The Long Shadow

  Her instinct was to argue, pointing out Patrik’s overhasty decisions and journalistic incompetence, his superficial judgements about news and his poor instincts, but instead she said nothing.

  ‘Do you want to work nights again?’ the editor-in-chief asked. ‘Or be a sub-editor? In charge of the letters page? Or something online? A news anchor on the web? How about that?’

  How could she possibly be a problem? She managed to bring home all the news editors’ odd stories – she found missing children in forests and uncovered terrorists, Nobel killers and Yugoslavian Mafia gangs … ‘I think you’re being bloody ungrateful,’ she said. ‘You make it sound like I spend all day sitting around drinking coffee, but I bring in more stories than anyone else.’

  ‘I’m not questioning your competence, just your attitude.’

  ‘My attitude? Is that more important than the fact I come up with the goods? Haven’t you got enough yes-men around you?’

  The editor-in-chief’s face darkened. ‘This isn’t a question of me wanting people who don’t contradict me—’

  ‘Of course it is. You’re just like every other male boss. You want well-behaved girl reporters who are cute and friendly and always do whatever anyone tells them. And I’m never going to be like that.’

  Silence descended on the room.

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Annika asked. ‘Honestly?’

  Anders Schyman bit his lower lip. ‘I’ve always defended you,’ he said. ‘Hell, I’ve gone further than that. I’ve gone into battle for you. The chairman of the board wanted to get rid of you, but I put my own job on the line to keep you.’

  ‘Oh, my heart bleeds,’ Annika said. ‘If the board ever gets to overrule you and starts hiring and firing staff, you’re finished as a boss, and you know it. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

  Silence descended again.

  ‘Are you interested in what I’ve spent the day doing,’ Annika asked, ‘instead of following up Patrik’s little notes?’

  Anders Schyman didn’t answer.

  ‘You remember the fatal gassing in Nueva Andalucía? The missing sixteen-year-old girl, Suzette Söderström?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I think she’s alive. I think she’s being held prisoner on a farm in Morocco. I’ve been going round talking to people who might have information about that farm and where it might be, how she came to be there, who else might be there and—’

  Schyman put his hands over his face and groaned. ‘Annika, Annika, Annika,’ he said. ‘There was a sabotage alarm out at the nuclear power station in Oskarshamn this afternoon, and we didn’t have a reporter we could send.’

  ‘I heard about that on the car radio,’ Annika said. ‘It turned out to be nothing. A welder who had a trace of explosives on a plastic bag with an IFK Norrköping logo on it.’

  ‘But we didn’t know that to start with. The fact remains that we didn’t have a reporter to keep an eye on the story.’

  Annika stared at him. ‘Well, that’s hardly my fault! I’m not the one who’s just got rid of half the staff!’

  Anders Schyman stood up. ‘We aren’t going to get any further,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the rest of the week to think about where you want to be transferred.’

  Annika remained seated, with a dizzying sense of freefall. Then she forced herself to get up, left the glass box and closed the door without looking back.

  Patrik stared at her as she walked across the floor of the newsroom. Of course he knew what they had been discussing. He must be on top of the world.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, just went to her laptop and tried to hold back the tears burning inside her.

  There were other places she could work. There had to be some other media company in Sweden that was willing to employ her. And she could manage without a job for a while, with the insurance money she was about to get. At the end of June she would finally be getting compensation for her burned-out house, six million kronor plus a quarter of a million for contents. Admittedly, Thomas would get half of that, but the plot would also be put up for sale and ought to bring in another couple of million. She’d checked online: there was only one vacant building-plot in the whole of Danderyd, and that was on the market for 4.4 million.

  Maybe getting fired wasn’t such a tragedy after all.

  Maybe it could be the start of something new, something good.

  Maybe it would be a good idea to go freelance. Then she could do exactly what she wanted without anyone else interfering …

  But she wanted to feel she belonged somewhere. She wanted her own chair, her own pigeon-hole in the post-room.

