‘That’s probably correct,’ Linde said, walking on down the street, then pushing open a saloon-style door. He ushered Annika in ahead of him, and she stepped through to find herself in a brightly lit neighbourhood bar.
A radiantly beautiful Spanish woman with swirling hair and a low-cut top let out a cry of delight when she caught sight of Linde. She rushed over to him and kissed him warmly on both cheeks. Their Spanish sounded like the water in the channels running beneath the streets.
‘This is a friend of mine, Annika,’ he said in English, and the woman turned to her. Her smile faded slightly.
‘Una mesa para dos,’ she said, spinning round and heading further into the restaurant.
Annika and Linde followed her.
They were shown to the table in the far corner. The woman lit a candle with a yellow Bic lighter, gave them two dog-eared menus in Spanish and sailed off towards the bar.
‘How well do you know her?’ Annika asked.
The policeman’s eyes twinkled. ‘Fairly well,’ he said, then set to studying the menu.
Annika felt strangely subdued. She picked up the laminated card and looked at the words without seeing them. She didn’t like the beautiful Spanish woman. ‘What’s been happening in the search for Suzette?’ she asked, trying to sound laid-back and unconcerned.
‘It’s like she’s been swallowed up by the ground. According to her mobile operator, her phone hasn’t been switched on since last Thursday. Would you like me to order for you?’
Annika put the menu down on the tablecloth. ‘Por favor.’
He ordered a long list of small dishes that flowed onto the table whenever the kitchen finished preparing them. He drank beer, Annika agua con gas.
‘Shall we talk about this drug raid?’ she asked, as the dishes started to empty. ‘I need some meat on the bones if I’m going to write a whole article.’
Linde thought for a few moments. ‘If you tell me what happened to your finger,’ he said, pointing at her left hand.
She hesitated, but saw no reason not to tell the truth. ‘Two men dragged me into an alleyway and cut it open last winter,’ she said. ‘They told me not to snoop. They didn’t like a story I was working on.’
‘Do you know who they were?’
She shook her head.
‘Do you want me to find out for you? Catch them and beat them up?’
She smiled at him.
‘Have you got a flash on that camera?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Maybe you can come along on something, if you want,’ he said. ‘We’re going to try to pick up one of the men later tonight. You’d have to stand well back and not show any identifiable police officers in your pictures.’
Her pulse rate went up a little. ‘A raid?’ she said. ‘Tonight?’
He leaned closer to her. ‘Okay, this is how it is,’ he said, lowering his voice, even though they had to be the only people in the restaurant who understood Swedish. ‘Greco, the drugs unit of the Spanish police, had been tracking two shipments of coke that were being delivered simultaneously to the harbour in Algeciras. They were both in refrigerated cargoes of fruit from South America. One was melons in the Apits warehouse in La Campana, and the other was a container of oranges from Argentina.’
‘And where are the oranges now?’
He gave her a wry smile. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘The oranges are on a lorry, on their way to Malmö.’
‘And you’ve switched the contents?’ Annika said.
Linde clenched his jaw. ‘We’ve got a transmitter on the lorry, but we haven’t been able to switch the cargo. It’s a gamble. My colleagues in Greco in Málaga can locate the exact position of the lorry down to ten metres. The problem is that the prospective recipients are getting nervous. They know that half the shipment has been seized, and they think there’s something dodgy about the other half.’
‘Okay,’ Annika said, opening a fresh page in her notepad. ‘Tell me what you want the article to say.’
‘That Greco had been following the impounded shipment for several months …’
‘Remind me, what does Greco stand for again?’
Linde looked annoyed. ‘Does that matter? They made their move when the cargo had been unloaded and was ready for distribution, which meant they could catch both the recipients and the suppliers.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Early morning, Thursday, the thirtieth of December.’
‘How?’
He took a sip of beer and told her that the police had rented several units in the same polígono as the fruit warehouse in question. They had followed the shipment from the moment it was unloaded in the large harbour at Algeciras, a city some way west of Marbella, until it arrived in La Campana by lorry. Officers from Greco had lain in wait in the rented units, with additional support from the riot police and police marksmen, and watched as the fruit was unloaded. They had waited until the recipients showed up, then made their move.
Annika was taking a lot of notes, writing quickly. ‘How many arrests?’
‘Five in the warehouse. The lorry driver was arrested at his home in Estepona later the same morning. Tonight we’re going to pick up the last member of the gang, one of the minor players. He usually acts as a courier, and was supposed to be driving the shipment up to Malmö via Berlin.’
Annika put her pen down. ‘But how were they able to unload a whole container full of cocaine and pretend it contained melons? Doesn’t anyone check that sort of thing in Customs?’
Linde burst out laughing. ‘The cocaine wasn’t inside the container,’ he said. ‘That was full of melons. A hell of a lot of melons, several tons, in fact. You can’t begin to imagine the smell.’
‘It was a refrigerated container, you said. That ought to keep them for at least a week.’
The policeman pointed a finger at her as if it was a pistol. ‘Bullseye,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a refrigerated container. There were seven hundred kilos of cocaine inside the walls of the container instead of insulation.’
