The policeman took a step forward and said, ‘Good to meet you.’ They shook hands and Thomas’s eyes flickered back to Annika.
‘Thomas is representing the Swedish Ministry of Justice,’ Annika said. ‘We used to be married. We have two children.’
‘Well, well,’ the policeman said. ‘Was he the one who didn’t like playing?’
Annika felt like jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow.
‘Good to see you,’ she said to Thomas, then, to Linde, ‘Shall we go and sit down?’
Linde put a hand on her shoulder, not taking his eyes off Thomas. ‘One floor down,’ he said, moving his fingers to her neck and gesturing along a panelled corridor. They turned round. His palm ended up on her waist. She could feel contentment burning through her body and Thomas’s stare on the back of her head.
‘Recently divorced?’ Linde asked, standing close to her on the escalator.
‘Not particularly,’ Annika said, not moving away.
Knut Garen had installed himself at a table with some chicken wings, fried baby octopus and prawns in a strong garlic sauce. He greeted her warmly.
‘It’s brilliant that we can do this straight away,’ Annika said, sitting down opposite him, Linde beside her.
She put her pen and notepad on the table, ordered agua con gas and a tortilla with albondigas from the waitress.
‘You know why I’m here?’ she said, and the officers nodded. ‘Why have drug-smuggling and money-laundering become blurred on the Costa del Sol?’
‘Look at a map,’ Garen said. ‘An hour by boat to Morocco, Europe’s very own hash plantation. Three-quarters of an hour to the Atlantic coast, where the ships turn up from South America with their cargoes of cocaine. And slap bang in the middle of it all is Gibraltar, a tax haven with no intrusive restrictions.’ He popped a baby octopus into his mouth. ‘It’s all here,’ he said. ‘The raw materials, the transport network, the distributors, the tax haven, serious corruption and customers.’
‘Customers?’ Annika said.
‘Spain has overtaken the USA as the biggest user of cocaine,’ Linde said. ‘One in four Spaniards over fifteen has tried it.’
‘But hash is still the main drug of choice,’ Garen said. ‘It’s estimated that a hundred and twenty thousand families in Morocco derive the whole of their income from growing hemp and producing cannabis. Do you know how they go about it?’
She shook her head. The police officer wiped his greasy octopus fingers on a napkin and picked up her pen and notepad. ‘They plant the seed in the spring and the plants grow through the summer,’ he said, drawing a plant with deeply lobed leaves. ‘Here, right at the top, are the seeds, hidden in little pods. Between the pods and the seeds there’s a fine yellow powder, a form of pollen. When the plants are harvested in the autumn they’re laid out on finely woven cloths on the floor and covered with plastic. Then they’re beaten with sticks to crush the seed-heads. The pollen filters through the cloth and gets collected underneath.’
The seed-head he had drawn reminded Annika of a fried egg.
Garen looked towards the entrance hall with an almost dreamy expression. ‘In October and November, nights in Morocco echo to the sound of sticks beating the ground, da-dunk, da-dunk. That’s the hundred and twenty thousand families crushing the seed-heads of their hemp plants. Obviously, outsiders have no idea what’s making the sound.’ He drummed his fingers on the table. ‘It goes on all night long,’ he said, ‘until the plants have been beaten three times. Then they’re done, and that’s when the buyers show up.’
He took his fingers from the table. ‘The gangs who deal in cannabis handle about twenty hash farmers each. The pollen and plants are taken to the coast where they’re dried and packed into hard blocks. It’s been going on like that for as long as anyone can remember.’ He drank the last of his beer. ‘What do you know about hashish?’
Annika took a sip of her mineral water. They used to meet up for a smoke behind the snowdrifts next to the sports ground in Hälleforsnäs. Sven always provided the hash, Sylvia Hagtorn brought the tobacco to roll it with, and Roland Larsson his grandfather’s pipe. Annika always thought the pipe was a bit disgusting, with the remnants of the old man’s saliva. And she didn’t think much of the effect either – it just made her feel sluggish and a bit silly. She’d be giggly and desperate for sweets. ‘Well, I know you smoke it,’ she said, looking down at her pad.
