The Long Shadow (18 page)

Then he put her down. ‘Quite some place to die,’ he said, still holding her.

She stood still, breathing into his shirt. He smelt of soap and grass.

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ he asked.

At that moment her mobile rang in her bag by her feet. She pulled free, her cheeks glowing, bent down and grabbed the phone. It was the presenter of the radio programme
Studio Six
. ‘I’d like to have you on for a debate on Monday afternoon,’ the man said.

She glanced up at Linde. The way he was looking at her was more than she could handle. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Who with, and what about?’

‘With Arne Påhlson, among others, about journalists’ credibility, about how easy it is to hold those in power to account when you’re sitting in their lap, about …’

She screwed her eyes shut. Don’t get angry, don’t feel insulted, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t give them the chance to play an outraged response on the radio.

‘I’m in Spain on a job,’ she said. ‘I can hardly hear you. What did you say?’

‘Er, about journalists’ credibility, about how easy it is to—’

‘Hello?’ Annika said. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello?’ the man from
Studio Six
said.

‘Oh,’ Annika said, holding the phone some distance away. ‘He disappeared.’ She ended the call and switched off her mobile. ‘I’ve got a date,’ she said, looking up at Linde again. ‘With Lenita Söderström, Suzette’s mother.’

‘You didn’t want to talk to the caller?’ he asked.

‘Can you drop me back at the hotel?’

They climbed back through the cordon, and Annika took a few pictures with the police car and the cordon in the foreground. She could already see the headline in tomorrow’s paper: ‘Sebastian’s killers died here.’ Then the story would be on its way off the front page.

Lenita Söderström checked into the hotel without Annika realizing who she was. The small woman stepped into the lobby with a brown suitcase on wheels, a coat over her arm and a slight limp, as if her shoes were chafing. She walked up to Reception and said something in laboured English, and Annika went back to the English-language edition of the local paper,
Sur
. They, too, had reprinted her pictures from inside the house. Photos:
Evening Post
.

‘Annika Bengtzon?’

She’d been expecting a blonde who’d gone to seed, with tortured hair and low-slung jeans. The little woman in front of her had reading-glasses on a cord round her neck and a slightly pilled jumper. She was fifteen years older than her picture on Facebook, and introduced herself as Lenita Söderström with a sturdy handshake. ‘Can we go and get some lunch?’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

Annika folded the paper and left the interior shots of the Söderströms’ villa on the table beside her. ‘I don’t know anywhere to eat round here. We can ask at the desk.’

‘No need,’ Lenita Söderström said. ‘I’ve been here before.’ She led the way through the doors, turned left
on the street outside, past the entrance to the El Corte Inglés department store, then went down the steps into the Marina Banús shopping centre. There she stopped. Little fashion boutiques and two trendy cafés filled the ground floor. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know it was here somewhere …’

‘This will do fine,’ Annika said, making for one of the cafés.

Lenita Söderström followed her hesitantly. ‘Isn’t it funny how the small, reasonably priced places never last?’ she said. ‘They always lose out to the big chains.’ She sat down opposite Annika at a small, round table. Annika glanced at her as she skimmed the menu. The café specialized in organic smoothies, freshly roasted coffee and salads ‘made with love’. She knew Lenita Söderström was forty-two, born the same year as Sebastian, but she seemed older. Her hair was ash-blonde, she had the beginnings of a double chin and a boyish figure.

‘These new places always seem to over-complicate things,’ Lenita Söderström said, putting the menu down. ‘I’ll have lasagne if they’ve got it, otherwise just a muffin. And a glass of red.’

Annika ordered two chicken stir-fries in her hesitant Spanish, plus two
agua con gas
and
una copa de vino tinto
.

Lenita Söderström sighed. ‘It’s so terrible not knowing where she is. It makes me so angry, so upset. The least she could do is call!’

Annika took her pen and notepad out of her bag. ‘Is this the first time Suzette has disappeared? Or has she left home without saying where she was going before?’

