The Long Shadow (7 page)

Annika could still feel how the blood had coursed through her body, turning her face dark red. She put down the mineral water. ‘How did you know I’d sold Sven’s car?’ she asked.

‘It was my cousin who bought it,’ he said, and drank some beer.

She stared at him. ‘Roland Larsson?’ she said. ‘He’s your cousin?’

‘Of course. We were best friends growing up.’

‘He was in my class at the Works School in Hällefors-näs!’ she said.

Jimmy Halenius laughed. ‘And he had a huge crush on you.’

Annika started to laugh as well. ‘God, he did, didn’t he?’ she said. ‘I almost felt sorry for him.’

‘We used to lie in the hayloft at Grandma’s on summer evenings, down in Vingåker, and Roland would spend hours talking about you. He had an old photograph he’d cut out of the paper, of you and a few other people, but he’d folded it so only you showed. He kept it in his wallet.’

The waiter came over with their starters and poured their wine. They ate, silent.

Annika pushed her empty plate away and studied the man opposite her. ‘How old are you really?’ she asked.

‘Two years older than Roland,’ he said.

‘Who was one year older than me, because he had to repeat a year.’

‘Education wasn’t exactly a priority in the Halenius family. I was the first to make it to university.’

‘Are you from Södermanland as well?’

He took a sip of wine and shook his head. ‘Östergötland, Norrköping. I grew up on the third floor of a block of flats on Himmelstalundsvägen.’

‘So are you Social Democrat royalty, then? You know, Mum a local councillor, Dad a union boss?’

‘God, no,’ he said. ‘Dad was a Communist. I was in the Red Youth to start with, but the Social Democrat youth movement had better parties. And much prettier girls. I got Roland to join as well. He’s still on the town council for the Social Democrats down in Flen.’

She visualized Roland Larsson, his rather squat frame and long arms. He and Jimmy Halenius were actually
fairly similar. She didn’t know he had gone into local politics. ‘What else is Roland up to, these days?’

‘He usually works in the ice-cream factory each summer, but he’s signing on at the moment.’

‘Does he still live in Hälleforsnäs?’

‘Last autumn he took the leap and went all the way to Mellösa. He moved in with a divorcee with three kids who has a place just behind the local shop, the one on the road out to Harpsund.’

‘Not Sylvia Hagtorn?’

‘Yes, that’s her name! Do you know her?’

‘She was in the class above us. Three kids? I wonder who with.’

The waiter removed their plates and brought the main course. He refilled Jimmy Halenius’s glass.

‘Are you married?’ Annika asked, glancing at the ring finger of his left hand.

‘Divorced,’ he said, as he attacked his steak.

‘Children?’ she asked, picking at the reindeer stew.

‘Two,’ he said. ‘Twins. One of each. They’re six now.’

‘And you have them every other week?’

‘Since they were eighteen months.’

‘How do you think it works?’

He drank some wine. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘How do you think it works?’

She swirled her wine in the glass. She didn’t usually like red wine and this was particularly heavy. ‘I hate being divorced,’ she said, meeting his gaze. ‘I miss my children so much I feel like dying when they’re not with me. And I … Well, I have a few problems with Thomas’s new … partner.’ She had almost said, ‘I hate Thomas’s new fuck.’

‘Really, why?’ He sounded almost amused.

‘She’s a walking cliché. I don’t understand what Thomas sees in her.’

‘So you don’t think she tore your family apart?’

Annika gripped her cutlery tightly. ‘Well, of course she did. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have my children with me all the time.’

Jimmy Halenius scooped some potato on to his fork. ‘Do you really believe that?’ he said. ‘Didn’t you and Thomas do a pretty good job of tearing your family apart without anyone else’s help?’

She was so taken aback that she dropped her knife. ‘What the hell would you know about that?’ she said.

He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about the two of you. I just know what mistakes I made. I was awful to live with. I didn’t communicate. I could start a world war about the tiniest things, but when it came to the really big issues I just expected her to know what I wanted. And now I’ve started four sentences with “I”. I’m fairly self-absorbed as well. Did I mention that?’