‘The pollen from the first beating is made into topgrade hash, the highest quality. We hardly ever get that in Sweden. The hash that reaches us is category three, the worst sort, the remnants from the last beating.’
Maybe that’s why it never really worked for me, Annika thought. ‘How does it get to Europe?’ she asked.
Linde shifted on his chair. Now his leg was pressed against hers.
‘It’s shipped out of two small coastal towns, Nador and Asilah, in February and March,’ he said.
She nodded and suddenly noticed how dry her mouth was. She didn’t move her leg.
‘The latest development is the so-called go-fast boats.’
She was gulping the mineral water.
‘Go-fast boats are really just big barges with somewhere between three and five 225-horsepower Yamaha motors on the back. Half the boat is full of fuel, the other half drugs. They go so fast that they can outrun helicopters. They dock out at sea with ships that refill their fuel tanks, then carry on, sometimes as far up as Barcelona.’
Linde held his mobile towards her with one hand. He rested the other on her knee. The phone’s screen was showing a shaky film of a cheerful dark-skinned man standing in the middle of a load of shipping pallets, holding onto a wheel. The wind was pulling hard at his hair. The cameraman, whoever he was, moved the camera away from the man and did a 360-degree turn. The film had been taken on board a huge barge that was crossing the sea at very high speed. The prow was full of countless square pallets, while the stern contained several hundred cylindrical drums of fuel. Then the film returned to the man and the screen went dark.
‘He doesn’t look so happy now,’ Linde said, pocketing his mobile. ‘What you saw in the prow was three tons of hash. He and the cameraman are in prison in Granada.’ He let go of her knee.
She laughed.
‘The EU have done a deal with the Moroccan government,’ Garen said. ‘The state has marched in and destroyed millions of hectares of cannabis plants. What do you think that means for the families who depend on growing it? No bread on the table. So what do they do?’
Annika waited for the answer.
‘Their plants are gone,’ he said, ‘but everything else is still there – staff, buyers, sellers, boats, vehicles, ships, containers, the network of contacts and distributors. So what do they do?’
‘Transport and sell something else,’ Annika said.
‘They transport and sell cocaine,’ the police officer said. ‘Morocco and the Western Sahara have taken over as the transit countries for the cocaine trade, and this is the doorway to their customers. All the cocaine comes from the coca plantations in South America, and almost all of it comes through here on its way to the European market.’
‘How much gets seized?’
‘About ten per cent, an average of ninety kilos a day. It’s estimated that a ton of cocaine reaches Europe via Spain every day.’ Garen leaned towards Annika. ‘And do you know what the drug gangs’ biggest problem is?’ he said.
‘Bribing Customs officials? Finding runners? Creating new markets?’
He shook his head. ‘All that’s easy. The hardest thing is knowing what to do with all the cash.’
Annika looked sceptically at him. ‘Hard?’ she said. ‘Just using notes?’
‘Money-laundering is the most complicated thing they do. And we’re making it harder. That’s why we have seminars like this one.’
Garen ate the last of the garlic prawns. ‘I have to get off to Granada,’ he said. ‘Are you okay with that?’
Annika looked through her notes.
There were several things she was wondering about, but he had to leave and she felt terribly tired. She smiled at him. ‘Thanks very much,’ she said. ‘This has been a huge help. I’m just wondering if you’ve got ideas about people I could interview. For instance, I’d like to get in touch with Jocke Martinez’s lawyer …’
‘I’ve looked into that,’ Linde said.
‘Excellent,’ Garen said, getting up. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ He kissed Annika on both cheeks and headed for the exit.
‘I guess I’m picking up the tab,’ she said.
18
Lotta was close to a breakdown. She’d called Annika at least a hundred times but there was something wrong with her mobile, which wouldn’t connect the calls – she kept getting a Spanish voice saying something unintelligible.
‘You need to dial four six before you call my number,’ Annika said.
