Last Will (44 page)

The phone rang again, three, four, five times …

“Thorell.”

Annika took a deep breath and cleared her throat.

“Yes,” she said, “good afternoon, my name’s Annika Bengtzon and I’m calling from the
Evening Post
. We met very briefly yesterday, in the animal-testing lab. I was there with Birgitta Larsén …”

“Ah yes,” he said. “The doctoral student.”

Annika smiled.

“Am I phoning at a bad time?”

“That depends on what you’re phoning about,” the pharmaceutical company boss said, and it sounded like he was smiling back at her.

“The death last night,” she said. “I’m interested in how it might affect your work.”

“As far as I’m aware, the matter is being investigated by the police,” Bernhard Thorell said. “Obviously, it’s very tragic, but it won’t have any noticeable impact on our research project.”

His accent was upper-class Swedish, not American English.

“One professor is dead,” Annika said, “and a second is being questioned about the incident. Surely that would affect relations and the working atmosphere within the Institute? I know they had an argument after the seminar on Saturday, and I know you were there …”

He breathed in so quickly and hard that Annika paused.

“I don’t know what that was about at all,” he said rather abruptly, “so naturally I can’t say anything about it.”

“I completely understand,” Annika said. “I just wanted to get an impression of what happened that evening, and I know that Lars-Henry confronted several other people, yourself included.”

Thorell was quiet for several seconds.

“In and of itself, that is correct.”

“I realize that you don’t want to speak out of turn,” she said, “but I was wondering if you might be able to tell me what Lars-Henry said to you personally?”

There was the sound of crackling on the line.

“I have a lunch appointment at the faculty club,” Bernhard Thorell said. “Meet me outside there in half an hour.”

He clicked to end the call without waiting for an answer.

The faculty club?

Was that the same thing as the Black Fox?

Annika parked her car outside an old wooden building at number 2 Nobels väg. It was a red-painted cottage with yellow shutters outside the windows and white curtains. She got out, locked the car, and peered curiously through one of the windows. It looked like they were holding some sort of conference in there.

With its mature trees and extensive lawns, the whole area exuded a sense of peace and quiet, with the noise of the expressway only audible as a distant rumble in the background. Ponytails and shirttails alike fluttered in the wind, the sound of footsteps and laughter echoing between the buildings. The spokes of bicycle wheels twinkled from the footbridge over to the Karolinska Hospital.

Annika walked slowly down the dead-end road, passing the Medical Society and a Friskis & Svettis gym, heading for the restaurant where she had eaten lunch with Ebba and Birgitta last week. Yes, the faculty club was the Black Fox. She checked her watch, she was on time. Just to be sure she walked past the windows, looking in, but she couldn’t see any sign of Bernhard Thorell, nor of Birgitta Larsén, for that matter.

She sat down on the steps leading up to the copper door.

The sun was beating down on her head, and she turned her face to the warmth and closed her eyes.

Lovely—she had forgotten how delicate sunlight could feel.

Still with her eyes shut, she let her head fall forward and realized she
was on the point of dozing off. She jerked and shook herself, pushing her hair back from her face.

Bernhard Thorell was heading toward her from further inside the campus, his hands in his trouser pockets. His suit, gray and ever so slightly shiny, fit his body like a second skin. The wind ruffled his hair, and his eyes wrinkled as he squinted against the sun.

I can see why Birgitta Larsén is so taken with him, Annika thought as she stood up and went to meet him.

He took his hands out of his pockets and they greeted each other.

“Sometimes Sweden really is lovely,” he said, his eyes looking her over.

She realized to her surprise that she felt flattered, a little shiver of heat running through her body. She pulled her hand away.

“So have you moved here for good?” she asked brightly.

Bernard Thorell laughed, flashing his even white teeth.

“Not at all,” he said. “I kept the family farm in Roslagen after my parents’ accident, and I try to spend at least a week or two there every year, to keep in touch with my roots.”

Annika’s smile stiffened—was his parents’ accident something she should have known about?

