Borderline: An Annika Bengtzon Thriller (5) (The Annika Bengtzon Series) - Softcover

Liza Marklund is an author, journalist, and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Her crime novels, featuring the relentless reporter Annika Bengtzon, instantly became international hits and have sold millions of copies in thirty languages worldwide. Visit her website at LizaMarklund.com.

Borderline

CHAPTER 1

The woman was lying on the hillside, covered with snow, in the forest some twenty meters behind the nursery school. One brown boot was sticking up, like a windswept branch, or perhaps the roots of a fallen tree. A ski track on the path seemed to hesitate at that point, marks in the snow showing where the poles had lost their rhythm. But apart from that the snow was undisturbed.

If not for the boot, the body could have been a rock, an anthill, or a sack full of last year’s leaves. It bulged like a white seal among the low scrub, shimmering and soft. The snow crystals on the boot glittered intermittently in the fading light.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Annika Bengtzon pretended she hadn’t heard the policeman as he came up behind her. She had trudged toward the body from a path behind Selmedalsvägen, via an abandoned football pitch, then up the hill and into the low-growing forest. Her boots were full of slowly melting snow, and her feet were so cold she was starting to lose the feeling in them.

“I can’t see any cordon,” she said, without taking her eyes from the body.

“This is a crime scene,” the policeman informed her, sounding as if he were trying to make his voice deeper than normal. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, at once.”

Annika took two more pictures with the camera on her mobile, then looked up at him. He was so young he hardly needed to shave. “Impressive,” she said. “The body’s still covered, but you already have a preliminary cause of death. What did she die of?”

The policeman’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know it’s a she?”

Annika looked at the body again. “Trannies might wear high heels, but usually not in size . . . What do you think? Thirty-six? Thirty-seven?”

She dropped her mobile into her bag, where it drowned in a sea of pens, children’s gloves, passcards, USB memory sticks, and notebooks. The policeman’s colleague came panting up the hill with a roll of tape in his hand.

“Has she been reported missing?” Annika asked.

“Fucking liberty,” the policeman said.

“What?” Annika said.

“That the Regional Communication Center call the evening papers before alerting a patrol car. Get lost.”

Annika hoisted her bag on to her shoulder, turned away from the body, and walked back toward the football pitch.

In recent months RACEL, Radio Communications for Effective Leadership, had been introduced throughout Sweden: a digital radio system for the police, ambulances and fire brigade that couldn’t be tapped into. At a stroke all the civilians who used to pass on tips about police were out of a job. The staff at the regional communication centres had enthusiastically taken on the task, as well as the extra income that came with letting the media know about outbreaks of violence and misery.

She reached the edge of the forest and stopped to gaze out across the suburb.

The gray-brown nine-story blocks below her were wrapped in a veil of frost and fog. The black branches of the forest were reflected in blank windows. The flats must have been built at the start of the massive house-building boom that had begun in the mid-1960s: The façades seemed to hint at some attempt at quality, as if there had still been an ambition to make the place worthy of its inhabitants.

Her toes were numb now. It was late afternoon. She could feel the wind blowing between the blocks.

Axelsberg. A residential district with no obvious limits, a name on a windy underground platform.

“A dead body behind a preschool in Axelsberg. It can’t have been there long.”

She’d been on her way back from Ikea at Kungens Kurva when the newspaper’s switchboard called. She had cruised through the slush, crossing the four lanes of the motorway and pulling off at the Mälarhöjden junction. Sure enough, she had got to the scene thirty seconds before the first patrol car.

She sent two of the pictures from her mobile to the desk, an overview of the crime scene and a close-up of the boot.

* * *

A dead body didn’t necessarily mean that a crime had been committed. All types of suspicious death were investigated by the police, but most turned out to have some natural explanation, or to have been accidents or suicides.

Something told Annika that this wasn’t one of those cases. The woman hadn’t been out jogging and then had a heart attack, not in those shoes. Anyway, she wouldn’t have been jogging through the undergrowth alongside the footpath. And she couldn’t have just tripped and fallen, not that far, and not right into the middle of a clump of bushes.

She had been covered with snow, but the caller had been correct: She couldn’t have been lying there for very long.

