‘What will happen to the children?’ Nina asked, thinking of Isak, the artistic little boy who talked out loud as he drew things.
‘There’s still a fully functional social-services unit out in Nacka, in spite of Ingemar Lerberg’s attempts to get it shut down.’
‘But who’s going to look after them?’
‘Apparently they’ve been placed in foster-care with a single mother-of-two in a three-room flat in Fisksätra.’
Nina looked out through the window, imagining the cramped space. Five children in two rooms? It might turn out okay. Or it might not.
‘That was pretty much the only policy Lerberg managed to get through the social-services committee,’ Q said. ‘New criteria for the recruitment of foster-parents. Anyone’s allowed to make an offer, and whoever bids lowest gets the children.’
Her boss’s body language indicated that they were done. Nina cleared her throat. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is one more thing. Would it be possible to have a room of my own? Maybe not straight away, but eventually.’
‘Don’t you like Jesper?’
She squirmed uncomfortably. ‘Yes, but …’
He smiled at her. ‘Good work on the Lerberg case,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad you’re happy here.’ He turned back to his computer, and she went out into the corridor. It was deserted. She walked cautiously back to her room.
Empty. The desk had been wiped clean and the chairs were tucked in.
*
From a short-term perspective, it’s incredibly boring to be successful. Monotonous and predictable. Doing the right thing demands so much consideration, anxiety and worry, so much doubt and frustration. Success is a tedious balancing act, walking the high wire without falling, concentrating the whole time, muscles tense, eyes focused straight ahead.
It’s so much more fun to let yourself fall, tumble through space, plummet, feel the wind fill your head with freedom all the way down to the ground, swirling, swirling …
And then …
And then?
EPILOGUE
The residential area lay to the north-east of Moscow. As the crow flew it was only thirty-five kilometres from the Kremlin, but in practice it was many light-years away. The tiles on the façades of the buildings had fallen off in great clumps, exposing the concrete beneath to wind and rain. The buildings stretched from there to eternity, from the railway station all the way to the marshes, identical except for their varying states of dilapidation: fourteen floors, eight entrances, twelve flats on each floor. To begin with she regularly got lost. Her flat was in one of the blocks in the middle of the district: on a couple of occasions she ended up trying to stick her key into the door of the wrong flat before she realized her mistake. Now she couldn’t understand how she had ever managed to get lost. Every building was distinctive. By her doorway the tiles had come off entirely, and someone had scrawled Путин навсегда on the cement. Putin navsegda, ‘Putin for ever’. The name of her street was счастливый улице, Sčastlivy Ulitsa. Happy Street. She’d almost found herself singing the Swedish hit from the sixties when she learned what it meant.
They would look everywhere for her, she knew that. Everywhere, but not here. Not in their own backyard.
The few people who spoke to her knew she came from Ukraine. She was Irina the piano teacher from Kiev, who made her living giving lessons. She had adopted her old speech defect once more – all those years of hard work to get rid of it actually made that fairly straightforward: she used the same techniques, just in reverse. That kept contact with neighbours and shop assistants to a minimum: she could see people literally squirming as she stammered whenever she tried to speak. No one could bear to talk to her long enough to find out how limited her Russian really was, or detect her hopeless Swedish accent.
Naturally she didn’t actually give any lessons. She didn’t think the neighbours she had introduced herself to suspected anything – she was so rusty at first that she could well have passed as someone taking lessons. Now she chose harder and harder pieces, a lot of Satie and Boulez, Stravinsky’s Petrushka. She had bitten off more than she could chew with Maurice Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, but it was a very pleasant torment.
Occasionally she would wake up during the night. She imagined she could hear Ingemar breathing beside her, or smell little Elisabeth. At times like that the pain closed around her, like a coffin, and she would gasp in the darkness with her mouth wide open, panting with her head thrown back until the screaming inside her exploded and died.
She caught sight of herself in the little mirror above the washstand, but she no longer flinched. Instead she stared into the heavily made-up eyes, brown now, the lenses still irritating. The optician had promised the discomfort would pass, but he was wrong. She ran a hand through her short, brownish-red hair – she actually liked it. She examined her firm, slender body. Eating nothing but protein had been easier than she had expected, and the effect had been striking. She had lost fifteen kilos in the months since she had arrived.
A playwright lived in the flat next to hers. He hadn’t done very well since glasnost and perestroika, and these days he mostly wrote melancholy poetry and drank a little too much vodka. He would come round to hers sometimes, putting up with her stammering in return for a free meal.
