Last Will (47 page)

She had never been out here before.

As she passed the Strömma Channel she found herself in a picture-book version of Swedish archipelago life.

How beautiful it was!

Her sat-nav was looking after the directions; otherwise she would never have stood a chance. About five kilometers beyond the channel, she turned off to the right and found herself on a twisting gravel road that wound over hills and through clumps of birch trees, past Friden and off toward the jetties of Tavastboda.

She drove past Lars-Henry Svensson’s cottage without realizing, and had to do a three-point turn and drive back. She stopped above the plot, parking behind an old Ford, and looked down at the little house.

The setting was idyllic, on a slope looking out across the sea, no neighbors, surrounded by nature. The wooden façade was painted rust red, with white eaves and original old windows.

It must have been a fisherman’s cottage once. The sunset was reflecting off the windows.

At the back she could make out an outside toilet and a large bonfire, and further down toward the water lay another little wooden house, presumably a wood-fired sauna.

Annika turned the engine off and opened the car door.

The worst he could do was throw her out.

It was cooler here than in the city, crisper and fresher. She took several deep breaths, letting the wind whip at her hair.

Maybe this was the way to live? Maybe she could feel at home on Tavastbodavägen?

She walked down into the garden, which was really just a patch of wilderness with clumps of wild flowers. There really was lily of the valley there, as well as buttercups, wood anemones and a large patch of cranesbill beside a little stream. There were paths strewn with pine needles running in various directions, neatly edged with perfectly smooth stones.

I wonder if he did all this himself? Annika wondered. Does he spend his holidays looking for stones, leveling the ground, laying out paths?

Lars-Henry was listed as single in the national register, but that was no reason to suppose he didn’t have lady friends.

She walked up to the veranda and knocked on the door.

No answer.

She knocked again, harder.

No response.

“Lars-Henry Svensson?” she called, loudly and clearly.

The wind rustled through the pine trees.

She stepped down and went around to the back of the cottage, to the outside toilet and bonfire. The burned wood was flaky and white, there couldn’t have been a fire for several days. The toilet was small, painted red in the traditional way, and even had a green heart on the door. It made her think of Grandma and Lyckebo again, as a streak of gold flashed past at the edge of her field of vision.

“Beautiful …” she whispered.

She went back to the house and knocked again. She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Carefully she pushed it open and peered into a small, pale-blue hallway.

“Hello … ?”

No answer.

She went in. There was a small kitchen to the left, then a little bedroom.

On the right was a larger room, which functioned as both dining and living room. A television was on, with the sound turned down. A plate of herring and potatoes lay on the little dining table, along with a small glass of schnapps. One of the lamps was on.

Svensson couldn’t be far away.

Maybe he’s down by the shore, Annika thought. Or maybe he’s gone off to get some beer to drink with his meal.

But his car was parked outside, the old Ford—that had to be his, didn’t it?

She walked out of the house again, feeling guilty at her intrusion, relieved to be back outside.

The sun was going down in the water below the cottage, and she walked slowly toward the jetty, where a rowboat rocked gently back and forth.

Maybe he’s out in another boat, Annika thought. Maybe he’s out checking his pots and nets.

But with a glass of schnapps already poured out?

She stopped and stared at the sunset, with a growing feeling that something wasn’t right. She went back up to her car and dug out her cell
phone from her ridiculously heavy bag, and called the national vehicle registry.

The Ford in front of her belonged to a Lars-Henry Svensson, registered as living on Ringvägen in Stockholm.

She put the cell phone in her pocket.

He had to be here somewhere.

How long could he have been gone? Were the potatoes warm? The schnapps cold?

She hurried back down to the cottage again and went straight into the main room to check the food.

The potatoes were cold. There was no condensation on the schnapps-glass.

Something was wrong.

She went over to the window and looked out at the trees, the sea, the lengthening shadows. The Ford up by the road, her SUV behind it. The drifts of wild flowers, a ramshackle garden bench halfway down the path to the little wooden sauna.

The sauna door was ajar.

She leaned closer to the window, screwing her eyes up to see better.

There was no smoke coming from the chimney, and the little window was dark, but the door was definitely open.

She went outside again, then down the pine needle–strewn, stone-edged path and up to the door of the sauna. From here she could hear the sound of waves lapping against the jetty.

As she opened the door wider, the dusk light fell on a small changing room. There was a pile of wood and a bundle of neatly folded towels, all blue. Apart from that, the room was empty.

On the opposite wall was the door into the sauna itself.

She took three paces toward it and pulled it open.

He was hanging on the wall.

Somehow she knew at once that he was hanging on the wall, he wasn’t just leaning against it, he wasn’t resting. He was hanging.

A large metal nail was sticking out of his right eye.

His left eye was staring at her, bloodshot and bulging.

There was another nail in his neck, through his throat.

She stared at him, closed her eyes, looked again.

Then she shut the door and went outside, where she threw up over an anthill.

Then she called Q.

The first police car was a normal patrol car; it arrived after just fifteen minutes. It parked down the hill, not far from the sauna, and two walking clichés got out and looked around.

Annika had locked herself inside her car with the engine running and the heater on. She felt so cold that she was shaking, and couldn’t stop looking in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was creeping up on her from behind.

She felt better now the patrol had arrived.

One of the officers came up the hill and over to her. When she showed no sign of getting out, he came around and knocked on her window.

She opened the window a few centimeters.

“Are you the person who called?”

She nodded.

“And the owner of the house is in the sauna, you say. Dead.”

She nodded again.

The policeman sighed.

“Someone from the crime unit will be here to ask you some questions in due course,” he said, then went back to the patrol car.

