The Long Shadow (47 page)

What no one knew was that sometimes the Troll Mother would come and visit her little girl, always at night when the roof was clear of snow and the child could use the fire ladder, and the Angel knew her address.

How she was going to find it in the big city of Stockholm was something to which she had given no thought but it wasn’t too difficult. A cab driver took her to 28 Tyska brinken, in return for the same payment as the lorry driver from Mölnbo. Then she rang the doorbell.

The Princess opened it. It took her several seconds to recognize the Fallen Angel.

They looked after her on the truckle-bed in the kitchen for several weeks. Her wounds were infected, she fell into a fever and the child in her belly wasn’t well. But in the autumn, just before the child was due, the Troll Girl took them all, her mother and the Princess and the Fallen Angel, to the cinema to see an almost new film from America.

The Troll Girl had already watched it several times, and knew all the dialogue off by heart. It was called
A Place in the Sun
, and it was about a poor young man who went to work for his rich relatives, and fell in love with a beautiful girl, and he was prepared to do anything for her sake, even murder someone. The film was terribly sad and the Angel wept for the pregnant girl, Al, for the handsome, weak George, his love for the divine Angela, and because he was unjustly executed in the electric chair.

Afterwards they went to a café, drank coffee and ate buns.

They didn’t say much, but they were all thinking how unfair life was.

The Troll Girl paid the bill and gave the waitress a generous tip.

Before they got up from the table she leaned forward and took the others’ hands in hers. Her voice was low and dark and her troll eyes were black as she prophesied their future. ‘We deserve a place in the sun,’ she said. ‘Each and every one of us, and all of our nearest and dearest. And that’s what we shall have, I promise you that.’

The words burned their way into the Angel’s body, and then the first contraction came.

The little boy was born at dawn the following morning.

She didn’t bother going to bed. She stayed at the paper, printing out everything she knew about Hannelore, Astrid, Siv and their children, about Carita Halling Gonzales and all she had done; she read up about Algeciras, Morocco and Asilah; she thought through what she needed to do, and when it was half past two she went home to pack. She took just a bag containing her laptop, the camera from Gibraltar, her toothbrush and a change of underwear. At four o’clock she got a taxi to the airport, boarded the plane and slept like a log.

She woke up as they were landing and tried at once to call the Swedish Embassy in Rabat. Another long harangue in French, which she thought meant they weren’t answering the phone yet.

She went straight from the plane to the car-rental desks on the floor below. There were more people there than ever before so she presumed the tourist season had started. She moved quickly and easily through the crowd because she had no luggage this time.

She hired a Ford Escort from Helle Hollis, found her way out of the increasingly chaotic airport, and saw they had built a vast Ikea warehouse next to the motorway since she was last there, unless she hadn’t noticed it before.

It wasn’t as hot as she had been expecting: the thermometer on the dashboard said twenty-six degrees. The sunlight was hazy and dull, strong enough to make her squint. She drove west, past Torremolinos and Fuengirola, then turned up onto the toll-motorway and speeded up. The landscape had changed since she was last there. The verdant vegetation was gone. Everything looked yellow-brown and burned, with just a few hints of dark olive-green.

Soon the signs for ‘Tickets Ceuta Tanger’ began to appear along the side of the road. She passed the Hotel Pyr in Puerto Banús on her left. The roadworks were still going on and she had to slow down in front of the hotel. She peered up at the third floor and tried to work out which room had been hers.

To her right the huge walls surrounding the villas of Nueva Andalucía rose up. She turned off the motorway and headed upwards, past the bullfighting arena.

‘You need to get the right exit from a total of seven roundabouts,’ Carita had said, when she’d invited her to that party.

She made one mistake and had to go back to Plaza de Miragolf, but after that she got it right.

The gateway was less ostentatious than she remembered it, unless she was just starting to get used to them. What a terrible thought. She pressed various buttons until house number twenty opened the gate without asking any questions. She drove in.

The development Carita Halling Gonzales had lived in had looked like a model village that evening, and it made the same impression in daylight. The houses clambered up the mountainside, a pastiche of a southern Spanish mountain village. The waterfall by the pool burbled, the bushes were in bloom and the glass of the lampposts sparkled.

