The Long Shadow (29 page)

Annika consulted her watch. ‘I’m going back to my room to find out a few basic facts for myself,’ she said. ‘Shall we meet down here in an hour?’

She went to the buffet, grabbed some bread, cheese and ham, which she wrapped in a napkin and put into her bag.

In her room, she called Carita Halling Gonzales and told her about the planned series of articles. They arranged that Carita would go with Annika and Lotta to Málaga, and agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock.

She ate the bread, cheese and ham as she read the Swedish morning papers online. Then she switched off her laptop, got up and lay down on the unmade bed. She could still detect his scent on the sheets.

This isn’t love, she thought. This is just because I want to do it.

The prison was located in a
polígono
not far from the airport. The building was a plain single-storey construction of concrete blocks, covered with what had once been whitewash. Now it was peeling off, grey-green from pollution and damp. It was surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire and an electrified fence.

‘Not exactly the Hilton,’ Carita said, from the back seat.

It was a quarter of an hour before their allotted visiting time. They had parked in the shade, on the road that led north from the prison. According to the thermometer on the dashboard, the temperature outside was thirty-two degrees.

‘Why does this man want to talk to a newspaper?’ Carita asked.

‘That’s one of the things I want to ask him. He’s obviously got some sort of motive.’

‘Do you think he’ll reveal something to you in exchange for something else?’

‘There’s not much I can do for him, except write about his case.’

‘What do you know about him?’ Carita asked.

‘He’s got a Swedish-Spanish mother and a Spanish father. He was arrested just after New Year as some sort of courier for the drugs that were seized in La Campana. I want his life story, his background, how he ended up as a drug-runner, a bit of an insight into that world.’

‘The light’s completely wrong,’ the photographer said. ‘It’s far too flat. Soon there won’t be any shadows at all.’

Annika looked at her. She was staring intently through the windscreen, as if she were evaluating what she could see with millimetre-precision.

‘You have to get going much earlier to get any depth
into the pictures,’ Lotta added. ‘We should have been here at dawn.’

Annika took a deep breath. Lotta was basically uninterested in anything to do with their work. She hadn’t asked a single question about the drug-runner or any other aspect of the articles. She turned back to Carita. ‘He speaks Swedish,’ Annika said, recalling the drunken swearing when he had been arrested in San Pedro. ‘But none of the guards do so you’ll have to do the talking before we get in. We’ve got authorization, but Niklas Linde warned me that they might kick up a fuss.’ To Lotta, she said, ‘We won’t be allowed to take anything into the visitors’ room. No bags or cases. They’ll check our pockets for mobile phones, pens, notepads and so on, but you can try smuggling a mini-camera inside your trousers. If we’re lucky, they won’t have metal detectors.’

‘But that’s unethical!’

‘The Spanish justice system doesn’t decide what we publish,’ Annika said. ‘Anders Schyman does. We provide the material and he makes the decisions. Shall we go?’ She opened the door and stepped out onto the street without waiting for an answer. It was like walking into a hairdryer. The wind swirled round her legs, blowing yellow sand around her skirt.

‘This couldn’t have been a prison to start with,’ Carita said, shielding her eyes with a hand as she studied the mouldy façade. ‘It must be some sort of adapted industrial building. A slaughterhouse, maybe. Well, he’ll probably be here for a while. The Spanish judicial system is renowned for being slow. People sometimes have to wait several years before they get to trial.’

She took the opportunity to touch up her lipstick, then trotted off towards the entrance round the corner. Her blonde hair bounced rhythmically on her shoulders.
Annika had left her sunglasses in the hotel room and couldn’t keep her eyes open when they stepped out into the full sun. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock, and they had to wait in the dust for several long minutes before the electronic lock on the gate whirred and they were let in to walk the few metres to the prison building.

‘
Buenos días, señores
,’ Carita chirruped, pushing her sunglasses onto her forehead. Annika wiped the sweat from her face with her palm and followed her in. The cool of the air-conditioning enveloped her and she wrapped her arms around herself. The door closed with a metallic clang. She sensed Lotta close behind her.

