Last Will (7 page)

“What else have we got?” she asked.

“There were freelance photographers outside the City Hall, so there’s more material from out there. The whole damn city’s cordoned off, so
we’ve got masses of pictures of stern-faced cops and big cars. Pages ten and eleven, police hunt last night.”

Anders Schyman still couldn’t sit still, and walked over to the window, where he stood with his back to the Russian Embassy.

“Are the police expecting to make any arrests in the foreseeable future?” he asked.

“The boat the girl escaped on has been found in Gröndal, and they think she got away south by car, toward Södertälje. She must have had help, someone driving the boat, and probably someone else on the inside as well.”

Anders Schyman picked up a ballpoint pen and drummed it against his thumbnail.

“Why south?”

“The police are saying that they were prepared for something of this sort and set up roadblocks more or less at once. If she’d headed north or east she would have been caught, and there’s nothing but water to the west. We’ve got a graphic of the escape route with some pretty accurate timings; the police reckon she was south of Skärholmen before 11:05, because that’s when the roadblock went up.”

He saw that Annika was staring at the pen and tossed it aside.

“What about pictures of the victims?”

Since the driving licence authority and the passport register had both closed their archives to the public, getting hold of pictures of victims was a recurring problem, another consequence of the fallout from September 11, the new age.

“Both von Behring and Wiesel were very public people, so there are plenty of pictures of them. Picture Pelle has pulled out a frame from the live broadcast from the Blue Hall as well, where they’re sitting next to each other at the table, laughing and raising their glasses. The quality’s not great, but it’s on six and seven … Then we’ve got the royal couple and their reaction, of course they didn’t see a thing but Berit’s managed to make it sound dramatic as hell. They were sitting in the Prince’s Gallery talking to some of the prizewinners when the shots were fired. If you measure the distance between the killer and the royal couple, it’s actually no more than a few dozen meters, even if half of that is thick stone walls …”

“What about the cover of the first editions?” the editor in chief interrupted.

“We’re waiting for the photofit picture, the headline will be ‘Face of the Killer,’ or something like that.”

Anders Schyman felt his tired brain implode and shrink to a tiny raisin at the top of his spinal cord.

“We’re waiting for a photofit that our reporter helped produce but which we can’t print because a fucking police state says we can’t do our fucking job, informing the public …”

He slumped onto his chair again and waved his hand.

“Out you go, get the paper finished,” he said. “But I want to see the front page before it goes to press.”

As his two colleagues gathered their things and left the room he got up and went over to the window to see what the Russian soldier was doing.

The guard’s shack was empty.

The soldier had gone.

Annika went into her room and wrote down everything she could remember. She noted exactly what had happened, just as she remembered it, including dancing with Bosse. All the details, what the police had said, everything she had seen and what she had felt.

She ended up with a poor, rather confused text, but it would never be published. She wanted to have a prop for her memory; she’d sat through enough trials to know that witnesses forget. Their memories change over time, and she wanted to have access to her original experiences.

So that no traces of the text were left on the newspaper’s server, she wrote it directly onto her electronic archive on the net, a mailbox on the Internet under the address [email protected]. That was where she usually left texts that she needed access to from other computers, or things she wanted to keep secret from the paper.

She sat for several minutes after switching off her computer, looking out over the newsroom. Her body was shrieking with exhaustion, but it was still pretty doubtful that she’d be able to get to sleep tonight.

She saw Jansson heading over to the smoking booth with a cigarette
and cup of coffee, and she grabbed her outdoor clothes and hurried over to him.

“Well, he was in a bloody awful mood,” Jansson said, glancing at Annika, who sat beside him with a cup of her own.

“He gets like that when I’m around,” Annika said, looking down at her coffee. “He’s furious about what I wrote about our proprietors and TV Scandinavia. You heard he didn’t get to be chair of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association?”

Jansson lit his hundredth cigarette of the night and blew the smoke onto his coffee.

“I think you’re taking it too personally. He’s a grown-up, after all, with a whole load of different responsibilities. If he spent his time worrying about things like that he’d never get anything done.”

Annika could feel the heat of the drink through the thin plastic and moved her fingers to stop them from getting burned.

“I know Schyman,” she said quietly. “Better than a lot of people realize. I know what his beliefs are, and trust me, this is the sort of thing he takes seriously. It’ll pass, but not until the chairman of the board has forgiven him. Give him six months, then maybe I can come back in from the cold.”

Jansson slurped audibly.

“What sort of nonsense is that?” he said after he’d taken a sip. “Out in the cold? Covering the Nobel banquet is a prestigious job!”

“With Olsson trailing behind me? You’re joking. And in this getup?”

She tugged at her pink polyester skirt, which now had a tear in the hem. She could feel Jansson looking at her the way he sometimes did, like he was looking at an unusual plant or a strange bird, not maliciously at all, more in wonder, as if he were a botanist or an ornithologist.

“What was it really like?” he asked, taking a deep drag on his cigarette.

She shut her eyes for a moment, conjuring up the impression made on her memory as she stepped into the Blue Hall.

“Overwhelming, to start with. A lot of light, a lot of people. Pretty horrible food, the starter was inedible. But it was warm, not stone-cold like everyone always says …”

She had ended up on the same table as Bosse from the other evening paper; they’d met before, not least when they were covering the murder
of Michelle Carlsson out at Yxtaholm Castle. They’d chatted and laughed, nudging each other and drinking toasts.

“Is it true they always put journalists behind a pillar so they can’t see anything?”

Annika nodded.

“Completely true. Three and a half hours and we didn’t have a clue what was going on up at the top table. You probably saw more on television. Is there anything you’re missing?”

“Did you really see the murders?”

She took a deep breath and collected her thoughts.