Lenita Söderström squirmed on her chair. ‘Don’t all teenagers do that? And she only does it because she knows how worried I get. I can’t eat, can’t sleep …’

Their food arrived and Lenita Söderström tucked into the stir-fry without asking where her lasagne was. ‘Suzette doesn’t think of anyone but herself,’ she said, between mouthfuls. ‘Since she was four years old, it’s been nothing but “me, me, me” with her.’

She drained her glass of wine and gestured for another.

Annika couldn’t think of anything to say. The woman was stressed and wound up. This would take time.

‘And Sebastian was off playing ice-hockey the whole time. We were stuck in America, unable to understand what anyone was saying. How much fun do you think that was? And with a kid who did nothing but cry.’ The wine had arrived and she took a gulp.

‘Where do you think Suzette might be?’ Annika asked.

Lenita Söderström leaned over the table. ‘All these years I’ve had to look after her on my own,’ she said emphatically. ‘Now Sebastian finally agrees to take a bit of responsibility, and what happens? She disappears after just two weeks. It’s incredibly irresponsible!’ She groaned and sank back in the rather too fashionable chair.

‘When did you last hear from Suzette?’

‘She called and said she was going to be moving in with that woman who has the stables up in the mountains.’

‘And that was last Thursday?’

‘After we spoke yesterday I had a look at her Face-book page. She hasn’t added anything since then.’

‘Do you think something might have happened to her?’ Annika asked gently.

The woman’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I found out about Sebastian in the paper,’ she said. ‘Imagine finding out your ex-husband is dead from the gutter press. Do you have any idea how awful that was?’

Annika wondered if the gutter press in question was her own paper.

‘I tried calling Suzette’s mobile straight away, but it wasn’t switched on. I left a message, but she hasn’t called back. I don’t understand why she’s treating me like this.’

‘You didn’t talk to her on New Year’s Eve?’ Annika said. ‘No text message at midnight, nothing like that?’

‘I was on a mini-cruise with my work colleagues, so I didn’t have a very good signal,’ Lenita said.

‘What do you do?’ Annika asked.

‘I’m in the hotel industry.’ Lenita ordered a third glass of wine. ‘I deal with the accounts, budgets, payroll. It’s very demanding.’ She mentioned a hotel that Annika had never heard of.

‘When Suzette has gone missing before, how long is it usually before she gets in touch?’

Lenita closed her eyes, her shoulders slumped; the wine was calming her. ‘A day,’ she said. ‘Once she was gone overnight. She slept at a friend’s without telling me. After that we talked about this. About how worried I get.’

Annika had been hoping for a different answer. She’d been hoping that Suzette had got into the habit of going missing for several days without being in touch, that she was experienced and competent when it came to running away, able to cope in all weathers. That evidently wasn’t so, and it was now a week since she had disappeared.

‘Has Suzette ever mentioned a friend called Amira, or Samira?’ she asked.

‘She never tells me anything.’

‘When did you realize she was missing?’

‘When I spoke to the Danish woman who owns the stables,’ Lenita said.

In other words, when Annika had handed her mobile to Vibeke Jensen.

‘And you booked a flight down here at once?’

‘It’s expensive, flying abroad, but what else can you do when something like this happens?’

‘What are you planning to do down here?’

‘Look for my daughter,’ Lenita said, and the tears overflowed.

Annika let her cry for a few minutes. Then she put her hand on the woman’s arm. ‘This is what we’ll do,’ she said. ‘I’ll write an article for the paper in which you’ll say you’re here to look for Suzette. We’ll encourage her and anyone who might have had any contact with her to get in touch with the police and tell them whatever they know. I’ll say that she’s never gone missing like this before – that’s right, isn’t it?’

Lenita blew her nose on a napkin and nodded.

‘I understand that Suzette’s sporty,’ Annika said. ‘She’s good at horse-riding and a promising tennis-player?’

Lenita snorted. ‘Do you know what it costs for a kid to go horse-riding regularly? When I said I couldn’t afford it, that Astrid showed up waving her purse. But what about getting there and back? To start with I had to go with her. It took more than an hour each way, then, when she started to go on her own, I had to keep forking out for Underground tickets and bus tickets and—’

‘You said she slept at a friend’s the night she didn’t come home. Who are her best friends?’

Lenita gave Annika the names of four girls who were all in the same class as Suzette at school in Blackeberg.