They were in a cramped reception area. In front of them there was a tall, veneered counter and to the left the arch of a metal detector. Four uniformed guards with batons and leather-belts were staring blankly at them. The only light in the little room came from a small window beside the door.

Carita started talking to one of the men, who wore a peaked cap although they were inside, and a large ring of keys on his belt. Annika heard ‘Manolo Zarco Martinez’ several times – clearly he wasn’t Jocke here but Manolo. Carita took her passport from her handbag. The man with the cap waved both hands dramatically and raised his voice. Carita began to do the same.

‘We’ve got authorization for two visitors,’ Carita said. ‘Not three.’

Annika put her passport on the counter and looked at Lotta.

‘I find things like this difficult,’ the photographer said. ‘It’s not natural for me to force myself on people in tough situations. I’ll wait outside.’

Annika nodded. They’d never manage to smuggle a camera past the metal detector anyway, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to show the man’s face.
His condition for agreeing to the interview was that he would be anonymous. The best they could have got would be a silhouette of him, or the back of his head.

‘Okay,’ Annika said. ‘Take a few shots of the prison in the meantime, something that makes it look really awful. You can imagine the headline, “This is where the Swede is being held”, something like that.’

Lotta put her hands on her hips. ‘I’m the photographer,’ she said. ‘There are loads of factors that determine whether a picture turns out well.’

‘That goes without saying,’ Annika told her.

‘We’re signed in,’ Carita said, putting her leopard-print handbag on the counter. Annika stepped up, put her outsize bag beside it and signed her name on a form she didn’t bother to read. ‘I need to keep my pen,’ she said. ‘And a notepad.’

Carita shook her head. ‘You can’t take anything in.’

‘Can’t I borrow one? That’s what usually happens in Sweden.’

‘
Bienvenido a España
,’ Carita said, stepping through the metal detector.

Annika’s belt set off the alarm so she had to take it off and leave it next to the bags on the counter.

‘Do you think they’ll go through our things?’ Annika asked quietly, glancing at the bags as she and Carita walked towards the cells.

‘Bound to,’ Carita said, smiling at the guard in the cap.

They went through a narrow doorway into a long, tunnel-like corridor that was even darker than the reception area. A single strip-light flickered weakly at the far end. On each side of the corridor there was a row of metal doors, the same brownish-red colour as the floor. The air-conditioning rumbled and rattled. The man with the cap held out his hand.

‘
Celda numero seis.
’

Carita set off into the tunnel. The floor was slippery and she held one hand up to keep her balance. Her high heels echoed. Annika’s sandals clattered and slipped. The guard’s keys jangled.

‘
Aquí
.’ Slowly he identified the right key and unlocked the cell door at shoulder and waist height. ‘
Sesenta minutos
,’ he said, opening the door.

They had an hour.

The cell had no window. The floor was the same colour as it was in the corridor, but the walls were darker, greyer. Annika stared into the room, at first unable to see the prisoner in his grey clothes sitting on his grey bed. She stopped short when she met his gaze from the far corner.

‘Good morning,’ Carita said, going to him and shaking his hand. ‘My name’s Carita, I’m an interpreter, but I understand that you speak Swedish.’

Johan Manolo Zarco Martinez got up slowly and reluctantly, his eyes on Annika. ‘You the reporter?’ he asked.

His accent was from the suburbs with a large migrant population. Annika held out her right hand. He took it and looked at her dubiously. ‘My lawyer said you were pretty,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t met you, has he?’

‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Annika said. ‘I’m afraid he was going on hearsay.’

‘You didn’t bring a beer or anything with you? They don’t check that closely.’

Carita sat at the end of the bed.

A low-energy bulb in the ceiling was casting a bluish light from above, throwing deep shadows under the man’s eyes and nose. Annika glanced round the cell. There was nowhere to sit apart from the bed. A faint
whining sound was coming from the air-vent by the door. It was cold, but not as cold as it was in the corridor. She stayed on her feet, with her back against the door. An hour felt like eternity. ‘Your name’s Johan?’ she asked.

‘Jocke,’ he said, slipping back into the shadows at the corner of the bed again. ‘But you’re not going to print my name, right? I don’t want my picture in the paper. Mum still lives in Sweden, you know. My sister too.’

