“We’re still working on that,” he said.
Confirmation of murder, Annika thought, making a mental note.
“Will it be Brolin?” she asked, then held her breath again.
This time the officer was saying nothing.
“Don’t know,” he said.
Linda Brolin, senior public prosecutor, was leading the investigation into the murders of Caroline von Behring and the two security guards at the Nobel banquet.
“Anyone else would be a bit impractical,” Annika suggested lightly, but the officer realized that he had said too much.
“You’ll have to get back to us later,” he said, and hung up.
She took out her earpiece and looked over at the house again. No visible movement. No flickering shadows.
They’re sitting inside talking, Annika thought. They’re sitting there working out what to do next. Maybe they’re almost done.
At that moment a dark vehicle swung into the road ahead of her, and she instinctively raised her arm to shield her eyes from the headlights. The vehicle rolled slowly down the road through the rain and pulled up at the end of Ernst Ericsson’s drive. The lights were switched off and the engine died.
She peered through the windshield, what was it doing there?
She gasped when she saw what sort of vehicle it was.
A police van, not an ambulance.
The police had called for transport to remove the corpse. Which meant that the body really was absolutely and indisputably dead, but it also meant something else.
According to the regulations, it meant that the head must have been separated from the body. Over the years she had seen similar vehicles arrive at other crime scenes, and they had all had one thing in common: the victim had suffered a brutal and violent death.
Ernst, she thought, what have they done to you?
Another vehicle turned into the road, behind her this time. She followed the progress of the headlights in the rearview mirror as they passed her and the vehicle pulled up just ahead of her.
An unmarked car, a Saab 95. Annika craned her neck to see who was inside. The coroner? More forensics officers?
Two men got out, one of them holding a large camera case.
Shit, the competition had arrived. It would have been nice to be alone here when they brought out the body.
The photographer unfurled his hood to keep the rain off, then took a camera out of the case and started checking the available angles. The other man looked at the house for a moment, then turned and looked at her SUV. He leaned forward, squinting, then took several hesitant steps before opening the passenger door.
“May I?”
It was Bosse.
Annika felt her throat tighten, and she merely nodded.
The well-built man sat down beside her and pulled the door closed.
“Terrible weather,” Annika said, staring ahead through the windshield.
“Christ, yes,” Bosse said, and she could tell he was smiling at her and turned to give him a quick glance. God, he was handsome.
“How have you been?” he asked, and she drew a very audible breath.
“It’s all been a bit much …”
He leaned over and brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek, his fingers leaving burning tracks on her skin.
“You haven’t been answering my texts,” he said quietly.
She looked down at her lap.
“I … I can’t,” she said.
A heavy silence filled the vehicle, and the drumming of the rain outside on the roof seemed to get louder and louder.
“Would you rather not see me?” Bosse said, his voice sounding oddly muffled.
Annika glanced at him again; his face was in darkness. The fact that he was sitting here seemed to fill the whole car. She could feel his presence as physically as if he had been holding her tight.
She looked away.
“I can’t,” she said, staring down at her hands.
“Okay,” he said after a short pause. “Okay …”
He opened the car door and got out into the rain as she reached out her hand to stop him, leaning over toward him. He quietly and carefully closed the passenger door behind him. And over by the house the front door opened and the gurney holding the body was rolled out into the rain.
Thomas was asleep when she got home. She closed the bedroom door, went into the office, switched on the desk lamp and called Jansson.
“Is it murder?” the night editor asked.
“Without a shadow of a doubt,” Annika said. “I imagine they’ll appoint a lead investigator within the next few hours, and I’d put money on it being Brolin.”
“How much is publishable?”
“So far, not much. Just observations of the crime scene, and the fact that a prosecutor is being appointed. But Q was there, so I’m hoping to get hold of him later on.”
“How did he die?”
“Don’t know, but it was probably violent.”
“How come?”
“Police van, not an ambulance.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Jansson said. “There’ve been a lot of accidents tonight—maybe the ambulances were busy elsewhere. Anything else?”
She bit her lip.
“Nothing else.”
“So, correct me if I’m wrong,” Jansson said, “we’ve got a death that might be murder, but which hasn’t been confirmed officially, and which might have been violent, but we can only speculate about that. Is this really much of a story?”
“Well, it’s the second time in six months that the Chair of the Nobel Committee has been murdered,” Annika said. “It’s huge. What’s the competition for the front page?”
The night editor sighed down the line.
“We’ve got great pictures of Princess Madeleine on a yacht out in Sandhamn.”
Annika shut her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Listen,” she said. “Get someone to put together an obituary of Ernst Ericsson, his life in words and pictures. There’s a lot to choose from; our illustrious colleagues on the morning paper did a big thing about him last winter when he got hold of a research grant worth three quarters of a billion from an American pharmaceutical company.”
“It all feels pretty limp,” Jansson said.
“Wait till you get my piece,” Annika said, and hung up.
