The Long Shadow (31 page)

She was taken aback. They hadn’t spoken since the infamous evening at the Järnet restaurant, with the ensuing pictures.

‘I was on my way to the loo,’ she said, still needing a pee.

There was a short, surprised pause.

‘What?’ Annika said.

‘Was that something you’d rather carry on with or can we talk for a minute?’

‘I’ll manage,’ Annika said.

He cleared his throat. ‘How’s the series of articles going?’

So, he’d been informed about it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said breezily. ‘It’ll be the perfect publicity brochure for the Justice Department.’

‘Excellent. I’ve got some information about our friend the Kitten.’

‘Really, what’s she done now?’

‘As you know, she was charged with three individual murders and one double homicide in a court in Boston. The trial was pretty quick, the verdict was announced yesterday. She’s been sentenced to eighteen years.’

Annika blinked. ‘That’s all?’

‘She had one of the best lawyers in the States. He got
the three murders discounted on some technicality, and she wriggled out of the double homicide by claiming self-defence.’

Annika sank onto the bed. ‘So what does this mean?’

‘That we can request her extradition, under suspicion of arson on your house.’

She stared at the stone floor. ‘Extradition? There’ll be a trial? And my name will be cleared? Will I get my insurance money?’

‘Our extradition request won’t be granted by the American authorities, so there won’t be a trial, but the fact that charges are laid against someone else means that you’ll be formally dropped from the investigation. The insurance company has already been informed. You’ll get the full amount.’

The insurance company. Get the full amount.

She tried to identify some sort of emotion inside her, relief or delight, but nothing came. She was just aware of the low murmur of the air-conditioning, the background rumble of the motorway and the questions that were piling up inside her head. Will they take the flat away now? Will they let me buy it from them? When will I get the money? Thomas will get half. Or will we have to rebuild the house? I don’t want to rebuild it! Can we sell the plot?

‘Annika?’ Jimmy Halenius said.

‘Er, yes?’

‘Did that picture in the paper cause you any trouble?’

She forced aside the background noise and the questions. ‘I survived,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

‘Only just,’ he said. ‘There was a big fuss in various parts of the building.’

Presumably he meant Rosenbad, since that was where he was calling from: the building in the centre
of Stockholm that housed the prime minister’s office, the cabinet office, the Justice Department and a few sections of the Foreign Office.

‘Shit happens,’ she said.

‘So what lessons do we learn from this?’

She got up and headed towards the bathroom. ‘Not to kiss in public places, and especially not when you’re on duty?’

‘Exactly!’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I really need a pee.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait.’

She stopped mid-stride.

‘You’re going to stay on the line while I pee?’

‘Well, you don’t have to take the phone into the bathroom.’

She shook her head, put the mobile on the floor, did what she had to, then picked the phone up again. ‘Are you still there?’

‘So where were we?’

‘Lessons for the future.’

‘Right. I was wondering if you’d like to come round to mine next time.’

She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘What makes you think there’s going to be a next time?’

‘I don’t think. I’m asking. Next Friday?’

‘I’ll have the children,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow, then, or Saturday?’

She looked up at the ceiling and breathed in the smell of the room: dust, disinfectant, insecticide and something unidentifiable. Could it be a lingering trace of Niklas Linde?

Did she want to see Halenius? She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

‘Can I call you at the weekend?’

She opened her eyes. ‘Sure.’ She ended the call and
curled up on the bedspread, pulling her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. She thought about dead children, ruthless women and powerful men. She let herself be swept off into something that was warm and dangerous.

Lotta was waiting in the lobby at a few minutes before four. She had all her photographic equipment with her, the rucksack, a clumsy tripod and a flash so big it had its own bag.

‘It’s good you’ve got everything with you,’ Annika said, ‘because this is going to be a difficult shot. The police officer in question can’t be recognizable, but the picture still has to be dramatic. The question is whether we doctor it instead of fussing with shadows and back-lighting and screens.’

Lotta looked at her in surprise. ‘Okay, I’m the photographer here,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d agreed that.’

