Last Will (26 page)

The warmth spread from her stomach and out through her whole body, easing the burden on her chest a little.

Bosse.

She couldn’t help laughing. He never gave up, never lost touch. No matter how far out in the cold she was, he didn’t care. Her colleagues on the paper never got in touch, apart from Berit, and Jansson very occasionally, but one of their rival reporters cared about how she was.

Maybe
, she texted back.
Seeing the Big One today, don’t know what he wants. Might have all the time in the world … Signed “it’s never too late to give up.”

She dropped the phone back in her bag and stood up, brushing the worst of the wet from her trousers. Then she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, steeled herself, and made a dash for the car.

Her cell phone rang as she was searching for her keys. It rang and rang as the rain found its way in under her collar and down her neck and back.

“Hello?” she yelled, trying to unlock the car at the same time as holding the phone and balancing her bag on her knee.

“Are you standing in the middle of the Niagara Falls?” Q asked.

The car flashed as the central locking clicked open. Annika managed to get the driver’s door open, but dropped her bag on the ground, spilling the contents.

“Fucking shit,” she said, on the brink of tears.

“Nice to hear your voice as well,” Q said. “I’ve got a picture I’d like to show you.”

Annika leaned down to pick up her Filofax, wallet, lip balm, a pack of headache pills, and half a pack of tampons from the puddle they were lying in.

“I didn’t know you’d taken up painting,” Annika said, throwing her soaking wet bag on the passenger seat.

And to think she had promised herself that she would never, ever get the inside of the car dirty.

“It’s a man,” Q said. “I’d like you to take a look at him, to see if you recognize him.”

She settled into the driver’s seat, shut the door and took a deep breath.

“God, this rain,” she panted, leaning her head back against the headrest.

“It’s not raining in this part of Kungsholmen,” Q said. “In fact it never rains anywhere on Kungsholmen. How soon can you get here?”

The traffic ought to have eased up a bit by now, but the rain was making the traffic toward Stockholm slow and heavy.

There’s no point getting worked up, she thought. You only end up getting stressed and dying of a heart attack. She tuned the radio to Easy-Listening Favorites on 104.7 and thought about Bosse.

She didn’t have to be at the paper until the afternoon.

Anders Schyman had sent her an email saying he wanted to see her at three o’clock, and the very thought of the meeting made her stomach churn.

Well, if he wants to buy me out, he’d better have his biggest checkbook handy, she thought.

She tried to think rationally, in terms of the numbers: how much was she willing to sell her job for? For what amount would she be prepared to walk away from something she had put so much time and effort into?

Ebba Romanova had got 185 million. And even that didn’t seem to have bought her peace of mind. You probably couldn’t sell the things that gave your life meaning.

God, she thought, roll on three o’clock so we can get this over with.

Suddenly she remembered something an American millionairess had said on television a week or so before:
Those who say you can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop
.

The car in front of her rolled forward two meters.

“Damn it, you’re soaked,” Q said as she walked into his office. “So, have you moved out to the suburbs?”

“The closest I could find a parking space was on Pipersgatan,” Annika said. “There must have been some serious climatic change on Kungsholmen after we spoke.”

Q looked out at the rain running down the windowpane.

“Oh yes, look at that,” he said. “Go and dry yourself off—you’re ruining my Persian rugs.”

“Where’s the picture?” Annika said, sinking onto an armchair.

Q handed her a photograph of a man of about twenty-five or so standing in front of a large yacht. His dark hair was ruffled by the wind; he had bright blue eyes, a suntan, a sweet smile. She stifled an impulse to smile back at him.

“Cute,” she said. “So what about him?”

“Do you recognize him?”

She studied the photograph carefully. It only showed his top half, which made it hard to judge his height and bearing.

“Don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

She screwed up her eyes and held the picture closer.

Had she seen him somewhere? Was there something familiar about him? Would she remember him if she bumped into him?

She put the picture down in her lap.

“I suppose it’s something to do with the Nobel banquet?” she asked.