‘And all the paperwork was in order?’
‘Pure as the driven snow.’ He glanced at his watch, then waved to the waitress. She sent one of the men behind the bar over with the bill.
‘Let me,’ Annika said, taking out her credit card.
‘Carmen only takes cash,’ Linde said.
‘You’re kidding,’ Annika said. ‘Her name’s Carmen?’
He stood up, put his jacket on and grinned.
They walked back up the hill towards the car in silence. The sound of Spanish television, laughing voices and the clatter of crockery followed them. The cacophony leaked out onto the pavement with the light from tapas bars and open living-room windows. Two teenage boys on a moped passed them with just a few centimetres to spare, and four cats leaped up, startled, from a large bin. The wind was chilly now and Annika wished she had brought a jacket.
‘Are you cold?’ Linde asked, and before she had time to answer he had put his arm round her and pulled her towards him, stroking her upper arm with his other hand to warm it.
She let herself be held, leaning into him, her hip bumping against him with every step. The exhaust fumes of the moped lingered. He pulled her closer and his steps became slower, until in the end he stopped. He turned to face her, with his arms round her shoulders. She let her own hands, which she had been holding folded to her chest, fall, then put them round his back, over the rough cotton of his jacket, pulling him to her.
Yes, she thought. I want this.
He kissed her. His mouth was warm and salty and tasted of garlic. His leg slid between her thighs.
Her breathing quickened, and she let go of him.
His eyes were twinkling. ‘Shall we go and catch some bad guys?’ he asked, taking a step back from her but keeping his arm round her shoulders. They carried on walking.
She let her arm slide down his back to his waist. Their hips bumped against each other all the way up the long
slope.
Saturday, 8 January
14
The house was on a back-street in the neighbouring town of San Pedro. It was in a corner, beside a little square lined with orange trees, two storeys high, originally white but discoloured by damp and pollution. The windows were covered with rusty black bars. The balcony on the upper floor was hung with towelling nappies put out to dry.
‘The drug-runner has children?’ Annika asked, in a low voice.
‘He rents a room on the ground floor from the family that owns the house,’ Niklas Linde replied, then left her in a doorway on the other side of the square. She pulled up the zip of the rough, oversized jacket she had been lent.
She watched the police officer walk slowly and silently along the pavement, towards his Spanish colleagues who were gathered in a side-street. The movement of his muscles was visible under his loose clothing. He can have anyone he wants, she thought, and he knows it.
The suspected drug-runner wasn’t at home. Right now he was in a nightclub called Dreamers down in Puerto Banús. He had informed the Spanish police of his whereabouts, albeit unwittingly, of course. He had called a woman named Betty and tried to persuade her to meet him, but Betty was tired and cross and had turned him down. Because the officers from Greco had been bugging his mobile for four months, they had known perfectly well that Betty wouldn’t go. She hated it when he called her, drunk, from various bars and hang-outs. It made her feel ‘cheap’. She didn’t think he showed her enough ‘respect’.
Linde had told her all of this while they were sitting in the car outside one of Greco’s safe-houses as the officers inside planned the impending arrest.
Annika pulled her hands up into the jacket sleeves and stamped her feet. She stared at the drug-runner’s window and thought about Betty. Had they had sex in there? How had that made Betty feel? Valued and respected? She stifled a yawn.
Her flight to Stockholm would take off in eight hours.
Then she heard stumbling footsteps approaching the square. They were a mixture of dragging and tottering, as if someone was trying hard not to fall.
She retreated deeper into the doorway and took out the camera. She switched it on, holding it with the lens pointing down. She had been given strict instructions not to test the distance to the door in the darkness until the man had been arrested because the red dot of the gauge could be mistaken for the laser sight on a rifle.
Then she saw a skinny person stumbling down the street on the other side of the square. He was a fairly young man with spiked hair that looked almost blond in the faint light. He took a few steps forward, then a couple to the side, seriously drunk. He stopped outside the door and swayed.
It was a good thing Betty had stayed at home.
He spent a long time fumbling with the key before he got it into the lock.
Then she saw a series of shadows emerge from the alleyways and streets around the house.
She raised her camera.
Several plain-clothes police officers and two in uniform reached the door just before it clicked shut. A moment later the man was outside again, a Spanish policeman holding him under each arm. His feet were dragging along the ground, and his face showed an expression of total surprise. He kept twisting his head from one policeman to the other, then started to protest in a pronounced Stockholm accent. ‘What the fuck’s all this? Eh? Come on, lads, what are you playing at?’
Annika touched the camera button lightly to get the image in focus, so that the man was sharply depicted in the middle of the picture, then pressed it down. For an instant, the flash lit the whole square. She waited a couple of seconds, then took another picture.
‘What the fuck? Joder!’
The drug-runner had decided he didn’t want to go with the policemen. He started waving his arms and kicking, but to little effect.
‘Cabrones! Imbéciles! Let go, for fuck’s sake! Fucking hell!’
A few moments later he was in the back seat of a Guardia Civil car, handcuffed, with one policeman beside him, one in front and another behind the wheel.
The car disappeared down the road.
Linde appeared beside her.