She tried to get Q on his direct line.
No answer.
She called the duty desk again.
They’d put a lid on the whole story.
She called the emergency call control center and asked if they’d had any calls about a death in Djursholm the previous evening.
Two, plus another in Mörby.
Anything that looked suspicious?
The one in Mörby was a suspected stabbing, and one of the cases in Djursholm was still undetermined; the police had been called to the scene. The third was a heart attack.
So who had made the emergency call about the unclear case in Djursholm?
The report didn’t say.
Oh well.
She called Q again.
Still no answer.
Who else could she contact?
Who knew Ernst Ericsson and might have something worth knowing?
She went into the online telephone directory and typed in the simplest of searches.
There were twenty-nine Birgitta Larséns, four of them in the Stockholm area: one in Haninge, one in Bandhagen, one on Kungsholmen, and one in Resersberg. The last one was the only one spelled with an accent over the e.
Annika took a couple of deep breaths before dialing the number.
“Good evening,” she said when a sleepy male voice answered. “My name is Annika Bengtzon and I’m calling from the Evening Post. I wonder if I’ve got the right number, I’m trying to reach Professor Birgitta Larsén of the Karolinska Institute?”
The man breathed loudly down the phone; it sounded like he’d got a cold.
“What?”
“
I’m trying to contact Professor Birgitta …”
“Birgitta,” the man said, evidently to someone next to him. “It’s some professor who wants to talk to you.”
“What?” Annika heard a sleepy woman’s voice say.
Annika sighed and closed her eyes as there was a lot of crackling and rustling at the other end of the line.
“Hello?” the woman said, and Annika could hear that it wasn’t the professor.
“Sorry to bother you so late,” Annika said. “My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I’m calling from the Evening Post and I’m trying to get hold of Professor Birgitta Larsén of the Karolinska Institute. But you’re not her, are you?”
“Who?” the woman said. “Has something happened to Mom?”
“No, not at all,” Annika said. “I’ve just got the wrong number. I was trying to get hold of a different Birgitta Larsén. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
The woman breathed out.
“Okay,” she said, and hung up.
Damn.
She logged into www.infotorg.se and clicked through until she got to the page where she could search for Birgitta Larsén.
Three hundred eighteen hits.
This wasn’t going to work. She had to think of a way to limit the search. How old was she? Where did she live? What was her husband’s name, assuming she was actually married?
Annika groaned.
She went onto Google instead.
Professor Birgitta Larsén, search.
Eight thousand seven hundred hits.
Articles about her research, more research, still more research, cultivation of roses …
Cultivation of roses?
She clicked the link.
Professor with rosy hobby was the heading.
An article from Gardening News.
Professor of biophysics, Birgitta Larsén, has many strings to her bow. In her beautiful garden in Mälarhöjden south of Stockholm …
Annika checked the postcodes for south Stockholm. Mälarhöjden came under Hägersten, where the postcodes all began with 129. The article in Gardening News was three years old, but Annika didn’t imagine that she would have moved. Not if she devoted all her spare time to her garden.
She went back into the Infotorg site and limited the search to birgitta larsén 129, and bingo!
One result. Number 7, Bisittargatan. Her husband’s name was Tage Friberg. And he was listed in the phone directory.
She answered on the first ring.
“This is Annika Bengtzon,” Annika said.
“Fancy that,” Birgitta Larsén said. “I had a feeling you were going to get in touch.”
“So you’re awake, then,” Annika said. “I presume you know why I’m calling?”
Birgitta Larsén blew her nose loudly.
“This is all too much right now,” she said with a sniff. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore; it’s all gone too far. I thought when they phoned to tell me—no, not Ernst as well …”
She started to cry down the phone, sniffing loudly. Annika sat and listened quietly.
“Do you know what happened?” the professor asked. “Do you know how he died?”
“Ernst Ericsson lived quite close to me,” Annika said. “I spent tonight sitting outside his house. The police have cordoned off the garden, and they’ve been searching the whole house. It looks like they think it’s suspicious.”
Birgitta’s crying got louder.
“It’s just like I said!” she cried. “Now they’ve taken Ernst too—I said, didn’t I, Tage? Was he murdered—do you know anything about it—has anyone said if he was murdered?”
“No,” Annika said. “But it looks very likely.”
The woman fell silent, and blew her nose once more.
“That’s what I thought,” she whispered. “As soon as Sören called, that’s what I thought. Now they’ve got rid of him as well, that’s what I thought …”
“Who are they?” Annika asked carefully.
“Oh, but my dear,” Birgitta Larsén said, completely lucid and clear now. “If I knew that then we wouldn’t have any problems, would we? We could just go and pick them up and lock them away, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose so,” Annika said. “What did Sören say when he called?”
She presumed they were talking about Sören Hammarsten, the vice chairman.