It had started snowing late the previous evening, sharp ice crystals that lashed at windows and stung like needles on the face of anyone who had to go out and buy milk at half past ten at night, as Annika had had to. During the morning the snow had started to fall more heavily and the Meteorological Office had issued a class-two warning: “Dangerous conditions for the public, damage to property and severe disruption of public services.”

An hour ago it had stopped.

The woman couldn’t have been lying there all night: If she had, her foot would also have been buried in the snow. She had ended up there some time this morning, Annika thought. What’s a woman doing, walking along a path behind a nursery school in high-heeled boots through a snowstorm at eight o’clock in the morning?

Annika headed right, down toward the street.

There were two nursery schools next to each other on Selmedalsvägen, one run by the council, the other private. Three patrol cars, the lights on their roofs flashing, were parked up, spreading a cloud of exhaust fumes in front of the entrances to the schools, which gradually dissipated among the climbing-frames and slides. As long as the lights were flashing, the engines had to run or the batteries would die. On more than one occasion a potential car chase had never happened because the police vehicle wouldn’t start.

A few parents, two mums and a dad, were arriving at the private nursery school, wide-eyed with anxiety. Had something happened? Surely not at their school. And not to their children because someone would have called, wouldn’t they?

Annika stopped behind one of the patrol cars and watched them. The father took charge and went up to the rookie cop who’d been left in the cold to fend off the press and any other curious onlookers.

A body had been found, presumably deceased, in the forest . . . No, not in the nursery-school garden, up on the hillside . . . No, it was unlikely that any of the children had seen it . . . No, the cause of death wasn’t known at present, and there was nothing to suggest that the death had any connection to the nursery school . . .

The parents breathed a sigh of relief and hurried in to their offspring, clearly relieved that, once again, death was someone else’s concern.

She went over to the rookie cop. “Bengtzon,” she said. “Evening Post. Which one of the nursery schools were her children at?”

The rookie glanced over at the council-run school. “Child,” he said. “She only had one, as far I know. A boy.”

Annika followed his gaze. A red cardboard star was hanging in the window next to the door. White snowflakes had been cut out and stuck to the glass. “And it was her workplace that sounded the alarm, wasn’t it? When she didn’t turn up this morning?”

He shook his head. “A neighbor,” he said, taking a step back. “But you’ll have to talk to the regional communication center about that, or a senior officer. I don’t really know anything.”

She felt a rumble of anxiety in her midriff, and thought it funny that she never got used to hearing news like this. A young mother with small feet and high heels drops her child off at nursery school and dies on a path as she’s heading home through a snowstorm.

Annika was so cold now that she was shaking. The cardboard star was moving gently in the window. A man went past down Selmedalsvägen on a bike.

She ransacked her bag for her mobile, then took a picture of the nursery school, nodded to the rookie, and went back to the newspaper’s car.

* * *

The temperature had dropped significantly since it had stopped snowing. Her breath turned to ice on the windscreen and she had to sit there with the defroster on full blast for several minutes before she could drive off. She undid her boots and wiggled the toes of her left foot frantically in an attempt to get some feeling back into them.

Ellen and Kalle made their own way home from their afterschool club, these days. It was on the other side of Hantverkargatan, and was one of the reasons why Annika had never tried to find anywhere else to live, even though the three-room flat she rented was far too cramped.

The traffic eased slightly so she took her foot off the clutch and the car moved a few meters forward. Not even the Essinge motorway had seen a snowplow. She wasn’t sure if the drifts on the road were the result of climate change or the consequence of a policy decision by the city’s new right-wing council.

She sighed and pulled out her private mobile, pressed to redial the last number, and listened to the crackle as the signal made its way through storms and satellites. There was a click on the line, no ringtone. “Hello, you’ve reached Thomas Samuelsson at the Department of Justice . . .”

Annoyed and slightly embarrassed, she clicked to end the call. Her husband hadn’t been answering his mobile since the evening before last. Every time she tried to get hold of him she heard that pompous message, which he insisted on keeping in English, even though they had been back from Washington for almost four months now. And the way he emphasized “Department of Justice,” Christ . . .

Her other mobile, the newspaper’s, rang somewhere deep in her bag. She dug it out without hurrying since the traffic wasn’t moving.

“What the fuck are these pictures you’ve sent through?” Patrik Nilsson, head of news on the printed edition, had evidently received the photos she’d taken with her mobile.

