The Long Shadow

by Liza Marklund

  ‘Stig Seidenfaden will see you in his office first thing tomorrow,’ the estate agent said. ‘Do you feel like heading down to the harbour for a bite to eat?’

  She smiled, but felt ready to collapse. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but I’ve already eaten. Now I need to go and write an article.’

  He tutted. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Annika said, ‘I think you’re pretty good fun.’

  ‘I was thinking more of you,’ he said seriously, as he switched off his computer.

  They headed out through the door together. Marmén pulled down the obligatory metal shutter and secured it with a padlock to a hook in the pavement. ‘Let me know if there’s anything else you need help with,’ he said, then waved and disappeared into the alleyways leading to the harbour.

  The lobby was empty. There wasn’t even any sign of the receptionist.

  Annika hurried up to her room without meeting anyone. Best of all, there was no sign of Lotta. Relieved, she slumped onto the bed. That’s how I see things, she thought. If I can avoid confrontation, if I don’t have to talk and explain myself, then I’ve won. If I can talk about work, and make use of other people’s expertise, I feel good. As long as someone answers my questions and does as I say, my anxiety fades away.

  She straightened her back.

  And that’s not very healthy, she thought. It might even be worthy of its own diagnosis. What if I’m mentally ill?

  Maybe she ought to see a shrink after all – her friend Anne Snapphane had been trying to persuade her to do so for long enough. Or she could try to change her behaviour. Make an effort to be more accommodating, even with people who didn’t do as she said. How hard could that be?

  She stood up and walked around the room restlessly. People with far worse problems than hers managed to fit in. They had the capacity to appreciate love – it happened all over the place, all the time. It happened in damp prison cells, where men were locked away because they were scared for their closest relatives. It happened in half-empty hamburger joints, where people with a disabled child stuck together and loved each other.

  She sat on the bed again and pulled her bag onto her lap. She took out her mobile and paused with it in her hand. She had to let Lotta know they would be going to Gibraltar early the next morning. The question was whether she should call her or send a text. She hesitated for half a second, then decided to text. First she clicked to check the list of missed calls.

  Thomas’s number was second on the list, after the government office.

  It was now a quarter past eight. She pressed ‘call’.

  The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four … ‘Hello, Thomas here …’

  She had to clear her throat. ‘Er, hello,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hi! Hello!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  A double greeting. He was surprised to hear from her. ‘I saw you called me,’ she said. ‘Some time this morning?’

  ‘Yes, I did! Can you hold on?’

  She heard him say something in English in the background. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I’m outside now.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the hotel, the Parador. A golf resort right by the sea, and right under the flight-path to the airport. If you hear something that sounds like the Third World War, it’ll be the easyJet flight from London bringing a load of British tourists on a package holiday to Torremolinos—’ The rest of his words were drowned in the roar of a plane coming in to land. ‘That was it,’ he said, and she couldn’t help laughing. He must have had some wine – he wasn’t usually so light-hearted.

  ‘Did you want anything in particular when you rang?’ she asked feebly, transferring responsibility for the call to him.

  ‘Er, yes,’ he said. ‘I had a call from the insurance company this morning. Do you remember that damage assessor, Zachrisson?’

  A small man with a wide, dishonest smile, in a glasswalled, high-rise office with chrome furniture. ‘How could I forget?’ she said.

  ‘He said we’re going to get the money. Do you know if anything’s happened?’

  She laughed with relief. It really was true. ‘They’ve identified the person who did it,’ she said. ‘It’s a woman who’s in prison in the US. She’s not going to be extradited, so there won’t be a trial, but any suspicions against us have been dropped.’

  She said ‘us’ rather than ‘me’, but he didn’t protest. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he said simply.

  She gulped, then said: ‘Do you want to celebrate?’

  ‘Celebrate?’

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow evening?’

  ‘The negotiations are due to finish at four or so. We were going to have dinner.’

  She bit her lip, making it bleed. ‘Okay,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘Of course.’

  There were a few long moments of silence. She put her hand over her eyes.

  ‘It’s just the Scandinavian delegation, though,’ he said. ‘The Norwegians have come along for the ride as usual, taking part in all the things they like about the EU but refusing to pay for any of it.’ He fell silent.

  ‘I could interview you about how the negotiations have gone,’ Annika said.

  ‘It might be a bit hard to summarize without—’

  ‘You can just say that the discussions have been very rewarding, that you’re making good progress and that everything’s going as well as can be expected.’

  He thought for a moment, then made up his mind. ‘They can manage without me. Where shall we meet?’

  She had to stifle a squeal of joy. ‘I’m staying in Puerto Banús,’ she said, trying to sound focused. ‘Have you ever been here?’

  ‘Once, with my parents, when I was fourteen. Where are you staying?’

  She gave him the name of the hotel and some basic directions. They arranged to meet in the lobby at eight. Then they hung up, and she remembered that she was supposed to be writing something, but she was feeling so tired that she pulled off her skirt and top and crept under the covers, her mind full of confused but hopeful thoughts, and fell asleep just as the lights came on along the motorway.

