The Long Shadow

by Liza Marklund

  She sat up wearily and squinted out at the sunlight. It was pouring in through a pair of small-paned french windows that weren’t shuttered. She got up to open them but they were locked. There was a pair of thin yellow curtains hanging on either side of the glass, and she pulled them closed in a vain attempt to shut out the heat.

  She was desperate to pee. She went over to the narrow door and tried the handle.

  Locked.

  She sat on the bed again, brushed some locks of sweaty hair from her forehead, and looked at the time. Half past six. She took off her jacket; the T-shirt under it was soaked with sweat.

  Last night she hadn’t been able to find a light-switch and had had to feel her way to the bed, where she had curled up in the darkness. Now she could see why. There was no electric light in the room. One wall was taken up by the bed she was sitting on, and the other by a large, solid wooden desk with a lantern and a box of matches on top. A rickety chair stood in front.

  What sort of room was this? A guest room? A nursery? Servants’ quarters? Or was it a cell?

  Right now it was definitely the latter.

  She got to her feet, went to the door and banged on it as hard as she could with her right fist. ‘Let me out!’ she shouted in Swedish. ‘For fuck’s sake, I need to go to the toilet! Hello! Can you hear me?’

  She stopped banging and put her ear to the door. All she could hear was her own heartbeat. She waited five minutes, then sat down on the bed again.

  She had to pee. She’d just have to do it on the floor if that was the only option.

  Then it occurred to her to look under the bed. Sure enough, there was an enamel pot under it. Almost exactly the same as the one her grandmother had kept at Lyckebo, her cottage in the woods near Hosjön, where there were no drains. She pulled it out and shrugged off her jeans. Afterwards she pushed it back under the bed, close to the wall.

  She sat on the chair by the desk.

  The house was silent.

  Her grandmother had never met Kalle and Ellen. Her children had never peed in an enamel pot in a draughty cottage beside the waters of Hosjön. When she got the money from the insurance company she was going to buy a place in the forest in Södermanland.

  She got up to bang on the door again, but stopped herself. They weren’t going to let her out just because she kept banging. And beating her hands to shreds wasn’t a particularly constructive thing to do.

  Her bag was on the floor beside the desk. She picked it up and took out her notepad and a pen. She chewed the pen and thought. The woman called Fatima knew Filip Andersson and that he’d been released from Kumla. Her questions about his passport meant she thought he was going somewhere. She hadn’t shown any surprise when Annika mentioned Suzette so the girl was here, or Fatima knew where she was being hidden.

  The farm she was in was large and wealthy. The little she had seen of the buildings and walls was well maintained.

  Annika got up and went to the french windows, drew the curtains and looked out.

  She couldn’t see much, just the yard she had crossed the previous evening, the inside of the wall and the hillsides beyond. She was at the very top of the large house. To the right was the smaller building that presumably contained stables and outhouses.

  Then she saw a young woman in a headscarf emerge from the outhouse, in the company of two young boys. Could that be Amira? She pressed her nose to the glass. No, this woman was much older: she must be more like twenty-five. She was holding one child in each hand and was walking towards the gate through which she herself had come the night before.

  Outside the walls, as far as she could see, stretched vast fields of verdant vegetation. She couldn’t make out the shape of the leaves, but she was sure they weren’t potatoes. On Wikipedia she had read that Cannabis sativa was a hardy, fast-growing plant that could survive in most climates and at altitudes of up to three thousand metres above sea level. As far as the European market was concerned, most of it was grown among the Rif mountains of northern Morocco.

  Annika recalled Knut Garen’s telling description of the rhythmic drumming that echoed through the Moroccan mountains in the autumn months, da-dunk, da-dunk, as the pollen from the cannabis plants was beaten out between layers of fine cloth.

  There was a rattle from the lock and the young man from the previous day appeared in the doorway with a gun. ‘Suivez-moi.’

  She put her notepad and pen back into her bag and went with him.

  ‘Laissez-le ici.’

