Ebba came and stood next to Annika, and together they looked into the childish face’s light-brown eyes.
“Beatrice Cenci,” Annika said. “I was reading about her on the Internet yesterday, about the fact that Alfred Nobel wrote a play about her.”
“Poor Beatrice,” Ebba said, looking sympathetically at the picture. “A young girl couldn’t win against men and the church in those days. She was doomed to fail.”
“So she really did exist?” Annika wondered.
“Oh yes,” Ebba said. “Her fate has fascinated people for several centuries. Alfred Nobel wasn’t the first great man to write about her. Percy Shelley wrote a play in blank verse in 1819, and Alexandre Dumas devoted a whole chapter to her in his epic work about crime, Celebrated Crimes. Why do you ask?”
“Who was she?” Annika asked. “And what happened to her?”
“Beatrice was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a rich and powerful nobleman.”
“And she murdered him?”
Ebba nodded.
“With the approval of her brothers and stepmother. During the trial it emerged that her father had been the most awful tyrant. He used to lock Beatrice and her stepmother inside his castle close to Rieti, and would subject them to pretty much every sort of abuse you can imagine.”
“But that didn’t count for anything in the trial?”
“Francesco was rich; the pope thought he would be able to get his hands on the family’s assets if Beatrice was gotten rid of. So she was beheaded on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crosses the Tiber at the edge of the Vatican. There were huge crowds there to watch. She became a sort of symbol for anyone who was the victim of an unfair trial, practically a saint.”
“But not in the eyes of the church, of course,” Annika said.
Ebba smiled.
“No, naturally. How are you getting on with your job?”
“I start again on Tuesday,” Annika said, smiling back at her. “I have to admit that I’m really pleased. I have to have something else to do beside just pairing socks.”
“I understand,” Ebba said, heading back toward the door. “Have you given any thought to what we talked about, moving away from violence and taking a look at the world of scientific research instead?”
Annika looked at her, watching the way her hair bounced as she walked.
“As far as I can see, the world of research can get pretty violent at times,” she said. “Did you happen to know Johan Isaksson?”
Ebba stopped midstep and turned around slowly. She looked at Annika thoughtfully.
“Isaksson?” she said. “Do you mean the lad who had that awful accident? Shut inside one of the freeze rooms?”
Annika nodded.
“I knew who he was—his lab was in the same department as mine. His research area was quite close to mine: he was looking into neurodegenerative diseases—Parkinson’s, I think. At any rate, he was working with signal pathways and proteins, just like me. Why do you ask?”
Annika took a breath, about to answer, but for some reason she changed her mind.
“I …I was locked in a room with a temperature of minus 20 not too long ago,” she said. “Last winter, actually. There were several of us—one man died …”
She looked down, not quite sure why she hadn’t said it like it was, that she’d been called in by the police to talk about Johan Isaksson’s death.
“Do you want to come along and take a look?” Ebba Romanova said. “Then you could get an idea of whether it’s worth covering?”
“Would that be all right?” Annika wondered.
“Of course,” Ebba said, “but if you haven’t got official access you’ll have to go incognito. Do you need to get anything, or can we set off straightaway?”
The Volvo was a station wagon, so that Francesco could go in the back. He was evidently used to it. He protested loudly when he wasn’t allowed to go with them.
The car still smelled new, with a hint of damp dog. Ebba drove calmly and sensibly down the Norrtälje road, then turned onto the highway through Berghamra.
“The research world is a bit odd,” she said. “I’m very glad I’m slightly detached from it—I don’t have to fight with everyone else for grants and status.”
Gray viaducts slid past outside the car windows.
“What makes it odd?” Annika asked.
“So many are called and so few are chosen,” Ebba said. “I’ve got two friends who are on their way to becoming professors, but their nominations keep getting challenged, to the point where they’ll be lucky to get their appointments before they retire. Is it like that in journalism too?”
“Not quite,” Annika said. “Most of the Swedish media is privately owned, apart from the papers published by unions and similar organizations. Then there’s Swedish Television and Radio Sweden. So the owners decide who gets the top jobs. They usually go for the people who are most commercial and fit in well with the board and management.”
“Naturally,” Ebba said. “It’s like that for us as well. Although your work is much more public than ours, of course. With us, there’s a constant stream of gossip and speculation and rumor about what everyone else is doing.”
“Is it very competitive?” Annika wondered.
“You bet!” Ebba said. “When I started my postgrad, that was the first thing my adviser told me: turn all your papers face down whenever you leave your desk. Never let anyone read anything you’re working on. Never tell anyone what you’ve achieved or what you’re trying to do. The levels of suspicion and secrecy are absurd.”
“What a nuisance,” Annika said. “But surely you have to be able to confide in someone?”
“Your adviser,” Ebba said, “although that can be a disaster as well. I know advisers who have stolen their doctoral students’ research and published it as their own. On the other hand I’ve seen the opposite too, students stealing their advisers’ results.”
