Authors: Liza Marklund
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime
‘What did she say afterwards?’
Annika took a deep breath. ‘Nothing. Well, actually, she asked me what he had whispered to me right at the end, just as we were leaving.’
‘What
did
he whisper?’
‘Nothing much. He hugged me and asked me to help him get out of there. I didn’t answer because there was nothing I could say.’
‘Why did Carita ask about that?’
‘No idea.’
‘Were you working with Carita yesterday?’
‘Yesterday … What – Friday? No, I was doing interviews in Gibraltar and Estepona, in Danish and Swedish. Why do you ask?’
Niklas Linde fell silent. The line crackled and hissed. Eventually he said, ‘Carita Halling Gonzales visited Johan Zarco Martinez in prison yesterday afternoon. Because she was already registered as a visitor, they saw no reason to stop her going in.’
‘Are you absolutely certain it was morphine? It couldn’t have been something else?’ She was feeling dizzy and sick.
‘Unless one of the guards supplied Jocke with the morphine, it must have been Carita. She’s the only person who had the opportunity. Jocke had no contact with the other prisoners, and he didn’t have any other visitors.’
‘That’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to her house. I
know
her. She’s vain, anti-British and seriously in love with her husband … But what does she say? Haven’t you spoken to her?’
‘We’ll put out a warrant for her with Interpol as soon as the post-mortem has been conducted.’
‘Why? Has she gone missing?’
‘The house is shut up. Her husband wasn’t at work this morning.’
‘So the whole family has gone? The children as well?’
‘Did Carita say anything to you about her background, her family?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The first place we look is with relatives and close friends.’
Annika could hear her own voice from far away, as if someone else was using it. ‘She grew up in Beverly Hills, and met her husband, Nacho, there. He’s a paediatrician, from Colombia. They lived in Bogotá in the early 1990s. Her father-in-law, Victor I think his name was, was chief of police there and was murdered by the Mafia, and they had to leave, because the Mafia wipes out the whole family so there’s no one left to inherit …’
‘Anything else?’
She screwed her eyes shut.
‘Her parents ran a biotech company, Cell Impact. When they died she inherited the business and sold it straight away because she didn’t know anything about that sort of thing. They used the money from the sale of the business to buy the house in Nueva Andalucía.’
‘You may be called in by my colleagues in Stockholm for a more formal interview at some point, but that’s enough for now. Well, take care …’
Annika stood up. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said. ‘Has the death been made public? Can we write about it in the paper?’
‘You’ll have to check with the Foreign Ministry press office. Nothing I’ve told you is official, as I hope you appreciate.’
‘One more thing,’ Annika said, before she changed her mind. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were married?’
There was complete silence on the line.
‘Oh, Annika,’ he said. ‘Are you disappointed?’
She cleared her throat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I feel dirty.’ There were limits. She was never going to turn into a Sophia Fucking Bitch Grenborg.
‘Maria knows,’ he said. ‘Not everything, and no names, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll never leave her. She knows that too.’
You’re deceiving yourself, she thought. One day you’ll meet someone you can’t resist, and then she’ll be left standing, your wife, in Ängslyckevägen, all alone with her empathy and tolerance.
More silence on the line.
I ought to tell him about Suzette, she thought. About the email, and the fact that she might be alive.
‘Was there anything else?’ Niklas Linde asked.
Annika didn’t answer.
‘Well, then, take care.’ He hung up.
She stayed where she was, paralysed. She felt like throwing up or crying or maybe both at once.
Carita Halling Gonzales visited Johan Zarco Martinez in prison yesterday afternoon … We’ll put out a warrant for her with Interpol as soon as the post-mortem has been conducted.
It just wasn’t possible. The Colombian Mafia didn’t carry leopard-print handbags and wear high heels.
Beer. Morphine. Dead men.
Size thirty-seven shoes. Few men have feet that small
.
She got up and went to the sink, turned on the cold water and drank straight from the tap. She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her face, run down her neck and under her collar.
