The Long Shadow (19 page)

Matches: Name

On the left-hand side was a picture of Suzette, presumably fairly recent and carefully selected. Her eyes were heavily made-up, her head was slightly tilted and
her black hair was sticking out. The angles were slightly odd – it had probably been taken with a webcam.

On the right were four options:
Send Message, Poke!, View Friends
and
Add to Friends
.

She clicked on
View Friends
and let out a whistle.

Suzette had 201 friends. They filled five pages, with names and photographs in alphabetical order, then a short description of each. They were all young and from Sweden. On the first page Annika found Amanda Andersson. As she herself was now part of the Facebook community, all she had to do was click on the picture of the young Amanda Andersson and send her a message. Whoosh. Off it went into cyberspace. With a bit of luck it would result in a phone call or email.

She carried on through the list of friends, and found Klara, whose surname was Evertsson-Hedberg, and Sandra Holgersson, and sent them messages as well. On the next page she found Polly, actually Paulina Sandman, with identical jet-black hair, the same expression and tilted head as Suzette.

They’d taken the pictures at the same time, Annika thought, on the same webcam. Maybe they’d set up their accounts at the same time, too, and gathered friends together. This was Suzette’s best friend.

She wrote her a message as well, slightly longer and more explicit than the others. She explained who she was, that she was writing about Suzette for the paper, that she didn’t want to get anything wrong, and that it was important her friends were given the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Then she looked through the list of friends once more.

No Amira, Samira or Akira.

She tried calling Niklas Linde but got no answer, so rang Knut Garen instead.

The police didn’t have any leads on Suzette, the
Norwegian explained. The physical search area had been expanded to cover a four-kilometre radius from the Söderström family home, which included parts of a rugged national park with deep ravines and steep waterfalls. They were also following up other lines of enquiry by going through her computer, speaking to her friends and neighbours, as well as to the staff at the bars of Nueva Andalucía.

She added a few lines to her article about the unsuccessful police search, explained that Suzette was a promising tennis player and that she trained regularly at her dad’s club, that her coach had once been ranked thirty-eighth in the world, and Suzette had been expected to have a career at least as successful as that.

She emailed her text and the terrible picture of Lenita to the
Evening Post
.

Then she opened the email from Carita with directions to her house. She hadn’t included any road names. ‘Turn left after Mercadona, drive past OpenCor and follow the road round to the left …’ On the way out to the car she stopped at Reception and asked for the number of Taxi Marbella. Just as back-up, in case she got lost.

The gate wasn’t quite as showy as the one to Las Estrellas de Marbella, but it wasn’t far off.

Carita Halling Gonzales’s estate lay high up a mountainside with a golf course immediately below. The streetlamps formed a river of light towards the sea, where Puerto Banús spread out like an intense thousand-watt bulb in the moonlight. She pressed the security phone for house number six and waited in the car as the gates slid open.

The buildings huddled together in groups of three or four. They were all different, pink or pale blue, ochre yellow or deep red, with balustrades, terraces and
decking. A swimming-pool with two waterfalls and large stone terraces faced the valley. Ornate streetlamps, like old London gas-lamps, lit the roads.

‘Welcome,’ Carita said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘Come in, come in! There’s no need to take your shoes off – you’re in España now! Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone …’

Having ‘a few neighbours’ round turned out to involve practically everyone on the estate.

‘You see that couple over there?’ Carita said. ‘She’s a maths teacher at Marbella International College, and he captains one of the yachts in the harbour. They’ve got two children and live just a bit further up. Nice people, but they’re Brits. The people going up to them now are Swedes. Do you remember the adverts for Diesel clothing back in the ’nineties? He did them. His wife was an international model in those days. Now they live in a neighbouring development. They’ve got two children, a son who plays football and a daughter who’s a Spanish show-jumping champion.’

Annika looked at the beautiful woman with the long, glossy hair. She was laughing as she put her hand on her husband’s arm. And she had a horse.

Carita gestured towards the other end of the room. ‘That woman’s Swedish, a partner in a law firm in Frankfurt. He’s from New Zealand and also works with boats. The young man with the dog is an estate agent from Jamaica. The older man used to run a bank in Kenya, but now he plays golf full-time. The couple over there are from Värmland – they moved down here when they sold their tyre company. But, dear me, you haven’t got a drink yet.’

