Last Will (56 page)

“You’re just right,” Annika said. “Can you help me lower Kalle down, do you think?”

She nodded eagerly, her tears forgotten.

The boy looked very doubtful as Annika knotted the blue sheet around his waist.

Can I really do this? Annika thought. What if I drop him?

Smoke was starting to pour into the room, and it looked as if the bedding by the door was starting to smolder.

“Okay,” Annika said, opening the window. “Are you ready?”

She forced herself to smile at her son, as his lower lip started to tremble again and he took a step toward the door. Annika quickly lifted him
onto the windowsill, turned him around to face the garden, then pushed his legs over the edge so they were hanging down the side of the house. She looped the sheet around the central bar of the window, then nudged the boy over the edge. There was a sharp jolt and the child screamed in terror and slid half a meter, but she managed to stop the sheet from sliding further.

What if he slips through the loop? she thought, letting out a bit more of the sheet, then a bit more, then a bit more, until finally there was no more sheet wound around the window-frame.

She couldn’t let go and lean out to see how far he had gotten.

“Are you down, Kalle?” she called.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Is there far to go?”

No answer.

She had to risk it.

She steeled herself as best she could, then let the sheet come free of the window-frame, and after just a couple of decimeters she heard him land on the terrace below. She let go of the sheet and leaned out.

“Kalle? Are you all right?”

The boy was sitting huddled up on the terrace, staring back into the house.

“Mommy!” he shouted. “The kitchen’s on fire!”

Inside the bedroom the smoke was gray and thick. The bedding by the door was alight now.

“Kalle,” Annika said. “I’m going to lower Ellen down now, and I need you to help her when she gets down, okay?”

Without waiting for a reply she crouched down beside Ellen.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, trying to smile. “Kalle’s already down, and he’s going to help you. That’s good, isn’t it?”

And the girl just nodded and waited quietly and patiently as Annika knotted the other sheet around her chest with trembling fingers. Then she sat the girl in the window as she had with Kalle, then nudged her out.

The jolt wasn’t so hard this time, Ellen was much lighter than Kalle.

The door behind Annika caught fire with a muffled oomph.

She lowered the girl down the last meter or so.

The heat hit her from behind, wiping out all focused thought. Unable to think rationally, she clambered up onto the windowsill and threw herself out. She tumbled through the air, straight out and straight down, falling from the upper floor to the terrace just as the room behind her exploded into a firestorm.

She landed on the terrace table.

Her feet hit the middle of the table, which shuddered under her weight. The jolt sent a shock of pain through her system, from skeleton and muscles to skin and nerves. Her momentum sent her crashing to the edge of the table on all fours. She almost tumbled headfirst off the edge, but managed to stop herself by grabbing hold of one of the chairs in front of her.

The world stopped. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

The pain quickly subsided. She sat up, straightening her legs. Sore all over, but nothing broken.

The children?

She clambered down from the table and stood up, carefully. Her hips felt very sore.

Kalle and Ellen were standing close together just below the terrace, she could see their wide-eyed faces peeping above the edge.

“Are you all right?” she asked, going down to them carefully, still not sure that her bones really were intact. “Did you hurt yourselves when you landed?”

The children shook their heads, their hair blowing in night wind.

A window behind her exploded in the heat, sending a shower of glass through the air, and she ducked instinctively and put her arms out to shield the children.

“Come on,” she said, heading across the grass, “let’s get farther away.”

And the children went with her in their pajamas, over the dew-damp grass in the direction of Ebba’s house. In the distance came the sound of sirens, a choir of emergency vehicles, and in the houses around them lights started to come on in the summer night.

That was when she saw him.

Her entire body knotted up, becoming as hard as a ball, adrenaline rushing through her, making her arms shake again.

He was standing behind his hedge looking into her garden. He hadn’t seen her, because he was craning his neck to look at the upper floor, dodging and hopping between the branches to get a better view.