She burst out laughing. ‘That could have been me you were describing,’ she said, astonished. ‘I was a terrible person to be married to.’ And the moment she’d said the words, she knew they were true. ‘I never even told him that I knew he’d been unfaithful. I just took my revenge, over several months, without explaining why. He didn’t realize a thing, obviously.’

The waiter asked if they’d like anything else, and Jimmy Halenius consulted his watch. ‘Shall we move on somewhere else and have a few drinks?’ he asked.

Suddenly Annika remembered the flight to Málaga the next morning. ‘Shit!’ she exclaimed, glancing at her own watch. ‘I haven’t even packed yet!’

‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘I have to be at Arlanda at half past four.’

‘Then there’s no point even thinking about going to bed,’ he said cheerily.

‘I disagree,’ she said, and fumbled for her bag.

Halenius called for the bill and paid in cash. He asked the waiter to summon a taxi, then helped her on with her jacket.

Outside it had started to snow, hard little flakes of ice swirling through the air and hitting her face like needles. The sign over the door creaked in the wind. A group of young men, with slicked-back hair, wearing English oilskin coats were marching down the middle of the street, waving wine bottles and mobile phones.

A taxi glided towards her. Jimmy Halenius stepped out into the road and the restaurant door closed behind him. He wasn’t particularly tall, maybe ten centimetres taller than her. ‘Where are you flying to?’ he asked.

‘Málaga,’ she said, as the taxi got closer.

‘Ah, España,’ he said. ‘
Entonces, vamos a salutar como los españoles!
’ He took hold of her shoulders, pulled her towards him, air-kissed her left cheek, then the right. ‘The Spaniards kiss twice,’ he said, his lips close to her ear. ‘It’s worth remembering when you’re there.’ He let go of her and smiled, his eyes narrowed to slits.

A taxi pulled up alongside them and stopped. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, and opened the door for her.

Annika got in without thinking and let him close it behind her. She saw him turn away and walk off towards Järntorget, turn up his collar against the wind and disappear round the corner.

‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

And only then did she realize that she knew no more about the Kitten than she had when she’d arrived.

The light was so bright that she had to close her eyes. She stood there swaying on the steps of the plane for several seconds before she could open them enough to make her way to the ground. Her knees and back ached. The low-cost airlines weren’t joking when they said you got what you’d paid for. The local buses in Stockholm were a Utopia of personal space compared to the sardine tin that had flown her to Málaga.

It was warm, almost twenty degrees. A smell of aviation fuel and burned rubber hovered over the cement apron. She was shepherded onto a huge bus that swallowed all the passengers, and realized it had been a mistake to wear her padded jacket. She tried to wriggle out of it. Impossible. Instead she sweated and suffered as the bus jolted its way along the endless terminal building towards the entrance.

The entire airport seemed to be a huge building site.

The deafening sound of cement-mixers and earth-movers reached all the way into the baggage hall. There were lots of different conveyor-belts, close together, and they rattled and creaked as they transported suitcases and sports equipment in an endless torrent.

‘Do you know where I can hire a car?’ she asked an elderly man. He had a large stomach and a vast golf-bag.

He gestured towards Customs, then to the right.

She squashed her jacket into her bag and went with the flow.

On the floor below the baggage hall, another equally large hall stretched out, full of car-hire companies. She walked hesitantly along the counters. All the usual names were there, Hertz and Avis, as well as some cheaper options with enormous queues. At the far end there were a few local firms. Tucked away in a corner she found a shabby desk with a girl who was sitting half asleep under a sign that read ‘Helle Hollis’.

What the hell? Annika thought, and hired a Ford Escort.

It took her a quarter of an hour to find the car in the huge garage. It was small, blue and anonymous. She threw her case into the boot and put her bag, notepad, mobile, camera, the guidebook she’d bought from the bookshop at Arlanda and the map from the hire company on the passenger seat, then squeezed behind the wheel and switched on her mobile.

She had read Clobbe’s worthless article online at Arlanda. The headline was ‘Death in Paradise’. The short text was piled high with clichés: ‘The sun is shining in the sky, but there is a chill in people’s hearts. They wanted nothing more than to live a peaceful life, but instead they got a brutal, early death.’

She had decided there and then not to bother Clobbe with any sort of handover.

‘You have four new messages,’ her electronic voicemail told her.

