“My boyfriend used to have one like that,” she said. “I sold it for him.”
“That was pretty nice of you,” the undersecretary of state said. “You must be one hell of a car salesman. No one knew how you managed to get five thousand for that old wreck!”
“Sven couldn’t sell it himself,” Annika said. “He … he died.”
She put her wineglass down on the table and went into the kitchen, her hands trembling.
Why on earth had she said that?
I’m an idiot, she thought, her cheeks burning.
Thomas was showing his guests around the plot while Annika put the children to bed and read them a quick bedtime story. Then she went down to the kitchen and squeezed the aioli she had bought from the supermarket out of the tube into a glass dish, adding a couple of extra cloves of crushed garlic for good measure. She followed the group’s progress around the garden from the window as she put the baguette, smeared with garlic butter, in the oven. She saw her husband gesturing with his wineglass as he explained something.
He’s proud of us, she thought. He wants to show his colleagues what he’s got. All of this means something important to him. We’re going to be fine.
Wilhelm Hopkins was moving about on the other side of the hedge. He was busy doing something Annika couldn’t really see, but it looked like he was trying to move something heavy.
He must be so curious, she thought. I bet he wants to know who our guests are.
The two men’s wives had scarcely spoken to Annika. They were both over forty, and were both wearing fashionable midlength skirts and smart jewelry. They were both slim, with the sort of very fine hair that demanded expensive cuts and loads of product. Now they were walking behind the men chatting to each other, sipping their wine and looking around. They both had teenage children who were probably out in the city somewhere, or hanging out with their friends.
Am I going to be like them? Annika wondered. Will I end up sipping chilled white wine in different suburban gardens for the rest of my life?
For some reason the thought sent a long, uncomfortable shiver down her spine.
She served the soup out on the terrace, and realized that she hadn’t actually managed to boil the life out of it. It was salty and full of dill, and the aioli was quite palatable. The bread was a bit singed round the edges, but it wasn’t a disaster.
“Well, your good health again, everyone,” Thomas said. “Bon appétit!”
They all seemed hungry, and ate in silence for a while. The breeze was mild and smelled of lilac blossom.
“There’s plenty more,” Annika said, and they all had a second helping.
The men started to talk louder and more animatedly about people at work, about various proposals that had flopped, and about how recalcitrant the Legislative Council was. Now that they were a bit drunk, they were actually very entertaining.
“You’re a journalist, aren’t you?” Larsson said, refilling everyone’s glasses.
“Thanks, not for me,” Annika said, stopping him as he got to her glass. “Yes, I’m a reporter on the Evening Post.”
“What sort of thing do you write about?” his wife asked.
“Violence and politics, mainly,” Annika said, swirling the wine in her glass.
“Really?” Larsson said. “Maybe you should come and work for us.”
Annika put her glass down.
“We both invade people’s privacy, but in different ways,” Annika said. “Was that what you meant?”
“What, you hang them out to dry on the front page and we make sure they go to prison?” Jimmy Halenius said.
To her surprise, Annika couldn’t help laughing.
“Let’s drink to that!” Thomas said.
They raised their glasses again, and over the rim of her glass Annika could see that Thomas was relieved; he hadn’t been sure if she would handle the situation and the conversation particularly well.
A moment later Wilhelm Hopkins started up his lawn mower. Not the modern little electric one that he usually used, but a huge monster that sounded like a crushing mill. The noise rattled around the houses, making the windows rattle.
“I don’t believe it,” Annika said.
“What?” Jimmy Halenius shouted to her.
Incredibly slowly, their neighbor steered his ancient lawn mower along the other side of the hedge, just ten meters from the terrace where they were sitting and eating.
“Does he usually behave like this?” the undersecretary of state yelled.
“Not quite like this,” Annika replied, “but I’m not exactly surprised.”
Jimmy Halenius looked in astonishment at the man’s heavy frame through the foliage.
“He’s really not joking,” he shouted in Annika’s ear.
A few moments later the exhaust fumes hit them. Annika started coughing and put her hand over her nose. What on earth did that thing run on, crude oil?
Thomas got up and came over to Annika.
“This isn’t working,” he said in her ear. “We’ll have to go inside.”
Annika nodded, picked up her glass, plate, and napkin and stood up, and gestured to their guests to do the same. They went into the dining room, carefully balancing the fine china and the crystal glasses that had belonged to Thomas’s grandfather.
Annika closed the terrace door behind them, but the sound of the machine still found its way in through the joints and panes of glass.
“He’s a little eccentric, our next-door neighbor,” Thomas said apologetically.
“Our house is built on what used to be a piece of common land,” Annika said. “And that particular neighbor can’t accept that Danderyd Council sold it with planning permission, and claims that he still has the right to use it.”
She glanced at Thomas and saw that he wanted her to shut up.
“It’s a fact,” Annika said, “that disputes between neighbors lead to murders practically every year in Sweden. People fall out about stairwells, laundry rooms, playground swings, you name it.”
She raised her glass.
“But of course you know all about that, you’re the professionals,” she said, taking a sip.