The photographer stared at her. ‘Of course I dialled the country code! Is your mobile even switched on?’
Annika dug around in her bag and fished it out on the end of the hands-free earpiece. ‘Sorry.’
‘How could you just leave me like that?’ Lotta said. ‘We’re supposed to be doing this series of articles together.’
‘Calm down,’ Annika said, switching her phone on. ‘You haven’t missed anything important. I’ve just been getting some background information. Did you get any pictures?’
‘Of what? This building? Or the picturesque surroundings?’ She gestured towards the windswept expanse surrounding the conference centre, the thundering motorway, the shabby industrial buildings in the background.
‘We need to sit down and try to book up some interviews for tomorrow,’ Annika said. ‘A drug-dealer, a solicitor specializing in money-laundering, a few jet-set Swedes …’
Lotta looked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘This has been really hard for me, getting up so early, and you just disappearing like that. I want to go to the hotel now and get unpacked, and then I need something to eat.’
Annika stared at the woman before her, her mane of blonde hair, long legs and angular shoulders. ‘Unpacked?’ she said. Then she remembered Anders Schyman’s words of wisdom: choose your battles carefully. It was Wednesday today. They were flying home on Saturday. They had two full days in which to complete the entire series of articles. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You go ahead. The Hotel Pyr is in Puerto Banús – you can see it from the motorway.’
‘What?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘I’ve got loads of work to do.’
‘But—’
‘With a bit of luck I’ll be able to get hold of the Swedish drug-runner in prison in Málaga. One of us needs to sort that out. Shall we meet up over breakfast in the hotel early tomorrow morning? Eight o’clock?’
Lotta was about to say something else, but Annika turned away and walked towards Niklas Linde’s car. Not the BMW this time, but a Jaguar.
‘Is that your photographer?’ he said, looking with interest at Lotta.
‘No,’ Annika said, as she opened the door. ‘She’s not mine, she’s the Evening Post’s. You’re welcome to borrow her.’
He grinned. ‘I prefer reporters,’ he said.
Annika waved as they drove past her in the car park.
The traffic was heavy, almost static. Linde closed his window and turned up the air-conditioning. The thermometer on the dashboard said the outside temperature was twenty-nine degrees.
‘Is it always this warm?’ Annika said. The sweat under her breasts was starting to dampen her T-shirt.
‘It’ll be like this until October,’ he said. ‘There’s never a drop of rain during the summer months.’
She took off her sunglasses and peered out at the sea. ‘Has anything happened in the Sebastian Söderström case?’
He frowned. ‘Have you heard what the post-mortem report said? About the thieves?’
She shook her head.
‘They weren’t gassed, they died from respiratory failure caused by a morphine overdose.’
Annika looked at him. His arms were chestnut-brown. ‘A morphine overdose? They were addicted to morphine?’
‘The morphine was in their bottles of beer.’
Annika recalled the cab of the thieves’ truck: the dirty windows, the split vinyl seats, the hamburger wrappers on the dashboard, the map of Marbella, the mud on the floor, the two half-empty beer bottles … ‘They were in the cup-holder next to the radio.’
‘One-litre bottles of San Miguel,’ he said. ‘Screw-top.’
‘So someone doctored them,’ Annika said. ‘That means …’
‘…someone killed them. Exactly.’
‘But who? And why?’
‘Why do you think?’
She fell silent.
‘It’s actually pretty smart,’ Linde said. ‘You can get morphine from any hospital. The cupboards are supposed to be kept locked, but they’re not hard to break into. The liquid forms have flavourings in them, so in this instance the pathologist thinks we’re dealing with tablets.’
‘But wouldn’t it take loads of pills to actually kill someone?’ Annika said.
‘Someone who’s not used to it would die from sixty milligrams of morphine chloride. That’s either three or six tablets, depending on their strength. The amount of poison in those beer-bottles would have knocked out an elephant.’
Annika held onto the dashboard as Linde overtook a bus full of golf-playing pensioners. ‘So what happened during the actual breakin, then?’ she said. ‘Didn’t the thieves have those injections to counteract the gas?’
