The Long Shadow (28 page)

Lotta was close to a breakdown. She’d called Annika at least a hundred times but there was something wrong with her mobile, which wouldn’t connect the calls – she kept getting a Spanish voice saying something unintelligible.

‘You need to dial four six before you call my number,’ Annika said.

The photographer stared at her. ‘Of course I dialled the country code! Is your mobile even switched on?’

Annika dug around in her bag and fished it out on the end of the hands-free earpiece. ‘Sorry.’

‘How could you just leave me like that?’ Lotta said. ‘We’re supposed to be doing this series of articles together.’

‘Calm down,’ Annika said, switching her phone on. ‘You haven’t missed anything important. I’ve just been getting some background information. Did you get any pictures?’

‘Of what? This building? Or the picturesque surroundings?’ She gestured towards the windswept expanse surrounding the conference centre, the thundering motorway, the shabby industrial buildings in the background.

‘We need to sit down and try to book up some interviews
for tomorrow,’ Annika said. ‘A drug-dealer, a solicitor specializing in money-laundering, a few jet-set Swedes …’

Lotta looked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘This has been really hard for me, getting up so early, and you just disappearing like that. I want to go to the hotel now and get unpacked, and then I need something to eat.’

Annika stared at the woman before her, her mane of blonde hair, long legs and angular shoulders. ‘Unpacked?’ she said. Then she remembered Anders Schyman’s words of wisdom: choose your battles carefully. It was Wednesday today. They were flying home on Saturday. They had two full days in which to complete the entire series of articles. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You go ahead. The Hotel Pyr is in Puerto Banús – you can see it from the motorway.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I’ve got loads of work to do.’

‘But—’

‘With a bit of luck I’ll be able to get hold of the Swedish drug-runner in prison in Málaga. One of us needs to sort that out. Shall we meet up over breakfast in the hotel early tomorrow morning? Eight o’clock?’

Lotta was about to say something else, but Annika turned away and walked towards Niklas Linde’s car. Not the BMW this time, but a Jaguar.

‘Is that your photographer?’ he said, looking with interest at Lotta.

‘No,’ Annika said, as she opened the door. ‘She’s not mine, she’s the
Evening Post
’s. You’re welcome to borrow her.’

He grinned. ‘I prefer reporters,’ he said.

Annika waved as they drove past her in the car park.

The traffic was heavy, almost static. Linde closed his window and turned up the air-conditioning. The
thermometer on the dashboard said the outside temperature was twenty-nine degrees.

‘Is it always this warm?’ Annika said. The sweat under her breasts was starting to dampen her T-shirt.

‘It’ll be like this until October,’ he said. ‘There’s never a drop of rain during the summer months.’

She took off her sunglasses and peered out at the sea. ‘Has anything happened in the Sebastian Söderström case?’

He frowned. ‘Have you heard what the post-mortem report said? About the thieves?’

She shook her head.

‘They weren’t gassed, they died from respiratory failure caused by a morphine overdose.’

Annika looked at him. His arms were chestnut-brown. ‘A morphine overdose? They were addicted to morphine?’

‘The morphine was in their bottles of beer.’

Annika recalled the cab of the thieves’ truck: the dirty windows, the split vinyl seats, the hamburger wrappers on the dashboard, the map of Marbella, the mud on the floor, the two half-empty beer bottles … ‘They were in the cup-holder next to the radio.’

‘One-litre bottles of San Miguel,’ he said. ‘Screw-top.’

‘So someone doctored them,’ Annika said. ‘That means …’

‘… someone killed them. Exactly.’

‘But who? And why?’

‘Why do you think?’

She fell silent.

‘It’s actually pretty smart,’ Linde said. ‘You can get morphine from any hospital. The cupboards are supposed to be kept locked, but they’re not hard to break into. The liquid forms have flavourings in them, so in this instance the pathologist thinks we’re dealing with tablets.’

‘But wouldn’t it take loads of pills to actually kill someone?’ Annika said.

‘Someone who’s not used to it would die from sixty milligrams of morphine chloride. That’s either three or six tablets, depending on their strength. The amount of poison in those beer-bottles would have knocked out an elephant.’

