The Long Shadow (22 page)

He glanced at her. ‘What is it, then?’

She decided to be completely honest. ‘I daren’t,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long that I don’t even know if I could.’

He laughed again, raised his hand and stroked her cheek. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he said. ‘It’s like riding a bike.’

‘How long are you going to be down here?’

‘Don’t know. I travel back and forth quite a bit. Why?’

She had been about to ask if he was on his way back to Sweden, where he lived when he was at home, if he had anyone waiting for him. Whether he would still be here if she was sent back to write about Patrik’s Costa Cocaine. But she just picked up her bag, opened the door and climbed out.

When the tail-lights disappeared round the corner of El Corte Inglés she had to bite her lip to stop herself crying.

She wrote a piece about the Swede’s arrest, uploaded the photographs, sent it all to Stockholm and slept for two hours. Then she got up, packed her clothes and laptop, went down to Reception and paid for her and
Lenita Söderström’s rooms with her personal Visa card. She left a note for Lenita saying she had gone back to Stockholm. Just in case anything happened, she left her mobile number.

She pulled out onto the motorway, which was now practically empty of vehicles, drove past the roadworks and La Cañada, and turned onto the toll motorway. Just before Torremolinos she passed a road accident. A lorry with French plates had turned over, spilling its load onto the carriageway, and she had to crawl past slowly on the hard shoulder. In the rear-view mirror she could see a Muslim woman wailing and beating her hands on her knees.

She arrived at the airport two and a half hours before her flight.

She spent an hour and a quarter trying to find the car-hire company’s depot. She was sweating by the time she reached the check-in desk. In security, they went through her bag, finding things she’d forgotten about, including a shrivelled, half-eaten apple and a letter-opener with the advertising slogan ‘
Evening Post
– sharp and to the point’. They took the letter-opener and made her put her lip-gloss in a see-through plastic bag.

‘Are you serious?’ Annika asked the security guard, when he handed her the little bag. ‘Do you really think I’m
not
going to blow the plane up just because my lip-gloss is in here?’

‘
No comprendo
,’ the guard said.

‘Exactly,’ Annika said, taking her deadly lip-gloss and putting it straight back in her bag. ‘You really don’t understand anything.’

The plane took off almost on schedule and she fell asleep at once.

She woke up at Arlanda when the wheels hit the runway. Her Harlan Coben book was on the floor and
the bottle of water she’d bought from Upper Crust in the departure lounge had leaked in the seat pocket in front of her.

Confused and slightly giddy, she was swept out of the plane and into the terminal building, through deserted corridors, past Passport Control and off towards the baggage hall. She had to wait more than an hour for her case.

It was dark by the time she finally emerged from Arrivals. It was snowing, and taxi drivers from several independent companies threw themselves at her, trying to grab her case, but she snapped at them and struggled towards a Taxi Stockholm car. Over the years she had tried to be open-minded and liberal, trying all sorts of obscure little firms, but after being shouted at and turfed out once too often because she wanted to pay by card or couldn’t tell them the way to her destination, she had given up.

The Taxi Stockholm driver took her case, opened the door for her, then didn’t say a word. Perfect.

She tried to read the evening papers in the back seat, but started to feel sick and gave up.

At five o’clock that afternoon she unlocked the door to her as yet unfurnished flat. The rooms were big and black, and there was a faint hiss from an air-vent somewhere.

She put her case and bag on the floor and hurried round turning on lights. In every window she could see her own reflection, a hollow-eyed woman with unkempt hair and skinny arms.

She turned away from her many selves, threw herself onto the bed and grabbed the phone. She rang the head of news, and sighed quietly when Patrik answered. ‘I thought Sjölander was supposed to be working,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this your day off?’

‘Just sorting out a few loose ends,’ he said. ‘What have you got?’

She shut her eyes and rested her forehead against the palm of her hand. ‘I’ve been sitting in a plane all day, and got home three minutes ago. What do you think I’ve got?’

‘The search for Suzette. You can check if anything’s happened, can’t you? Anything new about how the thieves died? A picture of the mother sitting on her missing daughter’s bed hugging a stuffed toy?’

