The Long Shadow (16 page)

Annika was sitting beside Niklas Linde in his big BMW, watching the scene. She was lucky to be there. She had given the police officer an ultimatum: she would only tell him what she knew about Suzette if she could join in the search. Linde hadn’t been able to argue.

They had stopped on a hill overlooking the riverbed. Annika pulled out the camera and opened the car door. Using it as a support, she took several long-exposure pictures. She could hear voices and the bleeping of the search team’s radios. ‘Do you think they’re likely to find her tonight?’ she asked.

‘They have to try,’ Linde said.

‘She’s been missing for six days,’ Annika said. ‘If she’s been out here the whole time, she must be dead.’

‘Do you want to talk to the officer in charge?’

‘Maybe just to get a quick comment on what he thinks of the situation,’ Annika said.

They rolled down towards the river. Linde parked, got out and marched up to the man in the reflective jacket. She saw them talking and gesticulating. She opened her door and moved slowly towards them, past groups of people with sticks and lamps tied to their foreheads, about to start searching for the missing girl. The ground was still warm and smelt of herbs. The wind coming off the sea was damp.

‘Our man isn’t an optimist,’ Linde said, coming back to her. ‘The toll motorway’s just above here. On the far side there’s the start of a huge national park that covers a vast area. I was thinking of helping with the search for a while. Do you want to come?’

Annika looked up at the stars. ‘Has Suzette been formally declared missing yet?’ she asked, into the darkness.

‘Her mother reported her to the Western District in Stockholm an hour ago. Interpol circulated it at once. The moment Suzette Söderström goes through Passport Control, takes money out at a cashpoint or makes a call on her mobile, the alarms will go off.’

‘Is Interpol really that effective?’ Annika wondered.

‘If she’s still alive, we’ll find her.’

‘Do you think she is?’

The police officer didn’t answer. He stopped beside her and gazed out at the moonlit riverbed. Annika concentrated on looking straight ahead, not at him. She couldn’t make him out. ‘Has anything new happened in the murder investigation?’ she asked.

‘Actually it has,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a preliminary cause of death.’

‘Gas?’ Annika asked.

‘Not just any gas. Fentanyl.’

‘Means nothing to me,’ Annika said. ‘Should it?’

‘It’s the same gas Russian special forces used to knock out the terrorists and hostages during the storming of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow a few years ago.’

Annika stared at him. ‘So many people died,’ she said.

‘At least a hundred and seventeen of the hostages. Some sources claim it was even more than that. Seven hundred survived. The interesting thing is that fentanyl is spread in aerosol form, as vapour.’

‘Which fits with the details of this case, from the position of the man on that big desk …’

He glanced at her.

‘How do you know it was big?’

She was staring straight ahead again.

‘Another interesting detail from the Moscow siege is that the special forces soldiers didn’t need gas masks,’ Linde went on. ‘Each of them was injected with the antidote, a derivative of naloxone, before entering the theatre. It blocks the effects of opiates for several hours.’

Annika looked at him quizzically.

‘It’s used to treat addicts,’ he said. ‘It makes it impossible for heroin users to get a kick out of their gear. Are you coming?’

She turned towards where the search party was disappearing beneath the concrete pillars of the toll motorway. She had three articles to write. First the description of inside the House of Death, the Söderström family home, illustrated with the poor-quality photographs from her phone. They were publishable only because they were exclusive. ‘You can’t sell them on,’ she had told Patrik. ‘They
mustn’t
reach the Spanish
papers. I pulled a lot of strings to get in and I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

‘They’re not that brilliant,’ the head of news had replied.

Then she had the main story of the day: where was Suzette?

Now that the girl had been reported missing, she was being encouraged to contact her family or the nearest police station but, according to her mother, she didn’t speak Spanish, could hardly speak English, and she never listened to the radio, read the papers or watched television. ‘The best way of reaching her whenever she takes off is usually through MySpace, MSN or Face-book,’ Lenita had said.

Suzette’s mother had booked a flight early next morning with the same cowboy outfit Annika had flown with, and they had arranged to meet up for an interview that afternoon.

