The Long Shadow (11 page)

A moment later she heard running footsteps. ‘Hello, Mummy,’ Ellen said.

Annika’s shoulders relaxed and a smile rose up from her heart. ‘Hello, darling, were you asleep on the sofa?’

A hesitant pause. ‘Maybe,’ Ellen said. ‘Can we have a dog?’

‘A dog? We live in a small flat – we can’t have a dog there.’

‘Anna’s got a dog, a brown one, and it’s not big.’

Annika stifled a sigh. This debate arose every time any of the children at nursery school got a new pet. ‘It’s lovely that you like animals – I do too – but we have to think about what’s best for them. You can play with Zico when we go to see Grandma and Granddad in Vaxholm.’

‘Zico’s nice.’

‘He’s lovely. What did you do at nursery today?’ The little girl, who had evidently been fast asleep in front of the television, sounded full of energy as she related everything she had done that day. Eventually Kalle came over and joined in with the conversation. No disasters, no crises, no nasty little horrors taking out their own low self-esteem on her kids today.

She said goodbye with lots of kisses and goodnight hugs, then sat for a minute or two with a warm, sad lump in her chest.

It was now completely dark outside. An ambulance drove past on the motorway, its siren blaring. She got up and closed the curtains, then turned on the main light and the lamp on the desk and got out her laptop. She felt utterly exhausted.

How many times had she plugged in this computer? Every time she arrived at work, and every time she got home.

The base of her spine ached when she sat down. The chair creaked. She logged into the hotel’s network; fifteen euros a day. She leaned her forehead in her hands for a minute or so, then got going. She took out her mobile and called Patrik Nilsson. ‘Annika!’ he cried. ‘Where have you been all day?’

‘Oh, just sitting around drinking coffee,’ she said.
‘I’m going to send you three articles: the fatal gassing and break-in, the family, and idyll-in-crisis. There are pictures for everything. How much do you want me to write?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve got,’ Patrik said.

‘How much space have you kept?’

‘Three double-page spreads and the centrefold, although Berit’s doing that with sport.’

‘I’ll send things through as I finish them so you can start work on them,’ Annika said. ‘You’ll have the first in an hour or so.’

They hung up and Annika rang Niklas Linde.

He answered on the fourth ring, and she could hear club music in the background.

‘A quick question,’ she said. ‘Have the Spanish police got any leads on the perpetrators?’

Thud, thud, thud.

‘Now I’m disappointed,’ he said, and Annika bit her cheek. What had she done wrong?

A woman was laughing so hard somewhere in the bar that she was practically howling.

‘There was me hoping you were after my body,’ Linde said, ‘but you only want me for my brains.’

Okay. He was one of those.

‘I wonder if Constable Linde might have had a few glasses of
vino tinto
since we last met?’ Annika said, looking at the time: half past eight. At that moment she remembered she hadn’t eaten since the awful sandwich she’d had on the plane that morning.

‘And a few
cava
s,’ he added. ‘Do you want to come down and have a glass or two?’

Thud, thud, thud.

‘Not tonight,’ Annika said. ‘I’ve got articles to write. That’s part of the deal.’

‘Some other night, maybe.’

Thud, thud, thud.

‘Maybe. Who knows? Any leads in the case?’

‘Just a moment,’ he said, suddenly sounding completely sober.

There was a bang and crash on the line and she had to take her earpiece out.

‘Hello?’ he said. The thudding was gone. Now the sound of traffic was in the background.

‘I was asking about leads,’ Annika said.

‘They’ve got quite a lot to go on,’ Niklas Linde said. ‘Tyre-tracks from two different vehicles, both types identified. Footprints from three suspected perpetrators, shoe sizes confirmed. There’s also other evidence that I can’t divulge at the moment.’

‘So the police are fairly confident of solving this crime?’

‘It’s just a matter of time,’ Linde said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Er,’ Annika said, ‘no, but …’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In a hotel called Pyr. It’s—’

‘Fancy that! I’m at the Sinatra Bar down by the harbour – it’s only three hundred metres away. Do you want me to bring you an emergency sandwich?’

