The Long Shadow (32 page)

‘Let’s talk about that when we get inside.’

He stopped beside the entrance to the warehouse. Annika studied the façade. The faded sign saying ‘Apits Carga’ hung crookedly. The metal shutters had probably been blue once, but the paint had peeled off through weather and heavy use. The building was fairly tall compared to its neighbours, about six metres, she guessed.

Linde looked round, then crouched down, unlocked a small padlock by the wall and pulled up the metal screen. Behind it was another door, which he unlocked and slid open. ‘Please,’ he said, gesturing for them to hurry inside. Annika stepped into the darkness, closely followed by Lotta, and he closed the door behind them. It went pitch-black. ‘Scared of the dark?’ he asked.

‘Actually, yes,’ Lotta said.

Annika didn’t answer, just breathed in the smell of sawdust and rotten fruit.

A moment later there was a click by the wall and the
warehouse was bathed in light. She raised her arm to her eyes instinctively, blinked a few times, and saw that the warehouse was equipped with the same sort of halogen floodlights you would normally see in sports stadiums or on building sites.

The warehouse was bigger than it looked from the outside. The walls had been whitewashed, with the exception of a grey rectangle of breezeblocks on the long wall at the back. Dust and spiders’ webs hung in the air. Chunks of timber and fragments of plywood were scattered on the floor. A rusty saw leaned against one of the end walls. There was a pile of tools, or rather fragments of tools, in the far left-hand corner. In the right-hand corner there was a metre-high pile of sawdust.

Linde let go of the circuit-breaker and came over to her. ‘You can’t refer to me as your source for this,’ he said, ‘not even anonymously. You can write something opaque, “the police investigation indicates”, something along those lines.’

She pulled her notepad out. ‘Okay,’ she said, and wrote
reliable sources within the Spanish police
.

Lotta had pulled out her camera and was heading enthusiastically towards the pile of tools in the far left corner.

Linde took a few steps across the concrete floor. His hair curled at his neck and his jeans were tight on his thighs. ‘Apits is a haulage company,’ he said. ‘They ship fruit and vegetables from South America to Europe. There’s no big apparatus behind it. It’s all fairly small-scale. Apits Carga is the freight part of the business. We assume that Carga owns the containers and pays the shipping costs. Apits Depósito is the storage side of things, and that’s the part of the business that rents this warehouse. Apits Transporte owns the articulated lorries that carry the containers north from here.’

‘What does Apits stand for?’ Annika asked.

‘I don’t actually know,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing that resembles “Apits” in English, Spanish or any other language. “
Apios
” is the plural of celery in Spanish – that’s the closest we’ve managed to get. We don’t think it’s got any significance, even if celery is a type of vegetable. The domain name apits.com has been registered, but isn’t in use. It’s not a first name or surname, so we’re assuming it’s an acronym.’

‘A Place Indoors Thwarts Storms?’

‘Or Airport Passenger Intelligent Transport Systems. That’s a Japanese set-up for streamlining passenger check-ins at large airports. Or Analogue Proprietary Integrated Telephone System. Together with Dpits, Apits forms an integrated telephone system developed by Panasonic.’

‘Not very likely, then?’ Annika said.

‘Not really.’

‘So it stands for something completely different?’

‘Anna Petter Ines Tore Sigurd. Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘This is brilliant,’ Lotta said. ‘Good light, great atmosphere. You really get a sense of workers toiling at their machinery.’

This is good, Annika thought. We sound completely normal. Not like we spent half the night fucking.

Linde walked past her towards the grey rectangle on the far wall. ‘There used to be an entrance at the back as well,’ he said, pointing, ‘but they bricked it up. They wanted control over anyone coming or going.’

‘Who are “they”? Who owns Apits – or, rather, who’s behind it?’

He let out a deep sigh. ‘Gibraltar,’ he said.

‘So how much do you really know?’

He held out his hands.

Annika knew perfectly well that they were hard and strong. She looked down at her notepad.

‘We know that the warehouse was rented on a two-year contract to Apits Depósito. We found that out when we searched the offices of the building’s owners, a company in San Pedro.’

‘But this has nothing to do with oranges and melons.’

