The Long Shadow Page 6

  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.

  Tuesday, 4 January

  4

  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 pa
d, 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 campervans 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.

  By the slip-road to Istán the motorway made a broad sweep towards the sea. There were more houses. She thought she should probably turn off soon and try to find a hotel. At the next moment she saw one to her left. ‘HOTELPYR.com,’ she read on the sign that stood out against the sky. She turned off towards a bullfighting arena.

  The Pyr was in the middle of Puerto Banús. She got a corner room on the third floor with a glorious view of the motorway.

  ‘Do you know something called lackanyarda?’ she asked the receptionist.

  ‘La Cañada? It’s a shopping centre. It’s huge, on the way to Málaga. You can’t miss it. Turn off towards Ojén.’

  Ah, she thought. The thing that looked like Kungens Kurva. It was half past one. She went back out to the car.

  Naturally, she missed the turning. She saw the development flash past on her left just as she realized she’d gone too far. After a moment of panic she managed to avoid ending up back on the toll motorway. She searched the jungle of incomprehensible Spanish advertising slogans, road signs and electronic messages for a slip-road that would let her turn round and head back the way she had come. She found one just after the Costa del Sol hospital.

  It was only as she was pulling into the jam-packed car park at the shopping centre that she noticed her shoulders were hunched somewhere near her ears. She forced them down into their normal position, squeezed the car past a British-registered Jaguar and parked beside the exit.

  Inside, the mall was thick with people. On the flight, she had read in the guidebook that the days before el día de Reyes, Epiphany, were among the busiest shopping days of the year. Most Spanish children didn’t get their Christmas presents until Twelfth Night, and it looked like every single last-minute gift in southern Spain had to be bought here.

  The temperature was the same inside as out, she noted, as she headed across the polished granite floor. The sun was shining through the glass ceiling several floors above, reinforcing her impression that she was still outdoors. She was forced forward by the flow of people, past exactly the same shops as there were in the shopping centres back home: Mango, Zara, Lacoste and Swatch. She found a floor-plan and realized she was standing by the entrance to H&M. She couldn’t see anyone who looked like a policeman in the mass of people, so she stood with her back to the plate-glass window to avoid being trampled.

  In front of her a huge Christmas tree reached up towards the roof, its bright green giving away that it was plastic. Christmas baubles, two metres across, hung from the beams in the roof, and a few palms leaned against a concrete pillar. They were so ugly that she presumed they must be real.

  ‘Annika Bengtzon?’

  There were two of them, and their appearance screamed plain-clothes Scandinavian police. One was very fair, the other ash-blond; they were both wearing jeans and comfortable shoes, and were very fit, exuding the confidence that only men in positions of unquestionable authority possessed.

  She shook their hands with a smile.

  ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry,’ Knut Garen said, ‘but there’s a tapas bar upstairs with an excellent view of the car park.’

  His colleague introduced himself as Niklas Linde, sounding as if he was from northernmost Norrland.

  They took the escalator up and pushed their way to a window table where, as promised, they were treated to a magnificent view of ten thousand cars.

  ‘Thanks for taking the time to see me,’ Annika said, putting her pen and notepad on the table.

  ‘Well,’ Knut Garen said, ‘this is the way it works. All contact between the Spanish police and the Swedish authorities has to go through us. We coordinate communication.’

  ‘To begin with, I was wondering if you know of a good interpreter,’ Annika said. ‘Preferably Swedish to Spanish, but someone who can translate from English would be fine.’

  ‘You don’t speak Spanish?’ Garen said.

  ‘No mucho,’ Annika said. ‘Comprendo un poquito.’

  ‘Carita,’ Niklas Linde said. ‘She’s Swedish, lives with her family down here, works with translations and stuff when she’s not interpreting. I’ll give you her number.’

  Garen took out his mobile. ‘This whole business with the Söderströms is just tragic,’ he said, as he looked up the interpreter’s number in his phonebook. ‘Breakins involving gas have been getting more and more common, but we’ve never seen one go so badly wrong before. Here you are, Carita Halling Gonzales.’

  She jotted down the woman’s landline and mobile numbers. ‘Will you be working on the case?’ she asked.

  ‘The Spanish police will be in charge of the investigation,’ Linde said. ‘We’re not actually operational here.’

  ‘We’re working on a different case at the moment,’ Garen said. ‘You might have reason to write something about that in the future. Greco and Udyco seized seven hundred kilos of cocaine from a warehouse in La Campana last week, and we think there’s a Swedish connection.’

  ‘Greco?’ Annika said.

  ‘The specialist Spanish unit that deals with narcotics and organized crime. We work with them a lot.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’ve got a few general questions about crime down here,’ Annika said. ‘I�
�ve read that the Costa del Sol is also known as the Costa del Crime. Is that an exaggeration?’

  ‘Depends how you look at it,’ Garen said. ‘There are four hundred and twenty criminal organizations here, involved in everything from growing hash and smuggling cocaine to car theft, people-trafficking and illegal gambling. It’s estimated that there are about thirty contract killings in Málaga alone each year. The sex industry is huge, employing more than forty thousand people. There are at least a hundred known brothels.’

  ‘How common is the use of gas in breakins?’

  ‘Extremely,’ Linde said. ‘The victims are often foreigners, as well as rich Spaniards, of course. It’s believed that the gangs identify their victims at the airport, follow them to their villas or apartments, then knock them out with gas when they’re asleep. There’ve been cases of people waking up to find their homes stripped bare, including the rings from their fingers. It often leaves them in a very bad way, and I don’t just mean the effects of the gas.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but not by name. I’m fairly incognito here.’

  She let her gaze linger on him: what exactly was his role? ‘And I understand that Swedes have been the victims of gassings before this,’ she said.

  ‘We have a hundred or so Swedish cases each year,’ Garen said, waving over another dish of jamón serrano.

  ‘What do you think about this particular breakin?’ she asked.

  The police officers looked at each other.

  ‘I mean,’ Annika said, ‘didn’t they have a gas detector? I’ve heard that everyone in Nueva Andalucía has one, these days.’

  ‘There are indications that this wasn’t an ordinary gas attack,’ Linde said.

  ‘I don’t know if we should …’ Garen said.

  Linde leaned across the table and lowered his voice. ‘The victims weren’t in bed when they were discovered,’ he said. ‘The woman was lying dead behind a door, and the man was found across a desk. The gas detector had been set off, and that probably woke them up. Someone switched it off.’

  ‘And the children?’ Annika said.