Last Will (39 page)

“You saw it happen?” Annika asked.

“No, but Malin, the kindergarten teacher for the younger children, did. She’s absolutely sure.”

“Okay,” Annika said. “Thanks for trying.”

They drove home and put the soup on to heat up. Annika had forgotten to put the wine in the fridge, so she put a few bottles in the freezer and hoped she didn’t forget them as she usually did. Both children were hungry and she made fish sticks and instant mashed potatoes for
them to eat before the guests arrived, but she let them eat off the best china.

Then they were more than happy to curl up in front of the television and watch a
Barbapappa
DVD.

Annika tidied away crayons and drawing pads and comic books from the dining area and set out a tablecloth and flowers in there too. She quickly vacuumed the floor and wiped all the countertops in the kitchen. She did a quick tour of the house, putting clothes, dirty washing, and toys in their respective places, gave the toilets and sinks a quick clean, and put out some clean towels.

Candles—should you have candles at the end of May?

She decided against it.

There. That would have to do.

She went up to the bedroom to find something to wear.

A dress, perhaps, or would that be too showy?

It was still warm outside, above 20 degrees, even though it was half past seven.

Surely Thomas ought to be home soon?

She brushed her hair and put on a cotton dress, then some lipstick and a pair of gold earrings. She looked in the mirror and decided she looked like a cheerleader from Hälleforsnäs who was trying to dress up as a Djursholm housewife.

She quickly pulled off the dress and wiped away the lipstick, and put on a pair of jeans and a neatly pressed white blouse instead. She kept the earrings—her grandmother had given them to her.

The doorbell rang—shit. Thomas wasn’t home yet—what on earth was she going to do?

She ran downstairs barefoot and pulled the door open.

Startled, the man outside took a quick step back before saying with a laugh: “Oh, hello, are we in the right place, the Samuelsson household?”

He was tall and dark and a bit gangly, his wife small and neat and beautiful.

“Absolutely,” Annika said, her mouth completely dry. “Come in, please …”

She opened the door wide and took several steps back.

“Thomas isn’t home yet, but please, come in …”

The couple, the Larssons, shook her hand and introduced themselves. Annika had heard of him: he was another one working on restricting people’s private space with surveillance and more legislation.

They had brought flowers and a bottle of red wine with a beautifully refined label.

“Would you like something to drink?” Annika asked, suddenly feeling that her hands were far too large for the rest of her body.

“A dry martini wouldn’t hurt,” Mr. Larsson said.

“Yes, why not?” Mrs. Larsson said with a smile.

Annika felt her own smile turn brittle.

How the hell did you make a dry martini?

Were there really people who actually drank that sort of thing?

She looked down at the floor and realized that she had to make a quick decision. Either she tried to live up to something she wasn’t capable of, which would get more and more embarrassing as the evening drew on, or she gave up at the start and got the embarrassment over and done with all at once.

“I don’t know how to make those,” she said. “Thomas might, but we don’t tend to have many spirits in the house. I put some bottles of white wine in the freezer. I don’t know if they’ve had long enough to chill, but if you can help me get one open we can give it a try?”

The Larssons raised their eyebrows a touch but decided to put a brave face on things. He managed to get the cork out even though it had almost frozen solid, and declared the wine to be at a perfect temperature.

“Great,” Annika said. “Maybe we should put the other one in the fridge now, what do you think? It’s such a nuisance when they freeze.”

They had just settled into the wicker sofa on the terrace with their glasses of wine when Thomas arrived home.

“God, sorry, I really didn’t mean …” he said, rushing up and greeting his guests breathlessly.

“It’s quite okay,” Mr. Larsson said, “I’m not God.”

Everyone laughed except for Annika, who went inside to check on the children.

“How are you doing, Kalle?” she asked, looking at him closely. “Does your head hurt at all?”

“You’re standing in the way of the television, Mommy,” the boy said, leaning to one side so he could see.

“Ellen,” she said, “it’s time to put your pajamas on. Do you want me to help you?”

“Is there any popcorn?” the little girl asked hopefully.

