. She was so slight that she almost vanished inside the big sweater. ‘And they tell me that’s normal as well. Everything’s so fucking normal!’ She threw out her arms in frustration.

  ‘Have you been here since you were released?’ Annika asked.

  Julia nodded. ‘It was the middle of the night. They took me down to the duty court and held the custody hearing at half past one in the morning, then drove me out here. Alexander was waiting for me.’ She looked out of the window. It was dark outside now. ‘I wasn’t well in prison,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t well here either to start with. Alexander wouldn’t have anything to do with me. He wanted to be with Henrietta.’

  ‘And that’s perfectly normal as well?’ Annika said, and Julia actually laughed.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ she said. ‘But they’re very professional here. Nina says so – she’s checked them out. This is the Rolls-Royce of family rehab centres, according to Nina, and it’s only reasonable that society should have to compensate us for the injustice we suffered …’

  Annika could hear Nina Hoffman’s voice behind Julia’s words. Julia’s best friend, the police officer with whom she had shared her training and patrol car, had been one of Annika’s sources in her investigation into David Lindholm. Annika could see Nina now, her tight ponytail, firm gaze, determined expression.

  Julia stood up again. ‘Do you want coffee, by the way? There’s some in the flask. And Alexander didn’t make the cake, Henrietta did, while Alexander sat beside her scribbling birds’ nests.’ She picked up the drawing at the top of the pile and held it up to Annika. A chaos of heavy black lines covered almost every millimetre of the large sheet. ‘That’s normal too,’ she said, putting it down again.

  ‘Maybe some coffee,’ Annika said. ‘The stuff we have in the newsroom is undrinkable. We reckon someone poured cats’ pee into the water
tank.’

  Julia gestured towards the flask but made no effort to stand up. ‘We’ll be here for at least three months,’ she said. ‘It’s for Alexander’s sake, they say. He’s the one being taken care of. Right now, we’re an emergency case, still under investigation.’ Her voice cracked on the last word. ‘It takes the doctors eight weeks to evaluate how disturbed we are. Then we get treatment for anything between two and six months. After that we get to live on our own, but fairly close to the home. The emphasis at this place is on relationships between parents and children. I’ll be getting support and advice on my parenting. Afterwards I can have follow-up support at home …’ Her head dropped into her hands and she started to cry.

  Annika, who had been pouring a cup of coffee from the flask, screwed the lid on and put it back on the table as quietly as she could. ‘It’s only natural for you to be angry,’ she said. ‘Alexander too. I’m not particularly fond of shrinks, but I dare say they’re right. It’s probably normal for the two of you to be utterly furious.’

  Julia took a napkin from the pile beside the cake and blew her nose. ‘They say that six months is like a lifetime to a small child. Alex spent seven months up in the woods with that madwoman, so of course he’s angry. He probably didn’t get any answers to his questions about where David and I were so, as far as he was concerned, we might as well have been dead. And the doctors say that he was aware his life was in danger. He had a lot of bruises and cuts on his body, so she evidently didn’t hold back on hitting him.’

  ‘How is he now?’

  ‘He’ll come to me, but he doesn’t want to look at me. He sleeps badly at night, keeps waking up and crying. We’ve had to start putting him in nappies overnight again, even though he’d been dry for almost two years.’

  ‘How do you spend your days?’ Annika asked, sipping the coffee, which was very good.

  ‘I have individual counselling sessions, and soon I’ll be able to join in with group therapy and talk to some other mothers. That’s supposed to be very helpful. Alexander messes about in the sandpit, draws and plays with balls. When we’re discharged from here, the childhood psychiatry unit will take over his case.’ She let out a laugh, suddenly nervous. ‘Oh, listen to me, going on,’ she said. ‘I really just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for us. I mean, you were the one who …’

  Annika was clutching her cup. ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m just glad I could be useful.’

  Silence descended again.

  ‘So,’ Julia said, ‘did you have a good Christmas?’

  Annika put her cup on the saucer. Should she tell the truth? That she and the children had spent Christmas Eve surrounded by boxes in Gamla stan, eating ready-sliced ham from the Co-op and watching Donald Duck on the laptop? That she had handed her children to their father for New Year and Twelfth Night, and that they were much happier with him?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve got a lot on at work. Today I’ve been researching a really gruesome murder down on the Costa del Sol.’

  Julia stood up. ‘The Costa del Sol’s a terrible place,’ she said, ‘especially Estepona.’

  Annika looked down at her hands. Why had she chosen that subject for small-talk? She knew that Julia had had a terrible time down there with her husband. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘We spent six months there,’ Julia said, ‘and David was off travelling almost the whole time. I was pregnant and didn’t have a car, and it was several kilometres to the nearest shop. I had to drag those bags of groceries home in thirty-degree heat.’

  ‘It must have been awful,’ Annika said.

  Julia shrugged. ‘He was working deep under cover. Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks at a time without getting in touch. It went on for years, the duration of that bloody operation. Years!’ She spun round. ‘And I never did find out what it was all about. Drugs or money-laundering or something like that.’ She moved towards Annika. ‘And do you know what the worst part was? I was so terrified that he was going to get hurt. That something would happen, something dangerous. And what did happen?’ She laughed. ‘He fucked a crazy bitch once too often so she shot his head and his cock off, and they locked me up, and Alexander …’ She was close to Annika now, staring into her eyes. ‘They say Alexander’s going to carry the scars of this for the rest of his life. And no one believed me.’ She slammed her hand so hard on the table that the porcelain jumped. ‘No one believed me!’

