The Long Shadow (38 page)

This was what they always did. Skirted around the important things. Said stuff that never meant anything. ‘Fine, thanks,’ she said. ‘Not enough time, a lazy photographer, too little preparation, but it’ll probably work out okay. How about you?’

He sighed. ‘This whole business, trying to coordinate economic legislation throughout Europe, is a much bigger task than I’d thought. I’m going to be on secondment to the department for a while. It feels good to be entrusted with something of this significance by the heads of the department.’

Why did he always have to tell her how fucking important and talented he was?

They sat in silence as the car climbed upwards. They were on a different road from the one she had driven along with Niklas Linde, so at least they weren’t on their way towards La Campana. The sun was low, colouring the walls red. Bougainvillaea tumbled over fences and rooftops, glowing like fire in the sunset.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘We have to try to make sure we get on well, you and I, for the children’s sake.’

He glanced at her, but said nothing.

‘I interviewed a guy yesterday,’ she went on. ‘He’s twenty-six years old and he’s locked up in a windowless concrete cell in Málaga. He’ll be lucky to get out before he’s thirty, and there was no need for him to end up there in the first place.’

Thomas didn’t respond, and turned into a large car park outside a place called El Picadero. ‘The porter told me this place used to be a ranch once upon a time,’ he said. ‘There were horses here until just a few years ago, in fact. I thought you might like it.’

The restaurant was a long, low building with flame-coloured tiles and a large covered terrace stretching the entire length of the front. Lanterns with candles were hanging under the roof.

‘Do you want to sit outside?’

She nodded.

They got a table for two at some distance from the door.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking as well,’ Thomas said, once they had sat down and ordered water and wine. He played with his napkin and shuffled his feet restlessly under the table, as he always had when he was worried or nervous about something. ‘It was wrong of me not to say anything about Sophia,’ he said. ‘You knew about it, and I wish you’d said something, but it wasn’t your fault that things turned out the way they did. Not exclusively, anyway.’

Annika looked at the tablecloth. She knew what he meant, and how hard it had been for him to say it. That was the closest she would get to an apology.

Evidently he hadn’t finished, because his feet were still shuffling about. ‘That’s why I think we should be honest.’

She nodded, agreeing.

‘So you can tell me …’

She blinked.

‘… if you were ever with anyone else.’

‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not with anyone, not once.’

The waiter arrived with their drinks. Thomas tasted the wine. Annika took a thirsty gulp of her mineral water.

‘How about afterwards?’ he said, when the waiter had disappeared.

The only man she had been with was Niklas Linde.

‘That policeman?’ Thomas said. ‘Or Halenius?’

The old fury poured out. She stood up, her chair jabbing into the diner behind her. ‘You’ve got a nerve!’ she said. ‘Cross-examining me about who I’ve slept with the moment you get a chance.’ I can walk back to the hotel, she found herself thinking. I can ask for directions. It can’t be more than five kilometres.

The other diners were looking at her curiously. The man she had rammed her chair into moved forward.

She was about to do it again: run away from confrontation and hide her head in the sand. She blushed and sat down. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Those people over there are Swedish,’ he said, nodding towards a table by the entrance. ‘They would have heard you even if they’re deaf.’

‘Sorry,’ she repeated.

The waiter appeared beside them and asked if they were ready to order. They hurriedly picked up their menus. ‘Apparently the steak is what we should have,’ Thomas said. ‘It gets cooked at the table on a red-hot stone. It’s supposed to be really good.’

Annika closed her menu without answering.

Thomas ordered a few starters, and
carne a la Piedra
.

The waiter disappeared.

‘The children,’ Annika said. ‘We have to put aside any disagreements. We have to be able to talk to each other without it always being so fucking volatile. For the children’s sake.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that too,’ he said. ‘How different things are now. We used to share the children, but now I’m the only one taking responsibility.’

‘No, Thomas,’ she said. ‘While we were married I looked after the children and you looked after your career. Not at the start, but once I was on leave you left me to it. Whereas
now
we’re sharing responsibility, the two of us.’