“Not today, it’s only Monday. We’ll have popcorn on Friday.”

“But Daddy’s got wine,” Ellen said.

“Five minutes more,” Annika said. “Then it’s time for bed.”

She went over to the kitchen to check on the fish soup. It was simmering on the lowest heat with the lid ajar. By the time she served it, it would probably have boiled away to a lumpy fish sauce, but right now she couldn’t care less.

Kalle didn’t seem too badly shaken up after his concussion. But he’d have to get used to having a scar on his forehead.

The Althins had arrived and were drinking wine on the terrace with the others when she went back out. Thomas handed Annika her glass.

“Hans tells me you don’t know how to make a dry martini,” he said with a slightly strained laugh.

“Have you ever, over the past seven years, seen me mix one single cocktail?” Annika asked quietly, taking the wine.

The doorbell rang again and the last guests arrived simultaneously, Per Cramne and the undersecretary of state, Halenius. They were each given a glass of wine and presented to Annika.

“Nice to meet you,” Jimmy Halenius said, smiling at Annika. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Well, cheers,” Thomas said, “and welcome!”

“I thought only small-time gangsters had names ending in
y
,” Annika said. “How come there are never any escaped prisoners called Stig-Björn, for instance?”

“My grandfather was actually called Stig-Björn,” Jimmy Halenius said. “He was convicted of the laundry-room murder in Angered in the sixties, you may have heard of it … But I don’t think he ever escaped, you’re right there.”

Annika stared at him. He was fairly short, nowhere near as tall as Thomas, his light-brown hair was uncombed, and he was wearing a check shirt. He looked terribly serious.

“You’re pulling my leg,” she said.

His face cracked into a wide smile, making his eyes narrow.

“Oh, now, whatever makes you think that?”

He thought he was so charming. He went around imposing limits on people’s freedom and attacking their individual integrity just to help his career, and no doubt he thought he was a really great guy.

“So how come you’ve heard about me?” she asked.

“You used to have an old Volvo, didn’t you?” he said. “A 144, dark-blue, lots of rust?”

Annika stared at him, feeling her blood rising through her body and settling in her face.

“My boyfriend used to have one like that,” she said. “I sold it for him.”

“That was pretty nice of you,” the undersecretary of state said. “You must be one hell of a car salesman. No one knew how you managed to get five thousand for that old wreck!”

“Sven couldn’t sell it himself,” Annika said. “He … he died.”

She put her wineglass down on the table and went into the kitchen, her hands trembling.

Why on earth had she said that?

I’m an idiot, she thought, her cheeks burning.

Thomas was showing his guests around the plot while Annika put the children to bed and read them a quick bedtime story. Then she went down to the kitchen and squeezed the aioli she had bought from the supermarket out of the tube into a glass dish, adding a couple of extra cloves of crushed garlic for good measure. She followed the group’s progress around the garden from the window as she put the baguette, smeared with garlic butter, in the oven. She saw her husband gesturing with his wineglass as he explained something.

He’s proud of us, she thought. He wants to show his colleagues what he’s got. All of this means something important to him. We’re going to be fine.

Wilhelm Hopkins was moving about on the other side of the hedge. He was busy doing something Annika couldn’t really see, but it looked like he was trying to move something heavy.

He must be so curious, she thought. I bet he wants to know who our guests are.

The two men’s wives had scarcely spoken to Annika. They were both over forty, and were both wearing fashionable midlength skirts and smart jewelry. They were both slim, with the sort of very fine hair that demanded expensive cuts and loads of product. Now they were walking behind the men chatting to each other, sipping their wine and looking around. They both had teenage children who were probably out in the city somewhere, or hanging out with their friends.

Am I going to be like them? Annika wondered. Will I end up sipping chilled white wine in different suburban gardens for the rest of my life?

For some reason the thought sent a long, uncomfortable shiver down her spine.

She served the soup out on the terrace, and realized that she hadn’t actually managed to boil the life out of it. It was salty and full of dill, and the aioli was quite palatable. The bread was a bit singed round the edges, but it wasn’t a disaster.

