Last Will (28 page)

The children came first, of course, and Thomas. She wasn’t very good at looking after any of them. But if she was going to manage it, she needed something more than the house and the garden; she had to find something to get properly involved in.

And it was stupid to turn money down, that was just a fact. There was no reason for her to leave the
Evening Post
without a seriously good severance package.

At least two years’ pay, she thought. Ideally three. And I want to keep my computer.

That would hardly be a problem; her PC was ancient.

At last the editor in chief pulled open the door to his little office behind the culture desk.

“Come in,” Anders Schyman said. “It’s a bit of a squeeze but you can have my chair. I’ll sit on the desk.”

He pulled the door shut behind her.

“What do you think?” he said, trying to sound lighthearted. “A lot of changes, eh?”

“It’s hard to believe it’s the same place,” Annika muttered, her mouth completely dry.

“Would you like something to drink? Coffee, water?”

“No, thanks,” Annika said quickly, “I’m fine.”

She sank onto his office chair.

The editor in chief settled on top of some printouts spread out over his desk, put his hands on his lap, and looked at her.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” Annika said, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking. About my job, about my future here at the paper, about what I can imagine doing in the future.”

Anders Schyman made himself more comfortable on the desk and looked curiously at her.

“I see,” he said. “And what conclusions have you reached?”

“You have to be careful with what you do with your ambitions,” Annika said. “I don’t think you can put a price on them. I’ve got a neighbor who …”

She fell silent, biting her lip.

“My job is incredibly important to me,” she said. “Maybe not the fact of being employed, really, but what I do with my time. What I spend my time getting involved with, that’s important, and to do it you need money, and if you haven’t got a job …”

She stopped and cleared her throat, as Schyman looked at her with a frown.

“What I mean,” she said, “is that money is really just money, but at the same time we all have to live, and money is extremely important when it comes to how you live. And people are prepared to do pretty much anything for money.”

The editor in chief nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s true enough,” he said.

“It’s not that I’ve turned into some ridiculous materialist,” she said.
“It’s not that at all, but I can’t ignore the symbolic significance of money and what it, in spite of everything, represents.”

He frowned as though he weren’t quite following her.

“That’s what I wanted to say,” she said quietly.

“Have you had any contact with the team investigating the Nobel killings?” the editor in chief asked.

Annika blinked, taken aback by the question.

“Er, yes,” she said. “Why?”

“How come they’re just treading water? Nothing’s happening! Haven’t they learned anything from the Palme case?”

“I get the impression they’re still working,” Annika said, “but for once they’ve managed to plug all the holes. Nothing’s leaking at all.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about proper journalism recently,” Anders Schyman said. “Serious digging, the sort of thing you usually do. Knowing how to get hold of a report from the Parliamentary Ombudsman a day early, for instance. That sort of knowledge is on the verge of dying out on this paper.”

Annika looked at her boss, bewildered.

“What report do you mean? The one looking into security at the Nobel banquet?”

“I think it’s time you came back and started work again,” Schyman said. “What do you think? Would that be possible, or is your information about the killer still too sensitive?”

Annika’s head was completely blank.

Come back?

“How … how do you see it, then?” she said.

Schyman got up and went over to his bookcase.

“I suggest that you come back to work on June 1,” he said, leaning over and searching along the bottom drawer of one of his cupboards. “That’s next Tuesday. How does that suit you?”

She stared at her boss, feeling her own arguments tumbling around her.

Come back and start working as if nothing had happened? As if she hadn’t been left out in the cold for six months, excluded from any sense of group identity, stripped of her place in the world?

“Yes, sure,” she heard herself say. “Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday will be fine.”

Anders Schyman straightened up and turned around, his nose red, his hair untidy.

“Here it is,” he said, putting a bag containing a new laptop on the desk. “You’re one of the day-shift reporters from now on: you choose your hours and your workplace yourself, but you have to be at the disposal of the news desk. You can’t just head off around the world without us knowing where you are and what you’re doing.”

