Borderline by Liza Marklund Read Free Book Online

copy of that day’s paper from the next table.
    HARRIET ATTACKED – BY HER OWN HAND!
    The front page was dominated by a picture of a fat woman in a hospital bed, scratching her face and apparently howling in pain. Evidently she was suffering from ‘alien hand syndrome’.
    It was almost comforting. Her husband might have gone missing in north-eastern Kenya, but at least Annika wasn’t being attacked by her own right hand. Mothers with young children might be getting murdered, but at least she had a job to go to.
    She leafed quickly through the news section, with hands that did exactly what she wanted them to.
    Not one word about the mother murdered outside the nursery school in Axelsberg.
    She tossed the paper into the recycling bin, went over to the sales analysts’ desk and borrowed (okay, stole) a copy of the prestigious morning paper. In the Stockholm section, under ‘news in brief’, there was a report about the dead body that had been found in a patch of woodland in Hägersten. No indication that a crime had been committed, no mention of the nursery school or of a human being. A dead body. Found. In a patch of woodland.
    She despatched the morning paper the same way as its evening colleague, pulled her laptop closer and began to search the blogs.
    On the internet there wasn’t a trace of the caution, ethical restraint or possible disinterest that the established media had shown towards the murdered mother. Speculation about what had happened to the dead woman behind the nursery school covered several pages. Most of the theories were presented as incontrovertible fact, and four names had been attributed to the victim. Either Karin, Linnea, Simone or Hannelore had lost her life: take your pick. Most had supplied her with too many children or no children at all, but one blog, ‘The Good Life in Mälarhöjden’, expressed concern, in a hideously misspelled post, over how poor little Wilhelm would manage, in much the same terms as Anne Snapphane had worried about Annika’s own children’s impending fatherless state.
    ‘And Linnea Sendman was allways so nice, even tho you could tell the divorse had been reelly awful …’
    That might be something, if her name really was Sendman, but the name might have been misspelled too.
    She searched for ‘linnea sendman’, and found pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, results from the Järfalla national swimming competition, that autumn’s new high-school students, and bingo!
    She leaned closer to the screen. A post from a Viveca Hernandez, blogging at one of the
Evening Post
’s own servers.
    When Linnea reported Evert to the police they took her seriously. The list of offences was so extensive and had been going on for so long that they said they were going to charge him with aggravated harassment. But they never did. Evert carried on as usual, calling at all hours of day and night, kicking the door and yelling so loudly it echoed up the stairwell. A week later Linnea called the prosecutor’s office and asked why they hadn’t picked him up, seeing as she’d filed an official complaint. The prosecutor told her that the crime had passed the statute of limitation. Abuse, unlawful threats and sexual assault of the sort she had described in her report had a time limit of two years. But aggravated harassment, Linnea said, had a limitation period of ten years, because she’d checked. Then the prosecutor told her the law didn’t work like that. Aggravated harassment wasn’t regarded as a continuous crime, apparently. Each offence had to be considered separately, and would have its own limitation period. He said that the ten-year period was purely hypothetical …
    Annika was astonished. Could that really be true? She herself had written plenty of articles and interviewed loads of experts and lawyers about aggravated harassment, and she’d thought she had a fairly good idea of what the law meant.
    For a woman living in a violent relationship it could be difficult to remember