“Damn,” Annika said. “I thought having a story pinched was unique to our branch.”
They drove onto the campus via Nobels väg, passing the Nobel Forum on their left and continuing into the university site. They rolled down narrow roads between heavy red-brick buildings.
“That’s where we used to have lectures when I was a student,” Ebba said, pointing up at a large building on the corner of von Eulers väg.
Annika looked up at it, a three-story brick building, the windows dating it to the 1950s.
They swung left and then right, and ahead of them loomed a modern white steel-framed building. Ebba had her own parking space outside the main entrance.
“This can’t have been built all that long ago?” Annika said, looking up at the sparkling façade.
Ebba shut and locked the car door.
“Sometimes I wonder if the right hand knows what the left is doing,” she said. “The politicians put up new buildings and pull old ones down, all at the same time. You’ve heard they want to spend five billion tearing down the entire hospital and building a new one? You can go in—it’s not locked—then aim for the stairs. We’re going down two floors.”
The building was light and airy. The stairwell was open and stretched up through all the floors, making the entrance hall seem much bigger than it was. They headed down the broad, dark oak steps to a large open space that functioned as the cafeteria, then one floor below that the stairs stopped in a series of heavy doors with coded locks.
“First right,” Ebba said.
Annika stood to one side to let the scientist past. She pulled her card through the reader on the door, and there was a faint click as the lock slid open.
“My office is straight ahead, then right. I’m just going to check if I’ve got any mail …”
Ebba stopped at the pigeonholes just to the right of the main door. A bulletin board shouted out the sort of messages that bulletin boards usually held, telling you to have your ID clearly visible, to use the right bar codes on envelopes, which numbers to call in case of problems and m
alfunctions.
“Are you going to get into trouble because I’m here?” Annika said in a low voice.
Ebba was looking through a pile of envelopes.
“I doubt it,” she said without looking up. “There are so many people coming and going that no one will notice you.”
She put all the envelopes except one back in her pigeonhole.
“Just a load of junk mail,” she said, slipping the chosen envelope into her handbag.
The corridor felt cramped and dark, even though the walls were white and the floor light gray. Annika could see daylight further ahead, but it didn’t reach far into the passageway.
“Shall I tell you a bit about what we do here?” Ebba said, glancing at Annika over her shoulder.
Without waiting for a reply she pulled open the first door on the left.
“The centrifuge room,” she said, and Annika followed her—yes, she could recognize centrifuges. They looked like washing machines, only bigger.
“What do you need them for?” Annika asked.
“We use centrifugal force to separate substances from the medium they’re suspended in,” Ebba said. “Suppose I want to extract a particular protein from a solution. I’d put it in a centrifuge and the proteins would form a lump at the bottom.”
Annika stared at the machines.
“The heaviest elements end up at the bottom?” she asked.
“Exactly. Very practical when you’re trying to get at things held inside cells and membranes, for instance.”
The door opened and a plump little woman came into the room, her hennaed hair all over the place. Annika recognized Birgitta Larsén at once, the professor who had been friends with Caroline von Behring.
“Ebba,” the woman said, handing the scientist a polystyrene box. “Can you be a dear and send this out, please? Thanks so much—remind me that I owe you lunch one day. By the way, we need to get onto the messengers about those missing antibodies—have you put in a claim yet?”
She moved quickly through the narrow space without waiting for a reply, passing close to Annika without appearing to notice her.
“I did it on Monday,” Ebba said in answer to the professor’s question.
They went out again, passing a huge photocopier surrounded by polystyrene boxes.
“For when we need to send things,” Ebba said. “Most of our stuff needs packing in dry ice to keep it cool. I’ll just make sure that this one gets sent out.”
Somewhere behind Annika a door opened and the sound of male voices laughing rolled along the corridor. She turned to see three men in suits come around a corner and along the narrow corridor; they were focused entirely on each other, talking loudly in English. Annika recognized the man in the middle but she couldn’t quite place him.
“Wait here,” Ebba said, disappearing into a small room.
Thirty seconds later she was back, without the package.
“Our professor hasn’t quite worked out that we’ve got people who do this for us,” she said.
Annika was standing in the corridor watching the loud men disappear.
“Who were those guys?”
She pointed at the door where they had vanished.
“Bernhard Thorell and his fan club,” Ebba said. “They’ve been here all week. This is my room.”
She tapped her four-figure code into the keypad to unlock the door, then let Annika into the smallest office she had ever seen. Three desks piled high with computers and heaps of paper were crammed into just seven square meters.
“And I thought I’d had some cramped offices!” Annika said.
Bernhard Thorell, she thought, the head of the American pharmaceutical company who was at the press conference in the Nobel Forum last winter.
“I gather this used to be the smoking room,” Ebba said, “so at least we’ve got good ventilation. Would you like to see my lab?”
“You have your own?” Annika said, starting get a grip on the perspectives of the research world.