  He wanted her to leave her bag. So she wasn’t going anywhere, and would be coming back here. Unless?

  ‘Où allons-nous?’ she asked. Where are we going? Her French really was pretty awful.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites maintenant?’ What are you doing now?

  ‘Ne vous inquiétez pas,’ he said. No need for her to worry.

  They went down a different staircase, first Annika, then the young man with the gun. It was a much broader flight of stairs than the one they had come up the previous evening. It was covered with thick carpet, and led down to the first floor of the house. They were in a large stone hall with doors in three directions, all of them closed and barred. The doors and walls were all dark and richly ornamented – there was even some gilding. Heavy stone and bronze statues stood in various alcoves. In place of the fourth wall, a well of light reached from the ground floor all the way up to the eaves. The staircase carried on downwards: she could see to the front door she had come through the night before.

  The young man stopped outside a large pair of double-doors on the left-hand side, opened one and ushered her in. She noted that there was a large key in the lock. She heard the door close behind her, then the click of the lock.

  She was in a library. The walls were covered with built-in bookcases that held masses of books, leather-bound and modern. There was both Arabic and Latin lettering on the spines.

  There was no other way out.

  She went over to the three windows and tried opening them, one after the other. They were all locked.

  She stopped in the middle of the floor, between two upholstered sofas in blood-red leather. Beside her was an ornate marble-topped table with a solid bronze ashtray on it. She kicked the table, hurting her toe.

  In one corner there was an old table with four chairs and a tray laid with breakfast for one. They weren’t going to let her starve. She went to the table and looked suspiciously at the food. She recognized pitta bread, and the vegetables alongside it, but the hummus in the middle looked dodgy. She sat down, picked up the fork, tasted it and decided it was actually pretty good. It was flavoured with garlic and parsley. She ate everything, washing it down with sweetened tea.

  She had just finished the tea when the lock rattled.

  Her stomach lurched. She didn’t want to go back to the stifling cell upstairs.

  But it wasn’t the young man with the gun. It was a slender girl with big eyes and jet-black hair. Annika gasped.

  ‘Ha!’ the girl said. ‘I’m starting to understand the language. I thought they said they were going to give you breakfast in the library, and I was right.’ She closed the door carefully behind her and leaned against it, her eyes shining with curiosity. ‘Is it true that you work for a newspaper?’

  Annika nodded. ‘And you’re Suzette?’

  The girl smiled broadly. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and trainers. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  Annika studied the sixteen-year-old. She was clearly happy and healthy, didn’t seem to have been suffering. ‘I wanted to see if you were here. A lot of people are looking for you.’

  Her face darkened. ‘No one cares,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Your mum’s really worried about you.’

  The girl walked away from the door and threw herself onto one of the leather sofas. ‘She only cares about her pathetic job. I just got in the way, and I cost too much money.’

  She half lay on the sofa with one le
g dangling over the armrest. Annika sat in silence and waited for the girl’s curiosity to build up again.

  ‘No one knows I’m here. How did you know?’

  Suzette was evidently aware that she was being kept hidden. She probably wasn’t supposed to be in the library.

  ‘The most important question is probably why you’re here,’ Annika said. ‘And how you got here.’

  Suzette shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Do you want to interview me?’

  ‘If you want to be interviewed.’

  ‘Ha!’ She threw her head back. ‘Fatima would never agree to that. I’m not allowed to tell anyone where I am.’

  ‘Why not?’ Annika asked. ‘Are you a prisoner?’

  Suzette picked at her fingernails, but she was still smiling. ‘Fatima came to get me,’ she said. ‘She told me to tell everyone I was going somewhere else, and then we came here.’

  Whatever the reason the girl was being kept out of the way, it didn’t seem to be anything that bothered her: that much was abundantly clear. What she was saying was probably true. Francis, the tennis coach, had said that Suzette was too disorganized to plan any sort of disappearing act.

  ‘But you didn’t have your passport with you,’ Annika said.