She parked outside
casa numero seis
, wound the window down and looked at the house. There were white aluminium shutters over all the windows. Blue and white police tape hung from the terraces and balconies of all three floors.

Annika switched the engine off, got the camera out of her bag and stepped into the sunshine. She stood beside the car for several minutes, just studying the house. There was no movement anywhere around her. No sound apart from the waterfall. It was as if all the houses had been abandoned, not just Carita’s.

She adjusted the focus and took a few pictures, some general shots of the area and some of Carita’s cordoned-off house. She hesitated, then climbed onto a raised flowerbed and took some pictures of the terrace behind the cordon. As long as she was standing on the flowerbed she wasn’t guilty of trespass. At least, she hoped not.

The terrace was as she remembered it. It was where she had stood talking to Rickard Marmén that evening. The potted plants were still there. A hose on a timer led along the edge of the terrace from the tap. The plants would survive long after their owners had vanished.

She jumped down from the flowerbed and went to ring the bells of other houses on the estate: she didn’t want to waste the opportunity to use the well-worn headline ‘A Town in Fear’. She got no answer. She found the pool-maintenance man and asked if he knew where the Halling Gonzales family had gone.

No, he didn’t keep tabs on the residents. They came and went all the time, or they rented out their houses. It was pretty much impossible to know who was where. She asked when the police had been there and was told that it was a while ago now, some time after Easter. He didn’t know anything about any of that, he added.

She thanked him and walked back to the car, looking
up at the houses and trying to work out which was number twenty. Someone was definitely at home there because they had let her through the gates.

The house was apricot-coloured, and was one of a row on the far side of the pool. The woman who opened the door had the same quintessential Scandinavian look as Carita: bleached hair, a dark tan, a bit of a facelift and gold sandals. Annika didn’t recognize her from the party last winter.

Her name was Tuula, she was Finnish, and had nothing but good to say about Carita Halling Gonzales. Carita had been on the committee that looked after things for the residents, and she kept everyone informed about the meetings, increases in ground-rent and shared activities. Her children had never thrown the sunbeds into the pool, which wasn’t something you could say of the British brats and their parents. Imagine having people like that here! Carita was always the person who called the water company when there was no water, or the electricity company when there was a power-cut, because she spoke fluent Spanish.

‘And garbage collections,’ Tuula said. ‘Who’ll call the council about the rubbish now?’

‘Apparently Carita is under suspicion for a serious crime,’ Annika said, trying to look concerned.

Tuula merely snorted. ‘The Spanish police,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows what they’re like. Lazy and corrupt to the core. Everything is all
mañana, mañana
in this country. They’re probably only blaming her because she’s foreign.’

Annika thanked her and went back towards the pool. The Finnish woman’s reaction was hardly surprising. Even the worst criminals had their supporters. There were still people who thought Pol Pot had been a really great guy.

She stopped to look out over the golf-course that spread across the valley below, then took out her mobile, found the number and called Knut Garen. He answered on the fifth ring. ‘I’m just calling to say that I’m on the Costa del Sol, and I’m planning to write about Carita Halling Gonzales,’ Annika said. ‘Does anyone know where she’s gone yet?’

‘No,’ Knut Garen said. ‘The Spanish police have been checking the passenger lists of all planes and ferries, but she must have got out another way.’

‘Could she still be in Spain?’

‘If she is, the whole family must have access to a completely different identity, with different schools, homes and bank accounts. We don’t consider that very likely. What are you planning to say?’

‘Anything I can get confirmed – by you, for instance. Has her arrest warrant with Interpol been made public?’

‘Not yet,’ Garen said.

She bit her lip. That had been a mistake.

‘But it might well be made public this afternoon. The Spanish police got the results of some DNA tests back from England yesterday, and they’ve linked her to the gassing in Nueva Andalucía just after New Year.’

Annika’s pulse quickened. ‘Linked her how?’

‘The safe and the other vehicle used in the break-in have been found.’

‘Where?’

‘The long-stay car park at Málaga Airport.’

Annika was walking back to her car. Very smart of Carita. If she’d abandoned the car by the side of the road or in the middle of nowhere, someone would have noticed it sooner or later. A car could be left for ages in the unmanned long-stay car park of a large airport without anyone thinking it odd.

‘Was there anything in the safe?’