She bustled off and Annika was left standing beside a group of expensively dressed people holding glasses of wine. She tried talking Spanish for a short while, but
after saying, ‘
Soy sueco
’, thereby introducing herself as a Swedish man, she stuck to English.

She went out onto the terrace and stood there gazing out across the harbour. The neon sign of El Corte Inglés was clearly visible.

‘Ah, so you found your way all right.’

Annika spun round when she heard the thick Gothenburg accent. She grinned as broadly as if she’d just met her oldest friend. ‘Rickard Marmén,’ she said. ‘I thought you lived in Marbella.’

‘I do, but my business partner has a house up here. What do you think? Do you feel like investing?’ He pointed at a sign on the next house,
Se vende
, for sale.

‘It’s all a bit too model village for my taste,’ she said.

He laughed heartily.

Annika nodded towards the for-sale sign. ‘How much is that going for?’

‘Depends what the owner needs. He’s a professional poker-player from Liverpool and he puts the sign up whenever things aren’t going well. The next time he wins he takes it down again.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Annika said. ‘I thought everyone who lived here was rich.’

Rickard Marmén smiled. ‘That depends on what you mean by “rich”. Most people here have a lot more time than people in Sweden, for instance. The tempo’s much slower.’

‘Naturally,’ Annika said. ‘If everyone spends all day playing golf, things don’t have to move quickly.’

Marmén moved closer to her and gestured towards the crowd by the bar. ‘I’d say most of them have worked hard, and probably still hold down jobs.’

‘So why have they moved here? For tax reasons? Or is it just the weather?’

‘A lot of taxes are lower in Sweden than they are in
Spain, these days,’ he said. ‘I think it’s more to do with wine, women and song.’

Carita sailed onto the terrace and tucked her arm under Annika’s. ‘My dear,’ she exclaimed, ‘you still haven’t got a drink!
Nacho, una copa de cava, por favor
…’ Then she leaned towards Annika and lowered her voice. ‘How did you get on today? Did you get a good interview with Suzette’s mother?’

Annika was given a glass of sparkling wine, which she put down at once. ‘I don’t think the girl’s run away,’ she said. ‘I think something terrible has happened to her.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Carita asked.

‘She hasn’t shown any sign of life in seven days. A girl with no connections in the area, who can’t speak the language, what are her chances?’

‘She could be with a man,’ Carita said.

‘Of her own free will? When she’s never even had a boyfriend? She’s only just turned sixteen.’

‘I was sixteen when I met Nacho,’ Carita said, beckoning over a tall, thin man with a receding hairline and sensitive hands. ‘Annika, this is my husband.’

They greeted each other properly, Swedish-style, with a handshake.

‘I understand that you’re a doctor,’ Annika said in English, but the man replied in Swedish.

‘Paediatrician,’ he said. ‘It’s an incredible career, taking care of the future.’

‘And you work at the hospital here in Marbella?’

He nodded. ‘It’s first-rate. It’s just been completely renovated. I’m in the neo-natal department, working with premature babies. To my mind, that’s the most important type of care of all. It repays you for decades to come. Will you excuse me?’ And he slid away.

‘Unbelievable,’ Annika said, ‘to think we haven’t got
space for a man like him in Swedish society. Where did you meet?’

‘At a party in Beverly Hills, at the home of a girl whose father was a scriptwriter on one of those never-ending soaps that don’t make it to Sweden. Nacho was so different from all the other boys, so much calmer, so much more … masculine.’

‘And he’s from Colombia?’

‘From Bogotá. Victor, his father, was chief of police. We spent a few years living there in the early 1990s, in Chía, the university city twenty kilometres north of Bogotá, on the way to Zipaquirá.’ She fell silent and twirled her wine-glass.

‘Why did you move?’ Annika asked.

Carita paused. ‘We couldn’t stay,’ she said eventually. ‘Victor led a raid against one of the big drug syndicates that ran cocaine factories in the jungle. He was murdered immediately afterwards.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Annika said.

