Last Will (30 page)

She didn’t answer.

“The second scenario,” he said, “is also about stopping attacks in advance. And we’re talking about phone-tapping, not arrest. If the Hells Angels are due in court and the police find out that someone is going to be killed—the prosecutor, the judge, a police officer—then they would be allowed to tap their phones and intercept their post. If the intention is to stop the trial, that would be regarded as a threat to the system, which would allow the new law to be applied.”

He gulped audibly.

“But you and your integrity-worshipping pals will probably see to it that it never gets passed.”

He stood up, toppling the chair behind him.

“The result will be that we have to sit twiddling our thumbs until the next terrorist bomb goes off, and then this proposal will sail through Parliament so fast you’ll hardly be able to see it. And you know what? When that happens, you and Berit and all the others will be sitting there screaming, Why didn’t you
do
anything? Why didn’t you
act
on the tip-off? Resign,
resign!
”

He walked out of the kitchen, and out of the house, and over to the small rocky outcrop at the corner of the garden. As the rain drummed against his back, he put his head in his hands and chewed his cheek until he could taste blood in his mouth.

FRIDAY, MAY 28

Annika was sitting on her bed looking out through the open window. It had stopped raining, but the sky was ash-gray through the leaves. The wind was pulling and tearing at the branches, and the pennant on Ebba’s flagpole was whipping in the air.

She had had nightmares again last night. It was a long time since she’d had so many of them so close together. For the first year after Sven died they had tormented her almost every night, but since she met Thomas they’d become much less regular. After that night in the tunnel under the Olympic Stadium they had got worse again, and then the angels had appeared. The angels from her dreams that sang to her even when she was awake. For now they were keeping their distance, but she sometimes got a sense of them in the shadows or hiding in corners.

Caroline von Behring had died all over again last night, her eyes crying out to Annika through time and space, but Annika couldn’t hear—the message got garbled—she didn’t understand what Caroline was trying to say.

She stood up and brushed her hair from her face, then made the bed. She tossed the bedspread over it and straightened its sides.

Thomas had hung his filthy suit on the door of her wardrobe, and she felt a little stab of anger in her chest. Presumably he was assuming that by some miracle it would be hanging in his own wardrobe in a few days’ time, neatly pressed and in a plastic bag from the dry cleaners.

She was never good enough, no matter how hard she tried.

Yesterday he had
promised
to come home in time for dinner. He had
promised
to play with the children and repair the puncture in Kalle’s bicycle.

Instead he had gone straight up to his damn office and sat in front of the computer. Then he had drifted down to the kitchen, expecting a plate of warm food on the table, an hour later than agreed.

He never listened to her; he didn’t care about her opinions and ambitions. The fact that they had bought a house in Djursholm didn’t help, it didn’t help, didn’t help …

She slapped the wall hard with her palm, so hard it made her eyes water with pain.

“Ouch,” she said, holding her wrist.

She went slowly down to the kitchen while her mood settled. She cleared away the breakfast things, wiped the granite countertop, got out the vacuum cleaner, and did a quick circuit of the ground floor. Made coffee. Drank it. Looked at the time, loads of time before she had to start getting dinner.

She pulled on her jacket and went on into the gale. The grass was begging for her attention, with its brown ruts full of water, but she turned her back on them and went out into the road.

Ebba’s red Volvo was standing outside her house, and Annika walked over and up the steps to the door.

Perhaps you didn’t just go over and ring on your neighbors’ doorbells out here?

She gulped, then rang the bell, hearing it echo inside the thick walls.

Almost a minute passed before Ebba answered, with Francesco trying to push his nose past her legs, waving his tail happily.

“Oh, hello!” Ebba said, looking genuinely surprised. “It’s you! Come in …”

“Thanks,” Annika said, stepping into the hall. “I don’t want to take up any of your time, but there was something I was wondering about …”

Ebba smiled. Today she was wearing a gray jacket and dark-gray slacks.

“Yes?”

Annika cleared her throat.

“Would you mind if I took another look at your painting, the girl who was beheaded?”

Ebba looked rather taken aback.

“Of course not,” she said, gesturing with her hand toward the library. “I have to head off to the lab soon, but please …”

Annika kicked off her shoes and walked quickly into the room with the enormous fireplace, padding soundlessly over the thick rugs toward the painting.

The background was different shades of brown, and the child-woman’s face was very pale, her slightly parted lips soft pink. She was wearing a white turban around her hair, and her dark blond locks curled around her neck and down her back. Her body was swathed in something white and shapeless, possibly a sheet, or a gown that was too big for her.

Ebba came and stood next to Annika, and together they looked into the childish face’s light-brown eyes.

“Beatrice Cenci,” Annika said. “I was reading about her on the Internet yesterday, about the fact that Alfred Nobel wrote a play about her.”

“Poor Beatrice,” Ebba said, looking sympathetically at the picture. “A young girl couldn’t win against men and the church in those days. She was doomed to fail.”

“So she really did exist?” Annika wondered.

“Oh yes,” Ebba said. “Her fate has fascinated people for several centuries. Alfred Nobel wasn’t the first great man to write about her. Percy Shelley wrote a play in blank verse in 1819, and Alexandre Dumas devoted a whole chapter to her in his epic work about crime,
Celebrated Crimes
. Why do you ask?”

“Who was she?” Annika asked. “And what happened to her?”

“Beatrice was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a rich and powerful nobleman.”

“And she murdered him?”

Ebba nodded.

“With the approval of her brothers and stepmother. During the trial it emerged that her father had been the most awful tyrant. He used to lock Beatrice and her stepmother inside his castle close to Rieti, and would subject them to pretty much every sort of abuse you can imagine.”