God, it was sour. She really couldn’t stand white wine.
“Not so long ago we had a neighborhood dispute in the Supreme Court,” Jimmy Halenius said.
“Did someone die?” Annika said.
“Only a cherry tree,” the undersecretary of state said. “It was all about a ditch that had been filled in, if I remember rightly, somewhere outside Gothenburg. The neighbors pushed the case through the legal system for ten years without coming to any agreement. Even the Supreme Court couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict in the end.”
“Things like that are tricky,” Larsson said. “I read about a case in Torslanda recently: one neighbor was intimidating the other—something about a boathouse.”
A moment later Annika saw Wilhelm Hopkins through the gap in the hedge that he usually drove through. He was pushing the vast lawn mower ahead of him, straining so hard that he was dripping with sweat, and without pausing he turned out of his own garden and drove right into Annika and Thomas’s. He flexed his muscles, then set off right across Annika’s newly planted flower bed.
She stood up, utterly speechless.
At that very moment Wilhelm Hopkins stopped, looked up at the house for a moment, then turned the lawn mower ninety degrees and continued along the length of the flowerbed. Summer flax and marigolds and Busy Lizzies flew through the air as the whirling blades cut them to shreds.
Something snapped inside her head. All those flowers, the children’s flowers, which she had planted and watered and nurtured.
“Right, you bastard,” she said, throwing her napkin on the floor.
She flew over and tore open the terrace door, dashed down the steps and across the grass. She shoved Wilhelm Hopkins with both hands, forcing him to let go of the mower, which spluttered and died.
“Help,” Wilhelm Hopkins cried theatrically, “she’s attacking
me, help!”
“Are you completely fucking mad?” Annika yelled, her voice echoing in the sudden silence. “Haven’t you got any manners at all? How the hell can you just drive your mower over my flower bed?”
She was about to give him another shove, but he took a step backward, pulling the mower with him.
“You little worm,” he said, his voice dripping with affronted derision. He stared down at his chest to see if she had left any mark, then took another stumbling step backward.
“You’ll pay for this,” he shouted. “I’m going to call the police. You hear me? The police!”
“Be my guest,” Annika shouted back. “By all means. Half the Justice Department just witnessed what you’ve done …”
Suddenly Thomas’s arms were wrapped round her, picking her up so she lost contact with the ground, swinging her around to face the other way.
“I really must apologize for my wife’s behavior,” Thomas said to the man.
“Like hell you do!” Annika yelled, trying to wriggle free.
Thomas was red in the face with shame and anger. Their guests had gathered round the terrace door and were staring at her with expressions of shock on their faces. All apart from Jimmy Halenius, who had walked onto the grass and was laughing so hard he was crying.
“And someone’s parked in the road!” the man was shouting. “You’ve gone too far this time!”
“Sorry,” Thomas said to his colleagues, and Annika could see that he was close to tears. “I really am terribly sorry about this. Annika, I don’t understand what’s gotten into you …”
“I can’t go on like this,” she hissed at him, pulling free. “You have to back me up, or we’ll have to move. Why do you think the last people who lived here moved? After all, you worked out that they must have lost at least two and a half million on the sale. Now do you understand why?”
He grabbed hold of her again, but she pulled away and walked quickly toward the front door.
At the corner of the house stood Jimmy Halenius, still unable to stop laughing.
“What’s so funny?” she said as she walked past.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Sorry, really, but it looked so incredibly funny …”
“I’m glad I was able to entertain you,” she said, going back inside the house.
She was halfway up the stairs when the phone rang.
I’ll let Thomas get it, she thought, realizing all of a sudden that she felt completely drained. Her whole body was shaking and she could hardly get up the stairs.
Is life supposed to be like this? she wondered. Why isn’t anything ever easy?
She leaned on the banister, feeling tears pricking her eyes.
The whole idea was that they would move somewhere peaceful and secure—that’s why they were here. This was supposed to be their safe place, and Thomas would finally be proud of her, but she simply didn’t fit in. No matter how hard she tried, it just kept going wrong.
Oh God, she thought. Why don’t I ever make anything easy for myself?
“Annika,” Thomas said behind her. “Annika, it’s the paper.”
She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, pressing her hand to her forehead.
“I don’t start work again until tomorrow.”
“That’s in two hours’ time, and they say it’s important.”
I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t go on like this.
“What?”
“Someone’s died. Drowned in his own bath, and apparently he lives close to us.”
“Who?”
“They said you knew him—something to do with that whole Nobel thing. His name’s Ernst Ericsson.”
SUBJECT: Nobel’s Will
TO: Andrietta Ahlsell
The person who occupied Alfred Nobel’s thoughts most during the last years of his life had herself been dead almost three hundred years: Beatrice Cenci.
The Nemesis project closes the circle of Alfred Nobel’s life.
He was born a poet. If he is certain of anything, it is this.
You say I am a riddle, he writes as a teenager—a 425-line poem about Paris and love. He writes other poems, a lot of poems, Thoughts of the night; he starts a novel, The Sisters.