Carita took a large gulp of wine. ‘The Colombians are a bit unusual,’ she said. ‘They’re not content just to kill their enemies, they wipe out whole families. There mustn’t be anyone left alive to inherit anything.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Nacho survived,’ she said, ‘because we were visiting my parents in Sweden. Have you had any food? The children and I spent all afternoon preparing kebabs.’ She took hold of Annika’s elbow and made her way back in among the guests.

‘I thought you were just going to be having a few neighbours round,’ Annika said. ‘This must be everyone in the neighbourhood.’

‘Certainly not,’ Carita said firmly. ‘One in five households won’t join our little association because of the membership fee, which goes into the gardener’s wages, pool maintenance and the satellite television dish. Isn’t
that just dreadful?’ She drank some more wine. ‘They’re not welcome here. And guess what?’ She whispered in Annika’s ear: ‘They’re all Brits.’

Racism comes in all shapes and colours, Annika thought.

She was running along the beach at sunrise. The sand was firm and pale grey. Large flocks of birds she didn’t recognize took off, shrieking, towards the light. She had the wind in her face and salt from the sea in her hair.

I could get used to this, she thought.

Afterwards she took a long shower and decided to have a proper breakfast, for the first time in a week.

The dining room had a tiled floor and spotlights set into the ceiling. The walls were yellow, the chairs blue, the curtains striped. She ate a slice of white bread with some ham, and a yoghurt, with coffee and a glass of juice. Then she went upstairs and called the newsroom.

Berit wasn’t there yet, so she asked to talk to Patrik.

‘What’s happening today, then?’ he said, in a tone that suggested he’d been up and about for hours.

‘I told you I didn’t want the pictures to be sold on,’ Annika said. ‘Despite that, they showed up in every Spanish paper yesterday.’

Patrik sounded affronted: ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m not the one who sits here trying to sell pictures abroad.’

‘But I told you—’

‘Do I look like a messenger? You’ll have to take it up with the picture desk. What are you writing for tomorrow?’

‘The burglars are dead, the stolen property’s been found and Suzette’s still missing. I’m starting to run out of new angles,’ she said.

‘The whole story’s gone cold,’ Patrik decided. ‘Get the first plane home tomorrow morning. You can spend today tidying up anything that’s left.’

‘I’ve got something about a Swede picked up in a recent drug raid down here,’ she said, thinking of her deal with Niklas Linde.

‘Write it up and we’ll see if we can use it. For tomorrow I want a summary of what life’s like for the Swedes down there. Are they all tax-dodgers, by the way?’ He sounded wistful, four thousand kilometres away in the newsroom. ‘“Swedes flee Costa del Sol”,’ he added. ‘Death in Paradise. End of an era. Truckloads of possessions heading north again.’

He took an audible gulp of something, probably coffee. ‘I’ve heard there’s a Swedish estate agent down there who knows all there is to know about the Costa del Sol. His name’s … Hang on, I’ve got it here somewhere … Rickard Marmén! Do you think you can find him yourself or shall I try to get a phone number for him?’

Oh, so Mr Marmén was an estate agent as well, was he? Of course he was.

‘I think I can manage,’ Annika said, leafing through her notepad until she came to his number.

‘Get some really doom-laden quotes that show the whole thing’s about to go under,’ he said, and hung up.

She called Rickard Marmén’s mobile number from the hotel phone, but got his voicemail. Must have been a late night at Carita’s, she thought, and left a message asking him to call her.

Then she rang Niklas Linde.

He picked up at once.

‘The Swede in the drug raid,’ she said. ‘I need more details.’

‘I’ll pick you up from the hotel at eight this evening,’ he said. ‘See you then.’

Her mobile rang.

‘Sorry I didn’t answer in time, love. How are you today?’ Rickard Marmén was as cheerful as ever.

‘Fine, thanks. My bosses in Stockholm have just asked me to interview you in your capacity as an estate agent. What do you think?’

‘We could probably sort something out. Call in at my little boutique at lunchtime. It’s opposite El Corte Inglés in Puerto Banús, the big department store that—’

‘I know where it is,’ Annika said. ‘And lunch, that’s at two o’clock?’

‘Say half past,’ he said.

She looked at her watch. She had four hours to kill.