Last Will (36 page)

“Hmm,” she said as she scanned the lines. “Okay, I see …”

Then she let out a deep sigh, and Annika could have sworn it was a sigh of relief.

“This is just his usual nonsense,” she said. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

She handed the sheet back to Annika.

“I presume Machiavelli is Ernst Ericsson,” Annika said. “And
my friend
is obviously Ebba: he saw the two of us together. Ebba’s told me what happened to her business, and obviously there are different ways of looking at that, but what does he mean about the dead animals? Could Ernst have cheated with some research results?”

Birgitta stood up, irritated.

“In this business you keep your work to yourself,” she said. “It’s not like journalism, where you stand up and pour things out every single day, no disrespect intended. Here you work in secret for several years before you reveal what you’ve concluded, so Lars-Henry obviously has no idea about how Ernst’s research is going. This is nothing but a classic case of jealousy. Ernst’s animals are fine, and he happens to be very fond of them as well. I’m on my way over there now, I’ve got a meeting with Bernhard Thorell to discuss renovation of the premises.”

“Can I come with you?”

Birgitta looked at her in surprise.

“We don’t usually let people in just like that,” she said. “After all the attacks by animal rights campaigners the buildings are kept completely anonymous. There’s no indication of what they’re used for from the outside. Why do you want to see them?”

Annika looked steadily at Birgitta Larsén.

“I’m interested,” she said.

“Interested in what?”

In what you’re hiding, Annika thought. In what you’re not telling me. In everything you don’t want me to know about Caroline, and in what happened on Saturday.

“In science,” she said. “In development and progress. You’re the ones who do the work—I’m just a megaphone.”

Her answer seemed to work on Professor Larsén. She pulled a bunch of keys from a drawer and headed to the door.

“It’s quite a walk,” she said. “And I need to get a decent cup of coffee on the way.”

They walked out of the building and emerged into the sunshine, heading across a lawn toward the Jöns Jakob cafeteria. Steel-edged glass doors slid open automatically as they approached. Inside there was a smell of school dinners, of boiled vegetables and gravy. Their steps echoed on the dark-red stone floor. Meter-thick wooden beams crossed each other in the ceiling. Long rows of rectangular birchwood tables only added to the school-cafeteria atmosphere.

“It hasn’t got any Michelin stars,” Birgitta said, “but they do decent lattes.”

They got two cups, Annika paying for both.

“Do you use test animals yourself?” she asked as they came out into the sunlight again.

“About fifty at the moment,” the professor said, turning off onto a footpath. “Mostly mice, but a few rabbits as well. They’re awfully sweet.”

“Isn’t it hard, having to make them suffer?” Annika asked, hurrying to keep up with the solid little woman.

The professor glanced quickly at Annika.

“My dear,” she said, “my research primarily requires behavioral studies. I teach the mice to take hold of pieces of candy with either the right paw or the left, to swim across a little pool, or pick up breakfast cereal in the middle of an open area.”

“What exactly are you researching?”

“The ageing process,” Birgitta Larsén said. “The biological effects of ageing, mainly on the nervous system, but also on the organs governed by the nervous system. Why do you ask?”

“You need to do tests on animals to look into that?”

“The truth is that there are a lot of similarities between the ageing processes in yeast, worms, mice, and human beings. So I wish I could say no. But unfortunately we aren’t quite at the stage where we don’t need to
conduct tests on animals. Difficult questions that affect an entire organism, plant and animal alike, can’t be answered simply by studying cell samples.”

They turned onto another path lined with a low hedge.

“Have you reached any conclusions?” Annika asked.

“What, that I can reveal to you? Well, the fact that glial cell line derived–neurotrophic factors are actually produced in greater quantities when we age. This is where we go in.”

“So you know how old I might get?”

“That depends mainly on your genes, darling, and obviously how well you look after yourself, but as far as we understand it today, the biological age limit for a human being is somewhere between one hundred twenty and one hundred thirty.”

She patted Annika on the cheek.

