The Long Shadow (9 page)

‘What about the “Idyll in crisis”, then?’ Patrik asked. ‘That’s what you’re there for, to describe the panic in the Swedish colony.’

Is it? Annika thought.

‘Idyll-in-crisis is my middle name,’ she said. ‘Every word will be dripping with horror.
No te preocupes
.’

‘Hmm,’ Patrik said, not sounding convinced.

Two bleeps on the line told her she had a call waiting. ‘I have to go,’ she said, and took the other call.

It was Carita Halling Gonzales. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘it’s all okay. I can take the job. I charge forty euros an hour, plus expenses.’

‘Er, okay,’ Annika said, presuming that was the usual rate for interpreters. ‘What does “expenses” mean?’

‘If I’m going to be driving you around, I’ll charge for petrol, that sort of thing.’

‘I’ve got a car,’ Annika said. ‘Well, it’s only a Ford. Can you start straight away?’

‘Oh, hang on, a police car …’

There was a crackle on the line followed by a long silence.

‘Carita?’ Annika said tentatively.

‘Sorry, they’ve gone now. You’re not allowed to use your mobile when you’re driving. Nacho got a sixty-euro fine last week. Where are you now?’

‘Lackanyarda,’ Annika said.

‘Poor you, on a day like today. Do you want to meet there or somewhere else?’

‘I’m staying in a hotel called the Pyr. It’s—’

‘Let’s meet up there in fifteen minutes or so. See you soon!’

‘Wait!’ Annika cried. ‘Can you bring the latest school yearbook?’

Carita Halling Gonzales looked exactly like the women shopping in La Cañada: thin, blonde and suntanned, slightly older than Annika. Gold ear-rings and rattling bracelets. A tight low-cut top and a leopard-print bag.

‘Nice to meet you,’ the interpreter said, shaking her hand warmly as she dropped a gold-cased lipstick into her bag. ‘What do you want to do first?’

‘Head out to the villa where they lived. Do you know where it is?’

Carita Halling Gonzales raised her eyebrows. ‘Somewhere in Nueva Andalucía,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got a more specific address, or a
supermanzana
?’

Annika stared at her: a what? A super apple?

‘Block, district,’ the interpreter said.

‘Oh,’ Annika said, pulling out her notepad. She leafed through it until she found the details Berit had got from
Paginas Blancas
. ‘Las Estrellas de Marbella,’ she read out.

‘The Stars of Marbella,’ Carita said, shaking her head. ‘No idea. We’ll have to call Rickard.’

‘Marmén?’ Annika said.

‘Do you know him?’ Carita Halling Gonzales said in surprise.

‘Doesn’t everyone know Rickard?’ Annika said, digging out the number from her notes.

Oh, yes, Rickard knew where Las Estrellas de Marbella was, all right. He’d run a decorating business in the not-too-distant past and managed to make a few deliveries there before the company had gone bust.

Carita wrote the directions on Annika’s pad. ‘Thanks, big kiss,’ she said, then handed the phone back to Annika.

‘Do you want to drive or shall I?’ Annika asked.

‘You drive. I’ll have my hands full trying to make sense of these directions.’

They got into the car and passed beneath the motorway.

‘Go past the bullfighting arena,’ the interpreter said, pointing a varnished fingernail. ‘What sort of articles are you going to write?’

‘I’ve already met a couple of police officers who told me some of the detail about the actual murders,’ Annika said. ‘Now I want to have a look at the house, so I can describe the area it’s in, maybe talk to some neighbours. Then I was thinking of trying to meet up with some of the Swedes living here, see if they can tell me how this sort of event will affect their lives, if at all.’

‘Murders?’ Carita said.

Annika glanced at the woman beside her, who was looking in a compact mirror and picking something off her teeth. ‘The police don’t think this is an ordinary break-in. The thieves used some strange kind of gas that killed the family almost instantly.’ She thought for
a moment. ‘They didn’t actually call them thieves, but murderers.’

‘How awful,’ Carita said. ‘Left at the roundabout.’

The road meandered between high concrete walls, dense cypress hedges and thickets of hibiscus and bougainvillea. Behind the walls and vegetation they could make out roofs of terracotta tiles, paved gardens and close-cut lawns.