Exhaustion gave way to anger. She stood up beside the bed, holding the phone. ‘At four o’clock this morning I sent an article and photographs of a Swedish citizen being arrested in a drugs raid in San Pedro outside Marbella. I think I’ve filled my quota of exclusives on this particular day off. If you think your new job means you can treat me like some nineteen-year-old temp, you’re seriously mistaken.’

There was silence.

‘Hello?’ Annika said.

‘Just so you know,’ Patrik said, ‘I’ve got this call on speaker-phone.’

‘Excellent,’ Annika said. ‘In that case, your friends can note that I’m taking next week off as time owing. I’ve been working twenty hours a day for five days in a row. I’ll be in on Monday to put in a claim for expenses.’

‘What do you mean, expenses? Your ticket was bought for you.’

‘Fuck you,’ Annika said, and hung up.

She slumped onto the bed again, picked up the evening papers that she’d thrown on the floor and leaned back against the pillows to read them.

Her piece about the raid was there. It probably hadn’t made it into the earlier regional edition, but Niklas Linde had said that wouldn’t matter.

She studied the pictures. They were certainly dramatic. The two uniformed officers were in the foreground, the reflective strips on their jackets shining like lasers in the flash. The Swede was waving his arms and kicking in protest, and his face was more or less obscured. Linde’s face was turned away and pretty much unidentifiable.

The text was short and to the point: Spanish police had crushed a cocaine-smuggling operation shipping drugs from the Costa del Sol to large parts of northern Europe; she had listed the facts about the raid in La Campana, seven hundred kilos found in a warehouse, melons from Brazil; last night’s arrest was the final one in the series; charges would be laid and the trials prepared.

She let the paper fall to her lap and wondered what she felt about writing an article to order like that. Nothing much, she decided. There was always someone who stood to gain from a piece of journalism. The only difference this time was that she was fully aware of the manipulation, although she would never admit that to her bosses at the paper.

She looked through the rest of the news. A UN helicopter had crashed in Nepal. Sweden’s first bed-and-breakfast for nudists was due to open in Skåne. A singer with silicon breasts had turned down the opportunity to appear in the Swedish heats of the Eurovision Song Contest, which had led to crisis talks at Swedish Television last night.

She dropped the paper onto the floor and picked up its rival. The first thing that struck her when she reached the editorial was her own picture byline from the
Evening Post
and a portrait of Jimmy Halenius. Between them hovered the picture taken outside the Järnet restaurant. ‘In the hands of power,’ the headline read. The text was a piece of indignant bluster, full of insinuating questions
such as ‘How much did they really have to drink?’ and ‘Should those in power and those holding them to account really have an intimate relationship?’, as well as ‘Did Halenius neglect his duties?’

She picked up the phone and called her editor-in-chief. ‘Have you seen the opposition’s editorial?’ she asked, without bothering to say hello.

‘I’ve spoken to their editor-in-chief,’ Anders Schyman replied. ‘If they don’t drop this now, we’re going to lay siege to every bar in the vicinity of their offices, take pictures of all their reporters and reveal all their sources. I’ll be replying in our editorial tomorrow. We will never reveal our sources, we will never surrender our expense receipts, and we will never go into any detail about what the two of you discussed.’

‘Good,’ Annika said.

‘What did you discuss, by the way? And how much did you drink? And who the hell paid?’

She collapsed into a little ball. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘To take them one by one: none of your business, I drank water, and Halenius paid. Not his department.’

‘How do you know him?’

She hesitated. ‘I grew up with his cousin.’

‘I heard you on the speaker-phone a little while ago. You really should watch your language, you know.’ He hung up.

She stayed on the bed for a while, struggling against almost overwhelming self-pity. She did nothing but stand up for that fucking newspaper, and what did she get in return, apart from demands, criticism and public humiliation over her choice of dinner-partner?

She cried for something like thirty seconds, then got up and went out into the hall for her suitcase. The bathroom was equipped with a washing-machine and a tumble-dryer, so she emptied her case straight into the
machine and started the quick-wash programme. She took her laptop with her into the kitchen, plugged the modem into the phone socket and prayed to God there was an Internet connection.

