The Long Shadow

by Liza Marklund

  Her name was Tuula, she was Finnish, and had nothing but good to say about Carita Halling Gonzales. Carita had been on the committee that looked after things for the residents, and she kept everyone informed about the meetings, increases in ground-rent and shared activities. Her children had never thrown the sunbeds into the pool, which wasn’t something you could say of the British brats and their parents. Imagine having people like that here! Carita was always the person who called the water company when there was no water, or the electricity company when there was a power-cut, because she spoke fluent Spanish.

  ‘And garbage collections,’ Tuula said. ‘Who’ll call the council about the rubbish now?’

  ‘Apparently Carita is under suspicion for a serious crime,’ Annika said, trying to look concerned.

  Tuula merely snorted. ‘The Spanish police,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows what they’re like. Lazy and corrupt to the core. Everything is all mañana, mañana in this country. They’re probably only blaming her because she’s foreign.’

  Annika thanked her and went back towards the pool. The Finnish woman’s reaction was hardly surprising. Even the worst criminals had their supporters. There were still people who thought Pol Pot had been a really great guy.

  She stopped to look out over the golf-course that spread across the valley below, then took out her mobile, found the number and called Knut Garen. He answered on the fifth ring. ‘I’m just calling to say that I’m on the Costa del Sol, and I’m planning to write about Carita Halling Gonzales,’ Annika said. ‘Does anyone know where she’s gone yet?’

  ‘No,’ Knut Garen said. ‘The Spanish police have been checking the passenger lists of all planes and ferries, but she must have got out another way.’

  ‘Could she still be in Spain?’

  ‘If she is, the whole family must have access to a completely different identity, with different schools, homes and bank accounts. We don’t consider that very likely. What are you planning to say?’

  ‘Anything I can get confirmed – by you, for instance. Has her arrest warrant with Interpol been made public?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Garen said.

  She bit her lip. That had been a mistake.

  ‘But it might well be made public this afternoon. The Spanish police got the results of some DNA tests back from England yesterday, and they’ve linked her to the gassing in Nueva Andalucía just after New Year.’

  Annika’s pulse quickened. ‘Linked her how?’

  ‘The safe and the other vehicle used in the breakin have been found.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The long-stay car park at Málaga Airport.’

  Annika was walking back to her car. Very smart of Carita. If she’d abandoned the car by the side of the road or in the middle of nowhere, someone would have noticed it sooner or later. A car could be left for ages in the unmanned long-stay car park of a large airport without anyone thinking it odd.

  ‘Was there anything in the safe?’

  ‘It had been blown open. It was empty, apart from a few traces of the explosives. But inside the car they found strands of hair and flakes of skin, and yesterday it was confirmed that they match Carita Halling Gonzales’s DNA.’

  ‘You had something to compare it to?’

  ‘From the search of her house,’ Garen said. ‘I think they got the DNA from her toothbrush.’

  Annika looked up at the house. Poor Jocke Zarco Martinez must have been party to a great deal of information. Carita had sacrificed her whole lifestyle to kill him. She hadn’t even taken her toothbrush with her when she’d run.

  Then she remembered a thought that had occurred to her during the night. ‘I didn’t see any broken walls in the Söderström family home,’ she said. ‘Where was the safe?’

  ‘There were safes in all the bedrooms. This one was in a room on the ground floor.’

  She frowned. She hadn’t known there were more bedrooms downstairs, other than Suzette’s.

  ‘Whose room was it in?’

  ‘Astrid Paulson’s.’

  She blinked. Of course. ‘What could she have had in there that was so valuable?’

  ‘Cash, deeds, documents, diamonds, codes, sensitive information. Take your pick.’

  Annika rubbed her forehead. Of course Astrid’s safe would be the most interesting in the house. Not Veronica the money-launderer’s, or Sebastian the financial disaster’s, but Astrid’s. She’d come first; she’d started her own business; she’d been running an estate agency on the Costa del Sol since 1968. ‘How much of this can I write?’

  ‘The head of the preliminary investigation will make the formal decision to arrest Carita Halling Gonzales in her absence this afternoon. At the moment there’s a warrant out for her for the manslaughter of Zarco Martinez. We know she gave him the morphine, but it’s not clear that she intended to murder him. But as of this afternoon those suspicions will be expanded to cover eight cases of murder. And when that happens, any restrictions on reporting will be lifted. I wouldn’t expect anything else.’

  Annika took her notepad and pen from her bag and scribbled down the information. ‘Eight cases?’

  ‘The family in the house, plus the thieves and Zarco Martinez. Now that we know how it all fits together, the prosecutor can assume she meant to kill him.’

  ‘Can I call and get it confirmed later on this afternoon?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  They were silent for a moment.

  ‘Why?’ Annika finally asked. ‘Why did she do it?’

  Garen didn’t answer.

  ‘But you knew her,’ Annika said. ‘You worked with her. What was her motive?’

  The police officer sounded weary. ‘Money, I assume,’ he said. ‘Status and recognition, maybe, a life of luxury …’

  Annika looked up at the terrace, with its blossoming hibiscus bushes. ‘But why choose to become a criminal? I mean, she didn’t have anything like that in her background. Quite the contrary, with a father-in-law who was chief of police in Bogotá.’

  Garen coughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We checked out what you said about her background. It wasn’t entirely correct. Her father-in-law, Victor Gonzales, was one of Colombia’s biggest cocaine barons. He, his wife and daughters were executed by another cartel fifteen years ago. They blew up his cocaine lab and burned his house down.’

  Annika could feel her cheeks burning, not just because of the sun. ‘But Nacho and Carita survived,’ she said, ‘because they were in Sweden visiting her parents.’

  Garen sighed. ‘Fifteen years ago both of Carita Halling’s parents were in prison in the USA. They used to run a company called Cell Impact. Then it went bankrupt, but to avoid scandal they started falsifying invoices and cooking the books.’

  Bloody hell! She really had been gullible. ‘But now they’re dead?’ Annika said.

  ‘Our colleagues in Sweden have spoken to them,’ Knut Garen said. ‘They live in a small village outside Borlänge. They haven’t had any contact with Carita since they were released from prison, and that was ten years ago.’

  Annika closed her eyes. Had the interpreter spoken a single word of truth during all the days they’d spent together? Yes: her father-in-law’s name and the fact that he had been murdered, and her parents’ company. She probably had grown up in Beverly Hills, and maybe she did meet her husband in the way she described. And her love for him and the children wasn’t necessarily a lie. Annika recalled Carita’s twittering presentation of her guests at the party, how pleased and proud she had sounded when she spoke about them. His wife was an international model, their daughter’s a Spanish show-jumping champion. She’s a partner in a law firm in Frankfurt, he used to run a bank in Kenya … ‘Do you think you’ll find her?’

  ‘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.

  34

  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 plugsocket 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 jet-setter’. 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?