“But that didn’t count for anything in the trial?”

“Francesco was rich; the pope thought he would be able to get his hands on the family’s assets if Beatrice was gotten rid of. So she was
beheaded on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crosses the Tiber at the edge of the Vatican. There were huge crowds there to watch. She became a sort of symbol for anyone who was the victim of an unfair trial, practically a saint.”

“But not in the eyes of the church, of course,” Annika said.

Ebba smiled.

“No, naturally. How are you getting on with your job?”

“I start again on Tuesday,” Annika said, smiling back at her. “I have to admit that I’m really pleased. I have to have something else to do beside just pairing socks.”

“I understand,” Ebba said, heading back toward the door. “Have you given any thought to what we talked about, moving away from violence and taking a look at the world of scientific research instead?”

Annika looked at her, watching the way her hair bounced as she walked.

“As far as I can see, the world of research can get pretty violent at times,” she said. “Did you happen to know Johan Isaksson?”

Ebba stopped midstep and turned around slowly. She looked at Annika thoughtfully.

“Isaksson?” she said. “Do you mean the lad who had that awful accident? Shut inside one of the freeze rooms?”

Annika nodded.

“I knew who he was—his lab was in the same department as mine. His research area was quite close to mine: he was looking into neurodegenerative diseases—Parkinson’s, I think. At any rate, he was working with signal pathways and proteins, just like me. Why do you ask?”

Annika took a breath, about to answer, but for some reason she changed her mind.

“I …I was locked in a room with a temperature of minus 20 not too long ago,” she said. “Last winter, actually. There were several of us—one man died …”

She looked down, not quite sure why she hadn’t said it like it was, that she’d been called in by the police to talk about Johan Isaksson’s death.

“Do you want to come along and take a look?” Ebba Romanova said. “Then you could get an idea of whether it’s worth covering?”

“Would that be all right?” Annika wondered.

“Of course,” Ebba said, “but if you haven’t got official access you’ll have to go incognito. Do you need to get anything, or can we set off straightaway?”

The Volvo was a station wagon, so that Francesco could go in the back. He was evidently used to it. He protested loudly when he wasn’t allowed to go with them.

The car still smelled new, with a hint of damp dog. Ebba drove calmly and sensibly down the Norrtälje road, then turned onto the highway through Berghamra.

“The research world is a bit odd,” she said. “I’m very glad I’m slightly detached from it—I don’t have to fight with everyone else for grants and status.”

Gray viaducts slid past outside the car windows.

“What makes it odd?” Annika asked.

“So many are called and so few are chosen,” Ebba said. “I’ve got two friends who are on their way to becoming professors, but their nominations keep getting challenged, to the point where they’ll be lucky to get their appointments before they retire. Is it like that in journalism too?”

“Not quite,” Annika said. “Most of the Swedish media is privately owned, apart from the papers published by unions and similar organizations. Then there’s Swedish Television and Radio Sweden. So the owners decide who gets the top jobs. They usually go for the people who are most commercial and fit in well with the board and management.”

“Naturally,” Ebba said. “It’s like that for us as well. Although your work is much more public than ours, of course. With us, there’s a constant stream of gossip and speculation and rumor about what everyone else is doing.”

“Is it very competitive?” Annika wondered.

“You bet!” Ebba said. “When I started my postgrad, that was the first thing my adviser told me: turn all your papers face down whenever you leave your desk.
Never
let anyone read anything you’re working on.
Never
tell anyone what you’ve achieved or what you’re trying to do. The levels of suspicion and secrecy are absurd.”

“What a nuisance,” Annika said. “But surely you have to be able to confide in someone?”

“Your adviser,” Ebba said, “although that can be a disaster as well. I know advisers who have stolen their doctoral students’ research and published it as their own. On the other hand I’ve seen the opposite too, students stealing their advisers’ results.”

“Damn,” Annika said. “I thought having a story pinched was unique to our branch.”

They drove onto the campus via Nobels väg, passing the Nobel Forum on their left and continuing into the university site. They rolled down narrow roads between heavy red-brick buildings.

“That’s where we used to have lectures when I was a student,” Ebba said, pointing up at a large building on the corner of von Eulers väg.

Annika looked up at it, a three-story brick building, the windows dating it to the 1950s.

They swung left and then right, and ahead of them loomed a modern white steel-framed building. Ebba had her own parking space outside the main entrance.

“This can’t have been built all that long ago?” Annika said, looking up at the sparkling façade.

Ebba shut and locked the car door.

“Sometimes I wonder if the right hand knows what the left is doing,” she said. “The politicians put up new buildings and pull old ones down, all at the same time. You’ve heard they want to spend five billion tearing down the entire hospital and building a new one? You can go in—it’s not locked—then aim for the stairs. We’re going down two floors.”

The building was light and airy. The stairwell was open and stretched up through all the floors, making the entrance hall seem much bigger than it was. They headed down the broad, dark oak steps to a large open space that functioned as the cafeteria, then one floor below that the stairs stopped in a series of heavy doors with coded locks.

“First right,” Ebba said.

Annika stood to one side to let the scientist past. She pulled her card through the reader on the door, and there was a faint click as the lock slid open.

“My office is straight ahead, then right. I’m just going to check if I’ve got any mail …”

Ebba stopped at the pigeonholes just to the right of the main door. A bulletin board shouted out the sort of messages that bulletin boards usually held, telling you to have your ID clearly visible, to use the right bar codes on envelopes, which numbers to call in case of problems and malfunctions.