Annika held onto the dashboard as Linde overtook a bus full of golf-playing pensioners. ‘So what happened during the actual break-in, then?’ she said. ‘Didn’t the thieves have those injections to counteract the gas?’

‘A naloxone derivative, yes. Traces were found in their blood.’

‘They opened the gate by using the right code. How did they know it?’

‘The code that was entered was the emergency one, not the one chosen by the family. That sort of code gets sold fairly often. There have been several cases of security companies being behind large-scale break-ins – they did one in an apartment complex in Nueva Andalucía.’

Annika scratched her cheek. ‘So they gassed the family,’ she said, ‘went inside without gas masks, smashed down the wall around the safe, carried it out to one of the vehicles, then looted the house, put everything into the truck and drove away.’

‘More or less.’

‘And when they thought they were home and dry they opened the bottles of beer to celebrate.’

Linde nodded.

They left the crowds on the public motorway and headed up onto the toll-road.

‘But didn’t those injections mean they weren’t susceptible?’ Annika said. ‘I thought they were supposed to block the effect of tranquillizers? So how could they die of a morphine overdose?’

‘The naloxone derivative only lasts an hour or two. Then the morphine kicks in. They must have got tired and parked up in La Campana for a rest.’

‘I presume there are no fingerprints on the beer-bottles apart from the thieves’?’

‘Correct.’

Mountains, sea and greenery flashed past. Annika shut her eyes and saw the little girl’s bedroom, the unmade bed, the paints, the doll with the curly brown hair. She recalled the corridor leading to the closed door of the parents’ bedroom, the floor where the children had died. ‘There’s something very odd about this crime,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think?’

Linde was staring straight ahead, and didn’t answer.

Then it struck her, a sudden, terrible realization. ‘No one laces beer with a fatal dose of morphine in advance unless they’re determined to kill the people drinking it,’ Annika said.

‘Quite right.’

She shivered, and he turned down the air-conditioning.

‘So this was a meticulously prepared mass-murder camouflaged as a break-in,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea why?’

The police officer shook his head. ‘They cleaned up very carefully after them. The thieves who carried out the break-in were a risk so they were eliminated. Presumably the explanation was inside the safe, but we’re unlikely ever to see that again.’

She looked out across the landscape. ‘What are the Spanish police doing?’

‘Nothing,’ Linde said. ‘The case is regarded as officially closed from a police perspective. The thieves are dead. There are a few loose ends, but there usually are.’

‘You sound critical?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not formally involved in the
investigation,’ he said. ‘I’m here to deal with the international drugs trade, not break-ins at local residential properties.’

‘But you think the Spaniards were too quick to drop this?’

He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. ‘There must be some motivation for this crime that we haven’t identified,’ he said. ‘Executing an entire family is an expression of serious brutality. The killer was making a point. We don’t know which of the victims was the real target. Was it the whole family, or just one?’

‘It can hardly have been the children,’ Annika said, ‘so that must mean one of the adults. Have you checked them out?’

Linde sighed. ‘Not very thoroughly. Sebastian Söderström was a charming slacker, completely incompetent when it came to money. Veronica Söderström was a well-regarded solicitor. Astrid Paulson was practically retired, and Suzette was a schoolgirl who was about to start work at a stables.’

‘Could there be something in Sebastian’s shaky finances?’

‘Of course, but if you don’t ask any questions, you don’t get any answers.’

‘And what about Suzette? Have you heard anything from her at all?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a thing. It’s like she went up in smoke on the thirtieth of December last year.’

‘Is there still any kind of active search for her?’

‘Now? No.’

‘Do you think she’s alive?’

‘There’s been no sign of life from her for four months. She hasn’t crossed any national boundaries, hasn’t withdrawn any money, hasn’t made any calls, hasn’t logged into the Internet. If she’s alive somewhere, she’s locked
up, unable to contact the outside world. So the worst of it may not be that she’s dead.’

Annika sat in silence for a long minute. She thought of the picture of the girl with the sullen demeanour, her black hair and fragile face.
The worst of it may not be that she’s dead
. How utterly appalling. ‘But there are still things to follow up,’ she said. ‘Aren’t there?’