“Only that Ernst’s son had found him drowned in the bath, and that the police had taken Lars-Henry in for questioning, as if he could have had anything to do with it …”
Annika stiffened. So they had already apprehended someone?
“But he might just have fallen asleep in the bath,” Birgitta said. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it on the front page, but sometimes Ernst drank a bit too much. And in my opinion he was a little too fond of Celexa, and when he had too much whiskey on top of that he could be a bit of a handful.”
“Like last Saturday?” Annika asked. “After the seminar?”
Birgitta Larsén blew her nose and snorted.
“It was all completely uncalled for, what Lars-Henry did. I know I ought to take more care of him now that Caroline is gone, but it’s very wearing, it really is.”
“Why should you have any responsibility for Lars-Henry? Did Caroline?”
The professor sniffed and blew her nose again.
“This really is absolutely dreadful,” she said. “Do you really think he was murdered? Couldn’t that be a mistake? Maybe he just fell asleep?”
“Maybe,” Annika said. “I’m about to talk to the police, and things will be clearer tomorrow.”
“Thanks for calling,” Birgitta said.
I’m the one who should be thanking you, Annika thought.
“Call me whenever you want to,” she said, and gave the professor her cell-phone number.
Q still wasn’t answering. Annika was absolutely certain he was at work, but he wasn’t necessarily in his office and she didn’t have his cell-phone number. She hadn’t managed to winkle it out of him yet.
But what she did have was his email. She took a chance and sent a provocative message:
How long is Brolin going to hold Lars-Henry Svensson? Call me. Annika.
Thirty seconds later her cell phone rang.
“We aren’t going public about Brolin yet, and definitely not about Svensson,” the detective inspector said in a loud, angry voice.
“So what are you going public with?”
“Whose side are you really on?”
Annika looked at the time.
“I started work again three and a half hours ago, and I’ve got thirty minutes to my deadline. Either I write what I think is true, or I write what I know.”
Q groaned loudly.
“Okay. We can talk about Brolin, but not Svensson.”
“How about someone taken in for questioning during the night?”
“Oh, what the hell? Okay.”
“Murder?” Annika asked.
“Absolutely.”
There were a few moments of silence on the line.
“You’re ruling out accidental death?” Annika asked. “Sudden illness? Suicide?”
“Of all the suicides I’ve seen, this would be one of the hardest ones to explain,” Q said, hanging up.
She wrote thirty lines about how yet another chair of the Karolinska Institute’s Nobel Committee had been murdered within the space of six months. How unconfirmed reports suggested that a relative had found him dead and that the police were completely convinced that he had been murdered. A short description of the crime scene and the police work out there; the fact that the lead investigator of the Nobel murders, Linda Brolin, had been allocated this case as well; ending with the fact that the police had already taken someone in for questioning.
She called Jansson as soon as she had emailed him the text, and waited in silence as he read it through.
The night editor was no longer sighing.
“You’re right,” he said. “This is hot. Madeleine’s off the f
ront and into the box at the top of the page.”
“Have you done Memories of Ernst Ericsson?”
“I took you at your word, so that’s sorted.”
When they had hung up Annika sat staring out of the office window.
It had stopped raining, and the sun was coming up. She could hear the birds singing in Wilhelm Hopkins’s hedge. If she listened carefully she could hear her family sleeping, Thomas’s rhythmic breathing on the other side of the wall, Ellen whimpering in her sleep—unless she was just imaging things? Was it just her own pulse she could hear?
As soon as she gave in, tiredness overwhelmed her. Her thoughts grew fuzzy, words faded away, her body ached, and her head felt full of lead.
God, she thought, I have to go to bed.
She went out into the bathroom, undressed, brushed her teeth, and crept into bed beside Thomas.
He didn’t wake up.
The water in the bathtub was cloudy and gray. There were long threads swimming about in it, like algae, sticking to the sides and stirring up small waves on the surface.
Annika was standing in the doorway staring at the bath. She didn’t want to be there at all, she wasn’t supposed to see this, she had a feeling she had already gone too far.
“It’s your deadline now,” Anders Schyman said behind her. “If you’re going to keep your job on this paper you’d better hurry up.”
She knew he was right and took a long stride into the bathroom.
There was a woman floating at the bottom of the bathtub. The algae was her hair, drifting out through the water like snakes.
“We need a police van,” Annika said, but at that moment the woman opened her eyes.
They had no irises, were just blank and white.
She tried to scream but no sound came out. She turned to run, but where the door had been was just a plain tiled wall.
The woman sat up in the bath, her blind eyes staring at Annika. She was naked, her skin covered in slime. She was trying to say something, but nothing but a hissing sound came out, and Annika realized that the woman was Caroline von Behring.
Annika pressed back against the wall, trying to catch her breath.
“I don’t understand,” she managed to say. “I don’t know what you want.”
Then something in her chest gave way and she could breathe again, to the point where she felt she could fly.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “Let me be! It wasn’t my fault!”
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