Annika put her bag on the floor. She’d fallen asleep on the bed and woken up with a headache. The limit of what she was prepared to put up with had moved considerably closer. That she was going to be meeting Niklas with a colleague from the paper was making her tense and nervous. ‘This series of articles is being published in the
Evening Post
,’ Annika said curtly. ‘There are certain guidelines that need to be adhered to, and they’re there because they work.’

‘That may be true for you,’ Lotta said. ‘I’m here to do a good job.’

Annika picked up her bag again. ‘I’ll be waiting outside,’ she said.

Niklas Linde arrived fifteen minutes late, true to form. Annika hurried to sit in the front seat while Lotta put her things in the boot.

‘Hi,’ he said, putting his hand briefly on her thigh. ‘How are you?’

She took a deep breath, terrified that Lotta would see, but overjoyed at his touch. She managed a smile. ‘Great,’ she said.

Lotta closed the boot and Linde removed his hand. She got into the back seat and leaned forward between the front seats the way Kalle and Ellen did when they weren’t strapped in.

‘Lotta Svensson Bartholomeus,’ she said, holding her hand out and smiling at him.

He took her hand briefly, then looked at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘Niklas Linde,’ he said. ‘I know this doesn’t look like a police car, but I can assure you it is. So I’ll have to ask you to put your seatbelt on.’

Lotta actually giggled. Annika glanced at her, then looked ahead, through the windscreen. Mustn’t give anything away, she thought. Lotta won’t notice anything if we don’t give her any reason to. She folded her arms.

He’d changed his clothes: the sports shirt had been replaced by a short-sleeved shirt of some rough material. His hair curled down onto his shoulders – she had washed it. She imagined she could still detect the smell of the cheap hotel shampoo.

‘How was Jocke?’ Niklas asked.

‘Not too good,’ Annika said. ‘He’s homesick.’

‘That particular prison usually has that effect on people,’ the police officer said, as he pulled out into the traffic.

She braced herself as they went round a bend by
holding onto the dashboard. The best defence was actually to act normally. ‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ she said. ‘The name “Zarco Martinez” can’t be very common?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Linde said. ‘It’s not Andersson, exactly, but it’s not Bartholomeus either. I know a few people called Zarco Martinez here in Marbella. One of them’s a bloody good solicitor.’

‘I’ve seen the name somewhere before,’ Annika said. ‘Before I ever heard of our little drug-smuggler.’

‘Jocke’s got a brother,’ Linde said. ‘He must be in prison somewhere because we haven’t seen him for a while. His name’s Nicke Zarco Martinez. They used to work together.’

The big brother who had started dealing while he was still at school. But where would Annika have come across his name? ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not right. Not Nicke Zarco Martinez. It was something else.’

A large bullfighting stadium slid past on the right. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’ve been here before.’

‘You wanted pictures of the warehouse in La Campana.’

Annika turned to Lotta. ‘Do you think there’s any point trying to get pictures of an old drug-dealers’ warehouse?’

‘There’s not really much to see,’ Linde said. ‘The container’s been taken away as evidence.’

The photographer thought for a moment. ‘Is it in an authentic neighbourhood?’

He glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘I think you could safely say so.’

Lotta nodded enthusiastically. ‘Let’s go, then.’

Annika looked at his profile. ‘My head of news wants a heroic portrait of a Swedish police officer on the Costa del Crime. Can I write about you, or is anyone else down here at the moment?’

He was steering the Jaguar fast through the narrow streets. ‘Knut Garen is the official Nordic representative here.’

‘Yes,’ Annika said, ‘I know. But sometimes the Swedish police conduct operations, don’t they, without actually being stationed here?’

She was thinking about David Lindholm, and Julia’s description of Estepona while he had been working under cover, infiltrating some drug gang.

Linde braked and blew his horn at a cement-mixer that had stopped in the middle of a roundabout. ‘At the moment I’m the only one here.’

‘So what do you do, then?’

He drove up onto the pavement and passed the cement-mixer on the inside. ‘I’m a co-ordinator. An observer, you could say. I’m the link between the police in Malmö and the Spanish police on a particular case affecting both countries.’

So he was stationed in Malmö.