‘A naloxone derivative, yes. Traces were found in their blood.’
‘They opened the gate by using the right code. How did they know it?’
‘The code that was entered was the emergency one, not the one chosen by the family. That sort of code gets sold fairly often. There have been several cases of security companies being behind large-scale breakins – they did one in an apartment complex in Nueva Andalucía.’
Annika scratched her cheek. ‘So they gassed the family,’ she said, ‘went inside without gas masks, smashed down the wall around the safe, carried it out to one of the vehicles, then looted the house, put everything into the truck and drove away.’
‘More or less.’
‘And when they thought they were home and dry they opened the bottles of beer to celebrate.’
Linde nodded.
They left the crowds on the public motorway and headed up onto the toll-road.
‘But didn’t those injections mean they weren’t susceptible?’ Annika said. ‘I thought they were supposed to block the effect of tranquillizers? So how could they die of a morphine overdose?’
‘The naloxone derivative only lasts an hour or two. Then the morphine kicks in. They must have got tired and parked up in La Campana for a rest.’
‘I presume there are no fingerprints on the beer-bottles apart from the thieves’?’
‘Correct.’
Mountains, sea and greenery flashed past. Annika shut her eyes and saw the little girl’s bedroom, the unmade bed, the paints, the doll with the curly brown hair. She recalled the corridor leading to the closed door of the parents’ bedroom, the floor where the children had died. ‘There’s something very odd about this crime,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think?’
Linde was staring straight ahead, and didn’t answer.
Then it struck her, a sudden, terrible realization. ‘No one laces beer with a fatal dose of morphine in advance unless they’re determined to kill the people drinking it,’ Annika said.
‘Quite right.’
She shivered, and he turned down the air-conditioning.
‘So this was a meticulously prepared mass-murder camouflaged as a breakin,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea why?’
The police officer shook his head. ‘They cleaned up very carefully after them. The thieves who carried out the breakin were a risk so they were eliminated. Presumably the explanation was inside the safe, but we’r
e unlikely ever to see that again.’
She looked out across the landscape. ‘What are the Spanish police doing?’
‘Nothing,’ Linde said. ‘The case is regarded as officially closed from a police perspective. The thieves are dead. There are a few loose ends, but there usually are.’
‘You sound critical?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not formally involved in the investigation,’ he said. ‘I’m here to deal with the international drugs trade, not breakins at local residential properties.’
‘But you think the Spaniards were too quick to drop this?’
He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. ‘There must be some motivation for this crime that we haven’t identified,’ he said. ‘Executing an entire family is an expression of serious brutality. The killer was making a point. We don’t know which of the victims was the real target. Was it the whole family, or just one?’
‘It can hardly have been the children,’ Annika said, ‘so that must mean one of the adults. Have you checked them out?’
Linde sighed. ‘Not very thoroughly. Sebastian Söderström was a charming slacker, completely incompetent when it came to money. Veronica Söderström was a well-regarded solicitor. Astrid Paulson was practically retired, and Suzette was a schoolgirl who was about to start work at a stables.’
‘Could there be something in Sebastian’s shaky finances?’
‘Of course, but if you don’t ask any questions, you don’t get any answers.’
‘And what about Suzette? Have you heard anything from her at all?’
He shook his head. ‘Not a thing. It’s like she went up in smoke on the thirtieth of December last year.’
‘Is there still any kind of active search for her?’
‘Now? No.’
‘Do you think she’s alive?’
‘There’s been no sign of life from her for four months. She hasn’t crossed any national boundaries, hasn’t withdrawn any money, hasn’t made any calls, hasn’t logged into the Internet. If she’s alive somewhere, she’s locked up, unable to contact the outside world. So the worst of it may not be that she’s dead.’
Annika sat in silence for a long minute. She thought of the picture of the girl with the sullen demeanour, her black hair and fragile face. The worst of it may not be that she’s dead. How utterly appalling. ‘But there are still things to follow up,’ she said. ‘Aren’t there?’
The Long Shadow Page 22