‘Has Suzette taken off before?’ Annika had asked, but Lenita had pretended not to hear her.

She hadn’t even researched the third article. It was about fentanyl gas, what it was made of and its effects. Maybe she could put the facts about the gas with the pictures from inside the house and come up with something that way.

She nodded at Linde. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like to come along for a while.’

In a country far away, in a strange moonlit landscape, Annika was walking with Niklas Linde, looking up at the stars. The bushes around her were prickly and tall, but she wasn’t scared. They were looking for something, she just couldn’t remember what, and she turned to ask him if he liked horses …

She woke up to hear her mobile ringing. It sounded muffled and enclosed. She pulled herself up in the bed, got tangled in the sheets and tumbled out onto the floor, then grabbed for her bag and pulled her phone out just before voicemail took the call.

It was Carita Halling Gonzales. ‘I can work this morning,’ she said, ‘but after that we’re going to be celebrating Epiphany here at home. Did you want to go to the tennis club?’

Annika sat up on the floor and disentangled her feet from the sheets. The dark night was still lingering within her. Niklas Linde was still sitting beside her. ‘Mm,’ she said. ‘That would be great.’ It was already full daylight outside but she had no idea what time it was.

She took the phone from her ear to check the time – nine forty-seven – and missed Carita’s next sentence.

‘… in reception.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said. ‘When?’

‘Hello! In fifteen minutes! Were you asleep?’

‘No, no,’ Annika said. She clicked to end the call.

Carita certainly took her work seriously. She must really need the money.

She put her mobile back into her bag, and that was when she saw the painting. It had got a bit crumpled. She smoothed out the girl and the horse on the desk, the last thing eight-year-old My had painted before she died.

Then she hurried away to have a shower, to stop herself crying.

The tennis club was high above the sea, at the edge of a cliff and surrounded by a relatively low wall. An enormous gate of the usual over-elaborate sort blocked the entrance. It was closed and locked. Annika parked on the road, blocking the traffic in one direction, but she had come to realize that this was perfectly normal.

There was no bell on the gate, and no one answered when she and Carita shouted.

‘You’re sure this is the place?’ Annika said.

Carita tied her belt tightly around her waist and started to walk round the property. Annika followed, with her bag and camera. At a more or less secluded spot, they heaved themselves on to the wall and jumped down into the grounds. The club was fairly small. There was one grass court and four clay. In the middle stood the clubhouse, the customary palatial affair with pinnacles and turrets, bay windows and terraces. The doors facing the sea were open.

‘Hello?’ Annika called, sticking her head through one of the windows.

‘
Oh, God!
’ A man with a mane of black hair stuck his head up from behind a desk. ‘Where did you spring from?’

His English was good.

‘A Swedish newspaper,’ Annika said. ‘We spoke yesterday, I asked if you were going to be having any sort of ceremony here in light of what’s happened.’

‘Ah,’ the man said, getting up and brushing the dust from his knees. ‘I remember. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m writing about the Söderström family for my paper. I know that Sebastian put a lot of effort into his club. Can I come in?’

The man put down a sheet of paper that he must have found in one of the bottom drawers. He hesitated. ‘We’re closed today,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I’m going to open up again. I don’t know who to ask.’

‘Didn’t Sebastian have a solicitor?’ Annika asked.

The man looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘His wife.’

Annika nodded. Of course.

Then the man let out a deep sigh, walked round the desk and opened one of the terrace doors for her and Carita. ‘My name’s Francis,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

Annika and Carita stepped into the clubhouse and introduced themselves properly. He gestured to them to walk over to the desk. Large piles of documents were heaped on top of it.

‘Would you like something to drink?’

Carita asked for a beer. Francis went off to the bar and got one for Annika as well. She took a sip and it went straight to her head. She put the glass on the counter.

The whole large building was one single room, open to the eaves. On the left-hand side there was a long bar with stools and little round tables in front of it. The reception desk dominated the middle of the room, and to the right a shop sold tennis clothes and racquets.

‘Do you know if Sebastian had any sort of legal representation in Sweden?’