He nodded. ‘The person who doctored the beer.’

‘He set the whole thing in motion,’ Annika said. ‘Hired the thieves, got hold of the gas and naloxone derivative, paid to get the villa’s alarm codes, poisoned the beer, took the safe and drove off.’

‘If it is a he.’

Annika gaped at him.

‘The footprints found at the crime scene,’ he added. ‘Three pairs, two of which match the thieves’ shoes. The third set were size thirty-seven.’

Few men have feet that small. ‘Do you have any idea who she could be?’

He smiled. ‘Oh, little Annika, you’re so serious,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re here again. Shall we put the gas attack behind us and talk about something more pleasant?’

‘Just one last question,’ she said.

He raised his right hand and brushed the hair from her face. ‘There were no fingerprints and no DNA to go on. No vehicle and no witnesses.’

She could feel his touch, like scalding water. ‘Just footprints,’ she said.

‘Just footprints,’ the police officer said.

She looked down at his feet. They were huge. ‘You know what they say about men with big feet?’ she said.

He glanced at her, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What?’

She relaxed and laughed, feeling her face getting
warm. She looked out at the concrete skeletons lining the motorway, and felt anticipation radiate from her stomach. ‘The Swedish drug-runner,’ she said, trying to sound normal. ‘Does he want to talk to the
Evening Post
?’

‘I spoke to his lawyer this morning. You’ve got an appointment to visit him in prison in Málaga at eleven tomorrow morning.’

He braked as they reached the toll-booth in Calahonda, and joined one of the queues, ending up behind a lorry from Morocco.

‘What do you think the cargo is?’ Annika asked.

Linde stretched out his hand again, took a gentle hold of the back of her neck, leaned across the Jaguar’s central console and kissed her. The effect was electrical. The hair everywhere on her body stood on end. She kissed him back as if she were drowning, running her fingers through his hair, then tightening her grip and holding him there. She kissed him until she was short of breath and the cars behind them blew their horns.

‘Are you staying at the same hotel?’

Annika nodded, feeling giddy. The car behind overtook them, its tyres squealing, and the driver gave them the finger as he passed.

‘Are you in a rush to get somewhere?’ she asked. ‘Or have you got time to see me to my room?’

He put the car in gear and drove up to the toll-booth.

It was much easier than she had expected. There was no embarrassment, no performance-anxiety. Their clothes ended up on the floor just inside the door and he looked at her with a mixture of laughter and seriousness in his eyes, then kissed her intensely.

He stayed with her afterwards.

Lotta was already installed at one of the window tables when Annika got down to the dining room. The photographer had a tray laden with eggs and bacon, cereal with pink yoghurt, a glass of orange juice and another of tomato juice, bread, cheese and peppers, and two chocolate croissants.

Annika got a cup of coffee and an English morning paper and sat down beside her. From the corner of her eye she saw Niklas Linde cross the vestibule towards the main doors. They were going to meet up again that afternoon and discuss what the Swedish police were doing on the Costa del Sol to combat drugs and money-laundering.

‘You’ve no idea what you missed last night,’ Lotta said, chewing energetically on a bit of tough bread. ‘I had a wonderful Spanish meal at a really authentic tapas bar down by the harbour. And you know those mountains you can see over there?’ she went on. ‘They’re actually in Africa!’

Annika looked at her to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. ‘Really?’ she said, opening her paper.

She could still feel Niklas’s arms round her back. They had showered together that morning, which she
had never done with Thomas. He always wanted to be left in peace in the bathroom.

‘The amount of crime down here is terrible,’ Lotta went on. ‘A man in the bar said they’ve got the Mafia here.’

‘Four hundred and twenty different versions of it,’ Annika said, as she leafed through the paper.

Lotta’s eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘Police information,’ Annika said. ‘They told me during my meeting with them yesterday when you were having trouble with the phone. A ton of cocaine reaches Europe via Spain every day.’

‘Well,’ Lotta said, ‘you have to take figures like that with a pinch of salt. The police say things like that to justify their budget. What we really need is proper journalism, based on facts that we find out for ourselves. That sort of thing gets badly overlooked in newsrooms these days.’