The Long Shadow Read Free Page A

Spanish coast and a bus crash in Denmark. Start with the bus and check if there were any Swedes on board.’
    ‘Lilian Bergqvist is asking for a review of Filip Andersson’s case,’ she said, switching the computer on next to Patrik’s thigh.
    ‘Old news,’ Patrik said. ‘We all knew she was going to do that as soon as we revealed that his sister was the real killer. Berit can write a note about it.’
    When
I
revealed who the real killer was, she thought, but said nothing.
    ‘The gassing in Spain sounds pretty grim,’ he went on, handing over the notes. ‘Looks like an entire family is dead, including the dog. See if you can make anything out of it, ideally a picture of them all, with the name and age of the dog. People are always interested in Spain – it must still be the biggest tourist destination for Swedes.’
    ‘Haven’t we got a stringer down there?’ Annika asked, remembering a picture byline of a suntanned man with a clenched smile.
    ‘He’s back home in Tärnaby for Christmas. The fire in Hallunda feels a bit thin, but maybe they had to evacuate and poor old Hedvig couldn’t get down in her wheelchair, or something else that would be good in the mix.’
    ‘Okay,’ Annika said. He’d already learned the vocabulary.
Good in the mix
. Bloody hell. ‘There’s a couple of other things I was going to check out,’ she said, making an effort to sound calm and composed. ‘I got a tip-off that the government was involved in a peculiar extradition case, and I’ve got a meeting at two o’clock that might lead to an interview about …’
    But Patrik had already got up and was on his way over to Features.
    Annika stared at him. She decided not to get upset. If he chose not to listen to his … subordinates, then that was his problem. She leaned back in the chair. She was pretty much the only person in the newsroom.
    She’d been called in by Schyman at eight o’clock that morning, and had assumed he would make another attempt to persuade her to accept one of the senior editorial positions. There were usually a few years between offers, but this time it was different. He’d tried before to push her into accepting head of news and headof supplements, and she had even accepted and become head of crime for a short time, but never before had he offered her lead editor.
    She let out a sigh. The way he had described it, five days on, five days off, she would still have been sharing the job with someone, probably Sjölander. She wouldn’t just have been held responsible for all the idiotic things that would inevitably have arisen while putting together the news section, but would also have had to sit through interminable meetings about budgets, marketing plans and staffing issues. I’d rather cover fires in blocks of flats in Hallunda, she thought, as she rang the section head of the emergency services control room.
    Smoking in bed, the section head told her, one dead, someone who’d taken early retirement. Fire extinguished. Limited smoke damage. No evacuation.
    ‘And who was the person who died?’ Annika asked.
    He leafed through his papers.
    ‘The flat belonged to a … I’ve got it here somewhere … Jonsson … Well, no one famous, anyway.’
    No one famous = no story.
    They hung up.
    The bus crash had involved a group of kids, a hockey team on their way to a tournament in Aalborg. The accident had occurred when the bus slid slowly off an icy country road in Jutland, and ended up on its side in a ditch. The children had had to scramble out through the driver’s window.
    Annika emailed the details to the picture desk and asked them to keep an eye open in case any pictures of terrified children appeared. The story wasn’t worth anything except as a caption to a photograph.
    The gassings in Spain was trickier to get to grips with. Patrik’s note had been a printout of a telegram from the main news agency, consisting of three lines statingthat a family with two children and a dog had been found