She couldn’t help laughing. ‘Ha, not a chance!’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’ She clicked to end the call, picked up the hotel phone and called Reception. The hotel didn’t offer room service.

The minibar was full of ridiculously expensive miniatures of spirits, but at the back she found two bars of chocolate and a dusty tub of roasted almonds. She ate the lot as she wrote the article about the murders. She referred to anonymous sources inside the police investigation, and described how the thieves, three people in two vehicles, had opened the gate to the road leading
to the Söderström family home at three thirty-four in the morning, made their way round to the ventilation unit at the back of the building and released an as yet unidentified gas into the system. She outlined the police theory about the family’s panic-stricken actions when they realized they were being gassed: how the gas detector had woken them, how the father had tried to stop it using the duvet, while the mother rushed to open the door for the children, then their instantaneous paralysis and death. Then how the thieves, or murderers, had stripped the house of valuables, and driven off.

She described the positions of the bodies when they were found by the cleaner, the police leads on the perpetrators, and how it was ‘just a matter of time’ before the culprits were caught.

She added some facts about gases used in break-ins. Hexane: a common industrial solvent, and a constituent of petrol and oil; it smells; large quantities required to knock someone out. Isopropanol: a solvent used in sprays such as de-icers, windscreen-washer fluid and detergents; has a characteristically strong smell; takes several hundred grams to knock someone out. Carbon dioxide: a natural constituent of air, forming about 0.03 per cent by volume; several kilograms needed to render someone unconscious, which would cause a fair amount of noise if it was pumped into a room quickly. Narcotic gases: used as medical anaesthetics, such as enflurane and isoflurane; fast-acting and capable of knocking someone out in very low percentages. More than two per cent by volume can be fatal. Laughing gas: used for medical purposes and as an oxidizer in finely tuned engines; a relatively high percentage, 65–70 per cent by volume, needed to send someone to sleep.

She wondered how the thieves had avoided dying from the gas. They must have worn masks.

Then she wondered what the other evening paper was doing, as her article vanished. She ought to have bumped into one of their reporters somewhere along the way. That she hadn’t suggested one of two things: either she was a long way ahead and had found better material, or she was on the wrong track entirely and had missed the real story.

Time will tell, she thought grimly, loading the photographs from the camera onto the computer.

Her mobile rang. It was Anders Schyman. ‘I’ve just had a strange phone-call from a reporter on the other paper,’ he said. ‘Have you been snogging some bigwig from the Ministry of Justice outside a restaurant?’

‘No,’ Annika said. ‘We had dinner. He gave me some information about something, then air-kissed me when we left. Are you worried?’

‘Not at all. Is everything going okay?’

‘Fine, although I’ve a lot to do.’

‘I won’t disturb you any longer.’

The pictures of the house were good. It looked as it was, big and flash, with long shadows over the garden.

She even offered a suggested headline: ‘KILLERS KNEW THE CODE’.

Then she set to work on ‘Idyll in crisis’. She described the residential area, how scared the neighbours were, the air of sadness in the Swedes’ regular bar, and then Carita’s quotes, albeit anonymous: ‘We’ve been expecting something like this to happen. There have been so many break-ins using knock-out gas down here’, and ‘Everyone will be a lot more careful after this’.

She attached a picture of the grand gateway to the residential area, then the photographs of the Swedes, with their names and ages.

That left the hardest piece: the article about the family.

She went into the
Evening Post
website. The main article was about an argument between a television presenter and a politician, followed by an item about a reality television star being insulted in a live broadcast. The rest of the news followed, in order of importance. The fatal gas attack was in seventh place.

There were pictures of the five victims: Sebastian Söderström, 42, Veronica Söderström, 35, My Söderström, eight, Leo Söderström, five, and Astrid Paulson, 68. The photographs were of variable quality, and none seemed recent.

She started by going through the school yearbook – or, rather, annual report – that Carita had lent her. The Marbella International College yearbook beat most Swedish coffee-table books in terms of size and quality. It included a presentation of the school, a run-through of all the subjects, facilities and premises, then photographs of all the classes, neatly lined up in their pale-blue uniforms.