‘You said the Swede had already been arrested,’ Annika said.
He grinned. ‘He has now,’ he said, then leaned over and kissed her.
‘What’s his name?’ Annika whispered, into his teeth.
‘Jocke Zarco Martinez. Are we going back to yours or mine?’
She pulled away and looked down at the camera. ‘I’m flying home in a few hours.’
‘You can do a lot in a few hours.’
She shook her head and looked up at him. ‘No,’ she said.
He lowered his head for a moment, then laughed. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you back to your hotel.’
He didn’t hold her on the way back to the car.
They got into the BMW without a word, and drove in silence.
Far too soon he pulled up in front of the entrance.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ she said.
He glanced at her. ‘What is it, then?’
She decided to be completely honest. ‘I daren’t,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long that I don’t even know if I could.’
He laughed again, raised his hand and stroked her cheek. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he said. ‘It’s like riding a bike.’
‘How long are you going to be down here?’
‘Don’t know. I travel back and forth quite a bit.
Why?’
She had been about to ask if he was on his way back to Sweden, where he lived when he was at home, if he had anyone waiting for him. Whether he would still be here if she was sent back to write about Patrik’s Costa Cocaine. But she just picked up her bag, opened the door and climbed out.
When the tail-lights disappeared round the corner of El Corte Inglés she had to bite her lip to stop herself crying.
She wrote a piece about the Swede’s arrest, uploaded the photographs, sent it all to Stockholm and slept for two hours. Then she got up, packed her clothes and laptop, went down to Reception and paid for her and Lenita Söderström’s rooms with her personal Visa card. She left a note for Lenita saying she had gone back to Stockholm. Just in case anything happened, she left her mobile number.
She pulled out onto the motorway, which was now practically empty of vehicles, drove past the roadworks and La Cañada, and turned onto the toll motorway. Just before Torremolinos she passed a road accident. A lorry with French plates had turned over, spilling its load onto the carriageway, and she had to crawl past slowly on the hard shoulder. In the rear-view mirror she could see a Muslim woman wailing and beating her hands on her knees.
She arrived at the airport two and a half hours before her flight.
She spent an hour and a quarter trying to find the car-hire company’s depot. She was sweating by the time she reached the checkin desk. In security, they went through her bag, finding things she’d forgotten about, including a shrivelled, half-eaten apple and a letter-opener with the advertising slogan ‘Evening Post – sharp and to the point’. They took the letter-opener and made her put her lip-gloss in a see-through plastic bag.
‘Are you serious?’ Annika asked the security guard, when he handed her the little bag. ‘Do you really think I’m not going to blow the plane up just because my lip-gloss is in here?’
‘No comprendo,’ the guard said.
‘Exactly,’ Annika said, taking her deadly lip-gloss and putting it straight back in her bag. ‘You really don’t understand anything.’
The plane took off almost on schedule and she fell asleep at once.
She woke up at Arlanda when the wheels hit the runway. Her Harlan Coben book was on the floor and the bottle of water she’d bought from Upper Crust in the departure lounge had leaked in the seat pocket in front of her.
Confused and slightly giddy, she was swept out of the plane and into the terminal building, through deserted corridors, past Passport Control and off
towards the baggage hall. She had to wait more than an hour for her case.
It was dark by the time she finally emerged from Arrivals. It was snowing, and taxi drivers from several independent companies threw themselves at her, trying to grab her case, but she snapped at them and struggled towards a Taxi Stockholm car. Over the years she had tried to be open-minded and liberal, trying all sorts of obscure little firms, but after being shouted at and turfed out once too often because she wanted to pay by card or couldn’t tell them the way to her destination, she had given up.
The Taxi Stockholm driver took her case, opened the door for her, then didn’t say a word. Perfect.
She tried to read the evening papers in the back seat, but started to feel sick and gave up.
At five o’clock that afternoon she unlocked the door to her as yet unfurnished flat. The rooms were big and black, and there was a faint hiss from an air-vent somewhere.
She put her case and bag on the floor and hurried round turning on lights. In every window she could see her own reflection, a hollow-eyed woman with unkempt hair and skinny arms.
She turned away from her many selves, threw herself onto the bed and grabbed the phone. She rang the head of news, and sighed quietly when Patrik answered. ‘I thought Sjölander was supposed to be working,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this your day off?’
‘Just sorting out a few loose ends,’ he said. ‘What have you got?’
She shut her eyes and rested her forehead against the palm of her hand. ‘I’ve been sitting in a plane all day, and got home three minutes ago. What do you think I’ve got?’
‘The search for Suzette. You can check if anything’s happened, can’t you? Anything new about how the thieves died? A picture of the mother sitting on her missing daughter’s bed hugging a stuffed toy?’
Exhaustion gave way to anger. She stood up beside the bed, holding the phone. ‘At four o’clock this morning I sent an article and photographs of a Swedish citizen being arrested in a drugs raid in San Pedro outside Marbella. I think I’ve filled my quota of exclusives on this particular day off. If you think your new job means you can treat me like some nineteen-year-old temp, you’re seriously mistaken.’
The Long Shadow Page 17