The Long Shadow (17 page)

‘Do you really think she’s run away?’ Carita said. ‘You don’t think something’s happened to her?’

Annika braked in the middle of a roundabout. She
had started to recognize the Brits who always looked the wrong way. ‘For someone who’s supposed to be impulsive, she seems very devious. She calls her mum and says she’s going to stay with Vibeke Jensen, and she tells Vibeke Jensen that she’s going back to Sweden. She tells her tennis coach that she’s going to a party and will stay with a friend, and also demonstrates that her mobile doesn’t work. Sounds like running-away-from-home plan A to me.’

‘So what did she tell her dad?’ Carita asked.

‘Well,’ Annika said, as she pulled out onto the motorway, ‘we’re never going to know, are we?’

‘What if she doesn’t turn up soon? Are you going to tell the police?’

‘I’m going to write about it in the paper,’ Annika said.

‘Do you want to come round to ours this evening? We’re going to a big lunch in Estepona at two o’clock, but we were thinking of doing something smaller this evening with a few neighbours, have some tapas …’

Annika took a moment to answer as she turned off towards the harbour. If she went, would the food appear on the invoice? ‘I’ve got a lot to write,’ she said, ‘and—’

‘But you still have to eat, and we’ll be starting late. Come at half eight, nine, something like that. You don’t have to stay the night.’

Annika pulled up in front of the hotel. ‘How do I find you?’

‘You need to get the right exit from a total of seven roundabouts. I’ll email you detailed instructions.’

Carita opened the door, jumped out onto the tarmac and walked off on her high heels.

Annika parked and went up to her room. She’d have time for lunch and to write up the interview with Francis before Lenita Söderström was due to arrive in Puerto Banús.

Annika, or rather the
Evening Post
, had come to an arrangement with Suzette’s mother. The paper would pay for her to spend three nights at the Hotel Pyr, on condition that she didn’t speak to any other media in that time.

She switched on her laptop and went to the paper’s homepage. The online edition was dominated by a web-TV item about a man whose nose was fourteen centimetres long. She moved on to the second most important news of the day, her article about Suzette. The murder of the Söderström family had been given its own little section of the website: ‘Costa del Sol Murders’. The newsroom in Stockholm had managed to dig out an old school photograph, but presumably Suzette looked rather different now. In the picture she was smiling uncertainly at the camera, with brown curls framing her face. In the description circulated by Interpol, her hair was described as short and jet-black. Annika skimmed her text. It was pretty thin. On the other hand, the picture of the search party, which obviously hadn’t found anything, was rather good. The blue lights were reflected in the concentration on people’s faces. The photo reeked of night and panic.

The second piece, about the House of Death, was considerably better. Using the pictures from her mobile with facts about fentanyl gas and the storming of the Russian theatre, she had managed to come up with a fairly credible reconstruction of the family’s last minutes alive.

There was the doorway where they had been found, the two young children on one side and the mother on the other. ‘One important physical effect of fentanyl is apathy,’ she had written. It meant that victims became lethargic, and even though they could see and register
everything, they didn’t react. That could have been why the terrorists in the Moscow theatre hadn’t fired their weapons when the building was stormed. The mother and children had been on either side of the closed door, unable to call to each other or open the door, but still aware that something terrible was happening. Then they had simply gone to sleep. Their final seconds hadn’t been full of anguish. Fentanyl was a strong narcotic. It didn’t cause hallucinations, anxiety or any similar response. Muscle-control simply declined and finally ceased. Victims lost consciousness, then stopped breathing. The process was rapid and would have been over in a couple of minutes.

There were the pictures of the children’s rooms, the desk where Sebastian had been found, and the bed with the duvet he had used to try to save his family.

Dreadful pictures, but they were exclusive.

The minute’s silence at the golf club was the third item under ‘Costa del Sol Murders’. The picture of the three and a half celebrities in sunglasses was perfectly okay, with the caption, ‘If everyone was like Sebbe, the world would look very different.’

She took a quick look at what the competition had produced. They were leading with the Söderström family, but with a different heading: ‘The Gas Murders’.