“Look!” Kalle said, pointing at Wilhelm Hopkins. “There’s our stupid neighbor.”

Annika hushed him and huddled down in the darkness.

I mustn’t let him know that we’re alive, she thought. He didn’t see us get out and now he thinks he’s succeeded.

Soundlessly, on bare feet, Annika and the children crept across the road and into Ebba’s garden.

“Why is our house on fire, Mommy?” Ellen said.

Annika tried to find her voice, tried to moisten her lips.

“I don’t know, darling. Houses catch fire sometimes.”

The girl’s bottom lip started to tremble.

“But where’s Daddy?”

“Daddy’s at work,” Annika said. “Daddy’s working late.”

“You had an argument,” Kalle said.

“Where’s Poppy?” Ellen said. “Mommy—Poppy and Ludde? Mommy, are they in the fire?”

She started to cry helplessly and tried to run back to the house, making Annika grab her again.

I can’t stay here, she thought. I can’t stay here with the children, letting them watch as their home burns down. I can’t let them see that our neighbors have set fire to our home and are now creeping around in the bushes watching to see us get burned alive.

“Poppy,” the girl sobbed, “I want my Poppy …”

Annika still had her cell phone in her pocket.

She pulled it out and checked the display. No one had called. Thomas hadn’t called. No one had sent her a text.

She called Thomas, but his phone was switched off and the messaging service clicked in. What could she say? How should she start?

She clicked to end the call and phoned for a taxi instead.

But she didn’t have any money, and where could she go?

She looked over at the house.

The last windows shattered. The fire was blazing in every room. The
sirens were closer now, but the fire brigade wouldn’t be able to do anything. Soon the roof would collapse.

She wanted to cry, but felt paralyzed. She wanted to scream, but felt mute.

The children pressed tightly against her and she knew she shouldn’t be standing there.

The children had been the target. Their rooms had been the ones that were firebombed. There must have been three Molotov cocktails, one at the bottom of the stairs, one in Ellen’s room, and one in Kalle’s.

Nothing in the master bedroom.

They knew I’d go to the children, they knew I’d try to save them. We wouldn’t have been able to get out. We were supposed to die.

This was personal.

Revenge, for the simple fact that they lived there.

Wilhelm Hopkins left his post behind the hedge and headed toward his porch. He stopped and wiped his shoes carefully before going inside the house.

You’re going to pay for this, Annika thought. If it’s the last thing I do, you’re going to pay for what you’ve done.

There was a taxi in the area and it swung into Ebba’s driveway just a few minutes later.

Annika slumped into the backseat with the children and gave the driver Anne Snapphane’s address.

“Damn,” the taxi driver said, staring wide-eyed at the burning house on the other side of the road. “Has anyone called the fire department?”

At that moment the first fire engine turned into Vinterviksvägen and pulled up in Annika’s drive.

“I’ll need to go up to one of the flats,” Annika said in a hoarse voice. “I haven’t got any money. Can you wait when we get there while I go up and get some money, do you think?”

The taxi driver looked at her in the rearview mirror.

“Not really,” he said.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back.

“That’s my house on fire,” she said. “Please.”

And he put the car in gear and drove slowly past all the emergency vehicles that were on their way to the fire on Vinterviksvägen. Past the fire engines and trucks, the blue night shredded by the lamps on their roofs.

Tonight will soon be over, Annika thought.

The taxi drove along the shoreline toward the city. To the west the sky was still dark, but behind her it was lit up by something other than the fire. The sun was on its way up over the horizon, or soon would be.

“How did the fire start?” the taxi driver asked.

“I really don’t want to talk,” Annika said.

She sat with the children huddled close to her, one on each side, stroking their hair and pajamas. The swaying of the car soon rocked them to sleep.

When she was sure they were asleep she took out her phone.

Q answered on his direct line after the first ring.

“I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you for a few more hours,” he said.

“My house is burning down,” Annika said quietly. “Someone set fire to it on purpose. Molotov cocktails in the kids’ rooms.”

