She felt her scalp crawl; she was having trouble breathing and felt strangely uneasy.
She had to focus—this was all about planning and marking out her posts.
She bit her lip to make herself concentrate, swinging her ponytail. She adopted an affluent facial expression and looked around at the more appealing villas. Immediately behind the crappy house was a really nice property, where a tall older man was polishing a Mercedes.
On the other side of the road lay the best house in the neighborhood. A villa in the national romantic style, three floors plus a basement, with hints of gothic mystery. The façade was heavy and dark, the effect lightened by the large windows and irregular woodwork of the veranda. The garden was mature and well looked after, with a summerhouse and a well. The far end was given over to a dog pen.
Even that, the Kitten thought, stopping for a moment. Even a dog pen.
She could almost guess what it looked like inside. She knew how it smelled, how it felt, the lofty ceilings, the light through the leaded windows, the draft under the doors in winter.
This was exactly the sort of house Grant lived in, summerhouse, dog pen and all. She smiled at the memories of her childhood friend. He grew up in the house next to her father’s, and visits to her father had been strictly rationed. She was allowed to be there when her mother was in the nuthouse. Fortunately, this happened every so often, like the time she slit her wrists and wrote drunken letters about the horrible whore (dad’s new woman, whom she never heard called anything else).
Those had been magical moments, the times she was allowed to go around Grant’s. She thought back to the gothic building.
The summerhouse, where they smoked their first joint.
The attic room up under the roof, where they had their stash of porn magazines.
The cellar, where they trapped mice and practiced cutting their heads off with an old kitchen knife.
She chuckled quietly at the memory.
Grant had been a sweetie. It was a shame he got so fucking boring when he grew up. Director of a fucking symphony orchestra—how boring could you get?
She sighed and pushed the bike on again—one, two, one, two, the crunch of Tarmac under her shoes. She was leaning heavily on the handlebars to relieve the pain in her left leg. You would hardly know she had a limp.
Soon her research out here would be done. She just had to get hold of a few things and check her timing.
She glanced back at the tasteless, trashy white house, the oh-so-clever reporter’s hideous home.
She’d be doing the area a big favor by wiping it off the face of the earth.
Annika returned to the newsroom, feeling suddenly lost and exhausted. What was she doing here?
She had no desk of her own; she had her laptop in her bag; she didn’t know who she should talk to about her work.
Spike?
He couldn’t even be bothered to look up at her.
Berit?
She had more than enough of her own to worry about.
It reminded her of twelfth grade, when the experts had decided that group work without a teacher, outside the classroom, was a good idea. Pointless and cheap.
She went over to the places allocated to the day-shift reporters. They were covered in shriveled apple cores, notes, and empty coffee cups.
So now she was expected to be a cleaner at work as well.
She gritted her teeth and found a large wastepaper basket, and swept everything into it without bothering to pick out anything that ought to go in the recycling bin, then went and got a damp cloth from the bathroom. She wiped the coffee stains and bits of banana off one of the desks and unpacked her laptop.
It was time to get organized.
What was she going to write about all this?
The murder of Ernst Ericsson was linked to the Nobel killings, she was absolutely convinced of that. There was a pattern here that she couldn’t quite make out, threads that ran together in a way that couldn’t just be coincidental.
But what would there be room for in tomorrow’s paper? How interesting was it really that a few drunk scientists had a row after a seminar?
She sighed loudly. Not very, if she was brutally honest.
If she had managed to find out exactly what had been said between Lars-Henry Svensson and Ernst Ericsson there might have been a story there, but the fact that she knew they had had a row was nowhere near enough on its own.
In the absence of any other leads, she looked up Lars-Henry Svensson in the national registry and got an address on Ringvägen on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm. Telia had two landlines listed in his name, one for Ringvägen and a second to a property on Tavastbodavägen out on Värmdö. No cell phone number listed.
She called both landlines. No answer, and not even an answering machine.
She got herself a mug of coffee and went for a stroll around the newsroom to gather her thoughts.
During the six months she had been away she had written down all the information she had about the Nobel murders. It was all hidden in her personal email on the net. She went back to her temporary desk and logged into [email protected].
Maybe it was time to look at the big picture. To let go of the details and see the whole thing instead. To look at the vast sums of money in scientific research and the pharmaceutical industry. To chart the path from design to patent, then to drug, and finally to consumer.
She looked through all her notes. The texts were unstructured and contained facts, details, and reflections all jumbled together. She found the information from Q about the assassin, the Kitten, and about what the killer had done and how the police had pieced it all together. Then details about Nemesis and Alfred Nobel. She found her own research about the money involved in the scientific community, the stuff she had put together after the press conference where Medi-Tec’s investment in the Karolinska Institute had been made public. She also found her notes after her meeting with Q to check out photographs up in his office the other day.
I’ve had enough of this, she thought. I’ve kept quiet about all this long enough now.
She reached for the phone and dialed Q’s direct line for the tenth time that day. He still wasn’t answering.
Damn.
She slammed the receiver down. She couldn’t just sit here, entirely dependent on just one source.