Who was she to decide whether or not someone was a criminal? The two Nordic police officers had recommended Carita Halling Gonzales because they, too, had used her as an interpreter.
She turned off the tap, tore off some kitchen paper and wiped her neck.
Criminals some way up the hierarchy probably looked just like anyone else. Lipstick, high heels and a leopard-print handbag: why not?
She sat down at the kitchen table again. She closed
her eyes, saw the villa in Nueva Andalucía and tried to understand what had happened there that night. She tried to see Carita pumping gas into the house and stepping over the dead bodies of the children …
She let the thought go. It was impossible.
Could there have been any misunderstanding?
Was Carita the victim of some sort of conspiracy?
Or was she mad?
No, not mad, obsessed. You don’t kill eight people unless there’s a very great deal at stake. Or do you? Even if you simultaneously love your family and get upset because your British neighbours won’t contribute to the pool-maintenance guy’s wages?
She got up and drank some more water, this time from a glass.
Carita had been extremely clever. Carved out a quite brilliant position for herself. By interpreting at police interrogations she knew exactly what anyone under arrest had said. By allying herself to Annika she had managed to get an insight into the work of the inquiry.
And she herself was responsible for Carita gaining access to the prison.
She jumped when her mobile rang. Number withheld, presumably the paper. Probably Patrik.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m home.’
‘Er, hello, this is Jimmy Halenius.’
Oh, fuck! Not him as well.
‘Hello,’ she said flatly.
‘Is this a bad time?’
‘Someone I interviewed on Thursday has just been found dead in his prison cell, and I’ve just found out that the interpreter I used is probably a killer for the Colombian Mafia,’ she said.
‘Oh, shit,’ Jimmy Halenius said. ‘Which prison?’
‘Málaga.’
‘Zarco Martinez? Bloody hell. We’ve just requested his extradition.’
‘Too late now,’ Annika said.
‘And the Mafia killer?’
‘A woman who worked as an interpreter for the police in Málaga.’
‘Oh, shit,’ he said again. ‘Would you like to come round and have dinner with me this evening?’
‘I’ve got some writing to do,’ Annika said. ‘If I can get permission from the Foreign Ministry, Zarco Martinez will probably be the lead story tomorrow.’
‘I understand,’ Jimmy Halenius said. ‘Good luck with the Foreign Ministry. You’ll need it.’
She put her mobile down and stared at her laptop. She couldn’t write about Carita. It was too tenuous. Besides, there wasn’t even a formal warrant out for her arrest yet. She’d count herself lucky if she found anyone who could confirm that the young man was dead. She wouldn’t be able to get verification of the cause of death or his last visitor, Carita.
And she couldn’t make any direct link to the murder of the Söderström family either.
Annika stretched her back and scratched her head.
Where could they have gone? They couldn’t go back to Colombia: the whole family had been forced to flee, hadn’t they? They’d had to abandon the good life in a cosy suburb there when Nacho’s father, the chief of police, was murdered by the Mafia. And the Mafia wiped out entire families, so that no one was left to inherit anything …
She could suddenly see Carita before her, outside the house, that rainy day when the policeman had let them in, when she had first become aware that there was another daughter, a girl called Suzette.
‘Another child?’ Carita had said, eyes wide, her face completely white.
She had noted Carita’s reaction, but had thought she was just upset at the whole story.
You didn’t kill them all, Annika thought. There was someone left, an heir. A serious miscalculation. She had to take a walk round the flat, into the children’s rooms, stroking the sheets on their beds. Then she roused her laptop and went onto Google.
Carita’s father-in-law, the murdered chief of police, maybe he was on some Spanish-language page, held up as a hero of democracy. Victor? Victor Gonzales?
She got 965,000 results.
She tried
victor gonzales policia bogota
.
The number of hits shrank to 179,000.