The Madrid correspondent hadn’t got anywhere near as far today. She had fewer facts about Suzette’s disappearance and, of course, no pictures from inside the house. But she had already spoken to Francis, which was fairly typical. She’d have to try to squeeze Francis into the article about Suzette’s mother.

In despair suddenly, she went to the bed and threw herself onto it. The best thing about staying in a hotel was that someone else cleaned up after you. It would
have been nice if they could have brought up a bit of food every so often, but Officer Linde had offered to do that for her.

She remembered her dream of them walking side by side through the pitch-black national park, the thorns, the mild breeze …

Her mobile rang. It was Linde. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

‘We’ve got the burglars,’ he replied abruptly. ‘Can you find your own way to La Campana?’

‘Have you arrested them?’

‘They’re dead,’ he said. ‘Have you been to La Campana?’

‘No idea,’ Annika said. ‘How do you mean, dead?’

The police officer groaned. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up. Ten minutes.’

She heard a shriek of car tyres before he ended the call.

The BMW’s side windows were spattered with mud.

‘Have you been driving off-road?’ Annika asked, as she pulled on the safety-belt.

Niklas Linde didn’t answer, just handed her a local Spanish paper and set off for Nueva Andalucía.

‘What’s this?’ Annika said. ‘I can’t read Spanish.’

‘Take a look at page seven,’ the police officer said.

She turned to it and found herself staring at her own pictures from inside the Söderström family home in Las Estrellas de Marbella.

‘Fuck,’ Annika said, crumpling up the paper. ‘I told them not to sell them to anyone else.’

‘I’m thinking of doing a deal with you,’ Linde said, manoeuvring the car between Porsches and cars rented for Sunday outings. ‘I’ll take you to the place where the Söderström burglars were found, and you can write an article about a case we’re working on.’

‘You’re thinking of doing a deal with me,’ Annika repeated. ‘What makes you think I’ll agree?’

‘Because that way you’ll get two good articles instead of none,’ Linde said. ‘I’ve done my research and found out that you’re the sort of person who likes doing deals.’

She was horrified. ‘What’s that supposed to mean,
“the sort of person …”? Who have you been talking to?’

He glanced at her. ‘What is it you lot usually say? “My sources are protected by the constitution”?’

‘You’ve been talking to Detective Inspector Q,’ she said.

He grinned and turned off into a rundown working-class district. He was heading for an industrial area, a
polígono
, and stopped outside a warehouse with shutters pulled down over its doors. ‘Apits Carga,’ Annika read, on a sun-bleached sign above the entrance. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘In here the Spanish police found seven hundred kilos of cocaine less than two weeks ago,’ he said, pointing at the shuttered building. ‘It was concealed in a cargo of melons from Brazil. We know that some of the shipment was intended for Scandinavia, mainly Malmö and Stockholm.’

Annika nodded. ‘Your colleague mentioned something about this when I met you at that shopping centre.’

‘Things have moved on since then,’ Linde said. ‘Now we need to pour oil on troubled waters up in Stockholm.’

‘You need an article,’ Annika said, ‘to calm down the intended recipients.’

‘Exactly. You can interview me about a big drug-smuggling operation being cracked on the Costa del Sol. A raid has been carried out and the final arrests will be made before you write the article.’

‘That’s not enough,’ Annika said. ‘I need a Swedish angle or my editor won’t take it.’

‘One of the men who’s been caught is a Swedish citizen. Will that do?’

She hesitated, trying out the headline: ‘Swede arrested in Spanish drug raid’. ‘That’s not going to sell many copies,’ she said. ‘Definitely not a lead.’

‘It doesn’t have to be the lead, as long as it gets into the paper.’

‘Then I’ll need details.’

‘You’ll get them.’

‘Can I take a picture?’

‘Go ahead.’

She pulled out her camera, opened the door and got out of the car. She took three shots of the peeling façade in portrait format, and four in landscape. Then she got back into the car. Linde drove off.

The street was narrow, the houses small and shabby. Washing hung from the balconies. The pavements were full of rickety plastic chairs, advertising hoardings and doormats. Men in caps were drinking coffee from shot glasses. Large women were carrying vegetables in flimsy plastic bags. Workmen blocked the traffic as they loaded their tools into vans.