‘What huge houses,’ Annika said.

‘Expensive too,’ Carita said. ‘That one up ahead, for instance, is on the market for nine and a half million.’

Annika peered at the black wrought-iron gates as they drove past. ‘That’s a lot, of course,’ she said, ‘but it’s what villas out in Djursholm cost.’

‘Not kronor, euros,’ Carita said, looking at the directions. ‘Right here, I think.’

They drove on for another kilometre or so. The interpreter was looking around, very alert.

‘That part up there must have only just been finished,’ she said, pointing up to the left. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen it before. Watch out for that pothole!’

Annika had to swerve sharply to avoid it. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘How can the developers leave the roads in this state?’

Carita sighed. ‘A few years ago the whole of Marbella Council was arrested. That hole has probably been dealt with and paid for several times over, but the work probably took the form of renovations on the home of the head of the highways department … Ah, here it is.’

A grand gateway that looked like something from an old Western appeared as they drove alongside a tall hedge.
Las Estrellas de Marbella
, it said, in curling gold lettering. An angel with marble wings was playing a harp right at the top. Two pink stone lions roared silently.

‘That’s the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen,’ Annika observed.

‘It’ll pass,’ Carita said. ‘After a couple of years down here you’re pretty much inured to it.’ She opened the passenger door and got out of the car. ‘I wonder how you get in.’

There was a post containing a keypad in front of one of the stone lions. Annika pointed at it. Carita skipped over and tapped in a few numbers at random. Nothing happened. ‘We’ll have to wait for someone to go in or out,’ she said.

Annika switched off the engine, grabbed the camera and went out into the afternoon sun. ‘What weather,’ she said. ‘Is it always like this?’

‘From November to March,’ the interpreter said. ‘Then it gets warmer again.’

Annika took a few shots of the gateway. ‘Have you lived here long?’

Carita frowned and counted on her fingers. ‘Almost seven years now,’ she said. ‘My husband’s Colombian, and we couldn’t live there for a number of reasons, so we moved to Sweden first, but that didn’t work. Do you know what happens in Sweden?’

Annika shook her head and listened to the wind. She could hear a car approaching.

‘Nacho, who’s a qualified paediatrician, couldn’t even get a job delivering papers. The government employment agency wanted to send him on a course so he could work as a hospital cleaner. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?’

A silver Jaguar cabriolet swung in towards the gate and a man pressed a remote control. The gates glided open. Annika and Carita jumped back into the car. Carita waved cheerily at the man in the Jaguar as they drove in.

‘So we moved here instead,’ she said. ‘Nacho got a job at the hospital straight away. We’re very happy. It’s a bit like south California.’ She looked at the directions again. ‘Down here,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be on the left-hand side of the road, a little way down the hill.’

The house loomed above them, heavy and solid. It stood on its own in a cul-de-sac, facing south towards the sea, with a mountain to the west. The drive was blocked, partly by a large gate and partly by a police cordon.

Annika parked next to the pavement further down, beside an overgrown plot with some abandoned foundations in the middle. They got out, and she took the camera from the back seat. They walked rather solemnly towards the house.

The drive continued to climb behind the gate and swung off left towards a carport. Two cars were parked there, an urban jeep and a smaller soft-topped vehicle. Annika raised her camera and took a few pictures.

The house stretched up towards the sky, a mixture of two and three floors, in an irregular and elaborate design. It was all terraces and balconies, bay windows, pillars and various types of arch, curved balcony rails and ornate iron balustrades. At the top there was a tower with arched windows. The garden was full of fruit trees and large palms. In front of the house was a paved pool area.

The whole plot was in shadow. Annika suddenly became aware that there was a cool breeze from the mountain. She fired off a series of shots of the house against the sun in the evening light. ‘Have you any idea how long the family lived here?’ she asked, folding her arms to keep warm.

Carita looked up at the house. ‘It can’t have been long,’ she said. ‘The estate’s so new.’

‘But the trees?’ Annika said. ‘They look very mature.’

‘Down here you buy palms when they’re ten metres tall. They deliver them on lorries with articulated digger attachments. Do you think this is a bell?’ She pressed something that looked like a switch on one of the gateposts.