Q sighed.

“Great, we’ve got to Twenty Questions already,” he said. “Can you think of where you might have seen this lad?”

Annika picked it up again.

“No,” she said after a long minute. “No, I’ve never seen him before.”

She put the photo on the desk.

“Sorry,” she said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Frozen to death,” Q said, picking the picture up. “He was found dead in a freeze room in one of the Karolinska Institute’s lab buildings on Monday morning.”

A shiver ran down Annika’s spine.

Frozen to death?

An image flashed into her mind: a frozen compressor shed at the end of the iron-ore railway, people freezing to death.

“How is that possible?” she said.

“We don’t know,” Q said, putting the photograph away in a desk drawer. “There’s no indication of any crime, so we haven’t begun an official preliminary investigation yet. The door was unlocked and the emergency release was in working order.”

“So how could something like that happen?” Annika said in a low voice. “How cold was it? How long was he shut in there? Why couldn’t he get out?”

She remembered the cold in the compressor shed, the way it had turned into burning, cutting knives.

“He’s something to do with Nobel, isn’t he?” she said. “How?”

“Time’s up,” Q said, standing up. “Well, we’d like to thank you for taking part in Twenty Questions. Thanks so much for coming.”

Annika left puddles of water behind her on the floor and the chair as she got up.

“What’s his name?” she said.

“Johan Isaksson,” Q said.

Johan Isaksson. His whole life ahead of him.

“Hang on,” Annika said, standing still again. “He must have been a student or researcher out at Karolinska, seeing as you don’t think it’s odd that he was found in that freeze room. So either he won a ticket in the lottery for students, or he was a waiter …”

She studied the expression on Q’s face.

“A waiter,” she said. “He worked at the banquet. You think he was involved somehow. Could he have been the contact on the inside? The one who sent that text message,
dancing close to st erik
? What makes you think that? What had he done that makes you think he was involved?”

Q sighed.

“He may not have been involved. It’s not certain he knew what the information was going to be used for.”

“So he started behaving strangely after the killings?” Annika said. “Guilty, irrational? The other students hardly recognized him? And you’ll have checked all the texts and calls and God knows what from loads of innocent people all spring to see if you can find some sort of link between the inside contact and the Kitten, but presumably you haven’t found anything? Which is why you’re wondering if I saw them together?”

“The lad was always a straight-A student,” Q said. “But after the attack he started to neglect his research. The postmortem indicates that he’d consumed a number of different things before he died, and he must have screamed like a lunatic. His vocal cords were in tatters. No crime suspected though.”

Annika stared at Q.

“The Kitten?” she said.

“No one knows if she works this way,” Q said.

“So how does she normally work?”

Q looked at her, suddenly seeming very tired.

“You’ve been off work too long,” he said. “You’re not really tuned into this, are you?”

“Come on,” Annika said.

Q sighed.

“All we know is that she shot two men in Jurmala in Latvia four days after the Nobel banquet, a doctor and an American, a former marine.”

He looked carefully at her for a few seconds.

“And how do we know that?”

Annika didn’t look away, her mind racing.

“The gun,” she said. “The bullets and the gun were the same, and the fingerprints from the shoe you found on the steps. You found her fingerprints at the crime scene in Latvia.”

“Almost right,” Q said. “Our Latvian colleagues found them. They were all over the house. Have you got any theory about why?”

“Why she shot them, or why she was so careless? Something went wrong. You said one of the victims was a doctor? She was wounded somehow.”

“A pail of hardened plaster was found by the bodies,” Q said. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to bring in the next contestant now.”

Annika stopped in the doorway.

“How much of this can I write?” she asked.

“I thought you were in quarantine.”

“If I’m lucky, I’ll be let back into the fold today,” she said.

Or I’m going to be thrown out head first, she thought.

“I’ll tell you when it’s time,” he said. “We’ve got to smoke out the Kitten’s client.”

“What do you know about him?” Annika said, hoisting her sodden bag onto her shoulder. “Apart from the fact that he’s got access to a great deal of money?”

