The Long Shadow
Authors: Liza Marklund
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime
A violent robbery has killed an entire family on the Costa Del Sol.
Annika Bengtzon is assigned to cover the story for the
Evening Post
. But when she arrives in Spain, 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.
Contents
Liza Marklund
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 pot-hole 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. ‘The 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
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 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.