He is seventeen years old when his father Immanuel realizes that Alfred’s ambitions to become a writer—dear Lord!—are completely genuine.
They live in Tsarist Russia, in St. Petersburg, close to the banks of the Neva. Anyone who can’t pay his debts is thrown into prison. His father’s business has gone badly—does Alfred want to see his father in the fortress? Can Alfred shoulder this burden? Is he prepared to take responsibility?
Alfred, Alfred, they shouldn’t demand this of you! It isn’t fair!
But he burns his poems. He burns them all, every last one. Only two remain, as copies in other hands. The Sisters is finished, but it is never published.
And the decades pass. Alfred reads, he writes letters, he collects an enormous library. Of all the loves that remain unrequited in Alfred Nobel’s life, literature is the greatest. Eventually he decides that he must finally—finally!—be true to himself.
In a prose drama written for the stage Alfred the poet will tell the truth about life and death. As a framing device he chooses the classic tale of the tragic fate of the Cenci family.
And the poet creates a remorseless settling of scores with church and society. In the very first scene he writes: There is no justice, neither here nor beyond the grave.
Disguised as the young Beatrice he cries: I am the avenger of wronged innocence and downtrodden justice.
The settling of scores is extremely violent. Beatrice the rape victim tortures her father, the rapist, to death. She pours molten lead in his ears and knocks his teeth out, all the while enjoying the experience: Ah, your cries cannot touch me. No music has ever sounded so sweet to my ears.
Alfred is very happy with his play. He writes to Bertha von Suttner that he has written a play in poetic prose, and that its scenic effect was very good.
He tries to have it translated into German, into Norwegian, but fails.
Instead he decides to have the work printed as it is, in Swedish, and he employs a young parson’s wife, Anna Söderblom, married to Nathan and living in Paris, to read the proofs.
The printer has his premises at number 19, Rue des Saint-Pères.
The proof copy, to be delivered to the young woman, is stamped:
Expédiée le 10 DECEMBRE 1896.
The play is finished, Alfred! It is ready now, on the day that you die!
The newly printed books, the spiritual testament of Alfred Nobel the poet, lie in piles in Pastor Nathan Söderblom’s office at number 6, Rue de Tour des Dames.
And the pastor reads, his relations read, his colleagues read, and they are agreed.
It is the industrial magnate who must be remembered, not the person.
His money is praised, not his creativity.
No one wants a critical settling of scores with the church, nor a violent drama about incest, nor harsh words about society from the grave.
No one wants to recognize Alfred the poet.
So the pastor burns the books.
He burns the entire print run, apart from three copies which remain hidden for a hundred years.
And so you are silenced, Alfred, once and for all.
So you are fooled, one final time.
But that’s all over now.
PART 3
June
TUESDAY, JUNE 1
At midnight it started to rain. Out of nowhere, the skies opened up and a crystal-clear shock of lightning lit up the whole area for a fraction of a second.
Annika rushed back to her car, which she had left on the other side of the fence. At the same time forensics officers poured out of the house, covering the ground around the entire house and driveway with large tarpaulins.
They don’t want any evidence out here to be washed away, Annika thought. They’ve still got a lot to do inside the
house, but they know they’re going to have to examine the garden as well.
The men moved quickly and efficiently under the heavy rain, then disappeared into the house again.
Annika bit her lip. This was starting to feel really odd. What could be taking them so long in there?
She pulled out her cell phone and called the duty desk of the police crime unit again, listening to the ringing tone as she stared out through the rain-streaked windows at the house.
Ernst Ericsson’s home was just a kilometer or so from Vinterviksvägen, down toward Djursholms torg. The house was a classic 1920s villa, yellow, two floors. The garden was flat and anonymous, not dissimilar to her own, but it had a large pool at the back.
The house was a hive of activity, lit up like a Christmas tree. The forensic team’s arc lights matched the flashes of lightning outside, showing that they were carefully searching the entire house. She had caught a glimpse of a garish Hawaiian shirt through one of the upstairs windows, so Q was here. Both the regular police and the crime unit had been there when she arrived, and the forensics team had turned up fifteen minutes later.
She started up at the house, at the shadows moving inside.
It was obvious that the police thought Ernst Ericsson had been murdered, but why?
Drowned in his bath, according to the tip-off to the paper, from one of the guys who spent all day listening to police radio.
It could be right, or it could be completely wrong.
The stereotypical officer who was guarding the cordon at the end of the drive wasn’t the talkative sort. She’d gotten no more than five words out of him—can you move back please—so he hadn’t exactly helped with any of the question marks.
There were no other media here, just her and the paper’s photographer, the cretinous Ulf Olsson. He was sitting in his own car, and she was more than happy for him to stay there.
Thank goodness I didn’t drink any more wine, she thought. Then the duty desk answered her call.
“I just wanted to check if a lead investigator had been appointed to the preliminary investigation into the murder of Ernst Ericsson,” she said, then held her breath as she waited for the reply.
She heard the duty officer shuffle some papers.
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