The Long Shadow (48 page)

‘People who are used to daylight usually pop up sooner or later. Terrorists and freedom fighters are different. They can spend for ever hiding away in caves.
But Carita Halling Gonzales wants to go out for meals in restaurants, send her children to good schools.’

‘Did she carry out the murders of her own volition? Or was she contracted, or forced, to do it?’

‘The murders link Zarco Martinez, the Apits organization and the Söderström family,’ Garen said. ‘But we don’t know what Carita Halling Gonzales’s motive was. We’re hoping to find out when we catch her.’

Annika thanked him for his help and ended the call. She had forgotten to ask about Niklas Linde.

There was a traffic-jam through San Pedro de Alcántara, but after that the traffic flowed fairly freely. She passed through the unjustly maligned town of Estepona with no problem. As she reached the top of the hill by the junction for Torreguadiaro, the Rock of Gibraltar rose from the sea in front of her, like a huge iceberg. Immediately behind it she could make out the Rif mountains of Africa through the mist.

Then all the road signs began to appear in two languages, Spanish and Arabic.

Algeciras was a messy city, quite different from the neat, picturesque places she had visited so far in Andalucía. The ornate Arabic script rushing past her only heightened her sense of unfamiliarity. She wondered how she was going to find the harbour, then saw that the word ‘PUERTO’, harbour, was painted on the tarmac of the motorway.

Low palm trees lined the six-lane
autostrada
. She followed the arrows, which led her onto an island with a forest of huge cranes. Cargo ships crowded the quays as far as she could see. Thousands of containers were stacked up, being loaded or unloaded in a sort of chaos that reminded her of an anthill. On Wikipedia she had read that Algeciras was the sixteenth busiest port in
the world. She wondered what the fifteen busier ones looked like.

She parked the car by the Estación Marítia and headed towards the Terminal de Pasajeros. It reminded her of the Silja Line Terminal in Stockholm’s Freeport, if a bit less organized. There seemed to be a number of different companies that sailed to Tangier. Large boards announced departures and arrivals, just like in an airport. She saw that she had missed one boat to Tangier by a couple of minutes. The next wasn’t for nearly an hour. She bit her lip. It was already after two o’clock. The crossing to Morocco would take a couple of hours, then she had to get through Customs and find a way to get further south. She had read online that there were trains and bus-taxis,
grand taxis
, between the cities.

She bought a ticket and took the escalator up to the departure hall. The Sala de Embarque was built entirely of speckled grey granite, and was the size of a football pitch. She checked in, no, she didn’t have any luggage, and was told that Passport Control would be open in a quarter of an hour and that she could go aboard then. The cafeteria was available in the meantime, the man said, pointing to a door on the far side of the football pitch.

It was almost as big, and just as deserted. She ordered a
café cortado
and a
bocadillo con jamón serrano y manchego
from a waitress with a gold stud in her nose; she was wearing pink underwear. She couldn’t help noticing this because the girl’s jeans were slung so low that her belt was at the same level as her backside.

She was seriously hungry. As she had been asleep on the plane she had missed the chance to buy one of the airline’s gluey sandwiches. She devoured the large baguette in three minutes flat. Then she tried calling the
embassy in Rabat again. This time the French voice told her that telephone hours were over for today.

Instead she rang Rickard Marmén.

He picked up at once. ‘Annika!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Have you managed to find a new life that suits you?’

‘I decided to keep the old one,’ she said. ‘I’m in the middle of doing it up, actually. Listen, have you ever done any property deals in Morocco?’

‘Can you hold on a moment?’ He said something in Spanish to someone next to him.

‘Morocco?’ he said, when he came back. ‘Sure. Morocco’s an up-and-coming country. What did you have in mind? I’ve got two villas overlooking the sea outside Tangier, and several nice projects off plan.’

She clenched her left fist in triumph. ‘Are there any property registers in Morocco? Public ones?’