  Suzette sat up on the sofa, annoyed, dropping her trainers to the floor. ‘Fatima’s got her own boats, hasn’t she? She doesn’t have to go through Passport Control. She uses her own private harbour.’

  Is that so? Annika thought. ‘And you’ve been here ever since?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Do you want to be here?’

  She stopped nodding and sat still. ‘You know what happened?’ she asked, her eyes filling with tears. ‘The gas?’

  Annika got up from the breakfast table and went to sit on the sofa opposite Suzette. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wrote about it in the paper.’

  The tears overflowed. ‘They were, like, so cute. Leo could be really annoying, but he was so little. My was lovely, really lovely. She loved horses, just like me …’ Suzette put her hands to her face and wept for several minutes. Annika sat quietly and waited for her to stop. In the end she wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hands and looked at Annika. Her makeup was smeared all over her cheeks.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll get you something to wipe your face,’ Annika said, and fetched her unused linen napkin from the breakfast tray.

  Suzette blew her nose loudly and wiped the mascara from her cheeks. ‘And Grandma as well,’ she said. ‘She was my best friend.’

  Annika sat down again. ‘Astrid, you mean?’

  ‘She always said I was her little princess, even though she wasn’t my real grandma.’ She blew her nose again. ‘She brought me here the first time. The farm was our special place.’

  Annika tried to sound calm and neutral. ‘So you and Astrid used to come here together?’

  Suzette nodded.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Grandma knows Fatima well. They do bizniz together. And Amira’s the same age as me, and she’s had her own horse since she was four. We used to come and stay here every summer.’

  ‘Isn’t it difficult talking to Amira?’ Annika asked, even though she knew the answer.

  ‘She speaks Swedish because her dad’s Swedish. She had Swedish nannies when she was little, and Grandma used to send her Swedish children’s videos.’ Suzette laughed. ‘Imagine, sending Seacrow Island to Morocco!’

  Annika leaned forward. ‘What’s Amira’s father’s name?’

  Suzette frowned. ‘He’s dead. I never met him. But her mum’s name is Fatima and her sisters are Maryam and Sabrina, and Maryam is married to Abbas, and they’ve got the cutest little children in the world, two boys. But Sabrina’s not here at the moment because she’s studying at Harvard, and Amira’s going there as well, as soon as she’s finished her International Baccalaureate exams.’

  Annika tried to look as if it was perfectly normal to study at Harvard. ‘Did Maryam go there as well?’

  ‘No, she did two years in Cambridge, like Fatima, but she wanted to come home and get married to Abbas, so obviously that’s what she did. Fatima doesn’t make anyone do anything. She doesn’t force me either, because I don’t like studying. I’ve got a horse of my own, Larache. He’s a mix of English and Arabian thoroughbred, and he’s the sweetest horse in the world. I want to work with animals and horses, and Fatima thinks that’s a good idea.’ She nodded to emphasize the point. ‘You don’t have to be top of the class,’ she said. ‘I help Zine and Ahmed – the foreman and his son.’

  ‘Did Grandma Astrid think it was okay, you working with horses?’

  The nodding was even more intense. ‘Of course she did. I mean, Grandma grew up on a farm, even if they weren’t very nice to her there.’

  Annika leaned back in the chair and tried to calm down. ‘Did Grandma tell you what it was like when she was little?’

  Suzette lay down on the sofa again and threw both legs over the armrest. ‘Sometimes. Her stories were all pretty sad …’ Then she leaped to her feet. ‘There’s a book about Grandma and her friends.’ She spun round and ran to one of the bookcases in the corner behind the breakfast table.

  ‘A book?’ Annika said, turning to see what she was doing.

  Suzette was running her hands over the spines of the books. ‘It was here somewhere … Got it!’ She held up a thin, stitched pamphlet with a white cover, no picture or other decoration, just the title and name of the author. ‘They’ve got all the Emil and Pippi and Goldie books,’ she said, ‘but this is pretty much the only adult book in Swedish.’ She handed it to Annika. ‘I’ve read it. It’s a bit weird.’