“You’ve got a bit of time left, dear. Would you mind switching off your cell phone? We conduct electrophysiological studies in Faraday cages in here, and we don’t want any more radiation than necessary. We’ll have to finish these before we go in.”

They sat down on a low bench outside the entrance. Annika switched off her cell phone, shut her eyes, and enjoyed the sunshine.

“What was Lars-Henry arguing with Ernst about on Saturday?” she said. “What exactly did he say?”

Birgitta Larsén let out a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a snort.

“Lars-Henry was picking fights with everyone, me included. I saw him attack several different people, singly or in groups. Ebba Romanova, for instance, and Bernhard Thorell. Sören Hammarsten and his little gang, and he had a go at the head of department for a while, but he only really exploded when he got to Ernst.”

“What about?”

She took a sip of her latte.

“More or less what he wrote in your email. That Ernst was fiddling his results, that he had been told to rerun the experiment but had failed and published the results anyway.”

“Meaning that he’d falsified his conclusions? About what?”

Birgitta Larsén finished her coffee.

“It’s all just nonsense. Nothing worth worrying about.”

Annika looked out across the lawns surrounding them.

“In that case it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “You may as well tell me.”

Birgitta Larsén sighed and glanced at Annika.

“You don’t give up, do you? It was to do with multiple sclerosis—you know about MS? An inflammatory disease of the central nervous system?”

“President Bartlet in
The West Wing
had it,” Annika said.

“I don’t know him,” Birgitta Larsén said. “The treatment is fairly new, about ten years old, and Ernst was one of the main people involved. His team confirmed that the new interferon beta treatment—the disease modifier, in other words—was sometimes neutralized by the body’s own antibodies. And it was his attempts to stop this neutralization that Lars-Henry accused him of falsifying.”

“How?”

“Ernst succeeded with his trials, and wrote an article about them which was accepted by
Science
. You’ve heard of
Science
, one of the most prestigious scientific journals?”

“I know the editor in chief,” Annika said, remembering her dinner partner at the Nobel banquet.

“Oh, well, then! The article was accepted on one condition, that Ernst repeat his trials and get the same results again. That much is true. What Lars-Henry claims is that Ernst cheated, and that he faked the experiments the second time around and submitted false results.”

“So did he?”

Birgitta snorted.

“Ernst had already done everything twice; he was absolutely convinced about the results. But despite this he did everything a third time. It took another four months, but he succeeded again. MS sufferers the world over will reap the benefits from now on. Have you finished your coffee?”

Annika crumpled the empty paper cup.

“Good,” Professor Larsén said. “You’re about to find out that these buildings weren’t part of Astra’s rather splendid old premises.”

She opened the main door, using both a plastic card and a code. They walked into a hallway with grubby walls and a dark-gray linoleum floor. They went down a flight of steps, then took an elevator down several more floors before stepping out into an underground hallway. A single strip light in the ceiling cast a bluish-white light and sharp shadows over their faces. Four plain, light-gray doors with coded locks led in different directions.

“These days the animals are kept completely isolated, both from each other and from external influences,” Birgitta Larsén said. “So we’ll have to change our clothes. I hope you haven’t got anything too valuable in that bag of yours?”

“Only money, credit cards, and car keys,” Annika said.

“Oh, well, then …”

They stepped into an air lock with changing rooms on either side, women to the right and men to the left. It was cramped and messy inside.

“For your hair,” the professor said, passing Annika a blue paper cap. “You’ll find a coat, gloves, and wooden sandals on those shelves over there. And wash your hands too, especially under your nails and around your cuticles—that’s where they’re dirtiest.”

Annika pulled her hair up and tied it into a loose knot, then put the cap on and pulled on an enormous green lab coat and a pair of pale-beige sandals. She scrubbed her hands and put on a pair of milk-colored latex gloves.

Another coded lock, and then they were inside the laboratory with the test animals.

“Hello, Eva, have you seen Bernhard Thorell?” Birgitta asked, walking up to a woman in similar clothing who was leaning over a bench. The woman didn’t look up, just carried on focusing intently on something.