A few seconds later the terrace door opened and a uniformed police officer came out onto the sun deck. Carita waved frantically. Annika hid the camera behind her back. The man came towards the gate and stopped a reasonable distance away.

Carita rattled off something in Spanish and the policeman sounded irritated when he answered. Carita pointed at Annika and said
Suecia
and
amiga
in a pleading tone, as well as a lot more that Annika didn’t understand. The policeman looked friendlier now, but shook his head sadly,
hoy no, imposible, mañana si
.

‘You can get inside the house early tomorrow morning,’ Carita said, taking her sympathetically under the arm and giving her a consoling pat on the shoulder with her other hand. ‘I told him you were a friend from Sweden, that you’re devastated by the tragedy and that you’d like to go in and say a last farewell to your friends here, in their home.’

‘I don’t usually lie about what I’m doing or who I am,’ Annika said, ill at ease.

‘I don’t think the constable reads the
Evening Post
,’ Carita said, heading back towards the car.

Annika had put the camera into its case and was about to get into the driver’s seat when her mobile rang. She looked at the display. Bosse calling.

Bosse?

‘Hello?’ she said hesitantly.

‘Annika? This is Bosse. Bosse Svensson.’

Of course. The reporter for the other evening paper –
she’d done some serious flirting with him. She still had his number in her phone. She turned away from the car and took a few steps into the abandoned plot. ‘What do you want?’ she asked quietly.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘it’s about work. I’m holding a picture that I was wondering if you’d like to comment on.’

Silence.

‘What sort of picture? What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve got a picture of you outside a restaurant and you’re cuddling the under-secretary of state at the Department of Justice.’

Annika stood perfectly still and let the words sink in. ‘“Cuddling”?’ she said.

‘Well, snogging, then.’

Annika’s jaw dropped as she stared at the derelict foundations. ‘Snogging? With Halenius?’

‘And I’m giving you the chance to comment.’

She shut her eyes and put a hand to her forehead. The Spanish air-kisses just before she’d got into the taxi. The group of noisy rich kids with their mobile phones in their hands.

She let out a deep sigh. ‘And you’re thinking of publishing the picture? In the paper?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘And you’re wondering if I’d like to comment?’

‘Of course you have to be given the chance to explain yourself.’

She snorted. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘This is my comment. I’m so relieved I never fucked you, Bosse. I’ve heard you’re completely useless in bed. Otherwise I have to refer to source confidentiality. Who I talk to, what we talk about, and how we do it, all of that is protected by the constitution. I have no intention of breaking the rules simply because you can’t handle rejection, Bosse.’

There was a long silence. Annika could hear the
sounds of the newsroom at the other end of the line. She knew Bosse was recording what she said. She wasn’t about to say anything in such a way that he could edit her words and replay them online or to his bosses.

‘I’ve been told that you drank a great deal of wine. Is that true?’

‘I didn’t want to drink wine with you, did I, Bosse? Has that left you feeling insulted?’

‘So you don’t want to comment?’

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ Annika said. ‘A wife and three kids in Mälarhöjden?’

Another silence.

‘Annika,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. We’re going to write about this. We’ve got information that Halenius was on duty that evening, but instead of doing his job he was out at a restaurant, drinking and flirting. And you always make such a big deal of your high moral standards and journalistic integrity. Can’t you see what this will do to your credibility?’

‘Did you volunteer to make this call, Bosse, or were you ordered to do it?’

He sighed and Annika heard a click. Presumably he was switching off the recorder.

‘You realize that we’ll ask his department to show us the receipt?’ he said. ‘Credit-card receipt, taxi receipts … It’ll all come out.’

‘If it was your idea to call, that means you still haven’t got over me and you want revenge. If you were ordered to do it, you have remarkably little backbone, seeing as you didn’t refuse. Are we done?’

‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ Bosse said.

She cut him off.

‘Problems?’ Carita said.

‘Not really,’ Annika said, unable to stop herself imagining Thomas’s face when he opened the other
evening paper the next day. ‘Shall we try knocking on the neighbours’ doors?’

Hardly anyone answered.

No one had seen anything.

No one wanted to say anything.

‘Where are we going now?’ Carita asked, as they reached the first roundabout on the way back to the motorway.