‘In part it does. The company ships fruit and vegetables, but only as a smokescreen for their real business.’

‘Which is cocaine from South America.’

‘Which is cocaine from Colombia,’ Linde said.

Annika walked around the walls, looking up at the exposed roof. She could feel him following her with his eyes. ‘Are the building’s owners under any suspicion?’

‘Discounted from the investigation entirely.’ He stopped in the middle of the floor. ‘This is where the container was,’ he said. ‘Checked through Customs in Algeciras on the twenty-ninth of December last year, with Apits Carga listed as the owner. Your little friend Jocke was supposed to have driven the contents up through Europe in a small lorry leased on a one-year contract by Apits Transporte. And that’s all we know.’

She walked over to him. He didn’t move. ‘So how did you catch them?’ He had shaved. He smelt good.

‘Surveillance,’ he said. ‘The boys talked among themselves. Jocke seems to have been at the centre of the web. We’ve re-evaluated his status. It looks likely that he was the link between the distributor and the other men who were arrested.’

‘He told me he never said anything important on his mobile.’

‘True,’ Linde said, with a grin. ‘But only if you count his conversations in Spanish. One of the lads used to live in Rinkeby and Jocke didn’t think we’d be able
to understand what he was saying if they spoke Swedish to each other.’

‘Is there any way to lower the lighting?’ Lotta called.

‘Lower it?’ he asked, turning towards her. She was lying on the floor with her camera pressed to her nose, photographing a broken pair of plate-shears.

‘A dimmer-switch or something?’

‘Er, no.’

He turned to Annika and ran his finger quickly down her cleavage.

Annika opened her eyes wide and pulled a face telling him to stop. They couldn’t start any rumours that she was having sex with her sources, not after the picture with Halenius. ‘So the distributor is Apits and its sister companies,’ she said, checking over his shoulder to make sure Lotta hadn’t seen anything. She was engrossed in the plate-shears.

‘Correct.’

‘And the men under arrest are … what? Small-time gangsters?’

‘Right again.’

‘And the supplier is?’

‘The Colombians.’

Annika looked at Lotta again. She recalled what Carita Halling Gonzales had said about her murdered father-in-law: the Colombians wipe out whole families. No one must be left to inherit anything. ‘Does the Colombian Mafia have a presence here on the Costa del Sol at the moment?’

‘Obviously they have representatives who make sure that the deliveries work.’

‘Is it okay if I move the saw?’ Lotta called from the corner.

‘Not really,’ Linde said.

She wanted to touch him. She wanted to put her hand on his stomach and stroke downwards, over his jeans. ‘How big was the seizure?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean by “big”?’

She stared at her notes. ‘Did everyone get excited and start cracking open the champagne?’

‘Seven hundred kilos is a lot, but on average the Spanish police seize a ton every day. So it won’t go down in the history books.’

Lotta got to her feet and brushed the sawdust from her dress.

Annika took a step back.

‘And Apits isn’t a particularly big player,’ Linde said. ‘But they’ve been established and active on the Costa del Sol for a long time. We’ve found information about rental contracts for trucks and warehouses going back to the mid-sixties. In other words, this is a small but very well-organized drug-distribution company. And obviously it’s a good thing if such an established syndicate gets smashed, particularly from our Swedish perspective.’

‘Why?’

‘Because their main customers were in Holland, Germany and Sweden.’

‘And this is the first time they’ve been caught?’

‘They’re bound to have had smaller shipments seized, but nothing on this scale.’

‘What will it mean for them? Is this the end of the business?’

‘We don’t know anything about their internal state of affairs, so it’s difficult to answer that.’

‘Will they get trouble from the Colombians?’

‘They’ll have to replace what was lost, and usually both parties share the hit. Every tenth shipment is lost,
and the Colombians bear that in mind in their planning. Anyway, it’s like a piss in the Nile for them. But for a set-up like Apits it could be make or break.’

He took a step forward, so that he was standing right next to her, and put his lips to her ear. ‘I won’t be able to spend tonight with you.’

She stiffened and her pen slipped, drawing a long line across her notepad. ‘Why not?’

‘I have to be somewhere else.’