  She sat down, shut her eyes and took several deep breaths, then logged in and opened up the document she had been writing. She had reached Suzette’s email, and tried to re-create it from memory.

  You can’t tell anyone about this email. Not Mum, and not the police. There’s no internet at the farm so I haven’t been able to email. Fatima would be furious if she knew I was writing.

  I’m with Amira. I’ve been here since New Year. I’ve got my own horse, called Larache. He’s a mix of English and Arabian thoroughbred. Don’t tell Adde I’ve been in touch. You can answer this but I don’t know when I’ll read it. We only go places like Asilah, not very often.

  Big hug from suz

  She read it through twice. It was ridiculous that the paper wasn’t interested in Suzette’s story. Why were girls with horses so boring? Besides, something bigger was going on underneath, something shady and out of reach, about Astrid and Siv and Hannelore and their families, something whose extent she was only just starting to appreciate.

  ‘What did Schyman want?’

  Patrik was standing beside her, unable to conceal his triumph.

  ‘To wish me a happy birthday,’ Annika said. ‘You know perfectly well what he wanted. He told me you want to get rid of me.’

  The head of news sat on her desk, on top of her notes. ‘You’re a good reporter, Annika,’ he said. ‘If only you could learn to—’

  ‘Spare us both,’ Annika said, grabbing her notepad. ‘I’d like to get on with what I was doing.’

  Patrik got up reluctantly. ‘Shouldn’t you go home? Tomorrow’s another day.’

  She made a decision. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she said, ‘so I won’t be coming in at all tomorrow. I need to see the doctor – it’s probably streptococcus.’

  He looked at her sceptically, but said nothing and went back to his desk.

  Annika clicked to close the Word document and went onto the net instead. There were flights from Stockholm to Málaga every morning. There were boats between Algeciras and Tangier all the time: she’d discovered that from the adverts along the Costa del Sol motorways. There was bound to be some way of getting from Tangier to Asilah – Morocco couldn’t be that big.

  She went onto Google Maps and typed in asilah morocco. A couple of seconds later she was staring at a satellite image of a town on the Atlantic coast of north Africa. It was probably fifty or sixty kilometres from Tangier. She took a couple of quick breaths and glanced over at Schyman’s glass box. It was dark: he must have gone home without her noticing.

  She hesitated for a second or two, then went to the booking page for the early-morning flight to Málaga. There were a few seats left on the plane, departing at six forty-five.

  Falling Through the Sky

  The Angel hit the ground with a thud once the Troll Girl and the Princess had disappeared. She was confined to bed with a fever and strange blisters on her hands, and was prescribed liniment for her chest and the prayers of the congregation.

  Father and the farm workers searched the surrounding area for three days and three nights. Then the runaways were reported to the Child Welfare Commission. The girls were officially declared missing, but not Wall-eye. He was no longer a ward, since he had come of age the previous month.

  The silence at Gudagården was extensive. Father took on the task of retribution, and mortifie
d his own flesh in penance, as well as that of the farm workers. This wasn’t well received. People had tolerated him beating the foster-children, but adult farmhands didn’t take kindly to being whipped by their master.

  Soon Father and the Angel were left to deal with the sowing and reaping on their own. Despite Father’s prayers for the Lord’s assistance, they didn’t manage to lift the potatoes before the first frost.

  Not a word was heard from the runaways, so Father took in more foster-children. He didn’t want any more girls who would run away, just boys of working age. And he got the worst ones, the ones no one else wanted, and he whipped the exhortations of the Lord God into them until their backs bled. Then he worked them until they couldn’t even think of dissent. He no longer searched for any who ran away, merely left them to the Lord’s Mercy and the Flames of Hell.

  The Angel was fourteen when Gregorius came to the farm. He was very different from all the other boys because he was dark, thin and quietly spoken; he never started fights and he wasn’t boastful or noisy. He smiled his strange smile and inspired respect among the gang of boys, possibly even fear. Those who chose to pick on him woke up with strange injuries or had peculiar accidents.