  Friday, 29 April

  23

  Dawn came later to the west of Spain than to any other part of Europe, a political decision by the Spanish authorities. They had decided that the whole of the Spanish mainland should share the same time zone as the rest of Europe, one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, which made no geographic sense. Annika was standing on the beach in shorts, a hooded jacket and trainers, watching the sun rise over Puerto Banús at half past seven in the morning. The same sun was shining on the other side of the sea, hitting the red mountains of Morocco, but there it was only half past five.

  She looked out across the water for a while. Her last day at work on the Costa del Sol. She would be flying home early the following morning. She hadn’t written up a single word of any of the interviews she had conducted. All of the material existed only as fragmentary notes in her pad or as digital information on her mobile. It would take days to go through it and structure it into anything that was publishable. And none of the articles felt particularly interesting. She hadn’t had time for what she’d been hoping to do: check out the members of the Söderström family.

  There has to be a motive for this crime that we haven’t identified. Executing an entire family is an expression of serious fucking brutality. The killer was making a point. We don’t know which of the victims was the real target. Sebastian Söderström was a charming slacker. Veronica Söderström was a well-regarded solicitor. If you don’t ask any questions, you don’t get any answers. Suzette vanished without trace on 30 December last year. The worst of it may not be that she’s dead.

  The wind had got up during the night. It had changed direction, and the air was cooler now. She was freezing in her skimpy shorts.

  Gibraltar was going to be a nightmare. They needed pictures from there, and they’d have to get some good shots of the Swedi
sh girl who was going to spill the beans about her jet-set lifestyle. She might be the only person they could print a picture of in any of the articles. It all depended on whether the solicitor was willing to be photographed.

  She wasn’t going to win any prizes for her journalism with any of this, she knew. Mind you, her articles never would. She covered the wrong subject areas in the wrong medium. Heavy politics with a shaky handheld television camera was a cast-iron way of getting nominated for an award, as were sensitive articles in one of the morning papers about children or old people threatened by council cuts, and war, of course. War was actually easiest. You just needed an old man holding a white flag on some road in Iraq and you’d get Picture of the Year.

  She raised her face towards the blood-red sun for a minute or so, then turned back towards the hotel. If she was in luck, she’d have time for breakfast before Lotta came down.

  They bumped into each other outside the lifts. Lotta got out of one just as Annika was about to get into the other. ‘Britain hasn’t signed up to the Schengen Agreement,’ Annika said, ‘so you’ll need your passport. We’ll set off in half an hour.’

  The doors closed and she was carried up to the third floor.

  She showered, got dressed, gathered her things together and wondered how she was going to persuade Lotta to take some photos. It was ridiculous, she thought, that the most troublesome part of an already difficult assignment was working out how to get the photographer to do her job.

  She knew Patrik was expecting an utterly corrupt solicitor, Swedish, obviously, who was prepared to have his name and photograph printed alongside an article in which he explained how many billions he had laundered for the drugs Mafia. She doubted that Rickard Marmén’s acquaintance would volunteer that sort of information. This had every chance of being a truly excruciating interview.

  How nice of you to see me. Tell me, have you been bought off by the Mafia? Oh, really? And how do you feel about the colleagues who have taken their money?

  She would just have to let him explain how the set-up with companies hidden from official oversight worked, and ask if he saw any dangers or shortcomings with it, then bulk out the article with Rickard Marmén’s description of how money-laundering worked. She would have to stitch it all together so that the Dane was the personification of an activity he didn’t actually represent, ideally in such a way that the paper wouldn’t get sued.

  She could hear Anders Schyman’s voice in her head: It’s just a question of how you frame the article.

  She left her room, closed the door and headed towards the lifts.

  *

  Lotta had even more equipment with her than she’d had the previous day: the rucksack with her camera and lenses, a large flash, a tripod for the camera and another for the flash, a circular screen to direct the light and another bag whose contents Annika couldn’t guess at. ‘Do you really think you need to take all that?’ she asked.

  Lotta didn’t answer, just carried it purposefully to the car, first the rucksack, then the two tripods, and finally the screen and the bag.

  ‘We only need fairly straightforward pictures,’ Annika said. ‘Really just four. A general view of Gibraltar, a shot of Main Street, a portrait of the solicitor and one of the girl in Estepona.’

  Lotta got into the car and started the engine. Annika got into the passenger seat with her bag on her lap. She pulled out a bundle of notes and printouts, and set to work. She knew she would end up feeling car-sick, but it would be worth it to avoid having to talk.

  Lotta drove up onto the N340, then turned right towards the toll-motorway. She didn’t say a word until they were halfway to Estepona. ‘Your outburst yesterday was completely unacceptable,’ she said, gripping the steering-wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  ‘Not now,’ Annika said, without looking up from her papers. ‘Not on the motorway.’

  The drive was shorter than she had dared to hope. They arrived at La Línea, the Spanish border-town that had practically merged with Gibraltar, after just half an hour. They drove along a four-lane highway that followed the coast, with the vast Rock rising up in front of them, 430 metres straight up from the sea, according to Annika’s printouts from Wikipedia.