The first was from Patrik, telling her to call the newsroom as soon as she landed.

The second was from Patrik, wondering if she was there yet.

The third was from Patrik, shouting excitedly that
the Spanish police had confirmed that Sebastian Söderström and his family had died of gas poisoning, and how come she hadn’t managed to find that out, seeing as she was there on the scene?

The fourth was from Berit. ‘We’ve divided it up like this,’ her message ran. Annika could hear her leafing through some notes. ‘I’ll put together Sebastian Söderström’s life-story from old cuttings. Sport will take care of his ice-hockey friends in the NHL and get comments from them. You can have three articles: “All about the gas murders”, “The life of the family on the Costa del Sol”, and that old classic, “Idyll in crisis”. Let’s catch up this evening. Good luck!’

A man came over waving both arms, shouting something at Annika inside the car. She presumed he wanted her space. She locked the door and picked up her notepad and mobile.

The man banged on her windscreen.

She wound down the window a centimetre. ‘What?’; she said.

He was waving his arms and shouting and she pretended not to understand.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘
No comprendo
.’

The man started threatening to call the police.

‘Go ahead,’ Annika said, closing the window again. ‘Good idea!’

She dialled the number of the first of the two Scandinavian police officers whose names Berit had given her, a Knut Garen, who turned out to be Norwegian.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m a reporter on the
Evening Post
newspaper. I was given your number by—’

‘I know, I spoke to Berit Hamrin yesterday,’ the policeman said. ‘She said you’d be in touch. Are you in Marbella now?’

‘I’m on my way.’

‘Let’s meet at La Cañada at two o’clock.’

‘Lackanyarda?’ Annika said.

‘Outside H&M,’ the policeman said, and ended the call.

Lackanyarda
, she wrote on her pad, started the engine and came close to running down the gesticulating man as she wove her way through the garage towards the exit.

The traffic was terrible. She understood perfectly why the Spaniards were European champions at knocking over pedestrians on road crossings. Car horns blared and drivers shook their fists.

‘Calm down before you have a heart attack,’ she muttered, trying to make sense of the road signs. She failed.

The reconstruction of Málaga Airport was a massive project. Immense concrete skeletons stuck up into the sky in every direction, and there were great piles of reinforced steel along the side of the road. Lorries, forklift trucks and diggers fought for space with cars, mopeds and the courtesy buses that carried people into the terminals from the long-stay car parks. All of the roads were provisional, painted with a mess of lanes and arrows.

There was no logic about the places she was supposed to aim for either – the girl at the Helle Hollis desk had warned her about that. In order to get to Marbella, she should aim for Cádiz or Algeciras, and take the toll motorway to start with, but then she had to head for San Pedro de Alcántara. That was important because otherwise she’d end up in Estepona.

‘And that’s a terrible place. I’ve heard about it,’ Annika had said, thinking of Julia.

The girl gave her a blank look. ‘I live there,’ she said.

Annika passed Torremolinos far below on her left, an endless grotesque chaos of shabby white buildings strung out along the Mediterranean coast. She overtook several VW camper-vans with French plates that seemed to have all their occupants’ belongings strapped to the roof, and was herself overtaken by a German-registered Mercedes. A Spanish BMW was weaving between the lanes and came close to hitting a Seat. She clung to the wheel and wondered what
lackanyarda
was.

When she reached the toll-paying section of the motorway, the traffic decreased radically. She could relax a bit and admire the dramatic scenery.

Thousand-metre-high mountains stretched all the way to the sea. The four-lane motorway, broad and smooth, clung to the mountainsides and leaped across valleys. Large advertising hoardings for nightclubs and estate agents lined the road, sometimes beside the abandoned ruins of old farm buildings. Newly built residential areas with boldly coloured villas started to pop up as soon as she passed the toll-booth. She had to dig her sunglasses out of her bag, the colours so bright they hurt her eyes: the clear blue sky, the green of the valleys, the pastels of the houses, and the sea glittering like a shattered mirror.

Just outside Marbella, next to a shopping centre that reminded her of the one at Kungens Kurva outside Stockholm, the motorways merged once more, and the traffic was as crazy as before. She kept to the right and managed to be in the correct lane when they split again. She didn’t want to end up in Estepona.