Read Online The Long Shadow by Liza Marklund - Free Book Online Page A

options with enormous queues. At the far end there were a few local firms. Tucked away in a corner she found a shabby desk with a girl who was sitting half asleep under a sign that read ‘Helle Hollis’.
    What the hell? Annika thought, and hired a Ford Escort.
    It took her a quarter of an hour to find the car in the huge garage. It was small, blue and anonymous. She threw her case into the boot and put her bag, notepad, mobile, camera, the guidebook she’d bought from the bookshop at Arlanda and the map from the hire company on the passenger seat, then squeezed behind the wheel and switched on her mobile.
    She had read Clobbe’s worthless article online at Arlanda. The headline was ‘Death in Paradise’. The short text was piled high with clichés: ‘The sun is shining in the sky, but there is a chill in people’s hearts. They wanted nothing more than to live a peaceful life, but instead they got a brutal, early death.’
    She had decided there and then not to bother Clobbe with any sort of handover.
    ‘You have four new messages,’ her electronic voicemail told her.
    The first was from Patrik, telling her to call the newsroom as soon as she landed.
    The second was from Patrik, wondering if she was there yet.
    The third was from Patrik, shouting excitedly thatthe Spanish police had confirmed that Sebastian Söderström and his family had died of gas poisoning, and how come she hadn’t managed to find that out, seeing as she was there on the scene?
    The fourth was from Berit. ‘We’ve divided it up like this,’ her message ran. Annika could hear her leafing through some notes. ‘I’ll put together Sebastian Söderström’s life-story from old cuttings. Sport will take care of his ice-hockey friends in the NHL and get comments from them. You can have three articles: “All about the gas murders”, “The life of the family on the Costa del Sol”, and that old classic, “Idyll in crisis”. Let’s catch up this evening. Good luck!’
    A man came over waving both arms, shouting something at Annika inside the car. She presumed he wanted her space. She locked the door and picked up her notepad and mobile.
    The man banged on her windscreen.
    She wound down the window a centimetre. ‘What?’; she said.
    He was waving his arms and shouting and she pretended not to understand.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘
No comprendo
.’
    The man started threatening to call the police.
    ‘Go ahead,’ Annika said, closing the window again. ‘Good idea!’
    She dialled the number of the first of the two Scandinavian police officers whose names Berit had given her, a Knut Garen, who turned out to be Norwegian.
    ‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m a reporter on the
Evening Post
newspaper. I was given your number by—’
    ‘I know, I spoke to Berit Hamrin yesterday,’ the policeman said. ‘She said you’d be in touch. Are you in Marbella now?’
    ‘I’m on my way.’
    ‘Let’s meet at La Cañada at two o’clock.’
    ‘Lackanyarda?’ Annika said.
    ‘Outside H&M,’ the policeman said, and ended the call.
    Lackanyarda
, she wrote on her pad, started the engine and came close to running down the gesticulating man as she wove her way through the garage towards the exit.
    The traffic was terrible. She understood perfectly why the Spaniards were European champions at knocking over pedestrians on road crossings. Car horns blared and drivers shook their fists.
    ‘Calm down before you have a heart attack,’ she muttered, trying to make sense of the road signs. She failed.
    The reconstruction of Málaga Airport was a massive project. Immense concrete skeletons stuck up into the sky in every direction, and there were great piles of reinforced steel along the side of the road. Lorries, forklift trucks and diggers fought for space with cars, mopeds and the courtesy buses that carried people into the terminals from the long-stay car parks. All of the roads were provisional, painted with a mess of lanes and arrows.
    There was no