‘When I was a little girl, I saw a television programme about a woman in Sweden who disappeared,’ she told him on one occasion. ‘It was just after my mother died. She was gone and I was left all alone, and I saw that programme about the woman who had done bad business with the wrong people, and had been forced to disappear for good. The story made a very deep impression on me. She had stashed some money away, assets no one else knew about, and she planned everything very carefully. She changed her name well in advance, and got hold of a new passport. Whenever she wanted to go out without anyone noticing her, she would wrap a scarf round her head, the way Muslim women do. She bought a second-hand car and paid cash for it, but never posted the change of ownership form. She got her money out of the bank before she left, and hid it inside the car. In the middle of the night she left her house and drove the old car across the border at Haparanda, then straight across Finland. She reached the Russian border before anyone had time to notice she was missing. The border guards were tired and hungry, and she had so many dollars with her that she was able to get in without her arrival being recorded anywhere. And then she made her way to Moscow, and left her old life behind without ever looking back. Some people might say she was heartless, that she was letting down everyone close to her, but she had no choice. If she hadn’t left, she would have died, over and over again …’
‘Did she have children?’
She opened her mouth to reply, but found that her voice was breaking. She nodded instead.
‘What happened to them? How did it end?’
Irina the piano teacher smiled through a wall of pain.
‘She never saw them again.’
Author’s Acknowledgements
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, alive or dead, are purely coincidental. Even if places, times and events in the novel might feel familiar, everything takes place in an alternative reality.
I would like to thank:
Peter Rönnerfalk, head of Södermalm Hospital in Stockholm, for allowing me to bother him with the strangest (i.e. macabre) medical questions.
Varg Gyllander, head of information at the National Criminal Police, for letting me visit National Crime, and for assistance with all manner of questions about police procedure, both sensible and impossible.
Helena Bergström, actor and director, for years of discussion about what happened to Ibsen’s Nora after she walked out of the doll’s house and slammed the door behind her.
Lawyer Thomas Bodström, for legal expertise and advanced fact-checking.
My daughter Annika Marklund and my husband Mikael Aspeborg for editorial checks.
Niclas Salomonsson, my agent, and his colleagues a
t the Salomonsson Agency, and of course all the staff at my Swedish publisher, Piratförlaget.
And, above all, Tove Alsterdal, author and dramatist, who is always the first to read everything I write, and who discusses and analyses every part of the text, who supports and encourages me, and makes me feel I can carry on. I’ve said it before, and this time it’s more true than ever: without you there would be no books.
The source for the descriptions of the very worst of human atrocities was Amnesty International.
Any eventual errors and peculiarities are entirely intentional.
About the Author
Liza Marklund’s 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.
Visit her website at www.lizamarklund.com
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
BORDERLINE
THE LONG SHADOW
LIFETIME
LAST WILL
RED WOLF
PRIME TIME
VANISHED
EXPOSED
THE BOMBER
By Liza Marklund and James Patterson
POSTCARD KILLERS
THE LONG SHADOW
Liza Marklund
A violent robbery has taken place in an affluent area of the Costa Del Sol, in which an entire family are killed.
Annika Bengtzon is assigned to cover the story for the Evening Post. But when she arrives in Spain and gains access to the crime scene, she discovers there was a third child – a teenage daughter – who is unaccounted for.
Annika makes it her mission to find the missing girl. But as she delves into the mystery she becomes embroiled in a far darker side of Spanish life than she’d envisioned, as she begins to piece together a terrifying story of violence, abuse and murder.
‘Liza Marklund has a knack for building beautifully elaborate and suspenseful plots. One of her greatest surprises is the strength of her heroine, Annika Bengtzon, an astonishing woman and an incredibly complicated character’
KARIN SLAUGHTER
BORDERLINE
Liza Marklund
In the midst of a Swedish winter, a young mother is found murdered behind her son’s nursery. Halfway across the world, in the sweltering Kenyan heat, a government official is kidnapped.
As a journalist, Annika Bengtzon is often on the frontline, witness to the darkness humans are capable of. But this time it’s different. It’s personal.
The official held to ransom is her husband and she must meet the extreme demands of his kidnappers if she is to bring him home. And what of the Swedish mother slain in the snow? Until her killer is found, no one is safe . . .
‘In a league of her own’
HENNING MANKELL
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Originally published in Swedish by Piratförlaget in 2013
as Lyckliga gatan
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Corgi Books
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Liza Marklund 2013
English translation copyright © Neil Smith 2015
Liza Marklund has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473508804
ISBN 9780552170963
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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