Last Will (51 page)

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Annika pressed
Get a new password
.

A new window appeared on the screen, and she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and leaned forward to read.

To get a new password you must answer your security question correctly:

What was the name of the first school you attended?

What was Caroline von Behring’s first school called?

She picked up the phone and called Birgitta Larsén once more. The professor was back to her old routine again and answered at once.

“Carrie’s first school? There was only ever one. The French School. Caroline was an incurable Francophile, a real snob if you ask me. What are you up to now?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Annika said, and hung up.

Filled in
French
.

A new window opened up.

Create new password.

Confirm password.

Annika chose
alfred
.

The screen flickered.

Welcome Caroline!

She gasped. Caroline had an online email account, and she had broken into it!

She glanced quickly over the page. It looked like the opening page of most other online mailboxes.

You have one (1) unread message.

On the left was a list of the usual folders: Inbox, Drafts, Sent mail, Spam, Deleted. In the in-box she could see her own email,
test
.

Below the list was a heading marked
My folders
.

It contained a folder entitled
Archive
.

Annika clicked on it, her pulse racing.

There were six messages, all sent to Andrietta Ahlsell from Caroline von Behring. Their headings were:
In the Shadow of Death, The Price of Love, The Greatest Fear, Disappointment, Nobel’s Will
, and
Alfred Bernhard
.

Annika opened them in order.

Her frustration grew with each one she read.

These weren’t secrets.

They were short musings about Caroline von Behring’s hero, tragic little commentaries on Alfred Nobel’s life and death.

She moved the mouse to hover over the sixth and last document, taking a couple of deep breaths before clicking on it.

It had been written in September last year, three months before Caroline’s death.

Annika read more and more slowly the further she got.

SUBJECT: Alfred Bernhard

TO: Andrietta Ahlsell

That’s his name, Alfred Bernhard, just like his namesake, just like Nobel, but his surname is Thorell.

He used to light up the whole room when he walked in.

Lectures with Bernhard Thorell in the audience were always a bit
magical
, oddly golden, somehow, never dull.

I felt so alive when Bernhard was nearby, so interesting and spiritual, my analyses and conclusions so radiant and clear.

Other people became tongue-tied in his presence, others strangely anxious.

I used to despise them.

It wasn’t that I was in love (that’s not how I would describe it), more like
flattered
, or possibly
fascinated
. He had a quality that really affected people, and if only he had studied a bit harder he would have made an excellent doctor.

But he still chose to be a scientist.

I got it into my head that he was doing it for my sake.

For my sake.

That was the effect he had on people: we all felt specially chosen, all of us gray souls.

He got in touch with me, asked if there were any doctoral positions in my research group, and I was so flattered that I hardly knew what to think: he wanted to work with
me
, on
my
project. His wish was confirmation of my own brilliance, my pedagogical and scientific superiority. The fact that his career choices were a consequence of his own poor exam results was something I never considered.

Caroline, Caroline, how naïve could you be?

When the first doctoral students came in and started to talk I dismissed them. I shouted at one of them, a young woman from Czechoslovakia who had staked everything on coming here—I drove her out and my cheeks still burn with shame when I think about it. Her name was Katerina; she was short, with dark hair. She had left her husband and her young daughter as hostages in her home country for the chance to conduct research at the Karolinska Institute (this was before the Iron Curtain came down), and she would sometimes weep over her test tubes because she was missing them so much. She came to see me, reluctantly, and accused Bernhard of the most peculiar things.

He had made an unwelcome approach to her, she had pulled away and gently declined, and then odd things started to happen to her research.

Katerina was adamant that Bernhard Thorell had changed the labels on her samples so that her experiment failed. She was absolutely convinced, and I can still remember how upset I got.

How
dare
she come to me with such absurd gossip? How
could
she? Had she no sense of honor? A week later I saw to it that she was expelled from the Institute and sent back to the concrete bunker outside Prague where she belonged.

I never found out what happened to her. I still don’t know what happened when she got home. Her young daughter must be grown up by now, an adult.

I’ve thought about you so often, Katerina.

Oh God, if only I had listened in time!

The next woman who came to me with stammering accusations was Tuula, a brilliant Finnish girl with her roots in the Swedish settlements of Ostrobothnia. She was on her way to making a remarkable discovery, and had finished the first draft of her article, which had been preliminarily accepted by the
Journal of Biological Chemistry
. She was already renowned within the Institute.