In her frustration she decided to do what she had done the previous evening, email him and hope he got in touch.
I’m thinking of going public with the Kitten, she wrote. Need to check to make sure I don’t blow anything vital.
The answer came just a minute or so later.
Sorry honey, I’m on my way out. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.
She replied at once: Okay honey. I gave you a chance to have your say. You didn’t take it. Silly.
Ten seconds later her cell phone rang.
“Meet me at the café on Norr Mälarstrand in ten minutes,” Q said.
“The Mälar Pavilion?” Annika asked.
“How the fuck should I know what it’s called?” Q said, and hung up.
Annika smiled and put her laptop away again.
The weather really was lovely. There was a warm breeze that smelled of soil and pavement, the irresistible scents of city and summer.
This is where I want to live, Annika thought. This is where I belong.
She locked the car and put the keys into her bag. It was ridiculously heavy, one of the disadvantages of carrying your workplace around with you.
The Mälar Pavilion was one of her favorite places on Kungsholmen, a little open-air café with rickety tables on neatly raked gravel, big sandwiches and hot chocolate, and blankets you could borrow if you wanted to, which was all too likely in the evening. The waters of Lake Mälaren rippled just a couple of meters from the tables, and on the other side of the water Långholmen and the towers of Högalid Church rose up.
Q was already there, sitting and staring at the Western Bridge through his sunglasses, with
an oatmeal cookie in front of him.
“Don’t you ever wear anything but Hawaiian shirts?” Annika asked as she dropped her bag down on the gravel, relieved to let go of it.
“They aren’t from Hawaii. They’re from Tuki’s Pareau in Avarua on Rarotonga. And when I go to weddings and high-class funerals I wear a hand-painted silk shirt I bought from Nelson Mandela’s tailor in Cape Town. Have I never told you that before?”
She pulled out the chair facing the detective inspector and put her pen and notepad on the table.
“Have you found a link between the Kitten and the boy in the freezer?”
“We’ve managed to tie Johan Isaksson to the Nobel murders,” Q said. “What are you going to write about the Kitten?”
Annika checked that her pen was working by scribbling on her notepad.
“That she was the one who did it. That she shot the Latvian doctor and her accomplice in Jurmala. That she’s suspected of killing Johan Isaksson.”
Q sighed.
“We can’t prove that the freeze room was murder, let alone that she was responsible.”
Annika pulled her pad closer.
“Okay,” she said. “Instant adjustment. Nothing about Johan Isaksson, except where and how he died, and the fact that you’ve linked him to the killings. How?”
“His cell phone.”
“So you’ve found it?”
“No, it’s still missing, but his adviser gave us the details of his pay-as-you-go number, and we know from his service provider that he sent five texts during the spring to another pay-as-you-go number that had already featured in the investigation.”
“The same number he sent dancing close to st erik to?” Annika said.
Q smiled wearily.
“No, you’re wrong there,” he said. “We’re piecing the puzzle together and have found several numbers and several different texts. We’re assuming that the Kitten was the recipient of dancing close to st erik, and then a text was sent from her number to another. Obviously, we’ve been looking at that number as well.”
“So whose phone was that?” Annika asked.
“Whose do you think?” he asked.
Annika stared hard at the detective inspector’s cookie for a moment.
“Her accomplice, of course,” she said.
“Right again. And who inherited that once the accomplice was dead?”
“The killer, of course,” Annika said, making notes on her pad. “So Johan Isaksson sent five texts to the accomplice’s phone this spring, and they were received by the Kitten instead. Do you know what he wrote?”
“No. What do you think?”
Annika shrugged.
“He must have been in touch with the accomplice,” she said. “Maybe it was the accomplice who got him involved? Maybe he had questions after the murders, or maybe he just felt guilty. Could he have been threatening them?”
“Maybe,” Q said. “And now he’s dead. Have you got it clear now?”
“I think so,” Annika said, scratching her head with her pen.
Q threw the cookie to some ducks that were paddling at the water’s edge.
“Hang on,” Annika said. “Why is it okay for me to go public with the Kitten now?”
“It isn’t okay,” Q said, “but I realize that I can’t stop you.”
Annika turned back a few pages in her pad and checked her notes.
“Off the record, again,” she said. “Could the Kitten have killed Johan Isaksson?”
Q sighed and watched the ducks squabbling over the cookie.
“That’s highly likely,” he said. “The method fits her profile. Effective, calculated, well planned, and without excessive violence. Controlled, professional.”
Annika nodded slowly.
“She didn’t kill Wiesel,” she said.
“He got in the way,” Q said. “She shot him in the leg to get to her target, von Behring, and she took her out with a single shot. She shot the guards outside to neutralize them, not to kill—one shot each.”
“Ernst Ericsson,” Annika said. “Did she kill him too?”
“Nope,” Q said.
“No?” Annika asked. “Why not?”
She tapped her pen on the table and looked out across Norr Mälarstrand. Then she put it down on the notepad.
“Ernst’s murder was much messier,” she said quietly. “There was something very personal about his case. Someone did something really terrible to him, didn’t they?”
