Apart from that, the papers were fairly similar, more or less as you might have expected. They had both bought the German terrorism angle and were identifying al Qaeda as the organization behind the attack. And they both identified Aaron Wiesel as the intended target and Caroline von Behring as an unfortunate woman who just happened to be standing in the way. Bosse’s picture byline stood at the top of an article about Caroline’s life.
He’s writing about the same things as me, she thought, then felt ashamed of her own sentimentality.
Bosse’s paper claimed that the search in Germany had been close to reaching a conclusion during the early hours of the morning, and the Evening Post quoted three anonymous sources claiming that three men had been arrested in Berlin the previous evening.
The wounded security guard spoke about the shooting out by the water in both papers, and looked exactly the same in both pictures. Wiesel was said to have flown out of the country, but no one could say where to.
Annika’s short piece about Caroline von Behring appeared as a two-column item at the end of the coverage.
The other paper had two more spreads of graphics and comment and analysis that added nothing.
But the Evening Post had one thing that the other paper didn’t.
On the comment pages a Professor Lars-Henry Svensson from the Karolinska Institute claimed that the Nobel Committee was unethical and corrupt, but his argument was unstructured and somewhat confused.
The activities of the Karolinska Institute are today governed by a number of profit-seeking companies, the professor wrote. The Nobel Committee chooses to prioritize questionable research into the origins of life. Using the Nobel Prize for profit is reprehensible for many reasons, but primarily because it goes against Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament …
“Mommy, he’s throwing balls at me,” Ellen yelled from the sea of balls.
“Throw them back,” Annika said, and went on reading:
The fact that Watson and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine is nothing but scandalous. Caroline von Behring was a great advocate of controversial stem-cell research, and her efforts were also pivotal in making sure that Watson and Wiesel were awarded this year’s prize. One might wonder at her motivations. We can’t lose sight of the debate about the future consequences of therapeutic cloning. The discussion of ethics and the value of human life must not be allowed to die with Caroline von Behring.
Who the hell accepted this peculiar article? Annika wondered. It came perilously close to slandering the deceased.
The professor had in all likelihood tried to get it into the more prestigious morning paper, then the other evening paper, and then several others before he came to them, and there were very good reasons why the others had rejected it.
“Mommy!” Kalle shouted. “She’s hitting me!”
Annika rolled the papers up and pushed them into her bag.
“Okay,” she said, getting up. “Do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to go and look at the house!”
It was already getting dark as she steered the car slowly along Vinterviksvägen in Djursholm. The road was narrow, with sandy patches along the edge of the pavement.
She pulled up by the curb, put the car in neutral, and pulled on the hand brake.
“What do you think, then, kids?” she said, turning to face the backseat. “Is it going to be fun living here?”
The children looked up from their Gameboys and gazed distractedly up at the white villa swimming out there in the encroaching darkness.
“Are there swings?” Ellen asked.
“You’ll have your own swing,” Annika said. “Do you want to go and have a look?”
“Can we go in?” Kalle asked.
Annika looked out through the windshield again.
“Not today,” she said, looking up at the modern building.
A sea view, she thought. A large garden with apple trees, oak parquet flooring throughout, open-plan kitchen and dining area, Mediterranean-blue tiles in both bathrooms, four bedrooms.
She recalled the pictures from the ad on the Internet, the light and airy bedroom, the open spaces.
“Why can’t we go in?” Kalle said. “The people who used to live here have moved, haven’t they?”
“We haven’t bought the house yet, Kalle,” Annika said. “So we don’t have our own keys yet. We can only go inside the house when the real estate broker’s here as well, and he isn’t here right now.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Ellen said, suddenly noticing that Thomas wasn’t in the car.
“Daddy’s coming later, he’s going to stay at Grandma and Grandad’s for a bit longer.”
She switched off the engine, the car died, and darkness swallowed them up.
“Mommy, put the lights on!” Ellen, who was afraid of the dark, said, and Annika quickly switched on the lamp in the roof.
“I’m getting out to have a look,” she said. “Do you want to come?”
The children both ignored her, focusing on the computer games again.
Annika opened the car door and stepped carefully out onto the frozen tarmac. The wind was blowing from the sea; she could feel the dampness even if she couldn’t see the water. The “sea view” in the ad was actually restricted to a little glimpse from one bedroom on the top floor, but that didn’t really matter.
She shut the car door behind her and walked over to the fence.
It was only three weeks since she had uncovered an old Maoist network in Luleå, and along the way she had found a large bag of euro notes in an old junction box. Converted into Swedish kronor, they were worth 128 million. She would be getting a tenth of that sum at the end of April next year as her reward for handing it in. In other words, 12.8 million kronor.
She had found the house in Djursholm before the money landed in her lap, practically newly built, quiet and peaceful, only 6.9 million.
She had got it for six and a half. No one else had offered more than that.
The contracts would be exchanged on May 1, once the reward had been paid out. They’d be selling their flat on Hantverkargatan in the spring; she’d already been in touch with a real estate broker and got it valued. They stood to get up to three and a half million for it.