After a few minutes she found Leo and My’s pictures.

Leo was much older than he had been in the picture on the paper’s website, with unkempt blond hair and a gap between his front teeth. He’d looked as if he might turn out to be a troublemaker. My was wearing a pale-blue dress and her hair in plaits. Annika swallowed hard and called Reception to ask them to scan the pictures and send them to her computer. A weary young man with acne collected the book and promised to do as she had asked.

It certainly looked as though the Söderström family had had an idyllic life. But was it really? Wasn’t it a bit rigid and confined? Veronica had been active in a women’s association and Sebastian had been involved with kids who were good at sport. Leo looked a bit of a
troublemaker and My was sweet. The stench of stereotypical gender roles was so strong it was all she could do not to hold her nose.

She put her hands over her eyes, so tired that the room was spinning.

Then she started writing. She wrote about Sebastian and his desire to give something back in return for having been given so much, about the tennis tournaments in the sun where poor kids won the chance for a better life, about how involved Veronica had been with her friends and family, about how cheerful and supportive the grandmother had been, in good times and bad.

When she had finished, she was in tears.

She emailed the final article and the scanned photographs, then went to bed without even brushing her teeth. The last thing she thought about was Jimmy Halenius and the picture to be published tomorrow in the other evening paper. She tried to work out if it bothered her but fell asleep before she had come to any conclusion.

It was raining. Annika was standing at the gate to the Söderström family’s villa. She could hardly see the house through the sheets of rain sweeping over the garden, dense as waterfalls.

‘Costa del Downpour,’ Carita Halling Gonzales said, coming up to her under a huge golf umbrella. ‘It doesn’t sound quite as catchy, does it?’ She flicked the switch that acted as a doorbell and peered up at the house.

‘Do you really think it’ll be the same policeman as yesterday?’ Annika asked. ‘And that he’s really going to let us in?’

Carita took a firmer grasp of her handbag, a checked one today. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He’s here, you can be sure of that. You can’t take that big camera in. He’ll know straight away that something’s not right.’

The terrace door of the house opened. Annika ran back to the car and tossed the camera onto the back seat. ‘Can I leave everything here?’ she called. ‘Or do you think it’ll get stolen?’

‘I should think this road has had its share of crime for this year,’ Carita said, waving at the policeman.

Annika watched as he approached the gate, blurred through the rain. She checked her mobile was in her
bag. She’d taken pictures with it before. Pretty poor, admittedly, but publishable.

‘Are you coming, Annika?’ Carita called.

She jogged back towards the interpreter as the policeman pushed the heavy gates open. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in rough English, and shook Annika’s hand formally.

She nodded and wiped the rain from her face.

The pool in front of the house was huge. The dark-wooden loungers looked black in the rain. She couldn’t get any sense of the view, everything beyond the garden hidden by curtains of rain.

‘This is how they got in,’ the policeman said, showing them the broken terrace door.

‘Do you want me to translate?’ Carita asked.

‘I’m fine with English,’ Annika said.

They stepped inside the house and the policeman closed the door behind them. The silence surrounding them was as dense as the rain. Suddenly Annika felt she couldn’t breathe.

‘The gas?’ she said, turning towards the policeman. ‘Is it gone?’

‘Long gone,’ he replied.

They were standing in a large hall that stretched up to the roof on the second floor, at least six metres, maybe more. Two staircases, one on either side of the hall, led upstairs. From the centre of the ceiling hung a huge wrought-iron chandelier. The floor, creamy-white marble, was shiny and ice-cold. Alcoves in the walls contained replicas of classical statues.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was hard to breathe. The air seemed damp and stale.

‘Where do you want to start?’ the policeman asked, and Annika jumped.

She felt in the bottom of her bag and pulled out one of Ellen’s stuffed toys that had ended up there by accident.
It was a little yellow dog that her daughter had won on a stall promising prizes for everyone at the funfair in Stockholm. ‘My daughter,’ she said. ‘She wanted me to give this to My.’

‘You have a daughter?’ the policeman said.

‘The same age as Leo,’ she said, as the policeman led the way up the marble staircase.