  Annika stared at it.

  A Place in the Sun

  by

  Siv Hoffman

  ‘And you found this here? In the bookcase?’ She opened the imprint page. Printed by a vanity press twenty years ago. Nina’s mother had evidently had ambitions to become a writer.

  ‘It was where I just found it. There’s no proper system, not like the school library. Everything’s all mixed up …’

  There was a noise from the door. Annika and Suzette stiffened. Annika sucked in her stomach and slid the book inside her jeans, then pulled her top over it, hoping it didn’t show.

  The young man called Ahmed came into the library, holding his gun in front of him. His eyes opened wide and he shouted something at Suzette in Arabic. She got up, quick as a flash, and slipped past him onto the stone landing. ‘Allez!’ he shouted angrily at Annika. ‘Dépêchez-vous!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she muttered. He wanted her to hurry.

  It was considerably cooler in the room now. Someone must have aired it. Which meant that it must be possible to open the window. They had also left a jug of water and a glass on the desk.

  The footsteps faded down the corridor and she pulled the book from her jeans and put it on the blanket. Then she crouched to look under the bed. Someone had emptied and rinsed the pot.

  She sat at the desk and took out her notepad and pen. Quickly she wrote down what Suzette had told her, filling in the gaps with her own thoughts and conclusions. Fatima had secretly collected Suzette. She must have known that something was likely to happen, and had wanted to get Suzette away from the Costa del Sol without anyone knowing. Why? Because she liked the girl, maybe. Because Suzette was her daughter’s best friend. Or did she have some other, less noble, reason? Was Suzette a hostage? In exchange for what? And from whom?

  Her next thought made her stop writing.

  If Fatima knew that Suzette needed to be saved, she must also have known that the Söderström family were in danger. She could be mixed up in the murders herself.

  Maybe she was the person who had ordered them to be carried out.

  Suddenly the walls felt even more restrictive.

  Annika put her pen down and got up to try the door. Still locked, of course.

  What if they didn’t let her out again?

  What if they kept her here for ever?

/>   Who knew where she was?

  No one, except Muhammad, the taxi-driver from Tangier.

  She felt her throat tighten and the classic symptoms of an approaching panic attack: tunnel vision, tingling in her fingers, utter terror.

  She stumbled to the bed and lay down on her stomach, facing away to the side.

  There’s no danger, she tried to persuade herself. If they really did want me dead, they’d already have killed me. Or they wouldn’t have let me in in the first place. Fatima may grow dope, but she’s not a murderer. That’s why she picked up Suzette. Fatima cares about people …

  She lay there without moving for a long time, concentrating on breathing normally.

  She should have grown out of these panic attacks by now.

  She got up cautiously and went to the window. It was still locked.

  She couldn’t see anyone outside. The skies had darkened: black clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic. They were going to have some rain.

  She looked down towards the building below her. The top floor, where she was now, was more sparsely decorated than the rest of the house, which suggested it was for servants, or had been added later. The middle floor seemed to be the main social part of the house. She didn’t have much sense of what was on the ground floor, but from the outside it had looked much more basic than the floor above. On the way to Asilah she had seen similar farms. Maybe this was the way houses were built in Morocco: you started with a fairly basic ground floor, then added to it as your finances allowed.

  The building was huge, at least a thousand square metres. And parts of it were extremely lavishly appointed. This was a wealthy farm. It was quite clear that Fatima belonged to the premier league of hash farmers.

  It was starting to get darker inside the room now.

  She sat down at the desk, picked up the pen from where it had fallen to the floor, and started to make a list of the farm’s inhabitants.

  How many people lived here? To start with, Fatima and her three daughters: Maryam, Sabrina and Amira. Maryam was married to Abbas, and had two little boys. They were probably who she had seen from the window that morning. Sabrina was at college in Boston. Zine, the foreman, and Ahmed, his son, must be the men with the guns.