She closed the window again and went on staring ahead of her.

A nail through his eye, sticking out maybe two or three centimeters.

Which meant that someone had knocked it in, using a hammer to drive it through the professor’s head until there was about an inch left.

How long could the nail be? How deep was a skull? Seven inches? Nine?

And what had Q said about Svensson earlier that day?

He had nothing to do with the death of Ernst Ericsson.

She heard her own reply echo in her memory:

And you’re absolutely certain of that?

His response:

Not a shadow of a doubt.

She gasped.

Now she knew why they were so certain Ernst Ericsson hadn’t committed suicide.

It might just be possible to drive a nail through your own neck, but not if you’ve already hammered one through your brain.

She pulled out her cell phone, thinking she ought to call home to Thomas.

She couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She could feel his anger through the air without the need for any cell-phone network.

I’ll deal with it when I get home, she thought. Otherwise I’ll only get it in the neck twice.

Three unmarked cars appeared about ten minutes later.

In the second one she caught a glimpse of a Hawaiian shirt.

She switched off the ignition, pulled on a cardigan she found on the backseat, and went out to meet the detective inspector. She waited patiently beside his car as he went down to the sauna and confirmed to himself that she wasn’t hallucinating.

“Not a shadow of a doubt,” Annika said. “Great.”

He pointed at the pile of vomit on the anthill just outside the door of the sauna.

“What are you doing here?”

“Is this a formal interrogation?”

He threw out his hands.

“Do I look like a microphone?”

“I was hoping to get a comment on the death of Ernst Ericsson,” Annika said. “There were lights on inside the cottage and the sauna door was ajar, so I looked inside.”

“You’re sure about that, the door was ajar?”

“I noticed it from the house,” Annika said, pointing up at the illuminated window up the hill.

“You were inside the house? What were you doing there?”

“There was a plate of herring and potatoes on the table; I was checking to see if the food was warm.”

Q groaned.

“So you’ve been scampering about touching things all over the scene of a crime?”

Annika bit her lip.

“Not the body,” she said. “I didn’t touch him. And I didn’t touch anything inside the sauna itself, except the door handle.”

Q walked over to his car, opened the door, and dug about for something inside the glove compartment.

Annika stayed close to him.

“This has to have some sort of personal motive, doesn’t it?” she asked. “This isn’t remotely clean or professional, so it wasn’t the Kitten, was it? And yesterday, Ernst Ericsson wasn’t her either, was it?”

The detective inspector emerged from the car with a small tape recorder in his hand and slammed the car door.

“Interview with witness Annika Bengtzon,” he said. “Personal details to be added later, Tuesday, June 1, time 7:55
PM
, at the crime scene on Tavastbodavägen in Fågelbrolandet, regarding the suspected murder of Lars-Henry Svensson …”

Annika turned and started walking toward her car.

“Where are you going?”

“The paper,” Annika said. “Don’t even think of imposing a ban on disclosure this time. I’m not going to stay quiet.”

“You’d never put an investigation at risk,” Q said.

“Please,” she said, turning to face him again. “This is my first day back at work. I can’t get myself thrown out again.”

He looked at her with his head tilted to one side, without the slightest trace of sympathy.

“Well, of course I’m going to issue you with a ban on disclosure,” he said, “according to chapter twenty-three, paragraph ten of the Judicial Procedure Act. I want you to stay here until we’re done, so that I can interview you properly.”

“I drove here and got out of my car,” Annika said. “I looked around for twenty-three minutes before I found the body. Then I threw up and phoned you. I haven’t seen anyone else here since I arrived. No cars have
gone past, nor any boats. I’ve been in all the buildings, including the outside toilet, and I’ve touched pretty much everything. Okay, I’m going now.”

“I forbid you to leave,” Q said.

“So shoot me,” Annika said, turning around and walking to her car.

She pulled out her cell phone and called the paper.

Anders Schyman tossed his briefcase on the desk in his little office. He had had a terrible day.

The family that owned the paper had been given early warning of the morning paper’s disastrous results for the first half of the year, and had pulled the emergency cord as hard as they possibly could.

There had been a meeting out at their villa on Djurgården, practically an inquisition.

All costs were to be reviewed.

All new initiatives were to be put on ice.

Every part of the media empire was to stop all new recruitment. They were no longer even allowed to use freelancers.

Fortunately there were several wise men and women among the editorial managers of the business. Together they had bullied the owners and the board into realizing that putting the brakes on was not the way to get out of a crisis.

Acknowledgement of a state of crisis was all very well, but you had to find ways for people to vent their frustrations, which were an inevitable side effect when you had to start slaughtering holy cows.

But you had to be able to push ahead as well.

He wasn’t sure if his message had really sunk in, but he knew he was going to have to spend the next month trying to rescue the new initiatives that he had thought were already safe.

He rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand.

Why on earth was he doing all this?

These cuts were enough to trigger his already somewhat-battered parachute, which could carry him safely and securely to the ground as the media world collapsed.

But he already knew the answer. It had been formulated by an old
hack at Swedish Television who had covered every global conflict from Vietnam to Iraq:
It’s never hard to step up to the mark in wartime. You only feel like curling up and dying in times of peace
.

And right now war was raging all around him, with a new front opening up against the idiotic priorities of the paper’s owners, alongside the ongoing battle against the other evening paper and future battles about ill-considered technological investments and negotiating positions.

His wife would be waiting for him. He ought to go home.

He sighed deeply.

She would rather he go home late with the battle behind him than show up early with the ballistics still going off.

Which is why he answered when the phone rang, even though he should have been on his way home.

“I’ve done it again.”

It was Bengtzon, the walking disaster.