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘Suzette was wary of boys,’ Lenita said, gesturing to the waiter. ‘She could see what had happened to me.’

‘Is she happy with her friends? Is she happy in Bromma?’

‘Bromma’s a nice suburb,’ Lenita said. ‘I know it isn’t Marbella, but I work hard to keep things together so we can stay in Långskeppsgatan.’

‘Why would she want to move to Marbella and live with her dad?’

‘She was fed up of school, but I told her that if you want to make anything of your life you need an education. I can’t support her for the rest of her life. And her dad won’t either, even if he’s rolling in money.’

‘But she kept going to school?’

‘Yes – it specialized in sport.’ Lenita Söderström scoffed. ‘What sort of an education’s that, I asked her, playing tennis all day long? I thought she should have studied economics. Then she could have got a good job. She might have found something at my hotel, maybe as a temp to start with – we always need extra people over the summer, at Christmas and New Year.’

‘But she moved down here to her dad so she could … what? Play tennis? Work?’

Lenita leaned towards Annika as a fourth glass of wine appeared. ‘If you knew what he’s done to me. The way he’s treated me!’

Annika put her pen on her pad. ‘Lenita,’ she said quietly. ‘Can we stop talking about you, and concentrate on Suzette instead?’

It wasn’t much of an article. Fortunately she had Francis’s description of Suzette to bulk out the text, because Lenita’s quotes were next to useless. The picture was even worse. Lenita was standing outside El Corte Inglés. With a good deal of wishful thinking you could just about interpret her expression as upset and desperate rather than affronted and half-cut.

After Annika’s pertinent but clumsy remark that she would rather talk about Suzette, Lenita had clammed up. She didn’t want to have her picture taken, and it was only when Annika threatened to tear up the paper’s agreement to pay the hotel bill that she relented.

She decided to wait before sending the text to Stockholm and concentrated on writing the article about the dead burglars. When she emailed it to the newsroom with the pictures, she pointed out that her photos from inside the Söderström house were in all the Spanish papers even though Patrik had promised they wouldn’t be. Then she looked at the time.

Only half past six.

Maybe she should try to get hold of Suzette’s school friends. None of them had their own flat or a listed phone number, but if she kept trying with various combinations of surname and postcode, she should be able to dig out their parents and their home phone numbers.

She tried the first girl, Polly Sandman.

No results.

Maybe her real name was something completely different, not Polly at all.

The second, Amanda Andersson, produced 618 results in Stockholm alone. Too many to choose from. Annika couldn’t assume the girl lived in Bromma and had been born in the same year as Suzette.

The third, Sandra Holgersson, lived on Aladdinsvägen, had the same surname as her parents, and they were all registered at the same address. A phone number was listed, but no one answered. However, it
was
Twelfth Night.

The fourth girl was called Klara, but Lenita hadn’t been sure of her surname. Something double-barrelled, she thought, Hermansson-Eklund or something like that. That particular combination drew a blank.

Annika got up from the computer and walked round the hotel room. Dusk was falling. The big mountain on the other side of the motorway was turning dark red in the dying rays of the sun, and the streetlamps had come on. The cars snaked slowly but relentlessly in both directions.

Maybe she should go round to see Carita and her family, after all. She had no great desire to spend another evening sitting here. She looked at the time again. An hour before she was due there. Should she have a shower? Go for a walk? Call the children?

She picked up her mobile and called Thomas, unable to bring herself to ring Sophia Fucking Bitch Grenborg’s home number.

The call bounced around the satellites, one ring, two, five, six, and with each one the loneliness in the room echoed a bit louder. Finally the call went to voicemail. She clicked to cut it off without leaving a message. She went back to her laptop and stared at the screen.

Suzette hadn’t been active on Facebook since last Thursday. Annika remembered the computer on the desk of the teenage bedroom next to the kitchen of the villa at Las Estrellas de Marbella. It must have been Suzette’s. But she could get into her account from any computer. Annika opened her own Facebook profile.

0 Friends.

She moved to
Search
and typed in suzette söderström.

There, a direct hit.

Name: Suzette Söderström

Network: Sweden