She had spent three years on her research, three years of eyes red with overwork, three years of neglected social life, but it was worth it, she said. It was worth it.

And she smiled as she said it, the only time in three years that I saw her smile.

And she smiled until Bernhard went to see her and reminded her of something she had forgotten: that a few months earlier he had helped with some mundane matter, the sort of thing we occasionally do for each other.

He asked Tuula to list him as the coauthor of her article, and naturally Tuula refused. Naturally! There was no reason whatsoever to name him. Bernhard asked her to think about it until Friday, saying that if would be for her own good if she changed her mind.

But Tuula held firm. She challenged him, and it went on to cost her dear.

When she arrived at the lab the following Monday the plug of her freezer had been pulled out at the wall. The lid was open and three years of research had melted into an ill-smelling sludge at the bottom of her test tubes.

Tuula left KI that day. She moved to England and repeated all of her experiments at Cambridge. She published her findings in
Science
two and a half years later.

Only after publication did she tell me all of this, in a long letter that I burned at once.

As time went on Bernhard no longer asked for permission. He simply stole other people’s research and published it under his own name. He had his unpaid assistants take care of his own doctoral thesis, and he was lucky. One of the young women, I forget her name, was a prodigious talent who secured his doctorate for him.

My own awakening was especially painful.

I have always had a soft spot for the animals. In those days there were all sorts of different ones, and they were all over the place, not only in isolated premises but in all sorts of locations.

I arrived at the lab late one evening to check on a small puppy that was unwell. The lights were off and all the doors were locked in the corridor leading to the lab, but over by the operating table some bright lights were on.

I went over to see if someone had forgotten to turn them off, but halfway there I stopped. An animal scream cut through the lab, deathly anguish echoing around the bare walls, and I saw shadows moving among the rows of shelves.

There was someone there, someone hurting one of the animals. The screaming rolled round the walls, muffling my footsteps through the shadows, and I got myself into a position where I could see what was happening.

It was Bernhard. He had secured a female cat in the stereotactic apparatus and was busy cutting out its womb. The cat hadn’t been drugged or sedated, and was screaming with a raw anguish I had never heard the like of before. He had secured the animal with a screw through the base of the skull and into its brain. And I could see Bernhard’s face in profile, and the look of complete ecstasy on it.

He was beside himself with joy.

I felt I was about to faint, but stood my ground.

I stood in the shadows as the cat bled to death, screwed into that contraption, as its screams grew weaker and Bernhard sat there enchanted with its organs in his hands, a womb containing embryonic kittens, with a pair of small ovaries stuck to the side.

Afterwards he washed the table carefully. He burned the body of the cat in the furnace, the way we did in those days, then filled in a report about his experiment.

Tests on the optical nerve
, he wrote.

Then he left the lab, turning the lights off behind him, and whistling as he went.

I spent the following week at home, with a terrible fever and horrible stomach cramps.

When I got back to the Institute I summoned Bernhard, the Institute’s magical charmer.

I told him I was terminating his doctoral position with immediate effect. He had thirty minutes to leave the premises.

But Bernhard just smiled.

Why?
he asked simply.

The cat,
I said.

Oh,
he said, tilting his head.

Thirty minutes,
I said.

I don’t think so,
Bernhard said.

Then he told me about the group photograph from the conference in Helsinki. He had it in a safe place, together with documentation confirming the date the picture had been taken.

He had also dug out the dates of when the supplementary research for my article in
Science
had been carried out, and—
would you believe it?
—they were the same dates.

The same dates.

Bernhard Thorell laughed, he laughed and laughed.

So, my dear Caroline, he said, standing right next to me, you’re going to pass my dissertation, and you’re going to do it this spring.

Never, I said, still hearing the cat’s screaming through my whole body.

But I did. I did it. I did it.

I passed his dissertation.

I fell in line, and I am still ashamed.

I have never told anyone, not even you, Birgitta.

But now I have to, because he’s come back.

He’s here again, and this time he wants more.

The Nobel Prize, Birgitta. He wants the Nobel Prize for Medicine for Medi-Tec’s research into the ageing process, otherwise he’s going to expose me. Not this time, I’ve told him, never again. I’d sooner fall.

He doesn’t believe me, I can see that he doesn’t believe me. For him the choice is so straightforward, and he presumes that it is for me too.

But he’s wrong.

He’s wrong.