Annika knew he was almost twenty-six, but he looked younger. There was something naïve about him, something rather touching, or possibly just a bit crazy. ‘What would you like me to call you in the article?’ she asked. ‘You can suggest a name.’

He lit up. ‘Any name I like?’

Annika nodded.

‘Steel Bollocks!’ he yelled, then burst out laughing so hard he could hardly breathe.

She sighed and waited for the laughter to stop. ‘Are you okay with … Andreas?’

He stopped laughing and pretended to throw up. ‘No, fuck it, that’s totally fucking uncool.’ He thought hard for a few seconds. ‘Call me Bobby.’

‘That’s not a Swedish name. It’s English.’

He straightened his back indignantly. ‘What the hell? You said I could choose!’

‘A Swedish name.’

He slumped back against the wall with his arms folded. ‘Fredrik,’ he said.

‘Fredrik,’ Annika confirmed, unable to see why Fredrik was so much cooler than Andreas.

Martinez pulled his sleeves down over his hands and tucked his knees up under his chin. ‘Have you any idea how long I’ve been in here? I’ve told them I was supposed to drive the gear to Stockholm so I could get a quick trial, but the bastards tricked me. I said I wanted
to be transferred to Sweden, but now they’re going to take me to the provincial prison in Alhaurín de la Torre. I know a guy who spent three years there before his trial. You’ve got to help get me out of here!’

‘You’re really going to have to talk to your lawyer about that,’ Annika said. ‘I don’t have any influence over the Spanish judicial system. I’d like to interview you about how you ended up here.’

‘I want guarantees,’ the young man said.

‘Of what?’

‘That I can serve my sentence in Sweden.’

‘I can’t give you that sort of guarantee. All I can do is write about you in the paper, try to influence opinion …’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘That’s good. Influence opinion. So they get me home again. Fuck, I can’t stay here.’

Annika breathed out and sank down onto the floor. She had thirty-five minutes left. ‘Shall we take it from the beginning?’ she said.

She asked some general questions about his childhood and youth. It didn’t sound much worse than anyone else’s. The third floor of a concrete block out in Skärholmen, parents divorced, an older brother and younger sister, mum and sister still living there. He talked animatedly about his schooldays and the gang he had been in, hanging out in the shopping centre and competing to nick things. They used to sell their haul at the flea-market in the basement of Skärholmen shopping centre on Saturday mornings. His brother, who was ten years older, had started dealing hash while he was at school. He had introduced his little brother to drug-running, a career choice that had been extremely profitable until just a few short months ago.

‘I started when I was too young to be charged,’ Martinez said. ‘It was perfect. I couldn’t be charged even if I was caught, but I never got caught.’

‘How did it work? What did you smuggle?’

‘Coke, mostly. That’s where the money is. It went really well.’ He seemed genuinely happy.

‘Shouldn’t you have been at school?’

‘My brother used to call and say I was ill. They probably just thought I was a very sickly child.’ He grinned.

‘What about your mum? What did you tell her?’

He shifted a bit and suddenly seemed uncomfortable. ‘That I was with Dad, and Dad thought I was with Mum. They never talked to each other.’

Annika stiffened. In a flash she saw her own children in twenty years’ time, sitting in a windowless cell in some foreign country, explaining how their lives had gone wrong in a similar way: ‘I’m here because my parents never talked.’ She dropped the subject. ‘How did it work? How did you find your employers?’

He shrugged. ‘First through my brother,’ he said. ‘Then just contacts.’

‘People you knew, or people they knew, or through the employment service?’

He grinned broadly again. ‘Not the employment service,’ he said. ‘Mates. Friends of friends.’

‘Do you use drugs yourself?’

‘Not much. Just occasionally. I prefer beer.’

Annika wished dearly that she’d managed to bring a pad and pen with her. Her head was starting to ache with concentration. ‘Did you always run the route from Spain to Sweden?’

‘I did Holland and Germany as well. The market’s better there.’

‘Do you remember the first time you did it?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. To start with it was easy. I used to go by train, with the gear in a sports bag. The first time with rubbers was worse. It’s tough when you don’t know how to do it.’

Annika blinked. ‘Rubbers?’