Q looked at her without moving a muscle.
“Yuck,” Annika said with a shiver. “Have you released Lars-Henry Svensson yet?”
“This morning. He had nothing to do with the death of Ernst Ericsson.”
“And you’re absolutely certain of that?”
“Not a shadow of a doubt.”
Q stood up.
“You can have the exclusive on the Kitten until midnight. Then we’ll announce a press conference for eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so it’s bound to start leaking in the early hours of the morning.”
“Wow, that’s really good of you,” she said, holding out her arms. “Here I am, keeping quiet for six months, and I get a couple of minutes to write up the whole story.”
“If I know you at all, you’ve already got eight different versions of the story in that hideous bag of yours,” Q said, picking up a toothpick and walking away.
We’ve gotten a bit too close, Annika thought.
She went up to the newsroom and unpacked her laptop for the second time that day. Then she went into her online archive and extracted the various draft articles she had written—three of them, not eight. The first one went straight to the point and was an account of what Q had told her the day she went on leave from the paper. The others versions were longer and more detailed, and parts of them could be used later as follow-up articles.
She copied the text from her email and put it into a document in Scoop, the word-processing program favored by the paper. She read it carefully, finding a few typos, and amended the information about the accomplice’s cell phone. She saved it to her own folder, and decided to finish the rest of the articles before sending everything to the shared filestore in one big bundle.
Then she pulled out the draft of her article about Johan Isaksson. His death had been reported as a short news item, described as a tragic accident. She updated her text, adding the fact that the police were now linking the death of the doctoral student with the Nobel murders, which meant that she had to go back through the article and cover up Isaksson’s identity. Whenever someone’s involvement in the investigation of a crime was made public, their identity was usually concealed. Obviously anyone who knew Johan Isaksson, and everyone who worked at the lab, would know whom the article was about, but for the vast majority of readers his identity would be hidden, at least for a while.
Slandering the dead was a serious matter.
Finally she pulled out the fragments of her article about Ernst Ericsson’s death. It may have been gruesome, but until she knew exactly how gruesome, there was no place for it in the next day’s paper.
She sent the whole lot over to the shared filestore. She checked that they had made it to the starting block for tomorrow’s edition.
She scanned the titles she had given the articles: Nobel killings solved (about the Kitten), More murders in Nobel’s wake (about the killings in Jurmala), Death at Karolinska Institute linked to Nobel killings (about Johan Isaksson). There they sat, competing for space with Berit and Patrik’s megascoop about the CIA and the extradition from Bromma.
I have to tell Schyman what I’ve written, she thought. I have to explain why I’ve kept quiet so long.
At the moment her cell phone rang.
She looked at the display: Anne S calling.
What did she want this time?
“Where are you?” Anne Snapphane asked crossly.
Annika brushed the hair from her forehead with her right hand.
“What?” she said.
“My le
cture! You promised to help me today—don’t tell me you’d forgotten!”
Annika screwed her eyes shut and bit the inside of her cheek. Damn!
“Of course I hadn’t,” she lied. “I’ve just been really busy.”
“What do you mean, busy? What, folding napkins for your coffee mornings?”
“I started back at work again today. I’m in the office at the moment.”
“So you can just forget about all the poor losers who haven’t found a hundred million in a garbage can?”
Annika looked at the time, still only quarter past four.
“I have to talk to Schyman, then I’ll come round to yours in about an hour, if that’s okay?”
Anne Snapphane muttered something and hung up.
Shit, shit, shit.
Should she phone Thomas to say she was going to be late?
She reached for the phone, then stopped herself.
Late? She would still be home by seven, and did that really count as late? Had Thomas been home before seven once in the past month? Had he ever called to tell her? No, and no.
Like hell was she going to call.
She put her laptop away again, threw her cup into the garbage and went over to Anders Schyman’s little cubbyhole.
He wasn’t there.
She sighed deeply and let her bag slip to the floor.
Now she’d have to talk to Spike instead.
The head of news was sitting eating an apple as he stared intently at his screen. Annika stopped next to him.
“Some idiot’s put a load of articles in the filestore saying the Nobel killings have been solved,” Spike said without looking at her. “Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“I started working again today,” Annika said. “I thought the whole point of me being here was to write articles.”
He looked away from the screen and stared at her.
“Why didn’t you do any of this before now?”
“I was under orders to stay at home and file my nails for six months,” Annika said, hoisting the dead weight of her bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll be on my cell phone if you need me.”
The traffic was terrible. She crawled along Fleminggatan, and called Schyman from outside the children’s old nursery school. As his phone rang she saw Lennart, Kalle’s favorite teacher, go past toward the subway. She waved but he didn’t see her. The editor in chief’s voicemail message clicked in and she left a slightly confused message about the fact that she’d written the story of the Kitten, and that the rest of the media would be finding out the details at eight o’clock the next morning. She tried making two more calls, without getting any answer, as she sat in a solid traffic jam at the junction of Birger Jarlsgatan and Runebergsgatan. She sat there for what seemed like at least one and a half eternities, forcing herself not to blow the car horn.
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