“Only the one up in the Golden Hall—von Behring was the only one who died up there.”

She fell quiet, remembering the look in the woman’s eyes, her body lying absolutely still.

“I saw her get shot, then I fell to the floor beside her …”

She could hear her voice breaking, and how an odd sound came bubbling up through her throat, a little sniff that she masked by taking a sip of coffee.

“But I didn’t see the killer at that precise moment, and I didn’t see her fire the shots.”

Jansson lit another cigarette.

“So how could you help produce the photofit?”

“I bumped into her a few moments before she fired—she stood on my foot.”

Annika put the plastic cup on the floor and pulled off her boot. A violet-blue swelling, the size of a five-kronor coin, was visible through her tights.

“Damn,” Jansson said.

“They’ll release the picture in the morning—I’d put money on it. They need to check with some other witnesses first.”

“How do they go about it? Is there someone there drawing?”

Annika felt her shoulders relax for the first time all night.

“It’s all digital these days. You sit inside the old Police Headquarters on Kungsholmen, in a normal office with three computers. They start
working with the person with the best information, the one they think saw most. When you’ve told them all you know you go through it all again, but back-to-front this time, and that dredges up other details. When you talk about something chronologically you’re looking for things that fit together, in order to make the narrative go forward …”

She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it; the words were tumbling out of her as if they’d been dammed up all night. Jansson listened and nodded and smoked, and she felt that it was doing her some good.

“I had to go out and have a cup of coffee for fifteen minutes, and when I came back in the technician had come up with a picture on the computer, then I had to say what was most wrong about it. The hairstyle, I said, and then he laughed and said that nine out of ten women always start by saying that the hairstyle is wrong. I kept making changes, and as long as I could see something that didn’t fit with my memory I had to stay, which is why it took so long …”

“Did he sit there drawing different noses?”

Annika took a sip of the now-cold coffee and shook her head.

“It’s all done by a computer program that has several hundred different noses that can be moved around, made bigger or smaller. Then eyes and lips and so on …”

“Wow,” Jansson said.

She crushed the plastic cup and knew that he was asking because he cared about
her
, not the photofit picture.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Suddenly the night editor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and got up with a little jerk.

“Well,” he said, “this won’t do.”

And she was left alone in the smoking booth, looking out through the nicotine-stained glass as the news team gathered for their second wind, another edition, a new day.

All of a sudden Thomas was aware of the swaying motion of the pattern made by the streetlights on the bedroom ceiling, woken by a sound he
could no longer remember. He lay still for a few seconds, letting reality catch up with him.

Something was rattling outside, a bus or a car or something—all these city sounds, all these constant stress factors. Swaying streetlights turned his bedroom into a barge on the sea, never still, always in motion. Shrieking engines turned his home into an echo chamber, a concert hall of urban sounds. He was tired of this apartment to the point of nausea, so unutterably fed up that he wanted to scream. How wonderful it would be to get away from here!

With a jolt he let go of the shimmering pattern on the ceiling and turned to face Annika’s side of the bed.

It was empty.

She hadn’t come home.

Anxiety kicked in—what could have happened? Why did she have to put herself in harm’s way all the time? Covering the Nobel banquet shouldn’t take all night, should it? What was there to write about, apart from Silvia’s necklace?

He looked up at the ceiling again and gulped hard.

He recognized this feeling all too well. Irritation was creeping up on him more often these days, nagging at him like a stone in his shoe. She never seemed to consider the fact that she was married and had children!

At that moment he heard the front door open out in the hall. A faint breeze ran across the floor as the air from the stairwell tried to even out the difference between the centrally heated flat and the cold of winter.

“Annika?”

She turned the light on and looked into the bedroom, standing on tiptoe.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Did I wake you?”

He pushed himself into the mattress, pulled up the covers, and did his best to smile.

Not her fault.

“No,” he said. “Where have you been?”

She sat down on his side of the bed, still wearing her ugly jacket. She looked very odd.

“You didn’t hear the news last night?”

Thomas plumped up the pillows and pulled himself up a bit.

“I was watching sports on Three.”

“There was shooting at the Nobel banquet. I was standing alongside and saw it happen. I’ve been with the police all night.”

He looked at her as if she were far away, not sitting there with him. If he stretched out his hand he wouldn’t be able to touch her, he wouldn’t be able to reach.

“How could something like that happen?” he said lamely.

She pulled a newspaper out of her dreadful old bag; the smell of fresh newsprint hit him as he turned on the light.

NOBEL KILLINGS—All-Night Police Hunt

Full Coverage of the Attack on the Nobel Banquet

Speechless, he took the paper and stared at the picture of people drinking a toast: a dark-haired woman and an almost completely bald man, both smiling, both dressed up to the nines.

“They shot the winner of the prize for medicine?”

She leaned over him and pointed at the woman.

“She was killed, Caroline von Behring. She was chair of the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute. I saw her die.”

She pulled off her coat and sighed quietly, then sat there with her head hanging and her back bent. It sounded like she was sniffing.

All of a sudden she was there with him, and he had an opportunity to comfort her.

“Anki,” he said, pulling her to him, her dress rustling as she ended up on top of him. “It’s all right now, you’re here with me.”

She pulled away, reaching for her jacket, then got up and went out into the hall.

The distance she imposed between them made him annoyed again, mixed up with disappointment and bitterness.

“I’ve got my meeting with Per Cramne at the Department today,” he called after her, unnecessarily loudly. “This is a big day for me!”

He thought he heard her open the fridge door and pour herself a drink.

She didn’t answer.

SUBJECT: In the Shadow of Death

TO: Andrietta Ahlsell

Emil, Emil, the youngest and the blondest of the Nobel brothers, the one who dances and laughs most.