‘How active are you?’

‘I follow the surveillance and am involved in the decision-making process: do we go in now? Do we wait? Shall we let the shipment through and try to get the recipient as well?’

‘Like you did with the second shipment at New Year?’ Annika said. ‘The one with the oranges that you put a transmitter on?’

His face assumed a grim expression. ‘They ditched the truck in Karlsruhe. The sides of the container had been broken open. They threw the transmitter into the Rhine.’

‘Oh,’ Annika said.

‘A serious fuck-up,’ he said. ‘And I was the one who insisted that we should let it through.’

She didn’t say anything for a minute or so. The streets
were climbing upwards, the gates growing more ornate and the walls higher.

‘God, how tasteless,’ Lotta said, from the back seat. ‘Who on earth would want to live like this?’

People willing to pay ten million euros, Annika thought. ‘Is it common to have Swedish police officers working under cover here?’ she asked.

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘But when it does happen, how does it come about?’

‘We’d be talking about an agent who’s extremely active. He infiltrates an organization, probably as a buyer. Under Swedish law we’re not allowed to incite people to commit crimes, unlike in most other countries. That makes the situation a bit tricky.’

‘But we do have agents like that?’

‘All countries do.’

‘Did you know David Lindholm?’

He cast her a quick glance of surprise. ‘The TV guy? No. Why do you ask?’

‘He was down here a few years ago on a fairly long undercover job.’

‘When was this?’

Annika thought for a moment. Julia had been pregnant with Alexander, and the boy was four and half now. ‘About five years ago,’ she said. ‘He lived in Estepona with his family for a while.’

Linde shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’

‘Yes,’ Annika said. ‘I’m absolutely certain. His wife hated it. David was gone for weeks at a time, and he couldn’t tell her anything about what he was doing.’

Linde frowned. ‘I spent all that year travelling back and forth, and I can assure you that we didn’t have any independent agents from Stockholm stationed in Estepona. That’s not to say he wasn’t here, of course, but he wasn’t working for the Swedish police if he was.’

Annika frowned. Could she have misunderstood Julia? ‘Maybe he was so secret that no one knew about him,’ she tried. ‘Not the Nordic co-ordinator or the Spanish police.’

‘That’s not how it works. Everyone is always kept informed of what we’re doing.’ He turned left and the road sloped downward. ‘Suppose we were driving from Malmö to Holland for some reason,’ he went on. ‘We’d have to have approval from the Danish and the German police, simply in order to cross their territory. Being so deep under cover that no one knows about it is completely out of the question. Do you recognize where we are?’

They were in an industrial district with low buildings and narrow streets. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I’ve been here before!’

Linde sighed. ‘You must have the worst sense of direction in Europe. Yes, you’ve definitely been here before, with me. You even took a picture of that doorway.’ He leaned across her, resting his lower arm on her thigh, and opened the glove-compartment. His touch made Annika stiffen – what if Lotta noticed? He fished out a large bunch of keys, then sat up. Annika could feel his arm burning through the fabric of her skirt.

‘What a charming place,’ Lotta said, opening the door.

‘Hang on,’ Linde said. ‘We can’t stop here.’ He put the car in gear and drove off.

‘Aren’t we going in?’ Lotta said, looking at the closed shutters as they disappeared behind them.

‘I’m fond of this car so it’s a better idea to leave it round the corner.’ He parked at a pedestrian crossing on the next block, switched the engine off and turned to face Lotta. ‘I’d appreciate it if you took a fairly discreet
camera with you. We’ll all benefit from being a bit incognito.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘Good,’ he said, taking the key from the ignition and getting out of the car.

Lotta took a camera and a small flash from the boot, and they started to walk up towards the warehouse. Annika and Linde were walking next to each other, close but without touching, up the long slope. The workshops and wholesalers had opened again after the siesta. The sound of saws cut through the air, and they had to jump to avoid a cascade of sparks from a metalwork lathe. Two men were shouting something further up the street. It was hard to tell if they were angry or happy.

‘What’ll happen to this particular gang?’ Annika asked. ‘How far have you got with the investigation?’