Annika and Carita shook their heads.

‘I’ve been looking everywhere,’ Francis said, gesturing towards the papers on the reception desk. ‘I can’t find any deeds to the property, nothing about any debts, no indication of what he wanted to do with the club … He must have kept all his legal stuff somewhere else, maybe at the villa …’

The man’s hands were trembling on the counter as he picked up a beer-mat, then dropped it again. Annika realized he was still in shock. ‘What’s your role here?’ she asked. ‘Are you the manager?’

‘I’m a tennis coach,’ Francis said. ‘Sometimes I book people onto the courts as well if I’m not doing anything else. Sebastian’s the manager.’

‘How many people normally work here?’

‘There are ten of us. I’ve told them all to come in on Monday. Do you know if they’ve found a will? I suppose Suzette owns the club now.’

His eyes darted round the room. ‘The gym’s downstairs,’ he said, pointing towards the shop.

‘Do you know Suzette?’ Annika asked.

Francis looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘I’m her coach.’

‘Coach?’

‘She doesn’t want to put in the work to get really good. I’ve tried to increase her motivation, but she’s not focused enough.’

Annika blinked. ‘Are we talking tennis here? Suzette plays tennis?’

Francis leaned across the bar and said, in a low, confidential voice: ‘Suzette’s world is governed by her emotional life, which is why it’s so hard to book coaching sessions. If she can’t be bothered to train, she can’t be bothered, but she only knows that just ahead of each session.’

‘Is she good?’

‘I recognize myself in her. She could have made it as far as I did at the very least.’

Annika felt stupid. ‘And how far was that?’

‘I was ranked thirty-eighth in the world when I was nineteen.’

Annika looked more closely at him. Why hadn’t she heard of him? Mind you, she probably hadn’t heard of anyone ranked thirty-eighth in any sport. ‘And now you work here,’ she said.

Francis gave a sad little smile. ‘I got fed up,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter how good a player you are if you’re not happy with your life. I was sent to boarding school in the USA when I was eleven. Of course it was a huge opportunity for me, but it meant I had to be away from my family. It wasn’t worth that. I gave it all up when I was twenty.’

‘And Suzette could be that good? Among the best in the world?’

‘She’s a lot like her dad, very athletic. Sebastian’s a very talented tennis player as well.’

Annika didn’t bother to correct his use of the present tense.

‘But it’s too late now,’ Francis said. ‘She should have focused more on her training when she was younger.’

‘Have you heard that she’s missing?’

Francis nodded.

‘Do you know where she is?’

He shook his head.

‘When did you last see her?’

He thought for a moment. ‘It must have been last Thursday. She turned up and cancelled her session, said she was going to a New Year party at a friend’s, that she’d be spending the night there.’

‘Did she say which friend?’

The tennis coach gazed out at the courts.

‘Amira? Was that her name? Or Samira? It’s hard to keep track of those girls. It might have been Akira …’

‘Do you know where this friend lives?’

He walked round the bar to Reception and sat down behind the desk. Annika followed him. ‘Do you think she’s likely to contact you? She must have had a mobile.’

Francis picked up a few sheets of paper and put them into a file. ‘She tried to make a call on it while she was here, but she said it wasn’t working. It made her very angry.’

‘Do you think she could have been play-acting?’ Annika asked.

Francis put the file down without closing the chrome clasp in the middle. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Could she have made up that business with the phone so that you wouldn’t wonder why she wasn’t answering it?’

‘No,’ he said, clicking the file shut. ‘Suzette was never calculating in that way. She was far too impulsive. She’d never be able to keep up the pretence.’

‘Do you have any idea where she could be hiding?’

Francis let his hands fall onto the piles of paper. ‘Have you tried the stables? She used to spend hours there. If there was anything she obviously cared about, it was the horses.’

They drove back towards the Hotel Pyr in silence.

‘So she’s with Akira/Amira/Samira?’ Carita eventually said.

‘I doubt it,’ Annika said. ‘If she was planning to run away, she wouldn’t have told her dad’s coach where she was going to stay.’