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
Matches: Name
On the left-hand side was a picture of Suzette, presumably fairly recent and carefully selected. Her eyes were heavily made-up, her head was slightly tilted and her black hair was sticking out. The angles were slightly odd – it had probably been taken with a webcam.
On the right were four options: Send Message, Poke!, View Friends and Add to Friends.
She clicked on View Friends and let out a whistle.
Suzette had 201 friends. They filled five pages, with names and photographs in alphabetical order, then a short description of each. They were all young and from Sweden. On the first page Annika found Amanda Andersson. As she herself was now part of the Facebook community, all she had to do was click on the picture of the young Amanda Andersson and send her a message. Whoosh. Off it went into cyberspace. With a bit of luck it would result in a phone call or email.
She carried on through the list of friends, and found Klara, whose surname was Evertsson-Hedberg, and Sandra Holgersson, and sent them messages as well. On the next page she found Polly, actually Paulina Sandman, with identical jet-black hair, the same expression and tilted head as Suzette.
They’d taken the pictures at the same time, Annika thought, on the same webcam. Maybe they’d set up their accounts at the same time, too, and gathered friends together. This was Suzette’s best friend.
She wrote her a message as well, slightly longer and more explicit than the others. She explained who she was, that she was writing about Suzette for the paper, that she didn’t want to get anything wrong, and that it was important her friends were gi
ven the opportunity to voice their opinion.
Then she looked through the list of friends once more.
No Amira, Samira or Akira.
She tried calling Niklas Linde but got no answer, so rang Knut Garen instead.
The police didn’t have any leads on Suzette, the Norwegian explained. The physical search area had been expanded to cover a four-kilometre radius from the Söderström family home, which included parts of a rugged national park with deep ravines and steep waterfalls. They were also following up other lines of enquiry by going through her computer, speaking to her friends and neighbours, as well as to the staff at the bars of Nueva Andalucía.
She added a few lines to her article about the unsuccessful police search, explained that Suzette was a promising tennis player and that she trained regularly at her dad’s club, that her coach had once been ranked thirty-eighth in the world, and Suzette had been expected to have a career at least as successful as that.
She emailed her text and the terrible picture of Lenita to the Evening Post.
Then she opened the email from Carita with directions to her house. She hadn’t included any road names. ‘Turn left after Mercadona, drive past OpenCor and follow the road round to the left …’ On the way out to the car she stopped at Reception and asked for the number of Taxi Marbella. Just as back-up, in case she got lost.
The gate wasn’t quite as showy as the one to Las Estrellas de Marbella, but it wasn’t far off.
Carita Halling Gonzales’s estate lay high up a mountainside with a golf course immediately below. The streetlamps formed a river of light towards the sea, where Puerto Banús spread out like an intense thousand-watt bulb in the moonlight. She pressed the security phone for house number six and waited in the car as the gates slid open.
The buildings huddled together in groups of three or four. They were all different, pink or pale blue, ochre yellow or deep red, with balustrades, terraces and decking. A swimming-pool with two waterfalls and large stone terraces faced the valley. Ornate streetlamps, like old London gas-lamps, lit the roads.
‘Welcome,’ Carita said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘Come in, come in! There’s no need to take your shoes off – you’re in España now! Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone …’
Having ‘a few neighbours’ round turned out to involve practically everyone on the estate.
‘You see that couple over there?’ Carita said. ‘She’s a maths teacher at Marbella International College, and he captains one of the yachts in the harbour. They’ve got two children and live just a bit further up. Nice people, but they’re Brits. The people going up to them now are Swedes. Do you remember the adverts for Diesel clothing back in the ’nineties? He did them. His wife was an international model in those days. Now they live in a neighbouring development. They’ve got two children, a son who plays football and a daughter who’s a Spanish show-jumping champion.’
Annika looked at the beautiful woman with the long, glossy hair. She was laughing as she put her hand on her husband’s arm. And she had a horse.
Carita gestured towards the other end of the room. ‘That woman’s Swedish, a partner in a law firm in Frankfurt. He’s from New Zealand and also works with boats. The young man with the dog is an estate agent from Jamaica. The older man used to run a bank in Kenya, but now he plays golf full-time. The couple over there are from Värmland – they moved down here when they sold their tyre company. But, dear me, you haven’t got a drink yet.’
She bustled off and Annika was left standing beside a group of expensively dressed people holding glasses of wine. She tried talking Spanish for a short while, but after saying, ‘Soy sueco’, thereby introducing herself as a Swedish man, she stuck to English.
She went out onto the terrace and stood there gazing out across the harbour. The neon sign of El Corte Inglés was clearly visible.
‘Ah, so you found your way all right.’
Annika spun round when she heard the thick Gothenburg accent. She grinned as broadly as if she’d just met her oldest friend. ‘Rickard Marmén,’ she said. ‘I thought you lived in Marbella.’
‘I do, but my business partner has a house up here. What do you think? Do you feel like investing?’ He pointed at a sign on the next house, Se vende, for sale.
‘It’s all a bit too model village for my taste,’ she said.
He laughed heartily.