“If it is a he,” Q said, shutting the door in her face.

She got out of the elevator, stepped into the newsroom, and entered a whole new world.

The news desk was gone, as was sports, and the coffee room contained three television cameras, its walls now covered with blue sheets.

She stopped for a moment to get her bearings, unsure of where to go. Berit had told her about the changes, but Annika hadn’t realized how comprehensive they were. Across the sea of unknown faces she could just make out the news desk over where the opinion-piece desk used to be. Entertainment and culture sat next to each other where IT support had once been. A new world, a new age.

I hope Schyman knows what he’s doing, she thought, as she headed off toward her office on the far side of the newsroom.

The curtains were gone, the sagging beige drapes that had hung in her room since the Creation. Now the glass walls were covered with the same blue sheets as the walls of the cafeteria. Above the sliding door was a flashing sign with the words
on air
, and she paused for a few seconds before opening the door and going in.

Where her desk used to be was now a large mixing panel with hundreds of controls and flashing lights. A girl with a ring in her nose and enormous headphones was perched on top of a tall bar stool and speaking
into a large microphone as she adjusted two of the controls. She gave Annika a completely blank look as she talked fast into the microphone about a traffic accident on the Essinge motorway.

Annika stopped, frozen to the spot, as the girl babbled away, then slid one of the controls, and a Madonna track started to play.

“What are you doing here?” Annika said to the girl.

“What do you mean?” the girl said, pulling off the headset. “I’m doing a live program. What do you want?”

“This used to be my office,” Annika said.

“What, back in the dark ages, you mean?”

She put the headset back on, turned away, and started to type into a computer. Annika took a step forward and saw a list of hit songs flash past on the screen.

She walked out of her room and closed the door carefully behind her.

Berit was sitting and working on a laptop by the old stationery store. Annika recognized her old bookcase and the filing cabinet containing old court reports and other background information.

“So they let you keep your furniture?” she said, and Berit looked up over her reading glasses.

“Annika!” Berit exclaimed, pulling off her glasses. “How lovely! Are you back for good now, then?”

“Don’t know,” Annika said, pulling over a chair. “I’m seeing Schyman at three o’clock.”

She looked around as she sat down.

“God, this place really has changed,” she said. “There’s a girl talking on the radio in my old room.”

Berit sighed.

“Just be grateful you missed the whole circus,” she said. “It’s been so chaotic that I just wanted to go home and hide. But things seem to have settled down, at least in terms of the move.”

“What happened to the crime desk?” Annika asked, craning her neck to look at where Berit’s desk used to be.

“The online edition is based there now,” Berit said. “And crime is just me and Patrik now, of course. That’s his chair you’re sitting on. This is
where we hang out now, but we’re allowed to work from home as much as we want.”

“That sounds good,” Annika said, then pointed at Berit’s desk. “Nice new laptop as well.”

“Oh yes,” Berit said. “So we don’t have to drag ourselves in to work, and the paper doesn’t have to provide space for us all. How are things with you?”

“Not great, to be honest,” Annika said, her shoulders slumping. “I’m worried about what Schyman’s going to say. I don’t want to be kicked out. You can’t just sell your lifelong ambitions, no matter how much money’s on offer. I need something to do with my time.”

Berit looked at her thoughtfully.

“It’s normally possible to have a proper conversation with Anders Schyman,” she said. “Don’t back down! And remember, you don’t have to give him an answer to anything he suggests there and then. Go home and think about it, whatever he’s offering.”

Annika nodded, suddenly on the verge of crying again.

“Screw it,” she said, forcing the tears aside. “So what are you up to? Have you got anything good in the works?”

Berit arched her back and picked up several printouts.

“Oh yes, wait till you hear this,” she said. “Are you okay for time?”

“I’m free until 2:59,” Annika said.

“Bandhagen,” Berit said. “I’ve been to see the woman and the girls several times, and this story just keeps getting weirder.”