Last Will

by Liza Marklund

  “Francesco’s coming with me, but it would be great if you could take the mail in once or twice. The plants should be okay. Here’s the key to the mail box … Thanks so much. Just call me if anything happens—my cell-phone number’s on my card.”

  She handed Annika a small key ring and a business card, gave a little wave, and jogged after her dog, who was on his way into Hopkins’s garden.

  “No, boy, not there, this way …”

  Annika gulped and put the card and keys in her pocket, then looked over at her car again. The bags of compost were on the ground next to the open trunk.

  No one was going to help her with them.

  MONDAY, MAY 31

  As Anton Abrahamsson stepped into the room, his knees felt like jelly. Early morning meetings at the top of the central building of the police complex on Kungsholmen were notorious, particularly the ones in the corner rooms with a view of the treetops in Kronoberg Park outside the window.

  And now it was his turn.

  The head of the Security Police and Bertstrand, his departmental boss, were standing by the window, talking quietly. The early morning sun reflected off the façade of the building opposite, casting uneven shadows on their faces. They were stirring their coffee cups and seemed to be talking in confidence.

  “Well,” Anton Abrahamsson said, rubbing his hands together to warm the cold sweat on them, “so this is what it looks like up here …”

  The men by the window looked up at him, put their cups down on a small, round wooden table, and walked toward him.

  “Welcome,” the head of the Security Police said. “Coffee, or perhaps some water?”

  He gestured toward a side table with a range of refreshments.

  Anton Abrahamsson shook hands with Bertstrand, then went and poured himself a glass of Ramlösa. His hand felt slightly unsteady and he didn’t want to risk spilling any coffee.

  I wonder if everyone gets this nervous before meetings to discuss a promotion, he thought.

  “Sit yourself down, Abrahamsson,” said the head of the Security Police.

  They settled onto a group of low armchairs, comfortable, dark-blue fabric. Anton stretched his legs out.

  “I hope all’s well with your family?” his boss said.

  Anton couldn’t help laughing—they were actually interested!

  “Thanks, yes,” he said. “Our lad’s getting big now, nine months old … We had a bit of trouble for a while with colic and so on …”

  Bertstrand leaned forward and clasped his hands together.

  “Anton,” he said, “we’d like to talk to you about the extradition from Bromma back in the winter.”

  Anton Abrahamsson nodded and smiled—yes, he remembered that very well indeed.

  “A tricky job,” he said. “I’m just glad it went so well.”

  His superiors exchanged a quick glance which for some reason made Anton feel a little uncomfortable.

  “The report you wrote,” the head of the security police said, “I presume it was accurate?”

  Anton took a sip of water and nodded thoughtfully—yes, indeed, it was entirely accurate.

  “There are a few details we’ve been wondering about,” Bertstrand said. “We’re hoping you can help to clarify the course of events for us.”

  Anton grinned and let his knees fall apart.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “At what point did you realize that there were members of the American CIA present at the extradition?”

  At what point?

  At what point?

  “Well,” he said, slightly hesitantly, “it must have been when George said that he’d brought with him some men from there to look after the transportation.”

  “George?” the head of the Security Police said.

  “The man who presented himself as the head of the American team,” Bertstrand clarified.

  “George?” the head of the Security Police repeated, looking blankly at Anton.

  “He was very polite and correct,” Anton said.

  The head of the Security Police shuffled awkwardly, the chair’s upholstery creaking slightly.

  Bertstrand moved to the very edge of his seat.

  “Were you wearing a mask at any point?” he asked, looking at Anton in a slightly accusing way.

  A mask?

  “At any stage in the proceedings?”

  Absolutely not.

  “Absolutely not, why would I have been?”

  “You didn’t react to the fact that all the American personnel had masks over their heads?”

  “Not George,” Anton said quickly. “He wasn’t wearing a mask. He was very …”

  Polite and correct, he was going to say, but of course he had already said that.

  His bosses exchanged a glance, and Bertstrand shook his head.

  “One more thing,” Bertstrand said, looking back at Anton again. “Why did you walk out?”

  Walk out? When?

  “Why did you and your colleagues leave the room while the CIA were conducting their humiliating treatment of the prisoner?”

  “We stayed,” Anton Abrahamsson said. “We stayed almost the whole way through.”

  “Yes,” Bertstrand said very gently and very slowly, “but why did you walk out when you did? I mean, toward the end?”

  Anton heard the prisoner’s screams echoing round the room, in this grand meeting room at the top of the central building on Kungsholmen, the rattle of ankle chains, the slicing of scissors through thick fabric. He heard the crying and calls for help, saw bloodshot eyes stare at the ceiling as the man’s naked body tensed while his anus was invaded.

  “I thought it was actually rather unpleasant,” he said.

  The head of the Security Police stood up and walked over to stare out across the treetops in the park.

  “Anton,” Bertstrand said, “there is a legal problem with this extradition, as you can probably understand.”

  Anton blinked. A legal problem?