“Okay,” Annika said, reaching for the computer. It was just like Berit’s.

“If you want to sit and work up here, there are desks behind the op-ed section that are available to the day-shift reporters, for the time being at least. We’ll have to see how much they get used.”

He pointed to the computer.

“It would be a good idea if you could check that the installations work—these new machines have had a whole load of teething problems …”

Annika pressed the
on
button and the laptop whirred into life, preprogrammed with her as its user.

Anders Schyman sat on the desk again.

“Then I’d like an update on the Nobel story,” he said. “You said you were still in touch with the investigators. Have you heard anything else? Anything we could publish?”

Annika’s fingers slid over the keyboard.

“I’ll have to see,” she said, looking up at her boss with a smile. “I can take a look and see what I’ve got hidden away.”

The editor in chief stood in front of her, looking awkward.

“I’ve been pushing ahead very hard recently,” he said. “It’s had more of an impact on the actual content of the paper than I imagined. Sometimes …”

He stopped and turned away.

“What?” Annika said.

He stood still for a few seconds, as if he were hesitating about going on.

“Sometimes I get the feeling that we’ve managed to lose the paper’s
soul along the way,” he said. “That we’re developing a whole load of new outlets, but have forgotten why.”

“I’ll go and check that the laptop’s working,” she said.

She went out to the temporary desks behind the op-ed section and tried to log into the paper’s wireless network. After a few seconds the
Evening Post
’s home page appeared on the screen. It worked!

She settled onto a dusty office chair, exhausted by a buildup of tension that she had hardly been aware of.

Belonging. A place to be. On Tuesday, as early as next Tuesday …

I should have made up my mind to fight, she thought. How could I even have considered giving up what I’ve got, selling everything I’ve achieved?

She cleared her throat and stretched her back, then tapped experimentally at the keyboard. She went onto Google, the site flashing up in an instant.

What a great computer, especially compared to her old wreck at home.

She pressed
refresh
, and wondered what to look up.

“Caroline von Behring,”
search
.

Seventeen thousand one hundred hits, far more than when she was alive.

As a powerful, living person you weren’t very interesting, Annika thought. As a dead murder victim you’re far more exciting.

Most of the results were reports in various papers, but there were other, more recent items. Women’s groups and various research setups had posted pages in memory of Caroline, and the Nobel Committee had a section of its own devoted to her work. There was also a discussion group, but you needed authorization and a password to get into that.

Annika went on, typed “Nobel Committee,”
search
.

Ten thousand eight hundred hits, most of them news-related. “Nobel Committee stirs up a hornet’s nest,” ran one headline, referring to the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize to a UN organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a couple of years ago.

Her eyes were drawn to another hit further down the list. It came from a discussion group, written by someone calling themselves “Peter No-Tail.”

“Today I found out the truth about the decision to appoint Professor Ernst Ericsson as chair of the Karolinska Institute’s Nobel Committee after von Behring: there was a huge bust-up!” Annika read. “One group thought it was obvious that the vice-chairperson, Sören Hammarsten, should take over, while another thought that Ernst should carry on von Behring’s work. We know what happened: Ernst won and now we’re waiting for the follow-up. Clash of the titans …”

Those men at the press conference, Annika thought. So there’s trouble at the top. And who the hell was Peter No-Tail?

Typed “Peter No-Tail,”
search
.

Seventy-three thousand six hundred hits.

“Peter No-Tail” and “Nobel,”
search
.

Three hundred ninety-two hits, among them a site about children’s books. She scrolled down the list but found nothing that could tell her who Peter was.

Typed “Alfred Nobel,”
search
.