“Your parents?” she asked, feeling very stupid.

He looked down at the gravel for a moment, then met her gaze with a hint of melancholy in his bright eyes.

“They died when I was a teenager,” he said.

Hadn’t Berit said something about them, about his father being a venture capitalist, and a car crash in the Alps?

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

He smiled.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve gotten over it—it was years ago now. Right now I’m only here to see how work on our research project is going.”

Annika snuck a glance at him. He was taller that he looked when you saw him from a distance.

“Is it going to lead to a Nobel Prize?”

“For this?”

He laughed.

“You never know. There are so many worthy candidates, and often you don’t know until later which discoveries are going to stand the test of time, so that’s not a good way to tell. Nobel wanted the prize to benefit humanity in the long term, so it’s a good thing that the Committee takes its time making its choice. You wanted to know what Professor Svensson said to me?”

“If you don’t mind telling me …”

Bernhard Thorell looked out across the grass, deep in thought for a few moments.

“The professor was very critical about our work,” he finally said. “Because we’ve found a way to slow down the ageing process, even to stop it. He accused us of wanting to discover the secret of eternal life, but that isn’t what our research is about at all.”

“He thinks you’re playing at being God,” Annika said with a smile.

Bernhard Thorell smiled back at her.

“Sadly it isn’t possible to conduct any sort of reasonable discussion with the dear fellow. I would have to describe him as a fairly extreme creationist.”

“So the pharmaceutical industry is the jaws of the monster?”

“Exactly. And we have to watch out, because otherwise
retribution awaits.
”

He said these last words in a hoarse voice with his eyes wide-open. Annika laughed.

“So Nemesis is going to punish you?” she said, and Bernhard Thorell’s smile grew wider. Two dimples appeared in his cheeks, and the color of his eyes looked deeper. Annika looked into them and thought
oh no, not again, not another Bosse
, but she still couldn’t help smiling back.

“So you know about Nemesis?” Bernhard Thorell said, taking a step closer to her.

“The goddess of retribution,” Annika said. “And the title of a play by Alfred Nobel.”

He tilted his head, smiling so that his teeth sparkled.

“Not many people know that,” he said. “That Alfred Nobel was so interested in Beatrice Cenci.”

He was standing so close that Annika’s head was spinning.

“She was a fascinating woman, who met a very nasty end,” Annika said, thinking that her voice sounded strange, too high, too soft.

He bowed his head while keeping his eyes on hers, then stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, making the shoulders of his jacket ride up slightly.

God, Annika thought, he’s so handsome.

“So young,” he said quietly, “and so beautiful …”

It sounded as if he were caressing her.

“I know,” Annika said breathlessly. “She was incredibly beautiful. Ebba, my neighbor, has a painting of her in her living room …”

All of a sudden there was total silence between them. Bernhard Thorell was staring at her, the glint in his eye dissolving and fading away.

“Not the one by Guido Reni?”

Annika searched her memory, who did Ebba say had painted it?

“I don’t know—I can ask,” she said with a confused little smile, taking a step back.

“Ebba?” Bernhard Thorell said. “Not the one working here at the lab? Ebba Romanova?”

Annika nodded—yes, that was her.

His smile was back, just as warm as before.

“Imagine,” he said, “what a small world.”

And he turned without another word and went inside the Black Fox.

The Kitten hung the bag holding her tennis racket higher on her shoulder and took hold of the bicycle’s handlebars with both hands. She let her ponytail fall down her back as she adjusted the visor over her eyes, her tennis shoes scraping the tarmac under her feet. Okay, off we go, and the bastard bike rolled along beautifully beside her. If there was one thing she was good at, it was melting into affluent suburban settings.

This was the first time she had found anything remotely good about this bastard country. For the first time she had found a shred of a reason for these people to live up here at the North Pole.