  “You were responsible for the extradition, yet the fact of the matter is that you handed over official control to the Americans,” Bertstrand said. “And that isn’t permitted under Swedish law. There will have to be an investigation, and the result will, sooner or later, be made public. Do you understand what this means?”

  Anton was suddenly gripped by an extremely unpleasant suspicion.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Bertstrand nodded understandingly.

  “I quite understand your situation,” he said. “We will have to help one another to get to the bottom of this.”

  “I wasn’t the one who authorized the transportation,” Anton said. “That was the Foreign Ministry. The foreign minister.”

  “Yes,” Bertstrand said, “but it isn’t the transportation per se that’s the problem.”

  “I could hardly help it if something happened once they were in the air—then it’s the captain who …”

  “Abrahamsson,” the head of the Security Police said, turning to face him again. “George is the problem. Haven’t you grasped that?”

  He walked slowly toward the chair where Anton was sitting.

  “How the hell,” he said slowly, “are we going to explain that you handed over official control at a Swedish airport to the American fucking CIA?”

  He shouted these last three words.

  Anton pushed back hard in his chair and clutched the armrests.

  “Let’s deconstruct this,” Bertstrand said. “The government decided that the terrorist needed to be extradited, so we’re in the clear on that. Whatever might have happened to him after that is also regulated by legislation that only the government can call upon, so we’re fine there as well. We might be able to make the transportation itself the issue here, in which case it would be the Foreign Ministry’s problem.”

  “The American fucking CIA?” the head of the Security Police shouted once more, staring red-eyed at Anton. “George?!”

  “If
we can keep the focus on the flight itself rather than on who was exercising official authority we should be okay,” Bertstrand said. “Most editors are typical blokes, and airplanes are much sexier than legal paragraphs, aren’t they?”

  The head of the Security Police groaned loudly, then went and sat at his desk.

  “We have to handle this in the right way from now on,” Bertstrand said. “It’s important that we say the right things, and that other things are, ideally, not said at all.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “How did you say your lad was doing, Anton? Nine months old, you said? Have you ever thought about spending a bit more time with him?”

  Anton merely nodded. He was unable to speak anymore.

  The sun was already warm. It was going to be a really lovely day, the first real summer’s day.

  Annika was taking a slow stroll around the garden while the children were putting their shoes on.

  The new flower bed by the gap in the hedge wasn’t, if she was honest, a thing of great beauty. The plants looked tired and untidy, leaning limply against each other, and there weren’t enough of them. But with a bit of luck they’d fill out over the summer and look healthier.

  Her mother-in-law had wrinkled her nose and wondered if Annika couldn’t have helped the children plant the bed.

  “I planted it,” Annika had replied. “Don’t you like it?”

  And Doris Samuelsson had changed the subject.

  Kalle was coming toward her, dragging his heels. He took her hand and burrowed his face into her jeans.

  “I want to stay at home today, Mommy,” he said.

  “Why’s that, then?” she said, crouching down beside him. “Aren’t you feeling well, or are you just a bit tired?”

  “I want to stay at home,” he repeated.

  “But I’ve got to start going to work again,” Annika said, stroking his back. “In a few weeks’ time Daddy will be on vacation, and then you can be at home, and go swimming with Daddy for almost the whole summer, and that’ll be good, won’t it?”

  The boy nodded. She took his hand and led him over to the SUV.

  Ellen had climbed up into the backseat by herself. Annika helped her with her seat belt, and they set off.

  When they arrived at the nursery school the little girl ran off with Poppy and Ludde under her arms, chatting to the staff, but Kalle hung back by the car.

  “What’s the matter, Kalle?” Annika asked. “Why don’t you want to go in?”

  “Come over here,” said Lotta, the member of staff who was making sure he settled in. “You’re so early today that you’ve got time to go on the computer before breakfast—if you’d like to?”

  The boy nodded, took Lotta’s hand and disappeared into the building.

  Help him, Annika thought, help him where I can’t. Please, someone, look after my children when I’m not able to.

  And she got in the car and drove home, for the last day of her leave.

  She cleared the breakfast things away. She wrote a shopping list of things she needed for dinner that evening. She made coffee. Drank it.

  She sat at the kitchen window looking out and feeling the pressure in her chest grow.

  Then she put her mug in the sink and went up to her computer again.

  Yesterday she had tried sitting and writing out on the terrace, but the brand-new battery was broken, so she was stuck with the cable and plug inside the house.

  The office was small and already full up. Thomas’s papers and books and reports lay all over the place, and she wondered if his office in the Department was this much of a mess. She quickly gathered together the documents on the desk into a pile, moved Thomas’s computer to one side, and put hers in the middle of the desk.

  She went onto the Internet and checked the Evening Post’s home page, but there were so many flashing headlines and animated elements that she was obliged to freeze the page before she could read it.

  Sunday had been relatively uneventful. Rumor had it that Princess Madeleine had decided to learn to sail; there’d been some sort of sexually motivated attack on Darin, a big pop star; and an eighteen-year-old in Borlänge had been shot in the leg by the police. And Zlatan had scored a goal.