‘It had been blown open. It was empty, apart from a few traces of the explosives. But inside the car they found strands of hair and flakes of skin, and yesterday it was confirmed that they match Carita Halling Gonzales’s DNA.’

‘You had something to compare it to?’

‘From the search of her house,’ Garen said. ‘I think they got the DNA from her toothbrush.’

Annika looked up at the house. Poor Jocke Zarco Martinez must have been party to a great deal of information. Carita had sacrificed her whole lifestyle to kill him. She hadn’t even taken her toothbrush with her when she’d run.

Then she remembered a thought that had occurred to her during the night. ‘I didn’t see any broken walls in the Söderström family home,’ she said. ‘Where was the safe?’

‘There were safes in all the bedrooms. This one was in a room on the ground floor.’

She frowned. She hadn’t known there were more bedrooms downstairs, other than Suzette’s.

‘Whose room was it in?’

‘Astrid Paulson’s.’

She blinked. Of course. ‘What could she have had in there that was so valuable?’

‘Cash, deeds, documents, diamonds, codes, sensitive information. Take your pick.’

Annika rubbed her forehead. Of course Astrid’s safe would be the most interesting in the house. Not Veronica the money-launderer’s, or Sebastian the financial disaster’s, but Astrid’s. She’d come first; she’d started her own business; she’d been running an estate agency on the Costa del Sol since 1968. ‘How much of this can I write?’

‘The head of the preliminary investigation will make the formal decision to arrest Carita Halling Gonzales in her absence this afternoon. At the moment there’s a warrant out for her for the manslaughter of Zarco Martinez. We know she gave him the morphine, but it’s not clear that she intended to murder him. But as of this afternoon those suspicions will be expanded to cover eight cases of murder. And when that happens, any restrictions on reporting will be lifted. I wouldn’t expect anything else.’

Annika took her notepad and pen from her bag and scribbled down the information. ‘Eight cases?’

‘The family in the house, plus the thieves and Zarco Martinez. Now that we know how it all fits together, the prosecutor can assume she meant to kill him.’

‘Can I call and get it confirmed later on this afternoon?’

‘Of course you can.’

They were silent for a moment.

‘Why?’ Annika finally asked. ‘Why did she do it?’ Garen didn’t answer.

‘But you knew her,’ Annika said. ‘You worked with her. What was her motive?’

The police officer sounded weary. ‘Money, I assume,’ he said. ‘Status and recognition, maybe, a life of luxury …’

Annika looked up at the terrace, with its blossoming hibiscus bushes. ‘But why choose to become a criminal? I mean, she didn’t have anything like that in her background. Quite the contrary, with a father-in-law who was chief of police in Bogotá.’

Garen coughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We checked out what you said about her background. It wasn’t entirely correct. Her father-in-law, Victor Gonzales, was one of Colombia’s biggest cocaine barons. He, his wife and
daughters were executed by another cartel fifteen years ago. They blew up his cocaine lab and burned his house down.’

Annika could feel her cheeks burning, not just because of the sun. ‘But Nacho and Carita survived,’ she said, ‘because they were in Sweden visiting her parents.’

Garen sighed. ‘Fifteen years ago both of Carita Halling’s parents were in prison in the USA. They used to run a company called Cell Impact. Then it went bankrupt, but to avoid scandal they started falsifying invoices and cooking the books.’

Bloody hell! She really had been gullible. ‘But now they’re dead?’ Annika said.

‘Our colleagues in Sweden have spoken to them,’ Knut Garen said. ‘They live in a small village outside Borlänge. They haven’t had any contact with Carita since they were released from prison, and that was ten years ago.’

Annika closed her eyes. Had the interpreter spoken a single word of truth during all the days they’d spent together? Yes: her father-in-law’s name and the fact that he had been murdered, and her parents’ company. She probably had grown up in Beverly Hills, and maybe she did meet her husband in the way she described. And her love for him and the children wasn’t necessarily a lie. Annika recalled Carita’s twittering presentation of her guests at the party, how pleased and proud she had sounded when she spoke about them.
His wife was an international model, their daughter’s a Spanish show-jumping champion. She’s a partner in a law firm in Frankfurt, he used to run a bank in Kenya
… ‘Do you think you’ll find her?’