“Maybe you could buy a boat,” Annika had said, curling up in Thomas’s lap.
He had kissed her hair, then pinched her nipple.
“Shall we go and have a little lie-down?” he had whispered and she had pulled away.
Couldn’t, didn’t want to. Every time he wanted to have sex she saw him together with Sophia Grenborg, kissing in public outside the NK department store where she just happened to see them. She kept imagining their bodies wet with sweat, their ecstatic faces.
“Mommy,” Ellen said through a crack in the car door. “I need to pee.”
Annika turned and went back to the car.
“Come on, I’ll help you,” she said, getting the girl out of her car seat.
She looked around to find a suitable spot to hide behind, gazing out over the sky, the treetops, and the buildings. The sky was clear, stars lighting up one by one. The silence around them was dense and black.
The house, her house, sat on a corner plot beside a crossroads. It was surrounded by houses in various styles, from big patrician villas from the turn of the last century to large brick buildings from the fifties with huge windows and big basements. Lights had started to come on, making the windows shine like cats’ eyes in the darkness. She could make out the house next door through the bare trees; the plots were all large, divided by hedges and fences.
A thought struck her: her house was the only new one. It was also one of the smallest in the area, with its 190 square meters.
“Where am I going to pee, Mommy?”
Annika walked around the car.
“Sit down here, no one will see.”
As her daughter was pulling down her tights and squatting at the side of the road Annika heard the sound of a car engine approachi
ng. The sound grew; the car was going fast.
Then its headlights broke through the darkness and swept over her and the car. It was a dark Mercedes with its lights full on. Instinctively she raised a hand to her eyes to stop herself being blinded, but the car turned off.
It turned into the drive, into what was going to be her drive, carried on past the house and across the lawn to the next plot.
“What the hell …?” Annika wondered, taking a couple of steps toward the fence.
“Mommy, I’ve finished,” her daughter said behind her.
“Get in the car and I’ll be right back,” Annika said, heading up the drive.
It was rutted with wheel marks, all heading toward the house then going off in different directions.
She took a few steps out onto the frozen lawn, following the tracks with her eyes.
The deepest and heaviest tracks led to where the Merc had just disappeared. She saw the car’s brake lights behind the bushes and heard the sound of the engine die away.
A tall, thickset man in a cap got out of the car and locked it behind him. Then he looked up, seeming to stare right at her, and she stepped back instinctively into the shadows.
He’s just taking a shortcut across the garden while the house is empty. How lazy.
The man carefully scraped the snow from his shoes and went inside the house, a rambling villa from the turn of the last century, all towers and pinnacles.
Then she looked at the grass again, trying to follow the other tracks in the darkness. They disappeared into other plots, other houses.
“Mommy, when are we going?”
The urgency in Kalle’s voice made her drop the obvious conclusion about the tracks before it had finished developing.
“Now,” she called, and turned back toward the road.
A woman walking a dog was approaching as Annika got closer to the car.
“Hello,” the woman said with a faint smile.
“Hello,” Annika said, realizing that she was freezing.
“Do you know if it’s been sold yet?” the woman said, nodding toward the house.
“Yes,” Annika said, “I’ve bought it.”
The woman stopped, somewhat surprised, as the dog tugged at its leash.
“How lovely,” the woman said, pulling off her glove and holding out her hand. “Ebba Romanova, I live over there.”
She gestured with the hand holding the leash to a house a short distance away, and Annika glimpsed another grand villa with a veranda and a summerhouse in the garden.
“And this is Francesco,” she said, patting the dog.
“But we won’t be moving in until May,” Annika said as she opened the driver’s door.
“Oh,” Ebba Romanova said, “how wonderful, May is so lovely out here. I do hope you’ll be happy here …”
Annika took a step toward the woman and pointed toward the house that the Merc had driven up to.
“Do you happen to know who lives there?”
Ebba Romanova followed her gaze.
“That’s Wilhelm Hopkins, chairman of the villa owners’ association.”
She pulled a face.
“He’s a little eccentric,” she said with a laugh.
Annika couldn’t help joining in.
“Well, I’ll see you again soon,” the woman said, pulling on her glove and setting off along the road once more.
Annika raised a hand to stop her, there was one more thing, something she was wondering. But the woman opened her gate and disappeared, and Annika never got to ask her question.
Why is my garden full of tire tracks?
The traffic heading into the city was sluggish. She couldn’t find anywhere to park near Hantverkargatan and ended up down by the City Hall before she found a more or less legal space. The children were tired and cold, so she decided to take the number 3 bus the two stops up toward the flat.
She looked up at the sky. There were never any stars visible from the city. Never any real silence, and never any real darkness either.
I like this, she thought. It’s nice, never being alone.
And her eyes settled on the main entrance to the City Hall, some twenty meters away. The heavy gates were shut up; there hadn’t been any word yet about how long the banqueting halls would be closed off.
Only two days ago, she thought with a shudder.
They were home just in time for the daily installment of the television Advent calendar for children.