There was.

She sat on one of the kitchen chairs and surfed in cyberspace. Apart from the usual disasters, gossip and political squabbling, it didn’t look as if anything much had happened in the world. Then she went onto her Facebook profile. She had eleven new messages: one was from Amanda Andersson, one from Sandra Holgersson, two from Klara Evertsson-Hedberg and seven from Polly Sandman. All of Suzette’s friends had replied to her. Her pulse quickened as she opened the most recent message, the one from Amanda.

‘I think your a gutter reporter who likes wallowing in other people’s mizery,’ she read.

‘Learn to spell first,’ Annika said out loud, and clicked to open the next, from Sandra.

‘Do you really work for a newspaper? Can you get tickets for
X Factor
?’

For a moment she considered replying, then decided against it.

Klara was financially minded. She offered to give an interview for ten thousand kronor. In her second message she lowered the fee to five hundred.

Annika didn’t answer her either.

Polly was the literary type, as the seven messages suggested. There were poems, reflections and thoughts about Suzette, school, boys and life in general. Annika read through them and composed a reply: ‘Dear Polly, what lovely poems and thoughts. Thanks for letting me read them. If you feel like writing anything longer, I know my newspaper runs a short-story competition for teenagers up to eighteen years old. I understand that you
haven’t heard anything from Suzette. If you do, please feel free to contact me again.’ She signed off with both her first and last name, to maintain a professional tone. She was careful not to give her mobile number – she didn’t want anyone shouting at her about her ethics or asking about
X Factor
tickets.

She was about to shut down the laptop when her mobile rang. The number was withheld.

‘Annika? Hi, this is Nina Hoffman.’

She stood up so quickly she hit her head on the lamp. ‘Hello,’ she said, rubbing the bump.

‘You left a message on my voicemail a few days ago. It sounded urgent. Has something happened?’

With one hand, Annika stopped the lamp swinging and remembered the crackly Telefonica voice on Nina’s mobile. ‘Yes, I’ve tried calling you a few times. Have you been in Spain recently?’

‘Er, yes. I’ve just had a week’s holiday on Tenerife. Why?’

‘I went to see Julia and Alexander,’ Annika said, going out into the hall and towards her bedroom. ‘We were talking about you, and Julia told me something I didn’t know.’

Nina waited. ‘Oh?’ she said eventually.

Annika sat down on the bed. ‘Filip Andersson is your brother,’ she said, and noticed that her heart was beating faster. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘Like what?’

‘And Yvonne Nordin was your sister.’

‘You mean I’m under some kind of obligation to tell you who I happen to be related to?’

Annika tried to focus. She could see Nina in front of her, the police uniform, the brown hair in a ponytail, the straight shoulders and stiff creases, the sense of restrained power, her efficient calm that night when
they had stumbled upon the murder scene in Sankt Paulsgatan.
Annika, get out of here. 1617 to Control, we have a code twenty-three, possibly twenty-four, and need reinforcements. I can see two, correction, three injured, possibly deceased
…

‘But we’ve talked about that night so many times,’ Annika said. ‘I kept going on about Filip Andersson, the murders, that I thought he might be innocent, about whether he knew David Lindholm. You listened to all my theories about David’s women, Yvonne Nordin among them, you even helped me get hold of a photograph of her, and throughout all that you didn’t say that they were your brother and sister. Don’t you see how odd that looks?’

Nina was silent for a long while. Then she asked, ‘Would you have mentioned it, if they’d been your brother and sister?’

‘Of course!’

‘So if you had any criminals close to you, or if you yourself had committed a crime, you’d have told me all about it straight away?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’ve killed someone. Why haven’t you ever mentioned that?’

Now it was Annika’s turn to be silent. ‘That’s hardly relevant,’ she said at last. She hated being reminded of her ex-boyfriend. It felt like another life.

‘Yes, it is, in the same way that it’s relevant that my siblings are criminals.’

‘This changes everything, don’t you see?’ Annika said. ‘It feels like you’ve been deceiving me all along.’

‘Well, I haven’t,’ Nina said. ‘I’ve never lied to you.’