The Long Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

again.
    The scenery outside became increasingly monotonous. The industrial units vanished, leaving just the pines. Their branches reached out towards the car, thesame dirty Volvo she had driven out to Garphyttan on the December day when she had found Alexander.
    At Brunna she turned right, towards Roligheten. All of a sudden the rain stopped. Annika had a terrible sense of direction and compensated for it by scrutinizing maps and writing detailed directions for herself. Left at Lerberga, then left again after 800 metres, past Fornsta. Through an army training area, then right.
    She was heading for Lejongården, a rehabilitation home for families, situated by the water of Lejondals-sjön, where Julia Lindholm had been staying with her son since he had been found.
    Annika had promised to visit them, but had kept putting it off. She didn’t know what to expect. She and Julia had met only twice before, both times under difficult circumstances. The first time, they had stumbled upon the gruesome murder scene on Sankt Paulsgatan on Södermalm. Annika had been shadowing Julia and her colleague Nina Hoffman on their shift in patrol car 1617 that evening. The call hadn’t sounded terribly serious, a domestic dispute, so Annika had been allowed to go with them as long as she agreed to stay in the background. Nina had ushered her away as soon as they had found the bodies.
    The second time they had met, Julia had been under arrest on suspicion of murdering her husband, police officer David Lindholm, and her son Alexander. She had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the City Court. No one seemed to care that she had always maintained her innocence, and claimed that another woman she had never seen before had shot her husband and abducted her son.
    Annika had only met Alexander once, on the night she had rescued him from Yvonne Nordin’s cottage outside Garphyttan. He had been missing for seven months.
    The headlights lit up a rough-hewn red wooden façade, the sort of red that reflected, which meant that it wasn’t proper old-fashioned paint but a modern oil-based version. This was the place she was looking for. She pulled up in front of the house, engaged the handbrake, switched off the headlights, but remained seated in the darkness with the engine idling.
    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