Last Will (8 page)

How Alfred loves him.

Emil, who has just passed his final exams, Emil, who is looking forward to starting his course at the Institute of Technology, Emil, who wants to be like his big brother, who wants to be like Alfred.

In his free time he helps his big brother with his work, oh, how he works—and he’s smart! He gets so good that he has responsibility for the production of the nitroglycerine that’s going to be used in the construction of the main rail line north of Stockholm, the new railway, part of the new age.

It’s the morning of Saturday, September 3, 1864, and he’s standing out in the fenced-off yard outside Alfred’s laboratory, distilling glycerine with C. E. Hertzman, a fellow student, you can almost hear their voices in the clear air, a hint of autumn on the wind.

Perhaps Alfred hears them. Perhaps big brother listens to their laughter and chat as he stands by his open window on the ground floor of the main building, talking to Blom, the engineer.

Then, at half past ten, Södermalm shakes, foundations crumble, windows break on Kungsholmen, on the other side of Riddarfjärden. A great yellow flame is visible throughout the whole of the capital, a flame that quickly becomes an enormous pillar of smoke.

Alfred is hit by the shockwave in his window, he gets thrown to the floor with facial injuries. A carpenter, Nyman, who happens to be passing on the street outside, is blown to pieces. A thirteen-year-old messenger boy, Herman Nord, and nineteen-year-old Maria Nordqvist are also killed. The bodies of Emil and his friend Hertzman are in such a bad state that at first it was impossible to say how many people had died.

The destruction of the laboratory complex is immense. The
Postal Paper
writes laconically: “Of the factory nothing remained other than a few blackened remnants, scattered hither and thither. In all the buildings in the vicinity, and even in those on the other side of the sound, not only were all the windowpanes broken, but also the lintels of their frames.”

Stockholmers spoke about the Nobel explosion for several decades.

Alfred himself goes back to work the next day.

He never speaks about the accident. He writes hundreds of letters, but he never mentions it.

And he never marries. He never has any children. He leaves his life’s work to those who carry humanity forward, through peace, inventions, and literature.

In his correspondence he describes his great loneliness, his deep sense of meaninglessness, his gnawing restlessness.

Never home, always traveling.

Annika was walking down a long corridor with no end in sight. Large crystal chandeliers swayed above her head, the pieces of glass tinkling and rattling even though there was no obvious breeze.

Far away, so far ahead that the walls almost merged, she could just make out a faint source of light.

She knew what it was.

Caroline was there. Caroline von Behring, the dead woman—she was waiting for Annika up ahead, but Annika had to hurry, she had to run, it was vitally important, and suddenly a wind blew up, a terrible headwind that made the chandeliers crash back and forth above her, shrieking and rattling and clattering above her head.

I’m coming
, Annika tried to shout, but the wind whipped her words away from her and threw them in the wrong direction.

You’ve got to hurry
, the wind whispered,
because I’m dying
.

No!
Annika cried.
Wait!

And the next moment Caroline was lying in front of her. She was lying on the marble floor and looking up at Annika, and Annika was so
relieved, she fell to her knees beside the woman and leaned over toward her mouth to listen, and that was when Annika realized that the woman’s chest had been torn open—she could see the rhythmic contractions of her heart and the blood gushing out with every pulse.

No!
she screamed in panic, trying to get up, but she was stuck fast, her hands were heavy as lead, impossible to lift.
I didn’t mean to get here too late, that wasn’t what I wanted!

But then she suddenly realized that it wasn’t Caroline von Behring lying there before her: it was Sophia Grenborg, her husband’s former colleague, and suddenly the horror switched to jubilation.

Now you die, she thought triumphantly, satisfaction spreading out from her stomach, right out to her fingers and toes.

The next moment Thomas was there, kneeling beside Sophia, taking her in his arms, and as the blood poured out of her open chest, he started to make love to the dying woman, and the dying woman laughed out loud.

She woke up with a start. The light in the room was thin and gray. In the corners she could still make out Sophia Grenborg’s tinkling laughter, fragile and cold as shards of ice.

She’s gone now, Annika thought. She’ll never bother us again.

Thomas had taken the children to nursery school, and she reached down to the floor for her cell phone to see what the time was. 10:46. She’d been asleep three and a half hours.

The dream followed her like an uncomfortable shadow as she showered and got dressed. She skipped breakfast, calling Berit and arranging to have an early lunch with her instead.

More snow had fallen during the morning, muffling all sound. The number 62 bus glided up to the stop, shapeless and soundless. The driver didn’t look at her as she got on, showing her season ticket. The indefinable sense of unease from the dream followed her down the central aisle of the bus, breathing on her neck as she passed the other passengers, all gray and shadowy, none of them paying her any attention.

I don’t exist, she thought. I’m invisible, and I’ve gotten on a ghost-bus to hell.

Twelve minutes later she got off outside the Russian Embassy. Berit had remembered to bring her lunch vouchers with her, and Annika guiltily borrowed yet another one.

“I’ll pay you back soon …”

Her colleague waved aside her assurances and made her way to the salad bar with the latest editions tucked under her arm.

They picked at their food as they read.

There were the victims: the prizewinner, the chair of the Nobel Committee, and the three guards. The information about these last three was sketchy; their full names hadn’t been known until the early hours, so no one had had time to contact their families yet.

“We’ll have to divide that between us this afternoon,” Berit said, and Annika made a note on the edge of the page.

The prizewinner had been moved from the intensive care unit to a normal ward.

“I don’t suppose he’ll be sharing a room with Dodgy Hip Helga,” Annika said, turning the page.