Annika went out into the kitchen and dialed Thomas’s cell phone; it rang but he didn’t answer. She lay the table and pulled out some leftovers from the fridge, some pork chops from yesterday and a bit of sausage Stroganoff from Thursday.
Just as she had put the sausage in the microwave the doorbell rang.
Thomas forgot to take his keys, she thought as she went to answer it.
But it was Anne Snapphane, her best friend.
“God, I hate moving,” Anne said, slumping down on the bench in the hall. “I can’t believe I’ve got so much stuff, I mean, I’m such an antimaterialist.”
“Hmm,” Annika said, glancing at her friend’s Armani jeans and Donna Karan top.
“Don’t you ‘hmm’ me,” Anne said. “I’ve almost unpacked everything now. Do you know, I’ve got eight cheese slicers, isn’t that ridiculous? And boxes full of old vinyl records … Which reminds me, I don’t suppose you want to see if there’s anything you want? Oh well …”
She sighed as Annika help up her hands defensively.
“No, you’ve never been one for music, really, have you?” Anne said.
“Is Miranda with Mehmet?” Annika asked, heading back into the kitchen were the microwave was bleeping.
Anne didn’t answer at once. She followed Annika and leaned back against the dishwasher with her arms folded.
“Playing happy families with him and his pregnant fiancée, yes,” she said quietly.
Annika poked at the sausage.
“Do you want anything to eat?” she asked.
“No, but I’ll take a big goddamn bottle of red,” she said.
When she saw Annika stiffen she laughed quickly.
“Only joking,” she said. “I’m not going to do that anymore. After all, I made a promise.”
“Do you like the flat?” Annika asked instead, filling a jug with water.
“I don’t know about ‘like,’” Anne said. “Obviously it’s good being able to live next to Mehmet, it’s closer for Miranda, but I’m not sure that art nouveau is really my style.”
Annika emptied the jug and refilled it with fresh, colder water. Her cheeks were glowing and for some reason she was feeling stupid. Anne Snapphane had moved into the city so her daughter could be closer to her dad, and so she would always be around the same school, the same friends. When Annika found herself suddenly awash with money it had been obvious to offer Anne an interest-free loan so she could sort her life out. When it turned out that the money wouldn’t show up before May, Anne had hit the roof. She had to move now, her dream flat was for sale right now, she couldn’t live anywhere else.
Annika had stood as a guarantor of a short-term loan until her reward was paid out. But now Anne seemed to think that the whole move had been nothing but a nuisance.
“Have you heard anything from TV Scandinavia?” Annika asked, to change the subject.
Anne snorted.
“My former employers have announced that they won’t be paying any severance, and that’s all I’ve heard from them. If I have any objections to this decision I’m welcome to put in a claim against them through the New Jersey courts. So hey, I wonder what to do, maybe I’ll get in my private plane and nip over …”
She sighed loudly.
“I have enough trouble scraping together the money for my monthly ticket for public transport here …”
“Kids,” Annika called toward the living room. “Food!”
“I’ve been thinking about doing some lecturing,” Anne said, hoisting herself up onto the kitchen c
ountertop. “I think I’d be able to put together something good about how to sort your life out and all that, there’s a hell of a market for developing leadership skills, self-realization, all that sort of rubbish. What do you think?”
“I can’t remember, did you say you wanted some food?” Annika asked. “We’re about to eat.”
“Sausage? No thanks.”
“I can do you a salad if you like?” Annika offered.
Anne shuffled on the countertop, irritated.
“Just tell me what you think of my idea!”
“Come on, before it gets cold,” Annika called toward the living room. “Well, lecturing would be good, but what would you talk about?”
“Myself, of course!” Anne said, throwing her arms out. “How I overcame my alcoholism, how I got out of the gutter when I lost my job as head of a TV station, how I manage to maintain a close and rewarding relationship with my ex-husband while he’s busy building a new family.”
The children came into the kitchen and scrambled up onto their chairs.
“Sausage frog enough, yum,” Ellen said.
“It’s called Stroganoff,” Kalle said. “And it’s just as good as the Nobel banquet, isn’t it, Mommy?”
Annika smiled at her son, while Anne raised her eyebrows.
“Of course, you got caught up in all that, didn’t you?” she said. “Poor you, having to cover that sort of nonsense, couldn’t you have refused?”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Annika said. “Until … well, you know.”
She fell silent and gestured pointedly toward the children with her fork.
“So, what do you think?” Anne said. “Do you think I’d be able to earn a living?”
“Sure,” Annika said. “It’s pretty specialized, but you’d be really good at lecturing. It’s great listening to you tell your stories. I think a lot of people would come out stronger after a session with you.”
Anne smiled broadly and jumped down from the countertop.
“That’s exactly what I think,” she said. “Listen, you haven’t got a spare five hundred I could borrow, have you? The move and everything cost so much and I’ve got a feeling I really need to go to the cinema.”
“The cinema?” Annika said.
“Yes, I can’t go and have a drink now, so what else am I supposed to do?”
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