Annika nodded towards the for-sale sign. ‘How much is that going for?’
‘Depends what the owner needs. He’s a professional poker-player from Liverpool and he puts the sign up whenever things aren’t going well. The next time he wins he takes it down again.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Annika said. ‘I thought everyone who lived here was rich.’
Rickard Marmén smiled. ‘That depends on what you mean by “rich”. Most people here have a lot more time than people in Sweden, for instance. The tempo’s much slower.’
‘Naturally,’ Annika said. ‘If everyone spends all day playing golf, things don’t have to move quickly.’
Marmén moved closer to her and gestured towards the crowd by the bar. ‘I’d say most of them have worked hard, and probably still hold down jobs.’
‘So why have they moved here? For tax reasons? Or is it just the weather?’
‘A lot of taxes are lower in Sweden than they are in Spain, these days,’ he said. ‘I think it’s more to do with wine, women and song.’
Carita sailed onto the terrace and tucked her arm under Annika’s. ‘My dear,’ she exclaimed, ‘you still haven’t got a drink! Nacho, una copa de cava, por favor …’ Then she leaned towards Annika and lowered her voice. ‘How did you get on today? Did you get a good interview with Suzette’s mother?’
Annika was given a glass of sparkling wine, which she put down at once. ‘I don’t think the girl’s run away,’ she said. ‘I think something terrible has happened to her.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Carita asked.
‘She hasn’t shown any sign of life in seven days. A girl with no connections in the area, who can’t speak the language, what are her chances?’
‘She could be with a man,’ Carita said.
‘Of her own free will? When she’s never even had a boyfriend? She’s only just turned sixteen.’
‘I was sixteen when I met Nacho,’ Carita said, beckoning over a tall, thin man with a receding hairline and sensitive hands. ‘Annika, this is my husband.’
They greeted each other properly, Swedish-style, with a handshake.
‘I understand that you’re a doctor,’ Annika said in English, but the man replied in Swedish.
‘Paediatrician,’ he said. ‘It’s an incredible career, taking care of the future.’
‘And you work at the hospital here in Marbella?’
He nodded. ‘It’s first-rate. It’s just been completely renovated. I’m in the neo-natal department, working with premature babies. To my mind, that’s the most important type of care of all. It repays you for decades to come. Will you excuse me?’ And he slid away.
‘Unbelievable,’ Annika said, ‘to think we haven’t got space for a man like him in Swedish society. Where did you meet?’
‘At a party in Beverly Hills, at the home of a girl whose father was a scriptwriter on one of those never-ending soaps that don’t make it to Sweden. Nacho was so different from all the other boys, so much calmer, so much more … masculine.’
‘And he’s from Colombia?’
‘From Bogotá. Victor, his father, was chief of police. We spent a few years living there in the early 1990s, in Chía, the university city twenty kilometres north of Bogotá, on the way to Zipaquirá.’ She fell silent and twirled her wine-glass.
‘Why did you move?’ Annika asked.
Carita paused. ‘We couldn’t stay,’ she said eventually. ‘Victor led a raid against one of the big drug syndicates that ran cocaine factories in the jungle. He was murdered immediately afterwards.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Annika said.
/> Carita took a large gulp of wine. ‘The Colombians are a bit unusual,’ she said. ‘They’re not content just to kill their enemies, they wipe out whole families. There mustn’t be anyone left alive to inherit anything.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Nacho survived,’ she said, ‘because we were visiting my parents in Sweden. Have you had any food? The children and I spent all afternoon preparing kebabs.’ She took hold of Annika’s elbow and made her way back in among the guests.
‘I thought you were just going to be having a few neighbours round,’ Annika said. ‘This must be everyone in the neighbourhood.’
‘Certainly not,’ Carita said firmly. ‘One in five households won’t join our little association because of the membership fee, which goes into the gardener’s wages, pool maintenance and the satellite television dish. Isn’t that just dreadful?’ She drank some more wine. ‘They’re not welcome here. And guess what?’ She whispered in Annika’s ear: ‘They’re all Brits.’
Racism comes in all shapes and colours, Annika thought.
Friday, 7 January
13
She was running along the beach at sunrise. The sand was firm and pale grey. Large flocks of birds she didn’t recognize took off, shrieking, towards the light. She had the wind in her face and salt from the sea in her hair.
I could get used to this, she thought.
Afterwards she took a long shower and decided to have a proper breakfast, for the first time in a week.
The dining room had a tiled floor and spotlights set into the ceiling. The walls were yellow, the chairs blue, the curtains striped. She ate a slice of white bread with some ham, and a yoghurt, with coffee and a glass of juice. Then she went upstairs and called the newsroom.
Berit wasn’t there yet, so she asked to talk to Patrik.
‘What’s happening today, then?’ he said, in a tone that suggested he’d been up and about for hours.
‘I told you I didn’t want the pictures to be sold on,’ Annika said. ‘Despite that, they showed up in every Spanish paper yesterday.’
Patrik sounded affronted: ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m not the one who sits here trying to sell pictures abroad.’
The Long Shadow Page 15