He walked past her towards the door, carefree and untroubled.

She stayed where she was, immobile. He’s got someone else, she thought. The woman in the background at the terrace where he was having coffee when I called.
Hasta luego
, then a kiss. Or Carmen at the restaurant up in that mountain village. Or one of the girls who were laughing so hysterically when he called me from the Sinatra Bar the first night I was here last time …

‘Is there anything else you want to know?’ he asked.

Who is she? Annika thought. ‘Jocke Martinez,’ she said. ‘How did he get his information from the distributors?’

He opened the door a crack and looked out, then closed it again. ‘That’s one of our biggest stumbling blocks,’ he said. ‘We don’t know how Martinez communicated with his employers, and we don’t know how Apits communicated with the Colombians.’

‘If they didn’t use the phone, did they write letters? Emails? Did they meet at various tapas bars and exchange coded messages in folded newspapers?’

‘We had Martinez under surveillance. He didn’t meet anyone we can link to the supply chain. We haven’t found any written evidence, and nothing on the hard-drive of his personal computer. But he could have gone to an Internet café and received messages under the alias
Horny Finnish Housewife on some online message-board that we don’t know about.’

‘Did he often go to Internet cafés?’

‘This was a really great place,’ Lotta said, stopping beside the police officer with a smile.

‘Never,’ Linde said. ‘By the way, I’ve found you a party girl. She says she wants to speak out in the paper as a warning to others.’

‘Great,’ Annika said, forcing herself to smile. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Come on. I’ll drive you back to your hotel.’

Lotta dashed to sit in the front seat. She was talking enthusiastically to Linde about how much she had appreciated the bare setting of the warehouse, the harsh shadows, the worn tools.

Annika sat in the back trying to get a grip on her feelings.

Somewhere else
.

Obviously.

What had she been expecting? That he’d move into the flat on Agnegatan?

She stared out of the window. Gates and walls and rooftops rushed past. No, she thought. I wasn’t expecting him to move in with me, but I did think he’d be with me for the few nights I’m here.

Then a terrible thought: He didn’t think I was any good in bed. She shut her eyes. Tried to pull herself together. I thought it was good, and that’s what matters. He can think what he likes. I don’t regret it. She stifled a sob.

‘What do you say, Annika?’

She met his gaze in the rear-view mirror. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Do you agree that art is much more real than journalism?’

She looked out of the window again. ‘That’s an
impossible question,’ she said. ‘What does “more real” mean? It’s like asking, “What’s special about a fish?” and getting the answer, “It can’t ride a bike.”’

Linde burst out laughing.

‘What I mean is that art creates an experience inside you as a viewer, whereas newspapers only report other people’s experiences,’ Lotta said.

‘That’s crap,’ Annika said. ‘Do you mean you never experience anything when you read a newspaper or watch the news on television? When children are gassed to death? Or teenage girls vanish without a trace? Or dictators are toppled and people get democracy?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Lotta said, sounding hurt.

‘So what did you mean? That people will be more affected by your photographs of those plate-shears than reading about little children dying of fentanyl-gas poisoning on the floor of the landing outside their mother’s bedroom door?’

The silence in the car was deafening. The only thing she could hear was her own agitated breathing.

Oh, God, she thought. I’m doing it again. Going into battle for the most ridiculous things instead of talking about the real problems. There must be something wrong with me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the most awful headache.’

‘Here in Spain there are lots of fun pills,’ Linde said. ‘Do you want me to stop at a
farmacia
?’

‘I’ve got some paracetamol in my room,’ she said.

They passed the bullfighting arena on the left and Annika could just make out the motorway below. Thank God they were nearly there.

They sat in silence until they pulled up in front of the Hotel Pyr.

‘Give me a call before you leave,’ he said, with a smile, through the open window.

She slammed the door and forced herself to smile back.

Lotta went straight up to her room without looking at Annika.

Fine, Annika thought. She went back out onto the street and set off towards the department store, turned right towards the harbour and went into McDonald’s. She’d had enough of spending the evenings starving in her hotel room. She ordered a quarter-pounder with cheese, carrot sticks and mineral water, then sat at a window table.