  ‘Try to find somewhere to park,’ Annika said. ‘It’s supposed to be really difficult to drive across the border, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll let us through at all seeing as we’re in a hire car.’

  ‘I’m going to take good pictures, and for that I need good equipment. I can’t drag everything with me so I’ll have to take the car across.’

  ‘To get the pictures we need, you don’t need all that studio equipment,’ Annika said.

  Lotta braked sharply. The cars in front of them formed a lengthy queue.

  Annika sighed. They waited for a minute. Two minutes. Five minutes.

  She opened the door and got out. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happened.’

  It was considerably cooler here than in Marbella. The sea on her right was the Atlantic, and the water beyond the Rock was the Mediterranean; the wind was coming from the Atlantic. She was glad she’d decided to wear her jeans and a sweater.

  She walked past car after car, some hundred metres, until she could see where the queue started. Then she turned and went back. Lotta had moved about four metres. She got back into the car.

  ‘This is the queue for the border-crossing into Gibraltar,’ she said. ‘We can probably expect to sit here for a couple of hours if we’re going to drive across. At least.’

  ‘You don’t respect my integrity as a photographer,’ Lotta said. ‘I have to feel happy to put my name to everything I produce. You tell me to take a nondescript picture of an ugly prison when it would actually be possible to take a really dramatic photograph of the same thing.’

  Annika swallowed hard. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but it’s the ugly prison that’s important for the article. It doesn’t matter that there are loads of women with goats and furrowed faces around us because, right now, we’re here to write about drugs and money-laundering.’

  ‘I’m not talking about women with furrowed faces, I only took those pictures so I had something to do while I was waiting. Of course it’s possible to take good pictures of a prison, but you have to follow the light – you have to work with the picture. Be there at dawn and dusk, see how the colours change …’

  ‘So why weren’t you there, then?’ Annika asked.

  ‘You’re the one who makes all the decisions! You’re the one who says when we’re going somewhere and where we’re going. You treat me like I’m your secretary.’

  ‘Have I stopped you taking the initiative? Have I said no on any occasion that you’ve suggested something? You’ve got exactly what you wanted every time you’ve opened your mouth!’

  Lotta looked down at her hands and tried to suppress a sob. ‘This isn’t easy,’ she said. ‘I’m completely new to this and you’re Annika Bengtzon. Do you really think I dare suggest to you what we should do?’

  Annika heard herself gasp. ‘ “You’re Annika Bengtzon”? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Everyone knows how you treat temps. Do you think I wanted to come on this job and spend four days in your company?’

  Annika stuffed her papers into her bag, opened the car door and got out.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lotta shouted.

  ‘Take whatever fucking pictures you want to. I’m going to interview the solicitor. See you at the airport tomorrow morning.’ She slammed the door and marched off towards the border with her bag over her shoulder.

  *

  There was no queue to cross the border on foot. She showed her passport and left the Spanish side, walked ten metres or so across no man’s land and entered the British border-post.

  The building looked like an Underground station in some London suburb. The ceiling was low and arched, the floor grey-blue, the walls concrete. There were a few tired pot plants, a Coca-Cola machine, and a machine selling disgust
ing chocolate. A sweaty, red-faced man was sitting at a desk and gave her passport a desultory glance as she walked past.

  She stopped at the tourist information office at the end of the tunnel, and asked for a map with City Mill Lane marked on it.

  ‘Go over the runway,’ the tourist guide said, pointing through the door, ‘then up to the left, over the drawbridge, in through the city walls, and you’ll be in Main Street. When you get to the Plaza turn left again, and City Mill Lane is a bit further up the Rock.’

  She said thank you, went out of the door, and found herself in Great Britain, on Winston Churchill Avenue. She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and began to cross a landing strip that stretched from one body of water to the other.

  This was where Veronica Söderström had worked. She had crossed this border every day, crossed this landing strip to get to work. Or did she usually drive? Did she sit in that long queue, or had she found some way of avoiding it? Why on earth had she put up with it?

  There had to be a very good reason why she had established her office in Gibraltar.

  The number of people crossing the landing strip was fairly small. There was a cold side-wind blowing from the Atlantic, and she hunched her shoulders and pulled her sleeves down over her fingers. Her pulse slowed. She forced Lotta’s words from her mind: Do you think I wanted to spend four days in your company?

  She was trembling as if she were actually freezing.

  In front of her there were some hideous apartment blocks, with washing hanging off them. There might be a lot of money here, she thought, but it doesn’t show in the look of the place.

  The centre of the city was older, better looked after, and seriously commercialized. Main Street had ornate benches that no one was sitting on, elaborate lampposts and rubbish bins, and hundreds of tax-free shops for tourists. It was a kaleidoscope of jewellers and off-licences, fashion boutiques, department stores, mobile-phone shops, toyshops and, thank God, camera shops.

  She went into one and asked for a decent digital camera with a wide-angle lens and a simple zoom, a large memory and a charged battery.