“He’s got half of Mossad guarding him,” Berit said, eating the last bit of a Wasa low-fat crispbread. “They’re having a hell of a time explaining how the hell he came to be shot. They knew there were loads of threats against him.”

Aaron Wiesel and Charles Watson were stem-cell researchers, and vocal advocates of therapeutic cloning. The decision to award them the Nobel Prize for Medicine had been controversial. It had unleashed a wave of protests from Catholic and radical Protestant groups.

“Did you follow the debate when the prize was announced?” Berit asked.

“I can’t say that I did,” Annika said, taking a bite of a stuffed cabbage leaf. “They want to grow embryos for their stem cells?”

“Yes, they want to transplant cell nuclei in their research, and that’s a way of producing embryos purely for experimentation. Bush tried to stop this sort of research in the US with every means at his disposal. In Europe it contravenes both the EU convention of 1997 and the recommendations of an EU committee last year. So far it’s only allowed in Britain, Belgium, and here in Sweden, actually.”

“And the religious nuts in the US are saying that the intention is to create some sort of Frankenstein’s monster, and that the scientists are trying to play at being God?”

“Not just the nuts, a lot of people share that view but express it in slightly milder terms. These aren’t easy questions.”

Annika tapped her fork against her plate.

“So what have they done with Watson, the other prizewinner?”

“He was flown out to the US in a private plane last night. I think they’ll be flying Wiesel out too as soon as he can be moved.”

Caroline von Behring’s life and career had been quickly summarized during the night by a reporter they had never heard of before.

“Must be someone on the online edition,” Annika said.

The article was flat and badly written. It revealed that the chair of the Nobel Committee was fifty-four years old when she died. She was related to the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, “the German military physician Emil Adolf von Behring from Germany.”

Emil Adolf von Behring was the man behind the theory of immunization, and discovered modern vaccination in the form of a serum against diphtheria. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1901.

Young Caroline followed in her ancestor’s footsteps and became an expert in immunology. She made her breakthrough at a young age, and went on to have a prestigious career at the Karolinska Institute. She became a professor at the age of thirty-eight, when she was also voted onto the Nobel Assembly. Three years later she became an Associate Member of the Nobel Committee, the body that makes the final decision on the allocation of the Medicine Prize, with only six members. At the age of fifty-two she was appointed Chair of the Committee, a position she held for the following three years.

She was married to her second husband, and had no children.

The Palace had conveyed the royal couple’s condolences, which was probably all the media would get from that quarter now.

“There’s practically no private information about the Israeli,” Annika said. “What do we know about him?”

“Single, childless, works in Brussels together with the American. Fairly secular, if you ask me.”

“Gay?” Annika asked, wiping a piece of bread round her plate to mop up the last of the dressing.

“Probably. I think he and Watson are a couple. They look quite cute together.”

A large part of the paper was taken up with the unsuccessful police hunt for the killer. There were pictures of police officers on bridges, police officers in tunnels, police officers beside various stretches of water. The photofit was on both the front page and a whole page inside the paper. The caption stated that the picture was produced with the help of “witnesses at the crime scene,” no mention of Annika. Practically every article about the police hunt was written by the reporter Patrik Nilsson, who, together with Berit, now made up the whole of the crime desk.

“Have you seen the competition?” Berit asked.

Annika picked up the other paper and quickly leafed through it.

They had roughly the same selection of articles and pictures, with one exception: Bosse’s article.

Annika felt herself blushing as she skimmed through his text. It covered three whole pages and described the course of events in the Golden Hall from a personal perspective, and it was both unnerving and very focused. He evidently hadn’t seen the killer, nor noticed when the pair who had been shot fell, nor seen the killer leave the hall. Even so he managed to pull it together: the hall and all the lights, the dancing, the heat, the blood, and the screaming.

And she’s dancing with me, we’re dancing in the Golden Hall beneath the gaze of the Queen of the Mälaren, she’s so light in my arms and I want to be here forever …

Annika read that sentence three times and felt her pulse quicken.

“Do you want coffee?”

Annika nodded.

They moved to the sofas at the far end of the room with their mugs and papers.

“What was security on the entrance like?” Berit asked, putting her mug down on a white napkin. “Metal detectors? Bags through a scanner? Pat-downs?”

Annika folded the other paper with a snort.

“Nothing like that at all. Everyone went in through the main entrance, you know, the gateway on Hantverkargatan, then over the courtyard and up to the doors that lead straight into the Blue Hall. We had to queue there for a couple of minutes and show our invitations, and then we were in.”

“Really?” Berit said skeptically. “Please tell me that the invitation had some sort of electronic tag?”

Annika took a sip of her coffee and shook her head.

“Printed black type on cream-colored card. You know, I still don’t think that’s right,” she said, examining the photofit picture on the front of the paper. “But I can’t work out what’s wrong with it.”

“You must have got a good look at her.”

“For about two seconds,” Annika said. “To start with I didn’t think I remembered anything, but the police officer in the profiling unit was pretty good. He dragged out pictures from deep inside here that I didn’t know were there.”

She knocked on her head.

“It must have been a very unnerving experience,” Berit said.

Annika slumped a little in the sofa, staring blindly at a large tapestry hanging on the wall.

“To begin with I almost had to laugh,” she said, her voice sounding suddenly weaker. “It looked so funny, the old bloke tumbling over like that—I thought he was drunk. Then there was a scream, sort of off to the right, and it just got worse until everyone was screaming and the orchestra stopped playing. Then the screaming carried into all the other rooms, sort of like a big wave …”

Berit waited for a few seconds after Annika had stopped talking.

“What were the security people doing?”

The gray suits with wires on their heads.