  The Angel was drawn to him like a moth to a flame and, like a careless insect, her wings were burned so badly that she was never able to fly again.

  She was fifteen years and eight months old when Mother realized she was pregnant, and by that time Gregorius had been gone from the farm many weeks. Father beat her legs, back and crotch to shreds, intending to whip the sin out of her wicked body, but all he succeeded in doing was giving her scars that stayed with her for the rest of her life. Then she was locked away in the loft where the Troll Girl and Princess had been made to sleep, beneath the frost-engraved glass of the attic window. And, like her predecessors, she climbed over the roof tiles and down the fire ladder as soon as her wounds had healed enough for her to run.

  She made her way to the road under cover of darkness, through the village and out onto the main highway. Early that morning she got a lift with a lorry-driver who was going all the way to Gnesta. He asked what a little girl like her was doing out on the road so early in the morning. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, and he said he wouldn’t say anything if he could be a bit friendly with her. And, of course, the damage was already done so she saw no real harm in letting him have his way.

  Her wounds stung when he took her, and she felt the earth close above her head, never to open again.

  He drove her to Mölnbo. From there she got a lift on a milk-truck that was on its way to Södertälje.

  By then it was evening and she was very hungry.

  She spent the night in a hollow next to the railway track, shivering like a dog, but she knew that there wasn’t far left to go because the Troll Girl had told her about her mother. She had been out on licence for a long time, and she wanted to take care of her daughter, but the Child Welfare Commission had said no: they thought it was better for the Troll Girl to be raised in the Righteousness and Discipline of the Lord at Gudagården.

  What no one knew was that sometimes the Troll Mother would come and visit her little girl, always at night when the roof was clear of snow and the child could use the fire ladder, and the Angel knew her address.

  How she was going to find it in the big city of Stockholm was something to which she had given no thought but it wasn’t too difficult. A cab driver took her to 28 Tyska brinken, in return for the same payment as the lorry driver from Mölnbo. Then she rang the doorbell.

  The Princess opened it. It took her several seconds to recognize the Fallen Angel.

  They looked after her on the truckle-bed in the kitchen for several weeks. Her wounds were infected, she fell into a fever and the child in her belly wasn’t well. But in the autumn, just before the child was due, the Troll Girl took them all, her mother and the Princess and the Fallen Angel, to the cinema to see an almost new film from America.

  The Troll Girl had already watched it several times, and knew all the dialogue off by heart. It was called A Place in the Sun, and it was about a poor young man who went to work for his rich relatives, and fell in love with a beautiful girl, and he was prepared to do anything for her sake, even murder someone. The film was terribly sad and the Angel wept for the pregnant girl, Al, for the handsome, weak George, his love for the divine Angela, and because he was unjustly executed in the electric chair.

  Afterwards they went to a café, drank coffee and ate buns.

  They didn’t say much, but they were all thinking how unfair life was.

  The Troll Girl paid the bill and gave the waitress a generous tip.

  Before they got up from the table she leaned forward and took the others’ hands in hers. Her voice was low and dark and her troll eyes were black as she prophesied their future. ‘We deserve a place in the sun,’ she said. ‘Each and every one of us, and all of our nearest and dearest. And that’s what we shall have, I promise you that.’

  The words burned their way into the Angel’s body, and then the first contraction came.

  The little boy was born at dawn the following morning.

  Wednesday, 15 June

  33

  She didn’t bother going to bed. She stayed at the paper, printing out everything she knew about Hannelore, Astrid, Siv and their children, about Carita Halling Gonzales and all she had done; she read up about Algeciras, Morocco and Asilah; she thought through what she needed to do, and when it was half past two she went home to pack. She took just a bag containing her laptop, the camera from Gibraltar, her toothbrush and a change of underwear. At four o’clock she got a taxi to the airport, boarded the plane and slept like a log.