She pushed the computer away and looked at the time. She ought to phone Patrik and tell him about Martinez. If nothing earth-shattering had happened in the world of television, if no one had tripped over during a live broadcast or something equally serious, his death would probably be the lead story, assuming she could get the story confirmed. She did a quick calculation. What were the chances of anyone else finding out about the death and getting confirmation of it before she did? Zero, pretty much. So there was no reason to call Patrik until she had something to offer him.
She reached for her bag and pulled out the notepad where she’d jotted down the main points of her interview inside the prison. She leafed through her scribbled notes as she reached for an apple that had seen better days. Then she picked up her mobile and dialled the press office at the Foreign Ministry. She took a big bite, leafing back through the interview with Wilma in Estepona, and her visit to Gibraltar. There was a click on the line
and a woman answered. ‘You’ve reached the press office of the Foreign Ministry, can you hold?’
‘How long for?’ Annika asked, but the woman had already put her on hold. There was a hiss on the line, like distant tinnitus.
She sighed loudly and hoped someone could hear her at the other end. She would use the prison interview tomorrow: news had to come before any series of articles. She picked up the pad again and carried on leafing through it.
Was there anything else she could use now?
Her eyes fell on a web address she had jotted down. The closed estate agency, with the Söderström family villa in the window.
There was a click on the line.
‘Hello?’ Annika said.
No answer, just more tinnitus.
She put the apple down, pulled her laptop towards her and typed www.aplaceinthesun.se into the address box of Internet Explorer.
She took another bite while the computer did its thing.
Welcome to A Place in the Sun, your Real Estate Agent on the Coast!
The website was like those of all the other estate agents she had looked at when she had checked house prices and properties around the world, albeit perhaps a little more basic. This was no big agency. The logo was in the top left corner, brash and ugly. Maybe there was some information about the family’s villa.
Another click on the line.
‘Hello? Hello!’
On the left, beneath the logo, there was a list of subsections:
Home, Property Search, New Developments, About Us, Contact
. She clicked on
Property
Search
to look for villas in Nueva Andalucía, but the link led nowhere.
‘Foreign Ministry press office, can you hold?’
‘Hello?’ Annika said. ‘I’ve already been on hold—’
There was another click and the buzzing resumed.
She threw the apple-core into the sink’s waste-disposal unit. Stuck-up diplomats, she thought, and clicked on the
About Us
link.
She found herself looking at the usual opening drivel in English: buying a property in Spain is a dream for a lot of people but it’s also a serious investment. So you need the very best advice and guidance from an established company. Since we opened our first office on the Costa del Sol in 1968, we’ve helped thousands of people to find a new home on the Spanish coast …
She clicked to get off the page, and found herself on the contact page instead. She was about to close the window when she spotted the agents’ email addresses:
Her skin broke out in goosebumps all over her body.
Astrid Paulson.
Ernesto Zarco Martinez.
Astrid Paulson was Veronica Söderström’s mother’s name. It could hardly be a coincidence, two women with the same name just round the corner from the office of the daughter of one.
Had Astrid Paulson been an estate agent? And who was this Zarco Martinez?
She hung up, leaving the woman at the Foreign Ministry to her fate.
She Googled ernesto zarco martinez, and got 133,000 results. Hopeless.
She stared at the screen until her eyes started to water, searching hard in her memory.
She’d seen this very name somewhere before, but with something else added. Another name, perhaps, or an address?
She thought for a while, then opened the search box for the laptop’s own hard-drive. She clicked to search for documents (‘word processing, spreadsheet, etc.’), and used the advanced search to look for a word or phrase in a document. Then she searched the entire hard-drive for Ernesto Zarco Martinez, with capital letters in the right places just to be on the safe side. It would take a while, but if she’d ever written that particular combination of names, the search function would find it.
A happy little dog appeared on the screen, wagging its tail as the computer searched. She went out to the bathroom, had a pee, washed her hands and face, and returned to the laptop. The dog was wagging its tail. No results so far. She went through to the landline in her bedroom.
‘Foreign Ministry press office, can you hold?’
‘No!’ she said loudly. ‘Absolutely not! If you won’t talk I’m going to write my article anyway!’