“Should I have?” she asked.

Annika leaned forward, and saw that the woman was holding a small mouse. With a swift movement she cut the head off the mouse, tossed the body onto a heap of other corpses and examined the little black head.

Birgitta Larsén looked at her watch.

“We were supposed to meet here, but I might just be a bit early. This is Annika Bengtzon, I’m showing her round.”

The woman glanced up at Annika.

“Hello,” said the woman called Eva, then she went back to her mouse’s head.

“What are you doing?” Annika asked, staring at the woman’s nimble fingers.

“I need to take a slice of the mouse’s brain to check its dopamine levels,” she said. “Looking at the signal substances, in other words. From the marks on the ear here I can see if it’s been genetically modified or not.”

She held the animal’s severed head toward Annika, who nodded mutely, then she pulled out the mouse’s brain with a practised movement and lay it on a small glass tray. It was the same color as raw smoked sausage, and looked like a piece of raspberry-jelly candy.

“Oh well, I’ll just have to wait,” Birgitta Larsén said. “Shall we take a look at my animals?”

She headed off down the corridor and Annika supposed that she ought to follow her.

“You know Bernhard Thorell?” Annika asked.

Birgitta Larsén laughed.

“Not really,” she said. “He got his doctorate here a hundred years ago, then he went and got a degree in economics in Britain, but now he lives in the States, where he’s MD of Medi-Tec—the pharmaceutical company, you know. They’ve got a very talented group of scientists over there: a year or so ago they published something of real significance.”

She rounded a corner, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

“Well,” she said, “the significance of what they discovered is open to debate of course, but I suppose I’m interested because their area of research is related to mine: ageing. They discovered a way to inhibit dystrophy in axons. And that affects pretty much everyone: you start to see the first signs at the age of nine or ten.”

“They’ve found a way to stop the ageing process?” Annika said.

“So they say,” the professor said.

“The wellspring of life,” Annika said. “Wow.”

“Well,” Birgitta Larsén said, “there are various other teams round the world that have reached similar results, so it isn’t quite the case that
the Medi-Tec team were either the first or the best, but they’ve certainly demonstrated that they’re both skillful and serious. This is where we go in.”

She opened a door, revealing row after row of animals in Plexiglas boxes.

“This is where the mice live,” she said. “As you can see, they’ve got sawdust in their cages, and that white stuff you can see is their toys. All the ones on this row are mine.”

“Their toys?” Annika said, presuming the professor meant the white fluff in the cages.

“We’ve done experiments to let the mice choose what they think is most fun to play with, little plastic houses, egg cartons, or Kleenex tissues. It turned out that they love tissues: they chew them, tear them to pieces, build nests with them. Next best were egg cartons, but they were completely uninterested in the sweet little plastic houses. What they liked best of all was dragging the tissues into the egg boxes and rearranging them.”

“That’s amazing,” Annika said, and sure enough, the mouse she was watching really was playing with the tissues. “What would have happened if Lars-Henry was right?”

Birgitta Larsén gave her a quick look, then pulled down a file and leafed through it.

“You mean if Ernst had cheated and sent in false results? If someone could actually prove that was what happened?”

“Yes, what consequences would that have had for Ernst’s career?”

She carried on looking through the notes, pausing before she answered.

“If he’d been exposed as a liar? Well, what do you think would have happened?”

“He certainly wouldn’t have been appointed Chair of the Nobel Committee,” Annika said.

Birgitta Larsén stopped and looked down the corridor.

“His career would have been left in ruins, of course. Maybe he could have got a job as a lab assistant somewhere.”

She closed the file with a snap and put it back on the shelf.

“Mice aren’t social creatures,” she said. “The females can put up with each other, but the males kill each other as soon as they’re given the opportunity. Rats, on the other hand, are pack animals; they’re further down the corridor. Sometimes we have rabbits as well; they’re on the other side. In total, we’ve got about two thousand cages here at the Institute.”

“No cats or dogs or monkeys?” Annika wondered.