  She woke up as they were landing and tried at once to call the Swedish Embassy in Rabat. Another long harangue in French, which she thought meant they weren’t answering the phone yet.

  She went straight from the plane to the car-rental desks on the floor below. There were more people there than ever before so she presumed the tourist season had started. She moved quickly and easily through the crowd because she had no luggage this time.

  She hired a Ford Escort from Helle Hollis, found her way out of the increasingly chaotic airport, and saw they had built a vast Ikea warehouse next to the motorway since she was last there, unless she hadn’t noticed it before.

  It wasn’t as hot as she had been expecting: the thermometer on the dashboard said twenty-six degrees. The sunlight was hazy and dull, strong enough to make her squint. She drove west, past Torremolinos and Fuengirola, then turned up onto the toll-motorway and speeded up. The landscape had changed since she was last there. The verdant vegetation was gone. Everything looked yellow-brown and burned, with just a few hints of dark olive-green.

  Soon the signs for ‘Tickets Ceuta Tanger’ began to appear along the side of the road. She passed the Hotel Pyr in Puerto Banús on her left. The roadworks were still going on and she had to slow down in front of the hotel. She peered up at the third floor and tried to work out which room had been hers.

  To her right the huge walls surrounding the villas of Nueva Andalucía rose up. She turned off the motorway and headed upwards, past the bullfighting arena.

  ‘You need to get the right exit from a total of seven roundabouts,’ Carita had said, when she’d invited her to that party.

  She made one mistake and had to go back to Plaza de Miragolf, but after that she got it right.

  The gateway was less ostentatious than she remembered it, unless she was just starting to get used to them. What a terrible thought. She pressed various buttons until house number twenty opened the gate without asking any questions. She drove in.

  The development Carita Halling Gonzales had lived in had looked like a model village that evening, and it made the same impression in daylight. The houses clambered up the mountainside, a pastiche of a southern Spanish mountain village. The waterfall by the pool burbled, the bushes were in bloom and the glass of the lampposts sparkled.

 
; She parked outside casa numero seis, wound the window down and looked at the house. There were white aluminium shutters over all the windows. Blue and white police tape hung from the terraces and balconies of all three floors.

  Annika switched the engine off, got the camera out of her bag and stepped into the sunshine. She stood beside the car for several minutes, just studying the house. There was no movement anywhere around her. No sound apart from the waterfall. It was as if all the houses had been abandoned, not just Carita’s.

  She adjusted the focus and took a few pictures, some general shots of the area and some of Carita’s cordoned-off house. She hesitated, then climbed onto a raised flowerbed and took some pictures of the terrace behind the cordon. As long as she was standing on the flowerbed she wasn’t guilty of trespass. At least, she hoped not.

  The terrace was as she remembered it. It was where she had stood talking to Rickard Marmén that evening. The potted plants were still there. A hose on a timer led along the edge of the terrace from the tap. The plants would survive long after their owners had vanished.

  She jumped down from the flowerbed and went to ring the bells of other houses on the estate: she didn’t want to waste the opportunity to use the well-worn headline ‘A Town in Fear’. She got no answer. She found the pool-maintenance man and asked if he knew where the Halling Gonzales family had gone.

  No, he didn’t keep tabs on the residents. They came and went all the time, or they rented out their houses. It was pretty much impossible to know who was where. She asked when the police had been there and was told that it was a while ago now, some time after Easter. He didn’t know anything about any of that, he added.

  She thanked him and walked back to the car, looking up at the houses and trying to work out which was number twenty. Someone was definitely at home there because they had let her through the gates.

  The house was apricot-coloured, and was one of a row on the far side of the pool. The woman who opened the door had the same quintessential Scandinavian look as Carita: bleached hair, a dark tan, a bit of a facelift and gold sandals. Annika didn’t recognize her from the party last winter.