The Long Shadow (4 page)

He must have moved from the motorway because now there was silence in the background.

‘I see,’ Annika said, losing hope of finding a lunch coupon, then discovered a crumpled one in the side-pocket.

‘Did you know it was Sebastian Söderström’s family?’

She was about to say, ‘Who?’ but gasped instead. ‘The ice-hockey player?’ She let the coupon fall to the desk.

‘Well, it must be ten years since he last played in the NHL. He’s been living down here for a while, runs a tennis club. As far as I’ve been able to find out, his whole family was wiped out, including his mother-in-law.’

‘Sebastian Söderström is dead?’ Annika said, waving at Berit to stop her heading off to the canteen.

‘He had a wife and two fairly young kids.’

‘What did you say about Sebastian Söderström?’ Patrik asked, suddenly materializing beside her.

Annika turned her back on him and stuck a finger in her free ear. ‘How reliable is this information?’ she asked.

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘Who can confirm it?’

‘No idea, darling. But now you know.’ He hung up without waiting for a reply.

‘What was all that about?’ Patrik asked.

Berit came back to the desk and put her bag down again.

‘Check out Sebastian Söderström on paginasblancas. es,’ Annika said, and Berit logged back in, typed in the details and read: ‘Las Estrellas de Marbella, Nueva Andalucía.’ The number had nine digits, and began with 952.

‘What’s going on?’ Patrik asked.

‘Just need to check something,’ Annika said, dialling the number of the villa in Las Estrellas de Marbella. After five rings an electronic female voice said ‘
Ha llamado a nuevo cinco dos
…’ She hung up and dialled the press office at the Foreign Ministry.

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Berit said, who could see what number she was dialling. ‘They’re usually the last to know anything.’

After the Asian tsunami the Foreign Ministry had got its act together and had been almost helpful for a while, but now they were back to normal.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon and I’m calling from the
Evening Post
,’ she said, when the call was finally answered. ‘I’d like confirmation that the family gassed to death in a break-in at Las Estrellas de Marbella in the south of Spain last night were Swedish citizens.’

‘We haven’t received any information to that effect,’ the woman at the Foreign Ministry said abruptly.

‘Perhaps you’d like to check,’ Annika said, and hung up.

‘My Spanish isn’t good enough for the Spanish police,’ Berit said.

‘Neither’s mine,’ Annika said.

‘Interpol,’ Berit said.

‘Europol,’ Annika said. ‘They’re more active.’

‘WHAT?’ Patrik shouted.

Annika jumped. ‘I have a source who says that the family gassed on the Costa del Sol was Sebastian Söderström’s. He was with his wife, children and mother-in-law.’

Patrik turned on his heel and yelled, ‘
Sport!
’

Annika took three long strides and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Calm down,’ she said, as he spun round to her. ‘I need to get confirmation. You can’t get Sport to start writing his obituary until we know it’s true.’

‘They need to start making calls,’ Patrik said.

‘And say what? That we
think
he’s dead? And even if it’s true, we don’t know that his family has been informed.’

‘You said they all died.’

Annika groaned. ‘Maybe he’s got parents, brothers and sisters.’ She took another step forward, stopping right in front of him. ‘A bit of advice, Head of News. Try to curb your enthusiasm. You’ll end up in the ditch if you carry on like this.’

Patrik paled. ‘Just because you didn’t get promoted,’ he said, and stalked off towards the sports desk.

‘We’ll have to try to get confirmation,’ Berit said, picking up the phone.

After several phone calls the Spanish police had confirmed that five people had been killed the previous night just outside Marbella in what looked like a gas attack in connection with a burglary. There would be no comment on the identity and nationality of the victims until tomorrow lunchtime at the earliest.

They took a break and hurried down to the canteen.

‘Sport isn’t exactly my strong subject,’ Berit said, once they were sitting at a window table with plates of beef stew in front of them.

Annika broke off a piece of crispbread and looked out at the greyness beyond the window. ‘He played professionally in the NHL for several seasons,’ she said, ‘first with the Anaheim Ducks, then Colorado Avalanche. He was in defence. In the early nineties he was selected to play for the Three Crowns national team several years running. I think he was in the team that won gold in the World Championships in Finland in ’ninety-one, and Czechoslovakia in ’ninety-two …’

Berit put down her fork.