“Dead mother. She’d just dropped her son off at nursery school and died on the way home, unknown how. I’d put a tenner on her being in the middle of a divorce and the kid’s father beating her to death.”

“Looks like the root of a fallen tree. How did you get on with Ingvar?”

Ingvar?

“Ingvar Kamprad, from Elmtaryd Agunnaryd?”

She had to search her memory to remember the job she’d initially been sent out to cover. “No good,” she said.

“Sure?”

Patrik had got it into his head that the roof of the Ikea branch at Kungens Kurva, the biggest in the world, was about to collapse because of the amount of snow on it. Which would undeniably have been a great story if it had been true. The staff at the information desk had looked totally blank when Annika had asked if they were having problems with the roof. She’d told them they’d had a tip-off from a member of the public, and that it clearly wasn’t true. In fact the “tip-off” had arisen during the eleven o’clock editorial meeting that morning, presumably somewhere inside Patrik Nilsson’s head. In other words, she’d been sent out to see if reality could somehow be adapted to fit the Evening Post’s requirements, which, in this particular instance, had turned out to be a fairly difficult task. The staff on the information desk had phoned someone in Maintenance at a head office somewhere, and he had guaranteed that the roof could cope with at least twenty-two meters of snow.

“No broken roof,” she said sardonically.

“Yeah, but what the hell, did you see it for yourself?”

“Yep,” she lied.

“Not even any cracks?”

“Nope.”

The traffic around her started to move. She put the car into first gear, slid on the snowy slush, and was able to get up to almost twenty kilometers an hour. “What are we doing with the dead mother?” she asked.

“The tree root?”

“The police seem pretty certain who she is—a neighbor called to report her missing during the day—but they probably won’t be releasing her name this evening.”

“And she was found behind a nursery school?” Patrik asked, with new interest in his voice. “By one of the kids?”

“No,” Annika said, moving up to second gear. “It was someone out skiing.”

“You’re sure? Maybe one of the kids ran into her on a sledge. Maybe an arm got caught in the runners.”

“The traffic’s moving now,” Annika said. “I’ll be with you in a quarter of an hour.”

* * *

She left the car in the newspaper’s garage, then headed down the steps to the underground tunnels. There used to be four ways up to the office, but bomb threats and box tickers had made sure that all but one were now blocked. The only way to avoid the caretakers was to go from the garage into the basement, then use the lift situated beyond the reception desk. She’d also have several run-ins with a former employee . . . admittedly, Tore Brandt had been fired after he was found to be selling black-market booze to the night editors, but the discomfort of having to walk past that long desk was still in her blood and she almost always used the basement entrance.

She had to wait several minutes for the lift. On the way up her stomach clenched, as it always did when she was on her way to the newsroom, a sort of expectant tension at what she might find when she got there.

She took a deep breath, then stepped out onto the stained ­carpet.

The open-plan office had been redesigned a couple more times during the three years she had spent as the paper’s Washington correspondent, to suit the new age’s demands for collaboration and flexibility. In the center of the room the news desk floated like a luminous spaceship. It had reproduced: There was no longer just one but three. Like two half-moons, print and online sat with their backs to each other, staring at their screens. Berit Hamrin, Annika’s favorite colleague, called them the “Cheesy Wotsits.” The webcast unit was situated alongside, where the reception desk used to be. A dozen huge television screens above their heads showed flickering feeds from a mixture of online sites, text TV, and docusoaps. Marketing and advertising were now part of editorial, physically as well as in organizational terms. The screens around the dayshift reporters’ desk had been removed altogether.

In fact, everything was much the same, just closer together. The hundreds of fluorescent lights spread their indirect glow in the same flickering blue tone. Desks were covered with drifts of paper, heads lowered in concentration.

Her years in Washington felt like a story someone had told her or the remnants of a dream. Life was back to square one. This was precisely where she had started as a summer temp thirteen years ago, in charge of the tip-off phone line, running errands, a drudge in the service of the news.

She was seized by weariness. She was still hearing about the same murders of women as she had that first summer, just despatched to cover them by different heads of news. She was back, even living in the same block, albeit in a different flat.

“Have you eaten?” she asked Berit, who was typing furiously on her laptop.

“I got a ...