  Suddenly Annika realized that visiting time was over. She pushed the coffee-cup aside and stood up.

  Julia slumped into her chair and stared vacantly ahead. ‘Who’d have thought it would be Yvonne Nordin, of all people?’ she said.

  Annika stiffened. ‘What? Did you know her?’

  Julia shook her head. ‘No, I never actually met her, or Filip Andersson.’

  Annika went to pick up her coat. ‘Speaking of Filip Andersson,’ she said, ‘the attorney general has applied to have his case reviewed.’

  ‘Nina will be pleased,’ Julia said tonelessly.

  Annika stopped, coat in hand. ‘Nina Hoffman? Why would she be pleased about that?’

  Julia scratched the back of her left hand. ‘Of course she’ll be pleased. Filip’s her brother.’

  3

  Annika tore out her mobile before she had even opened the car door, then sat in the driver’s seat and dialled Nina Hoffman’s number from memory. Why the hell hadn’t she mentioned that she was the sister of Filip Andersson and Yvonne Nordin? It took ages for the call to connect. Annika stared out at the dark windows of the rehabilitation home as the phone rang.

  How many times had she and Nina discussed the Södermalm murders, and whether Filip Andersson was innocent or guilty? And Filip’s contacts with the underworld, and with David Lindholm? After she had visited Andersson in prison last autumn she had gone to see Nina afterwards to tell her about it …

  There was now an engaged tone, as if the call had been rejected.

  Throughout their conversations Nina had had a hidden agenda. Maybe she had been lying the whole time. Maybe she had talked to Annika only to find out what she knew, and try to direct what she wrote.

  Annika dialled the number again, as she watched the lights go on in the corridor inside the building. Henrietta was walking along it with Alexander. He was so small that Annika could see only the curls on the top of his head.

  There was a click on the line and the message service clicked in. Annika hurriedly ended the call, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  She’d trusted Nina, but Nina hadn’t been honest with her. Annika had asked her to dig out Yvonne’s passport picture, and Nina hadn’t said they were sisters.

  Annika dialled the mobile a third time. Voicemail again. She cleared her throat. ‘Er, hello, this is Annika Bengtzon,’ she said. ‘Happy New Year. Listen, can you call me when you get this? Okay? ’Bye for now.’

  She called Reception at Police Headquarters and asked to be put through to the duty desk of the station on Torkel Knutssonsgatan. The man who answered gave his name as Sisulu. ‘Nina Hoffman’s on leave,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back on Sunday.’

  Annika thanked him and put the mobile on the passenger seat, started the car and pulled out onto the road, heading back towards the office.

  When she reached Kallhäll she remembered she had no reason to hurry anywhere. She didn’t want to get back to Patrik and his little notes, and she was in no rush to return to the as yet unfurnished flat on Agnegatan.

  When the mobile rang on the seat beside her and she saw her ex-husband’s number on the screen, she felt strangely elated.

  ‘Hello, Thomas here.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Hi,’ she said, rather too brightly.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you driving?’

  She laughed, feeling the warmth spread. ‘I’ve just been out on a job and I’m on my way back. No problem.’

  ‘Listen, we’re planning Easter, and we were wonderin
g how you’re fixed that week?’

  The happiness was wrenched from her body with a force that felt quite physical. ‘Are you using the royal we?’ she asked, trying to sound light-hearted. It didn’t work.

  ‘Easter’s late this year – Maundy Thursday’s the twenty-first of April – and it’s the following week that’s a bit tight. I’m away at a conference, but that’s my week for the kids, so I was wondering if we could maybe swap …’

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ Annika said. ‘I got a new job at the paper today, and it’s going to mean a few changes.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should have discussed it with me first?’ he said curtly.

  Raw anger flared. She clenched her teeth and swallowed. ‘It won’t affect my weeks with the children, so I couldn’t see any reason to mention it to you.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said crossly. ‘Sophia wants to talk to you.’

  He passed the phone to his new partner.

  ‘Hi, Annika.’

  ‘Hello,’ Annika said.

  ‘We’ve been having a discussion, my girlfriends and I, and we’ve got a little invitation for you.’

  Annika took a deep breath and forced herself to stay calm.

  ‘You work with the written word so we wondered if you’d like to join our reading group?’

  Reading group? Jesus Christ. ‘Erm …’ Annika braked at the traffic lights at the Rissne junction.

  ‘This week we’re reading a wonderful book by Marie Hermanson, The Mushroom King’s Son. It’s about working out what really matters, finding your place in the world. The son grows up in the forest but he really belongs on the coast. Do you like Marie Hermanson?’

  Annika had read Clam Beach, and had started a book about a man who lived under some stairs, but she hadn’t finished that one. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Things are a bit tricky right now, I started a new job at the paper today, so everything will be a bit up in the air for a while.’

  ‘A new job?’ Sophia said. ‘But how’s that going to affect our weeks with the children?’

  There, right there, was the limit of how much crap Annika felt she had to put up with.