The detective inspector fell silent. Annika could hear the rustling of paper.

“Are you all all right?” he eventually asked.

“I got the children out through the back, lowered them down using sheets.”

“Can the house be saved?”

“Not a chance,” Annika said. “It’s gone.”

He sighed.

“You really know how to do it … ,” he said.

“I know who did it,” she said. “Wilhelm Hopkins, the old man next door, the one who phoned about Bernhard Thorell’s car. He was standing in the bushes watching after we got out. He was one who started it.”

“Why do you think that?”

Annika pushed the hair from her face, and realized she was covered in soot.

“He’s been trying to get rid of us since we arrived. He uses my lawn as a shortcut and drives his lawn mower over my flower beds.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s prepared to murder you and your family.”

“He’s been trying to get rid of us since day one. He dug up …”

She fell silent, suddenly unable to go on.

“This was personal,” she said. “It was done by someone who wanted to hurt me as badly as he could. First he smashed the window next to the front door and set fire to the staircase so we wouldn’t be able to get downstairs. Then he smashed the windows of the children’s rooms, I saw the brick he threw into Kalle’s room, and then he threw gasoline bombs through the broken windows. Into the children’s rooms.
The children’s rooms!”

She started to cry quietly.

“I’ve still got my hands full with Bernhard,” Q said. “Come up here when you’ve had some sleep. We’ll talk more then.”

“Okay,” Annika said.

She tried calling Thomas again.

Still just the messaging service.

Please leave a message after the tone. Peep.

She breathed soundlessly into the silence of the phone for a few seconds, watching the lights of the suburbs drift past the car windows, then cleared her throat. She had to let him know what had happened, had to tell him his children were all right.

Because he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there
.

She had had to deal with it alone. He had left her and she had had to get herself and the children out all on her own.

The taxi passed the old city boundary at Roslagstull and headed into the center of Stockholm.

She clicked to end the call.

The Kitten walked toward passport control, breathing shallowly, her palms sweating. She
hated
this fucking country. Even the airport exuded smugness: empty, tasteful, neatly effective.
Arlanda,
what sort of fucking name was that for an airport, some sort of misspelled attempt at
Air Landing
?

She had tried to be rational. Had realized that it probably wasn’t the geographic location that was the problem. Naturally, it had to do with
her personally, as always. She had messed up her markers, not by much, but enough for it all to fall apart.

It was the fault of the people here.

The police in this country weren’t normal. That sat in their nasty little rooms and carried out their nasty little tasks as if they were the only thing that mattered. They didn’t shy away from using complicated and controversial technology. How fucking irritating was that?

And then there were the bastard law-abiding, ever-observant citizens. They were everywhere, making notes, carefully and conscientiously, phoning the nice, friendly police as soon as they saw something
suspicious
. What fucking losers! Even out in the middle of fucking nowhere they’d stop walking their dogs and phone to report something. How could they put up with themselves!

But worst of all was that nasty little heroine, that oh-so-wonderful reporter. So conscientious! So good with details! So amazingly careful and thorough!

So they had identified her. Fine! A lot of her protective barriers had been swept away, but not all of them. The damage was serious, but not irreparable.

The queue for passport control moved ahead of her, slowly and sporadically. She sighed, put her cabin bag down and checked the little box in her pocket. (When she had to deal with any official authority, she always made sure she had the box close at hand.)

The little reporter. Well, she wouldn’t be doing any more reporting now.

The Kitten tried to locate the sense of calm satisfaction at a job well done, but for some reason it wasn’t there.

Death by arson was about as far below her dignity as you could get. As a tool it was really far too clumsy and unreliable.

But this time it had worked perfect, Molotov cocktails landing right in the kids’ beds. She had watched the house until it was burning properly and the lads from the fire brigade showed up. The front door hadn’t opened once, no one had jumped from the burning kids’ rooms upstairs. No ambulances had turned up to take any smoke-damaged kiddies away.