His astonishment was written across his face.

Annika stared at him. He’d started to get some grey hairs by his temples. The wrinkles around his eyes were more clearly defined than before. He’d put on weight as well. Maybe Sophia Fucking Bitch Grenborg baked cakes. Thomas had a weakness for cake.

Silence descended. A cricket started to chirrup in the grass alongside them. Others answered it from some distance away. A dog barked.

The waiter arrived with their starters, one plate of finely sliced ham, and another with cheese and walnuts.

‘I thought we could share them,’ Thomas said. ‘Have you tried this?
Jamón ibérico bellota
, the best in the world.’

They ate without talking. Annika wolfed down the ham, the cheese and endive salad with walnuts in a Gorgonzola cream. She drank water and, for once, a whole glass of wine.

The darkness was getting thicker, and soon formed a wall around them.

‘Have I told you what Ellen said the other day when we were on our way to her school?’ she asked. ‘“When I get old, you’ll be dead, and then you’ll come back.”’

Thomas laughed. ‘We have a daughter who believes in reincarnation.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I wonder if she had a previous life, and who she might have been?’

‘Mahatma Gandhi?’ Annika suggested.

‘Well, not Josef Stalin, anyway,’ Thomas said. ‘She’s far too scared of blood.’

They chuckled.

At that moment his mobile rang. He pulled it out of his inside pocket, peered at the screen, then stood up and turned his back on her.

‘Hi, Kalle,’ he said, walking out to the car park.

She watched him, deflated.

Their son was calling him, but he didn’t want the boy to know that he was having dinner with her because it would be too complicated to explain to Sophia.

She got up and threw her napkin onto her chair. There had to be some limit to the humiliation. She was expected to sit there and tell him who she was sleeping with, but he couldn’t even own up to the fact that they were having dinner together.

She’d made it a couple of metres into the car park when Thomas caught sight of her.

‘I miss you too, Kalle,’ he said. ‘Do you know who’s coming now? There’s someone here who I think would like to talk to you.’

She stopped mid-stride. He was standing four or five metres away, holding the phone out to her. She practically ran towards it. ‘Kalle?’ she said.

‘Mummy?’

Warmth welled inside her, bringing tears to her eyes. ‘Hi, Kalle, how are you?’

‘Mummy, guess what! I’ve lost a tooth!’

She laughed and stopped a tear with a finger just
below her eyelashes. ‘Wow, another! How many is that now?’

‘Loads! Do you think the tooth fairy knows the way to Grev Turegatan?’

‘Leave it in a glass of water and you’ll see that it’s turned into a gold coin by tomorrow morning.’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes?’

‘When are you coming home?’

‘Tomorrow. And I’ll see you on Monday when I pick you up from after-school club.’

‘I miss you, Mummy.’

‘And I miss you too. Is Ellen still up?’

‘She’s asleep – she’s just a baby.’

‘Well, you should be asleep too. Sleep well, now. I love you.’

She waited for the words he usually said at the end of every phone-call: ‘I love you, Mummy, you’re the best mummy in the whole
wooorld
.’ They didn’t come.

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you going to marry Daddy again?’

She saw Thomas walking around the car park the way he did when he got nervous. He never could stand still. ‘No, darling, I’m not. Here comes Daddy, so you can say night-night to him as well.’ She passed the phone to Thomas and went back to her chair. It was completely dark now. The warmth of the day was still lingering, and the wind had died down. Thomas ended the call and put away his mobile.

The waiter removed their starters and came back with a frame on which he placed a red-hot stone slab. Then he laid out thin slices of marbled T-bone steak and vegetables, and three different sauces, and showed them how to melt fat directly on the stone, then fry the meat.
It hissed and crackled, smoked and steamed.

Annika was enchanted by the flame burning beneath the frame, and the crackling from the stone.

‘I miss you sometimes,’ Thomas said.

She thought he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. ‘Why?’ she said eventually.