“Well, your good health again, everyone,” Thomas said. “Bon appétit!”

They all seemed hungry, and ate in silence for a while. The breeze was mild and smelled of lilac blossom.

“There’s plenty more,” Annika said, and they all had a second helping.

The men started to talk louder and more animatedly about people at work, about various proposals that had flopped, and about how recalcitrant the Legislative Council was. Now that they were a bit drunk, they were actually very entertaining.

“You’re a journalist, aren’t you?” Larsson said, refilling everyone’s glasses.

“Thanks, not for me,” Annika said, stopping him as he got to her glass. “Yes, I’m a reporter on the
Evening Post
.”

“What sort of thing do you write about?” his wife asked.

“Violence and politics, mainly,” Annika said, swirling the wine in her glass.

“Really?” Larsson said. “Maybe you should come and work for us.”

Annika put her glass down.

“We both invade people’s privacy, but in different ways,” Annika said. “Was that what you meant?”

“What, you hang them out to dry on the front page and we make sure they go to prison?” Jimmy Halenius said.

To her surprise, Annika couldn’t help laughing.

“Let’s drink to that!” Thomas said.

They raised their glasses again, and over the rim of her glass Annika could see that Thomas was relieved; he hadn’t been sure if she would handle the situation and the conversation particularly well.

A moment later Wilhelm Hopkins started up his lawn mower. Not the modern little electric one that he usually used, but a huge monster that sounded like a crushing mill. The noise rattled around the houses, making the windows rattle.

“I don’t believe it,” Annika said.

“What?” Jimmy Halenius shouted to her.

Incredibly slowly, their neighbor steered his ancient lawn mower along the other side of the hedge, just ten meters from the terrace where they were sitting and eating.

“Does he usually behave like this?” the undersecretary of state yelled.

“Not quite like this,” Annika replied, “but I’m not exactly surprised.”

Jimmy Halenius looked in astonishment at the man’s heavy frame through the foliage.

“He’s really not joking,” he shouted in Annika’s ear.

A few moments later the exhaust fumes hit them. Annika started coughing and put her hand over her nose. What on earth did that thing run on, crude oil?

Thomas got up and came over to Annika.

“This isn’t working,” he said in her ear. “We’ll have to go inside.”

Annika nodded, picked up her glass, plate, and napkin and stood up, and gestured to their guests to do the same. They went into the dining
room, carefully balancing the fine china and the crystal glasses that had belonged to Thomas’s grandfather.

Annika closed the terrace door behind them, but the sound of the machine still found its way in through the joints and panes of glass.

“He’s a little eccentric, our next-door neighbor,” Thomas said apologetically.

“Our house is built on what used to be a piece of common land,” Annika said. “And that particular neighbor can’t accept that Danderyd Council sold it with planning permission, and claims that he still has the right to use it.”

She glanced at Thomas and saw that he wanted her to shut up.

“It’s a fact,” Annika said, “that disputes between neighbors lead to murders practically every year in Sweden. People fall out about stairwells, laundry rooms, playground swings, you name it.”

She raised her glass.

“But of course you know all about that, you’re the professionals,” she said, taking a sip.

God, it was sour. She really couldn’t stand white wine.

“Not so long ago we had a neighborhood dispute in the Supreme Court,” Jimmy Halenius said.

“Did someone die?” Annika said.

“Only a cherry tree,” the undersecretary of state said. “It was all about a ditch that had been filled in, if I remember rightly, somewhere outside Gothenburg. The neighbors pushed the case through the legal system for ten years without coming to any agreement. Even the Supreme Court couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict in the end.”

“Things like that are tricky,” Larsson said. “I read about a case in Torslanda recently: one neighbor was intimidating the other—something about a boathouse.”

A moment later Annika saw Wilhelm Hopkins through the gap in the hedge that he usually drove through. He was pushing the vast lawn mower ahead of him, straining so hard that he was dripping with sweat, and without pausing he turned out of his own garden and drove right into Annika and Thomas’s. He flexed his muscles, then set off right across Annika’s newly planted flower bed.