‘How do you know all this?’

Annika took a sip of mineral water. ‘He was my ex-boyfriend’s idol,’ she said, and Berit let the matter drop.

‘There’s something about fading sports stars,’ she said. ‘They seem to attract misery.’

Large raindrops were striking the window.

‘Imagine hitting the top when you’re twenty-four,’ Annika said. ‘You’d spend the rest of your life as a has-been.’

They skipped coffee and went back up to the newsroom.

Patrik was practically jumping up and down beside Annika’s chair. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘As of this afternoon Kicki Pop is going to be presenting the radio programme that goes out before P1’s in-depth news programme. I want you to call Erik Ponti at Radio News and find out what he thinks about that.’

Annika stared at the … head of news, and waited for the laugh that would tell her it was a joke. It didn’t come. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘I’m busy with the murders in Marbella. That’s a huge story. There are loads of Swedes down there who—’

‘Berit can deal with that. I want you to do this now.’

She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘You’re telling me to call Erik Ponti and try to get him to bad-mouth a female
colleague? One who just happens to be young and blonde?’

‘He’s famous for saying that bimbos are the lowest of the low.’

Annika sat down, her back ramrod straight. ‘Ponti may be pompous and self-important,’ she said, ‘but he’s not stupid. He criticized a blonde female colleague once when he had every reason to do so. But considering the amount of shit he caught, do you really think he’d do it again?’

Patrik leaned over her. ‘Make the call,’ he said.

Annika picked up the phone and dialled Radio News.

Erik Ponti didn’t feel like making any unpleasant comments, not about Kicki Pop personally and not about her programme.

‘What a surprise,’ Annika said, pulling her jacket on and heading towards the caretaker’s desk.

‘Where are you going?’ Patrik called after her.

‘I’ve got a meeting at two o’clock,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘Who with?’

She turned round and looked him in the eye. ‘There’s such a thing as confidentiality of sources,’ she said. ‘Ever heard of it?’

‘Not where your superiors are concerned,’ he said, and his ear-lobes were dark red.

‘Not where the legally responsible publisher is concerned,’ she corrected.

Then she went to the caretaker’s desk and booked out a car from Tore.

The rain was heavy now, so she had to keep the windscreen wipers on. It was only half past one but darkness was edging in, creeping up on frozen pedestrians, filthy streetlamps and lorries with flickering headlights.

She was heading west, towards Enköping, past Rissne, Rinkeby and Tensta. She passed blocks of flats, terraced houses, empty schools and an abandoned football pitch. The traffic on the motorway ground to a complete halt outside the railway station in Barkarby and Annika peered through the windscreen of the car in front to see if there had been an accident she could phone in to the paper. It didn’t look like it. Maybe a pedestrian had been knocked down. Or someone had jumped in front of a train. That was fairly common.

Soon the traffic was moving again, if slowly. The residential buildings thinned out, pine forest and industrial units taking over. The road surface was terrible, with brownish-grey sludge thrown up at the windscreen. She switched the radio on, but it was in the middle of a segment of adverts so she turned it off again.

The scenery outside became increasingly monotonous. The industrial units vanished, leaving just the pines. Their branches reached out towards the car, the
same dirty Volvo she had driven out to Garphyttan on the December day when she had found Alexander.

At Brunna she turned right, towards Roligheten. All of a sudden the rain stopped. Annika had a terrible sense of direction and compensated for it by scrutinizing maps and writing detailed directions for herself. Left at Lerberga, then left again after 800 metres, past Fornsta. Through an army training area, then right.

She was heading for Lejongården, a rehabilitation home for families, situated by the water of Lejondals-sjön, where Julia Lindholm had been staying with her son since he had been found.

Annika had promised to visit them, but had kept putting it off. She didn’t know what to expect. She and Julia had met only twice before, both times under difficult circumstances. The first time, they had stumbled upon the gruesome murder scene on Sankt Paulsgatan on Södermalm. Annika had been shadowing Julia and her colleague Nina Hoffman on their shift in patrol car 1617 that evening. The call hadn’t sounded terribly serious, a domestic dispute, so Annika had been allowed to go with them as long as she agreed to stay in the background. Nina had ushered her away as soon as they had found the bodies.

