The Long Shadow Read Free Page B

dead after they’d been gassed in connection with a break-in.
    She started by going to the website of the only Spanish newspaper whose name she knew,
El País
, and was caught by the main headline:
España es el país europeo con más atropellos mortales de peatones
.
    She squinted at the screen. She really should be able to understand it. Two years of Spanish at school wasn’t much, but online newspaper language wasn’t very demanding. She thought it meant that Spain was the European country with the highest mortality rate for pedestrians – 680 last year.
    She closed the article and went on searching for something like
Familia muerto Costa del Sol
.
    Nada, niguno, vacío
.
    But
El País
was a national paper, presumably based in Madrid. Maybe they didn’t bother with things that happened down near the edge of Africa. But surely a whole family dying ought to warrant a mention, at least in the online edition.
    She stood up and went to fetch a plastic cup of coffee from the machine, returned to her desk, sat down with it and thought. Gassed in connection with a break-in? She’d never heard of that before. She typed the words into Google and got one hit.
    Something wrong with the translation?
    She blew cautiously on the coffee and took a careful sip. It tasted even worse than yesterday’s.
    She went back to Google, tried ‘gas’ and ‘break-in’, and this time the results were better.
    ‘Driver knocked out with gas during break-in,’ was fourth on the list. The article was from Radio Sweden and had been published on 14 December 2004. Several pallets of flat computer screens had been stolen froma lorry at the Shell garage at Västra Jära on highway 40, just west of Jönköping. Neither the driver nor his dog, who had both been asleep in the cab, had noticed the robbery. When he had woken up the driver had had a headache and felt sick. The police suspected he had been knocked out with some sort of gas. They had taken blood samples to see if they could find any trace of it.
    Here we go, she thought, and scrolled down the screen.
    ‘Thieves drugged dog with gas – rapid rise in burglaries in Stockholm,’ she read. The article was from
Metro
, and was only a week or so old.
    She went into the paper’s archive and carried on looking.
    ‘Thieves used gas on tourists – Four people knocked out in campervan – Heavy doses of hexane gas can cause serious injury,’ and ‘Action-film director robbed with gas –
The whole thing was terrible
’.
    The article was about a Swedish director whose home on the Spanish coast had been broken into. He and his girlfriend had woken up the next morning to find all the doors wide open and the flat empty.
    ‘So, we’re back to being foot-soldiers again,’ Berit said, putting her handbag down on the other side of the news desk.
    ‘Happy New Everything,’ Annika said.
    ‘How are you?’ Berit asked, hanging her coat on the back of her chair.
    Annika’s hands hovered above the keyboard. ‘Pretty good, thanks. This year has to be better than last because anything else just isn’t possible.’
    Berit put her laptop on the desk. ‘Is it just you and me left?’ she asked.
    Annika looked round.
    Patrik was talking animatedly into his mobile overby the sports desk, there were a few people from the online edition in what had once been Entertainment but which now produced copy for cyberspace, and one of the Sunday-supplement editors was hanging around the picture desk. Tore, the caretaker, was laboriously fixing that day’s flysheets – the newspaper’s yellow posters – to the notice-board.
    ‘Newspaper wars are just like any other,’ Annika said. ‘The ground troops are cut and everything gets spent on technology and smart bombs. When did Schyman talk to you?’
    Berit Hamrin pointed at Annika’s coffee. ‘On Friday. Is that drinkable?’
    ‘Negative. He called me this morning. Did he want you to join the management team?’
    ‘Head of news,’ Berit replied. ‘I said