“I share it with seven other people. Left, then the first corridor on the left.”
Annika let Ebba go first and followed her with a slight sense of claustrophobia. The corridor was pressing in on her from every angle, above, below, and on each side. Admittedly, it was a bit lighter here, all the lab doors had round windows in them, but the feeling of being shut in was worse. Maybe it was because of the bookshelves, computers, and printers that had been squeezed in between the different offices, with rows of test tubes and petri dishes and flasks. There were posters and notices taped up all over the place. Some of the lab doors had timetables on them, for people to book time on.
“This is an air lock,” Ebba said. “You have to change shoes and put on protective clothing before going inside the cell lab. Here you go—it fastens at the back of the neck.”
Annika took the yellow-and-white striped tunic, which reminded her of the surgical outfits she had seen in ER. It had long sleeves with tight, elastic wrists. On a shelf to the right of the door was a row of white wooden sandals next to a pair of large gas canisters.
“Which ones should I use?” Annika asked, reading the names above the shoes.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ebba said.
They went into the laboratory.
An Asian woman was crouching in a fume cupboard, concentrating hard on dripping something into a test tube with a large pipette. She was wearing the same yellow-and-white protective clothing, with gloves that covered her wrists.
“There are loads of Chinese people here,” Ebba said, then said hello to the woman. She didn’t answer.
“What’s she doing?” Annika asked.
“Don’t know,” Ebba said, glancing quickly at her. “She’s so tense, I think she must be preparing cells to try and detect proteins with the help of antibodies. Antibodies are expensive, a big experiment can cost up to sixty thousand kronor. And a whole delivery has only just gone missing …”
She moved a bit closer to Annika and lowered her voice.
“You never ask what other people are doing,” she said. “And you never tell anyone else what you’re doing. It’s best not to get your own research mixed up with anyone else’s.”
Ebba stepped away, and went back to her usual tone of voice.
“My cells are in this incubator.”
She opened something that looked like a normal fridge, but inside it was warm rather than cold.
“They need 37 degrees to thrive. Add a bit of nutrient and five percent carbon dioxide, and they almost always do what you want them to. Unless something happens, of course.”
“Like what?” Annika asked.
“It could be something as simple as picking up the wrong bottle when you’re working on an experiment,” Ebba said. “There are any number of ways of messing things up, like confusing different growth cultures. So many of the bottles look the same.”
She closed the door of the incubator and went over to a large bucket with a lid.
“This is where I keep the cells when I’m not using them,” she said, unscrewing the lid and pulling out the insulation. “This is liquid nitrogen, minus 196 degrees.”
White vapor drifted out of the container and Annika instinctively took a step back.
“Talking about cold,” she said, “could I see the freeze room?”
Ebba replaced the polystyrene container and screwed the lid back on.
“Sure,” she said. “It’s in the next corridor along. We’ll have to go through the air lock again.”
The freeze room was at the far end of a section of corridor that received no natural light at all. Shadows from the doors along the corridor cast strange patterns over the walls.
“As you can see, light and temperature are controlled from out here,” Ebba said, pointing to a large control panel to the right of the door. A display indicated that the temperature inside was minus 25 degrees.
“What was he doing in there?” Annika asked.
“I suppose he was fetching something,” Ebba said. “
We store a whole load of samples in there, as well as quite a bit of useless stuff, like waste blood and so on. We can go in for a moment, but I have to warn you, it really is extremely cold.”
She pressed a switch to turn the lights on and pulled the door open. The cold hit them, making Annika gasp.
“I think we’ll leave the door open,” Ebba said.
The room was very narrow, lined with shelving on both sides. Bottles and flasks and boxes were piled up to the ceiling; every inch of space seemed to have been used.
“How on earth could he have got stuck in here and frozen to death?” Annika said, fighting against claustrophobia.
“The emergency door opener has been a bit temperamental before—I was almost shut in once,” Ebba said. “And rumor has it that he was under the influence of alcohol and something else, so his wits probably weren’t at their sharpest.”
Annika looked around the room, feeling that she would soon have to get out.
“But there’s an alarm over there,” she said, pointing to a button close to the floor at the far end. “Why didn’t he press it? And why didn’t he yell until someone came and opened up?”
“He was on his own here on a Saturday evening. His lab was the only one booked.”
Annika looked at Ebba and couldn’t help asking: “How do you know that?”
Ebba stopped and looked at her calmly and blankly for a few seconds.
“The booking timetables are pinned up outside the air locks,” she said breezily. “Anyone who can read can see who’s booked in. Shall we go back out?”
Annika stepped quickly out into the corridor and breathed out quietly, relieved, as the door closed behind them. A moment later there was a commotion behind them in the corridor. Ebba stepped quickly to one side as a man in a gray cardigan stormed past them.
“Birgitta!” he roared, the name echoing along the walls.
“Damn it,” Annika said, “what on earth’s happened?”
The man stopped outside one of the labs and stared in through the round window.
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