Last Will (12 page)

Beside her stood Eleonor, Thomas’s former wife. Eleonor and her mother-in-law had kept in touch after the divorce, which only served to exacerbate Annika’s feelings of inadequacy.

“The children need something to eat first,” Annika said, pretending not to see Eleonor. “Then I’ll be happy to serve your guests. Can I make some sandwiches?”

Doris’s thin lips grew even paler.

“But my dear,” she said flatly, “there’s plenty of food here.”

Annika looked down at the trays on the countertops: herring canapés, prawn canapés, mussel canapés.

She leaned down toward Kalle.

“Have you seen Daddy?” she asked quietly, and her son shook his head.

She took the children’s hands again and set off once more into the sea of people.

When she finally found Thomas down in the wine cellar her back was sticky with sweat. He was standing talking to Martin, Eleonor’s new husband.

Martin looked amused, but Thomas seemed ill at ease and slightly drunk.

“The problem isn’t that the police are bugging criminal groups,” he said, slightly too loudly, spilling some of his fortified mulled wine as he tried to emphasise the importance of his argument. “The problem is that their activities aren’t regulated, and can’t be controlled, and we have no legislation governing how the police should handle the mass of surplus information they get these days …”

“Thomas,” Annika said, trying to get his attention. “The children have to have something to eat. I’m going to go and buy something for them.”

“Pretending that we don’t need any new legislation is just sticking our heads in the sand …”

“Thomas!” Annika said. “Thomas, I’m going to take the children home now. Do you think you’ll be able to get a lift back into town with someone later?”

He turned to look at her, annoyed at the interruption.

“Why? Where are you going?”

“The children have to eat. They won’t eat herring and mussels.”

Martin followed the exchange with amusement, crossing his arms and leaning back, the rich entrepreneur enjoying the paltry concerns of the middle classes.

“Can’t you give them something else, ask if you can make them a sandwich or something?”

Thomas was evidently embarrassed at her showing up in the cellar. Annika swallowed her anger and sense of not being good enough.

“Do as you like,” she said.

She turned and walked away, with the children trailing after her.

Annika stopped at the McDonald’s on the E18 on her way into Stockholm. The children got a Happy Meal each, but she couldn’t force herself to eat anything. After they had eaten most of their hamburgers and pulled their plastic toys apart, she sent them off to play in the ball pit.

She bought a coffee and sat down with the evening papers next to the play area.

The other paper had managed to put together a special supplement, and had a picture of the arrest of the family in Bandhagen on the front cover. Bosse had written the article. She traced his name with her fingertip, then looked round in embarrassment to check that no one had seen her.

The
Evening Post
had nothing, at least not in the early edition she had gotten hold of. She had no illusions that her paper would have shown any better judgement or held any other opinion of what the main news of the day was: they just hadn’t had time.

Apart from that, the papers were fairly similar, more or less as you might have expected. They had both bought the German terrorism angle and were identifying al Qaeda as the organization behind the attack. And they both identified Aaron Wiesel as the intended target and Caroline von Behring as an unfortunate woman who just happened to be standing in the way. Bosse’s picture byline stood at the top of an article about Caroline’s life.

He’s writing about the same things as me, she thought, then felt ashamed of her own sentimentality.

Bosse’s paper claimed that the search in Germany had been close to reaching a conclusion during the early hours of the morning, and the
Evening Post
quoted three anonymous sources claiming that three men had been arrested in Berlin the previous evening.

The wounded security guard spoke about the shooting out by the water in both papers, and looked exactly the same in both pictures. Wiesel was said to have flown out of the country, but no one could say where to.

Annika’s short piece about Caroline von Behring appeared as a two-column item at the end of the coverage.

The other paper had two more spreads of graphics and comment and analysis that added nothing.

But the
Evening Post
had one thing that the other paper didn’t.