If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t show it. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are, but only in printed form. You can look at them all you like, but you have to do it in person. They haven’t been computerized. And they’re in French, Spanish and Arabic.’

She bit her lip. ‘If I have a name and a city, is there any way of finding out where that person lives?’

‘Hmm,’ Marmén said. ‘You want to find an address in Morocco?’

‘If possible.’

‘And you’ve got the name of the person, and you know which city they live in?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, you could try going through a
muqaddam
.’

‘A what?’

‘The local civil servant. There’s one in charge of each district. They distribute voting cards, keep a record of who lives where, sign applications for ID cards and so on.’

She closed her eyes and breathed out. She would have bought a house off Rickard Marmén just to make him happy. ‘On a completely different subject,’ she said, ‘what do you know about Asilah in Morocco?’

‘A sleepy little dump, although they restored the medina fairly recently. It’s supposed to be quite smart.’

‘Would there be a
muqaddam
there?’

‘In Asilah? Bound to be.’

‘And how do I find him?’

‘It’s probably no harder than finding the police station. Just ask someone. And if you go to Asilah, be sure to try the food at Casa García. You do like Spanish food, don’t you? It’s on the main road into the city, looking out over the harbour. Well, I need to get going, love. Was there anything else?’

‘I’ll be in touch if I make a mess of the renovations.’

‘You’ll be more than welcome.’

When Passport Control opened she was at the front of the non-existent queue. She got a stamp and was ushered into a glass corridor that hung high above the harbour. Beneath her, dozens of lorries were heading onto or off one of the ferries.

She had to show her passport once more before she was allowed to board the ship, when she was assailed by déjà vu: a school trip to Finland in the mid-1980s. She seemed to recognize everything, from the tired blue carpet to the duty-free shop and the bar with its maritime theme.

She walked about the various decks, and concluded that she and the lorry drivers, who all seemed to know each other, were the only passengers.

Outside the women’s lavatory on deck six she discovered why her surroundings seemed so familiar: the fire-drill instructions were in Finnish. The ship had
previously worked the Stockholm–Helsinki route.

With a dull clanking the ferry pulled out and began to head towards Africa with long, lurching rolls. Annika settled down in the bar.

They passed several ships in the seaway as they followed the Spanish coastline westwards. She saw towns and villages, sandy beaches, olive plantations and wind turbines. It had just occurred to her that she was travelling along the new Iron Curtain, between the first world and the third, when suddenly she felt ill. She had forgotten that she was always seasick, no matter how insignificant the swell.

Quickly she took out her laptop, to have something else to think about. She moved to a table with a plug-socket in the wall alongside it, then opened a new document and wrote a news article about the gassings in Nueva Andalucía, which were on their way to being cleared up. Interpol had issued a warrant for the arrest of a Swedish woman living on the Costa del Sol in Spain on suspicion of eight counts of murder. Sebastian Söderström and his family had been among the victims.

She referred to Knut Garen as her source, in his capacity as Nordic police representative on the Costa del Sol. She wrote that the suspect and her family had disappeared from their home without trace, and that the police believed they had fled the country. She mentioned that the car had been found at Málaga Airport, with DNA evidence, the expanded arrest warrant and Interpol. She also mentioned the link to Johan Zarco Martinez’s death, that the suspect had been the last person to visit him in prison before he died. The article was short and concise. She saved it, then looked at the time.

Ninety minutes until they docked.

She opened another new document and wrote an
article about Carita Halling Gonzales. Any decision to publish the name and picture of a suspected criminal wasn’t hers to make: it was down to the person legally accountable for the paper’s publication. She thought for a moment, then decided to call Carita ‘the Swedish jetsetter’. She wrote that ‘the Swedish jet-setter’ had lived in the well-to-do district of Nueva Andalucía (anywhere that wasn’t a suburb full of concrete high-rises was a ‘well-to-do district’ in evening-tabloid jargon), and that she had worked as a translator and interpreter, occasionally for the media and the Spanish police. She described the woman’s social life with her friends, how she had been active in the local residents’ association. She quoted Tuula, the Finnish neighbour, anonymously. Then she saved the file to the hard-drive, clicked to close the document and looked out across the sea.