  Nothing about Caroline von Behring.

  Nothing about the Nobel killings.

  It was as if nothing had happened. People had already started to say, Oh yes, the Nobel banquet, didn’t someone die there? Someone who fell over the railings into the water, or something?

  She almost couldn’t remember it properly herself anymore. After just six months her memory was getting hazy. The music was almost silent now, the food had lost its insipid taste.

  Only Caroline remained, the look in her eyes when she realized, her silent plea.

  Like so many times before, Annika logged into her external email address, annika-bengtzon@hotmail.com, and pulled her text about the Nobel banquet out of her electronic archive.

  It was very fortunate that she’d written everything down immediately. It was a relief that her thoughts were all there, that her reactions were recorded unclouded. About the lights, the glasses, the dancing, and Bosse, of course. And getting pushed, the bruise on her foot, the shoulder strap, Caroline, the blood, those yellow eyes.

  Those yellow eyes …

  She closed her eyes and looked into them, now only remembering the memory of them.

  How quickly things fade.

  She closed the article and checked her regular email, the one connected to the paper that she accessed through Outlook Express.

  She had gotten three new messages.

  Party at the nursery school—bring cakes, we’ll provide coffee and juice!

  She stared at the email for a long minute.

  The nursery school in question was the one on Kungsholmen, and the email had reached her by mistake, a mass email sent to a mailing list that they hadn’t taken her name off.

  They didn’t belong there anymore.

  She clicked to open the second one: New battery.

  She could pick up a replacement battery from Spike in the newsroom any time after eleven. Great.

  Her hand stopped, hovering over the keyboard as she read the title of the third.

  You’re lying, and you’re going to be punished!

  The sender’s name made her lean closer: Nobel Lives.

  What the hell?

  She clicked to open the email.

  You’re one of the hypocrites, she read. You’ve set yourself up as a champion of the truth, but all you bring are lies and darkness.

  What the … ?

  She scrolled down and read on.

  I know the truth about the Nobel Assembly, the mail continued. The high priest of hypocrisy, the Machiavelli of the Nobel Committee, the man who has turned dissembling into an art and despotism into a virtue, he thought he’d silenced me when he banished me, but that would take a far more serious offense, just ask Nemesis, ask Caroline von Behring! And ask Birgitta Larsén!

  Aha, she thought, and went back up to the signature Nobel Lives. She highlighted the name, clicked to bring up properties, and found the real address behind the signature: lh.svensson@ki.se.

  She let out a deep breath—she might have known!

  But what did he mean—who was he referring to? Ernst Ericsson, Caroline’s successor as chair of the Committee?

  Everyone knows but no one’s saying anything; they’re all joining in this filthy game. The most powerful man has been bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by the pharmaceutical industry, and is resting safely in the monster’s maw. He drinks too much and lets through unreliable results—and now his MS treatment is being tested on people, but what happened during the tests on animals? Why were they buried in secret? We must all take our responsibility. Whose life is more important? The powerful man’s, or the sick man’s?

  Annika’s unease grew the more she read.

  Your friend is an opportunist who maneuvered her partners out of the way. I know what happened, only money cou
nts, only Mammon matters. Now she has bought herself a position in the world again, a place at the table of the hungry, in the room where Sæhrimnir the hog is slaughtered day after day without any thought of the consequences …

  The last section was addressed directly to her.

  You have a responsibility to the world, the responsibility you took upon yourself to safeguard the truth, but you are betraying it.

  This will not go unpunished.

  WILL NOT GO UNPUNISHED!

  The email wasn’t signed.

  She sat and stared at the screen until her eyes burned.

  It was nothing unusual for nuts to contact you when you had your name under articles in one of the evening papers. Up in the newsroom she had a shoebox full of peculiar and threatening letters, faxes, and printouts of emails.

  This was something else, something more.

  The unhinged, ostracized professor really did want something with her.

  He hadn’t signed the email, but had sent it from his usual address at the Karolinska Institute. So clearly he wasn’t bothered about concealing his identity. In that respect he was just like the member of staff at the Social Democrats’ party headquarters on Sveavägen who conducted a smear campaign against the leader of the Moderate Party. He could easily have set up a Hotmail address and called himself something like single mom Alice.

  The fact that his signature was Nobel Lives was a bit odd, but she knew someone who worked for Sydsvenskan in Malmö who popped up as Sherlock when his name was Anders, so maybe it wasn’t that unusual.

  She rubbed her forehead. This was quite straightforward, really.

  Either Lars-Henry Svensson was a paranoid obsessive, or there was something in what he was saying.

  She looked at the time; it was already quarter to nine. She reached for the phone on the desk, dialed reception at the Karolinska Institute, and asked to be put through.

  Professor Birgitta Larsén picked up after the first ring. Annika said her name, but the professor cut her off abruptly.

  “So what’s Caroline been telling you this time, then?”

  “I’ve got a different source today,” Annika said. “I’ve received an anonymous email from the Karolinska Institute, and I think I know who wrote it.”

  Birgitta Larsén sighed loudly.