Naturally, she knew why—she didn’t need a shrink to explain her
reasoning: the area reminded her of where her dad lived just outside Boston, where he moved after the divorce. Big, comfortable detached houses in muted colors. Small-paned windows that shimmered unevenly in the sun. Well-clipped lawns and blossoming fruit trees in spacious gardens, behind neatly painted fences and trimmed hedges.

She had to admit she was surprised.

There was some civilization up here, after all.

The exception was that silly little reporter’s horrible modern monstrosity.

On a flat patch of ground cut up by tire tracks she had chucked up a showy white house with dead architecture, with no sense of tradition or proportion. It had been easy to find the plan of the house in an old ad on the Internet. All open-plan and so-called modern on the ground floor, and four bedrooms upstairs. You didn’t have to be Einstein to work out how the Bengtzon family used the rooms.

The two bedrooms at the front of the house were where the little darlings slept, blue curtains with pictures of toys on them for the boy, pastel-colored with flowers for the girl. Christ, it made her want to throw up. At the back lay the master bedroom and a small office, where Ms. Bengtzon had nice, tidy sex with her dull bureaucrat husband and wrote her nasty little articles.

She felt her scalp crawl; she was having trouble breathing and felt strangely uneasy.

She had to focus—this was all about planning and marking out her posts.

She bit her lip to make herself concentrate, swinging her ponytail. She adopted an affluent facial expression and looked around at the more appealing villas. Immediately behind the crappy house was a really nice property, where a tall older man was polishing a Mercedes.

On the other side of the road lay the best house in the neighborhood. A villa in the national romantic style, three floors plus a basement, with hints of gothic mystery. The façade was heavy and dark, the effect lightened by the large windows and irregular woodwork of the veranda. The garden was mature and well looked after, with a summerhouse and a well. The far end was given over to a dog pen.

Even that, the Kitten thought, stopping for a moment. Even a dog pen.

She could almost guess what it looked like inside. She knew how it smelled, how it felt, the lofty ceilings, the light through the leaded windows, the draft under the doors in winter.

This was exactly the sort of house Grant lived in, summerhouse, dog pen and all. She smiled at the memories of her childhood friend. He grew up in the house next to her father’s, and visits to her father had been strictly rationed. She was allowed to be there when her mother was in the nuthouse. Fortunately, this happened every so often, like the time she slit her wrists and wrote drunken letters about
the horrible whore
(dad’s new woman, whom she never heard called anything else).

Those had been magical moments, the times she was allowed to go around Grant’s. She thought back to the gothic building.

The summerhouse, where they smoked their first joint.

The attic room up under the roof, where they had their stash of porn magazines.

The cellar, where they trapped mice and practiced cutting their heads off with an old kitchen knife.

She chuckled quietly at the memory.

Grant had been a sweetie. It was a shame he got so fucking boring when he grew up. Director of a fucking symphony orchestra—how boring could you get?

She sighed and pushed the bike on again—one, two, one, two, the crunch of Tarmac under her shoes. She was leaning heavily on the handlebars to relieve the pain in her left leg. You would hardly know she had a limp.

Soon her research out here would be done. She just had to get hold of a few things and check her timing.

She glanced back at the tasteless, trashy white house, the oh-so-clever reporter’s hideous home.

She’d be doing the area a big favor by wiping it off the face of the earth.

Annika returned to the newsroom, feeling suddenly lost and exhausted. What was she doing here?

She had no desk of her own; she had her laptop in her bag; she didn’t know who she should talk to about her work.

Spike?

He couldn’t even be bothered to look up at her.

Berit?

She had more than enough of her own to worry about.

It reminded her of twelfth grade, when the experts had decided that group work without a teacher, outside the classroom, was a good idea. Pointless and cheap.

She went over to the places allocated to the day-shift reporters. They were covered in shriveled apple cores, notes, and empty coffee cups.

So now she was expected to be a cleaner at work as well.

She gritted her teeth and found a large wastepaper basket, and swept everything into it without bothering to pick out anything that ought to go in the recycling bin, then went and got a damp cloth from the bathroom. She wiped the coffee stains and bits of banana off one of the desks and unpacked her laptop.