The strait was narrower. The mountains were so close to the ship that she felt she could touch both continents at the same time if she stretched out her arms. She was still feeling sick.

She opened the article she had already started about how Carita Halling Gonzales had set about carrying out the mass murder in Nueva Andalucía, a long, detailed description of what had happened that night in early January.

She described how the woman had planned the murders of the Söderström family and the two Romanian crooks. How she had got hold of gas, beer and morphine, how she had stolen or bought the codes for the alarm, and recruited the unfortunate criminals. How they had driven up to the villa along roads wet with rain, injected themselves with the naloxone derivative, then headed to the ventilation unit at the back of the house, with a gas canister, a lump-hammer and a crowbar …

She wrote of how the thieves had loosened a pipe from the fresh-air intake and attached it to the gas canister, then turned the valve and listened to the hiss as the gas poured into the house. Then they had waited. The gas alarm had gone off. Lights had come on in the bedrooms. Could the cries of the dying children be heard beside the ventilation unit at the back of the house?

She went back to her old articles and reread them.

One effect of fentanyl poisoning was lethargy. The mother and two children had been found lying on either side of a closed bedroom door, unable to cry out to each other or open it, yet still fully conscious. They had been dead within minutes.

No, there probably hadn’t been any cries.

Annika looked up at the horizon to try to suppress her nausea. The ferry had left the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic.

She got up and bought a bottle of mineral water, then carried on with her article.

They had broken in through the terrace door. The gas-alarm was shrieking but everything else was silent. Then they had switched off the alarm, the hardest part of the job over. Now they had plenty of time.

They began by stealing the safe, a time-consuming and noisy job, then carried it out to the woman’s car. She had driven off, with the safe in the boot, and probably the gas canister, which hadn’t been found.

The car, and the remains of the safe, were dumped in the airport car park.

The thieves had stripped the villa of art, rugs and jewellery. They hadn’t known they had just four hours to live.

Annika saved and then closed the document. The ferry was swinging south, leaving Spain and Europe behind,
and was rapidly approaching the Moroccan coast. The sun had passed behind some clouds and the sea was grey. Rain hung heavily above the Rif mountains. She could make out buildings along the shore, tall and white, as well as a number of cranes.

She closed her laptop. She received a message on her mobile from Meditel, a mobile operator, welcoming her to Morocco. She put everything away in her bag and went out on deck. The wind tugged at her hair. She felt better immediately.

The construction boom from the Costa del Sol seemed to have spread across the strait. She could see people on the beaches, cars on the roads, shops with big plate-glass windows. She had never been to Africa before, but this was nothing like she’d been expecting.

The ferry slowed, the deck and walls shaking as it approached the quayside. She looked at her watch: they’d been late leaving Algeciras and the crossing had taken almost half an hour longer than the promised two hours. It was now a quarter to five. She paced about restlessly, hoping that the
muqaddam
observed the Spanish custom and stayed open for part of the evening.

The lorry drivers and workmen gathered on deck five, chatting to each other in a mixture of French, Spanish and Arabic. None of them seemed to be in any great hurry. She positioned herself strategically beside the door through which she had entered the ship, hoping to get off quickly, but nothing happened. There was a lot of banging and crashing below her, and she presumed that gangways and ramps were being fixed in place.

Then the door opened – not the one she was standing next to, but the corresponding one on the other side. She ground her teeth in frustration but went meekly to the back of the queue.

It took ages.

First she had to fill in a form, listing all her personal details, her profession and her address in Morocco, the purpose of her visit and how long she was planning to stay. She knew better than to say she was a journalist, and put ‘writer’ as her profession. Two Customs officials and two border guards were checking all passports and travel documents with irritating thoroughness.

‘What do you write?’ one of the customs officials asked suspiciously in English, fingering the laptop in her bag.