‘Looks like real people live here,’ Annika said.

Linde waited as two young women crossed the street with their prams. ‘The construction workers who were ordered to build Puerto Banús in the 1950s came from the north. They had to start by building their own homes. That’s what we’re looking at here.’

‘And this is where the thieves were found?’ Annika said, fishing out her notepad. ‘Is it spelled the way it sounds, La Campana, with a C?’

‘The truck’s over there,’ Linde said, turning into a large vacant plot. The furrowed ground and mass of tyre-tracks indicated that it was used as a general car park. A police cordon surrounded the far end where an old truck was parked with its back doors facing the wall. One of the rear doors was open, creaking in the wind. A car from the Policía Local was parked beside the cordon.

‘Are they … still there?’ Annika asked.

‘The bodies were taken to the mortuary early this morning.’

‘And this is where they were found?’

‘In the driver’s cab, to be precise. Shall we take a look?’

He switched off the engine, grabbed a torch and got out of the BMW. Annika followed, hoisting her bag onto her shoulder. The policeman went over to his colleague, shook his hand and exchanged greetings. Then he waved and pointed, towards her and the car, and beckoned her over. ‘We can go in as long as we don’t touch anything,’ he said, holding up the tape so that Annika could get underneath.

The ground was uneven and hard, and she stumbled. A few clumps of grass clung to life between the potholes. Patches of cement suggested some old foundations or a roadway.

She stopped a couple of metres from the truck’s rear door. Linde took a few more steps, lit the powerful torch and directed the beam inside the vehicle. It reflected back towards them off a large flat-screen television. He moved the beam and Annika watched as it lit the frame of a painting, a statue, a large globe and a rolled-up rug. On the floor of the truck sat a jewel-box and several games consoles – Annika recognized a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox. She pulled out her camera and took some pictures. ‘Five lives,’ she said. ‘For this.’

‘Seven,’ Linde said. ‘The thieves were killed as well, of course.’

He walked over to the left-hand side of the driver’s cab, where he was out of view of his Spanish colleague.

‘Is this everything that was taken?’ Annika asked, following him unsteadily.

‘The list isn’t firm. It was put together by the cleaner,
and she hasn’t much idea of what the art was or who it was by.’

‘How did the thieves die?’ Annika asked. ‘Were they shot? Beaten to death?’

He shook his head. ‘There were no external injuries on the bodies.’

‘Could it have been the gas? Fentanyl?’

‘Probably.’

‘Who found them?’

‘A man who lives on the other side of the street above that restaurant. He’d seen the truck standing here for several days and thought it was odd that it was still here over Epiphany. He came over to take a closer look and found them.’

Annika looked up at the cab. She could see only a dirty side-window and the edge of the roof. ‘They couldn’t have been visible from the outside,’ she said, ‘or someone would have noticed before.’

Niklas Linde stopped beside the cab and inspected it, keeping his hands by his sides. ‘The cab was unlocked,’ he said. ‘The old man opened the driver’s door. One of the thieves was in the passenger side, the other in the driver’s seat. The driver tumbled out when the door was opened. The old man had a minor heart attack and had to be taken to hospital by ambulance.’

‘Can we open the door?’ Annika asked. ‘If it’s still unlocked?’

He shook his head. ‘We can’t touch the handle.’

‘But if I climbed up,’ Annika said, ‘I could take a picture through the side-window?’

‘Without touching anything?’

There were steps beside the wheel-arch that she could stand on. ‘Can you lift me up?’ she asked.

He looked amused. ‘How much do you weigh?’

She hit his arm.

‘Come on, then,’ he said.

Annika let go of her bag, took a firm grip of the camera with her right hand, and stood in front of him. He put both hands round her waist, breathing on the back of her neck. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now.’

With a powerful thrust he lifted her into the air. She put one foot on a step to the cab and looked in through the side window. A narrow driver’s seat and a wider passenger seat in cracked vinyl, hamburger wrappers above the dashboard by the windscreen, a map of Marbella, mud on the floor, two half-empty beer bottles in the cup-holder by the radio.

She raised the camera and fired off a series of pictures of the interior.