The second time they had met, Julia had been under arrest on suspicion of murdering her husband, police officer David Lindholm, and her son Alexander. She had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the City Court. No one seemed to care that she had always maintained her innocence, and claimed that another woman she had never seen before had shot her husband and abducted her son.

Annika had only met Alexander once, on the night she had rescued him from Yvonne Nordin’s cottage outside Garphyttan. He had been missing for seven months.

The headlights lit up a rough-hewn red wooden façade, the sort of red that reflected, which meant that it wasn’t proper old-fashioned paint but a modern oil-based version. This was the place she was looking for. She pulled up in front of the house, engaged the handbrake, switched off the headlights, but remained seated in the darkness with the engine idling.

Lejongården was a dark, squat, single-storey building located on the shore of Lejondalssjön. It looked like a day-centre, or perhaps an old people’s home. A little playground was visible in the light from the porch. The water lay still and grey in the background.

‘I really do want to thank you,’ Julia had said on the phone.

She adjusted her hair, switched off the engine and stepped out onto the gravel drive. At the porch she stopped to look out across the lake. A few naked birches shivered hesitantly along the shore, their branches as grey as the water. There was a wooded island a hundred metres or so out in the lake. In the distance she could just make out the faint rumble of the motorway.

The door opened and a woman in a Norwegian-patterned cardigan and sheepskin slippers leaned out into the porch. ‘Annika Bengtzon? Hello, I’m Henrietta.’

They shook hands. Henrietta? Should she know the woman?

‘Julia and Alexander are expecting you.’

She stepped inside. There was a vague smell of damp. Pale linoleum floors, pink fibre-glass wallpaper, plastic skirting-boards. Straight ahead, behind a half-closed door, there was what looked like a meeting room. She could make out some brown plastic chairs around a veneered table, and heard someone laughing.

‘I’d like you to behave perfectly normally,’ Henrietta said, and Annika instantly felt herself tense. ‘This way.’
Henrietta led her down a narrow corridor with a row of doors to the right and windows facing the car park on the left.

‘This reminds me of the only time I ever went Inter-Railing,’ Annika said, hoping she sounded normal.

Henrietta pretended not to hear her. She stopped at a door halfway along and knocked.

There were no locks or room numbers, Annika noted. She had read on the home’s website that they tried to maintain ‘a cosy atmosphere to make people feel cared for and safe’.

The door opened. A triangle of yellow light stretched out across the floor of the corridor. Henrietta took a step back. ‘Alexander’s baked a cake,’ she said, ushering Annika in. ‘Just let me know if you’d like me to take him out to play for a bit.’ She addressed this last remark inside the room.

Annika paused in the doorway. The room was much bigger than she had expected, rectangular, with a large picture window at the far end, and a door leading out to a terrace. A double-bed and a small child’s bed stood next to each other just inside the door, and further in there was a sofa, a television and a table with four chairs.

Julia Lindholm was sitting at the table, in a sweater whose sleeves were too long, her hair in a ponytail. Her son had his back to the door, and his arms were moving as though he was drawing frantically.

Julia got up, ran over and hugged her hard. ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said, still holding Annika tightly.

Annika, who had been holding out her hand, hugged her back awkwardly. The door closed behind her. ‘I wanted to see you.’

‘Not many people have been allowed to visit yet,’ Julia said, finally letting go and walking over to the sofa. ‘My
parents were here for Christmas, and Nina’s visited us a few times, but I’ve said no to David’s silly mother. I don’t want her here. Have you ever met her?’

‘No.’ Annika let her bag and padded coat fall to the floor beside the sofa. She looked at the boy, could see his fragile profile behind his hair. He was drawing with thick crayons, firmly and intently. She moved closer, sank down beside him and tried to catch his gaze.

‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said. ‘My name’s Annika. What are you drawing?’

The boy clenched his jaw and went on drawing with even greater concentration. The lines were thick and black.