He put another slice of meat on the stone. ‘You never went with the flow. You always said what you thought. I was never very happy when I was discussing anything with you, but I always ended up wiser.’

Thomas fried and sliced the meat, fried and sliced.

She was still full from their starters.

The flame under the frame flickered and went out.

The waiter came and took their empty plates away.

Neither of them wanted dessert or coffee. Thomas picked up the bill and paid with a credit card she’d never seen before. He signed with his usual looping signature, and left a ten-euro note as a tip.

‘Is the state footing the bill for this?’ she asked.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to end up in the
Evening Post
.’

She laughed.

‘It’s my private account,’ he said. ‘We have a joint one for food, travel and other shared expenses …’

Annika turned towards the darkness. She really didn’t give a shit about their shared account.

He saw her reaction. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you and I tried hard enough,’ he said.

She shivered: it was getting cold now. She was pleased she’d put on her ugly old sweater. ‘Shall we go?’ she said.

‘Maybe we could get a drink somewhere,’ he said. ‘Somewhere down by the harbour.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty tired.’

They left the restaurant and walked out into the car park. There were hardly any cars left.

‘Do you miss me?’ he asked. ‘At all, ever?’

All the time, she thought. Every day. Whenever I’m alone. Or do I? She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not as much now. At the start it was awful. The fact that you were gone was like a black hole inside me. It was like you’d died.’ She stopped beside the car. ‘It would probably have felt better if you had died, because then at least I’d have had the right to grieve.’

‘I never wanted that,’ he said. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’

‘You should have thought of that before,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said.

They got into the car and drove in silence through the streets of Nueva Andalucía. The sky was dark and starless – clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic during the evening.

‘It was on a night like this that the Söderström family were gassed to death,’ Annika said. ‘A cloudy night, but colder. They had the heating on in all the bedrooms.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come and have a drink? A beer, maybe, or just a coffee?’

‘Maybe a beer,’ Annika said.

They parked at the Hotel Pyr and walked down to the harbour. Crowds of people were milling about in the streets. They shuffled slowly out of the way whenever a Lamborghini wanted to get through. The row of bars and nightclubs lining the quayside were pumping out light and music. Thomas was heading towards the Sinatra Bar.

‘Can’t we walk out onto the pier?’ Annika asked.

She didn’t want to run into Niklas Linde and his girls.

They walked past the lighthouse and carried on along the breakwater. The wind was cold and Thomas did up his jacket. Annika stuck her hands into the pockets of
her jeans. They were walking close to one another without actually touching.

‘There’s a lot I wish I’d done differently,’ Thomas said, into the wind. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the consequences. I was just thinking that you were so cold and difficult and emotionless.’

‘She was the easy way out,’ Annika said. ‘You do have a tendency to just
end up
doing things.’

He stopped, without looking at her. To the south-west there were scattered lights on the shore of Africa.

‘I know I made mistakes,’ Annika said. ‘I was running away too. And I’m pretty sure we could have sorted things out, if we’d tried to get help.’

Now he turned to her. ‘Do you think it’s too late?’ he asked.

At first she thought she’d misheard him, that the wind was playing tricks on her. ‘Too late?’

He put his hand on her cheek and kissed her.

At first she was completely rigid. His lips were soft and cold. ‘Come on,’ he said, in a low voice. He took her hand and led her back towards the lights on the quayside.

She went with him, her fingers laced in his, and it struck her that he had always held her hand in this way – imagine forgetting something like that. She moved closer to him because her injured forefinger was hurting.

They walked round the harbour and back towards the hotel, along streets that quickly became empty and cold when the music and lights no longer reached them.

The reception desk was unmanned, the sound of a television coming from the little office behind. They walked quickly and silently through the lobby and got into the furthest lift. Annika pressed the button for the third floor and Thomas brushed her hair aside. She
caught sight of her reflection in the mirror as he kissed her earlobe.

Her room was completely dark. Thomas turned on the ceiling light. ‘I want to look at you,’ he said. ‘See if I remember you right.’