Almost one and a half million hits. She picked one of the first,
www.nobelprize.org
, and clicked on a link in the left-hand column to reach an archive of articles about the inventor. There were facts about his early years (impoverished), his education (private tutors), his inventions (numerous, dangerous, and ingenious). And there was one article about his love of literature and his feeble efforts in that field. Alfred Nobel wrote a stage play, the story of a young girl who was the victim of incest. It was said to be poorly written and had never been performed. It was called
Nemesis
, and showed the young girl getting her revenge by murdering her father. Her name was Beatrice Cenci, and she was sentenced to death for her crime and beheaded in Rome on September 11, 1599 …

Annika stopped reading.

Beatrice Cenci? That date,
again
?

She realized that she knew what Beatrice Cenci looked like. She was a childlike woman with incredibly sad eyes, looking over her shoulder,
staring hard at anyone looking at her, from the wall of Ebba Romanova’s library.

“So you’re sitting over here? Well, tell me, what happened?”

Berit was striding toward her.

“Oh,” Annika said. “Er, yes, it was really good.”

“What happened?” Berit asked, looking curiously at Annika’s new laptop.

“I’m staying,” Annika said, unable to hold back a smile. “I start work again officially on June 1.”

“Brilliant!” Berit said. “Have you got anything to work on, or shall we talk on Monday afternoon and come up with a plan?”

Annika pulled a face, looked at her watch, and turned off the computer.

“I’m not in crime—I’m working directly for the news desk,” she said. “Schyman was pretty clear on that point, and I can’t just drift about doing what I like. I’ll have to be one of Spike’s slaves and do as I’m told.”

“Oh well,” Berit said, “we’ll soon see about that.”

Annika put the laptop away in its bag and zipped it closed.

“Berit,” she said, “did you know that Alfred Nobel wrote a play about incest just before he died?”

Berit, who was about to walk away, stopped.

“A play about incest? What, you mean a proper theater play?”

“A tragedy in four acts,” Annika said.

“I had no idea,” Berit said. “It’s weird that we’ve never heard about it. Do you think that’s really true?”

“It was called
Nemesis
,” Annika said, “about a young woman who murders her father. Apparently she was a real person—her name was Beatrice Cenci …”

“And I daresay things didn’t end happily ever after for her,” Berit said. “Could it possibly be the case that Nemesis punished her soon afterwards?”

Annika hung the laptop over her shoulder and picked up her bag.

“Bingo,” she said.

“You have to be careful if you’re going to start playing God,” Berit said with a wave.

Although Annika couldn’t see any connection at all, an image of Sophia Grenborg popped into her head.

Thomas was heading out from Rosenbad, pushing the door open with a gentle touch of his hand on the brass door handle. The door flew open, quickly and silently. He opened his umbrella.

The rain hadn’t stopped. It was still lashing the pavement with such intensity that the drops bounced, forming a hazy carpet a few inches above the ground. He stopped for a few moments, staring at the sight, feeling oddly content.

It had been a good day, a really good day. For the first time he felt like he was finding his feet, like he was starting to belong there. His formal role was approaching its conclusion, he wasn’t supposed to be staying on after the briefing on Monday, but this afternoon he had been led to believe that he would be staying after all. He’d tried to call Annika, but her cell phone had been switched off.

Now she’ll see, he thought. She never really believed I could pull this off, but now she’ll have to accept that she was wrong.

Annika hadn’t been at all enthusiastic about the project. Sometimes he thought she was jealous, that she couldn’t bear the fact that his career had overtaken hers. She wanted to feel important, and when her imposed period of leave coincided with the job of a lifetime for him, their marriage had suffered. On the few occasions when she showed any interest at all in his work, she flew at him with a load of angry questions, which just made him tired and disappointed. A lot of commentators had questioned the government’s new proposed legislation; he’d read them all and had concluded that they were very confused. People were arguing against existing laws, against consultations, investigations, and referrals to the Legislative Council, and it was all getting mixed up. He knew Annika, and he knew that she was driven by a genuine belief in justice. Maybe her questions were serious, but that didn’t mean she was right.