On the comment pages a Professor Lars-Henry Svensson from the Karolinska Institute claimed that the Nobel Committee was unethical and corrupt, but his argument was unstructured and somewhat confused.

The activities of the Karolinska Institute are today governed by a number of profit-seeking companies,
the professor wrote.
The Nobel Committee chooses to prioritize questionable research into the origins of life. Using the Nobel Prize for profit is reprehensible for many reasons, but primarily because it goes against Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament …

“Mommy, he’s throwing balls at me,” Ellen yelled from the sea of balls.

“Throw them back,” Annika said, and went on reading:

The fact that Watson and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine is nothing but scandalous. Caroline von Behring was a great
advocate of controversial stem-cell research, and her efforts were also pivotal in making sure that Watson and Wiesel were awarded this year’s prize. One might wonder at her motivations. We can’t lose sight of the debate about the future consequences of therapeutic cloning. The discussion of ethics and the value of human life must not be allowed to die with Caroline von Behring
.

Who the hell accepted this peculiar article? Annika wondered. It came perilously close to slandering the deceased.

The professor had in all likelihood tried to get it into the more prestigious morning paper, then the other evening paper, and then several others before he came to them, and there were very good reasons why the others had rejected it.

“Mommy!” Kalle shouted. “She’s hitting me!”

Annika rolled the papers up and pushed them into her bag.

“Okay,” she said, getting up. “Do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to go and look at the house!”

It was already getting dark as she steered the car slowly along Vinterviksvägen in Djursholm. The road was narrow, with sandy patches along the edge of the pavement.

She pulled up by the curb, put the car in neutral, and pulled on the hand brake.

“What do you think, then, kids?” she said, turning to face the backseat. “Is it going to be fun living here?”

The children looked up from their Gameboys and gazed distractedly up at the white villa swimming out there in the encroaching darkness.

“Are there swings?” Ellen asked.

“You’ll have your own swing,” Annika said. “Do you want to go and have a look?”

“Can we go in?” Kalle asked.

Annika looked out through the windshield again.

“Not today,” she said, looking up at the modern building.

A sea view, she thought. A large garden with apple trees, oak parquet flooring throughout, open-plan kitchen and dining area, Mediterranean-blue tiles in both bathrooms, four bedrooms.

She recalled the pictures from the ad on the Internet, the light and airy bedroom, the open spaces.

“Why can’t we go in?” Kalle said. “The people who used to live here have moved, haven’t they?”

“We haven’t bought the house yet, Kalle,” Annika said. “So we don’t have our own keys yet. We can only go inside the house when the real estate broker’s here as well, and he isn’t here right now.”

“Where’s Daddy?” Ellen said, suddenly noticing that Thomas wasn’t in the car.

“Daddy’s coming later, he’s going to stay at Grandma and Grandad’s for a bit longer.”

She switched off the engine, the car died, and darkness swallowed them up.

“Mommy, put the lights on!” Ellen, who was afraid of the dark, said, and Annika quickly switched on the lamp in the roof.

“I’m getting out to have a look,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

The children both ignored her, focusing on the computer games again.

Annika opened the car door and stepped carefully out onto the frozen tarmac. The wind was blowing from the sea; she could feel the dampness even if she couldn’t see the water. The “sea view” in the ad was actually restricted to a little glimpse from one bedroom on the top floor, but that didn’t really matter.

She shut the car door behind her and walked over to the fence.

It was only three weeks since she had uncovered an old Maoist network in Luleå, and along the way she had found a large bag of euro notes in an old junction box. Converted into Swedish kronor, they were worth 128 million. She would be getting a tenth of that sum at the end of April next year as her reward for handing it in. In other words, 12.8 million kronor.

She had found the house in Djursholm before the money landed in her lap, practically newly built, quiet and peaceful, only 6.9 million.

She had got it for six and a half. No one else had offered more than that.

The contracts would be exchanged on May 1, once the reward had been paid out. They’d be selling their flat on Hantverkargatan in the spring; she’d already been in touch with a real estate broker and got it valued. They stood to get up to three and a half million for it.

“Maybe you could buy a boat,” Annika had said, curling up in Thomas’s lap.

He had kissed her hair, then pinched her nipple.

“Shall we go and have a little lie-down?” he had whispered and she had pulled away.

Couldn’t, didn’t want to. Every time he wanted to have sex she saw him together with Sophia Grenborg, kissing in public outside the NK department store where she just happened to see them. She kept imagining their bodies wet with sweat, their ecstatic faces.

“Mommy,” Ellen said through a crack in the car door. “I need to pee.”

Annika turned and went back to the car.

“Come on, I’ll help you,” she said, getting the girl out of her car seat.

She looked around to find a suitable spot to hide behind, gazing out over the sky, the treetops, and the buildings. The sky was clear, stars lighting up one by one. The silence around them was dense and black.

The house, her house, sat on a corner plot beside a crossroads. It was surrounded by houses in various styles, from big patrician villas from the turn of the last century to large brick buildings from the fifties with huge windows and big basements. Lights had started to come on, making the windows shine like cats’ eyes in the darkness. She could make out the house next door through the bare trees; the plots were all large, divided by hedges and fences.

A thought struck her: her house was the only new one. It was also one of the smallest in the area, with its 190 square meters.

“Where am I going to pee, Mommy?”

Annika walked around the car.

“Sit down here, no one will see.”

As her daughter was pulling down her tights and squatting at the side of the road Annika heard the sound of a car engine approaching. The sound grew; the car was going fast.

Then its headlights broke through the darkness and swept over her and the car. It was a dark Mercedes with its lights full on. Instinctively she raised a hand to her eyes to stop herself being blinded, but the car turned off.

It turned into the drive, into what was going to be
her
drive, carried on past the house and across the lawn to the next plot.

“What the hell …?” Annika wondered, taking a couple of steps toward the fence.

“Mommy, I’ve finished,” her daughter said behind her.

“Get in the car and I’ll be right back,” Annika said, heading up the drive.

It was rutted with wheel marks, all heading toward the house then going off in different directions.

She took a few steps out onto the frozen lawn, following the tracks with her eyes.

The deepest and heaviest tracks led to where the Merc had just disappeared. She saw the car’s brake lights behind the bushes and heard the sound of the engine die away.

A tall, thickset man in a cap got out of the car and locked it behind him. Then he looked up, seeming to stare right at her, and she stepped back instinctively into the shadows.

He’s just taking a shortcut across the garden while the house is empty. How lazy.

The man carefully scraped the snow from his shoes and went inside the house, a rambling villa from the turn of the last century, all towers and pinnacles.

Then she looked at the grass again, trying to follow the other tracks in the darkness. They disappeared into other plots, other houses.

“Mommy, when are we going?”

The urgency in Kalle’s voice made her drop the obvious conclusion about the tracks before it had finished developing.

“Now,” she called, and turned back toward the road.

A woman walking a dog was approaching as Annika got closer to the car.

“Hello,” the woman said with a faint smile.

“Hello,” Annika said, realizing that she was freezing.

“Do you know if it’s been sold yet?” the woman said, nodding toward the house.

“Yes,” Annika said, “I’ve bought it.”

The woman stopped, somewhat surprised, as the dog tugged at its leash.

“How lovely,” the woman said, pulling off her glove and holding out her hand. “Ebba Romanova, I live over there.”

She gestured with the hand holding the leash to a house a short distance away, and Annika glimpsed another grand villa with a veranda and a summerhouse in the garden.

“And this is Francesco,” she said, patting the dog.

“But we won’t be moving in until May,” Annika said as she opened the driver’s door.

“Oh,” Ebba Romanova said, “how wonderful, May is so lovely out here. I do hope you’ll be happy here …”

Annika took a step toward the woman and pointed toward the house that the Merc had driven up to.