Last Will

by Liza Marklund

  “What sort of a day have you had, darling?” she asked, kissing her on the forehead.

  “I did a drawing for you, Mommy,” she said, wrapping her arms round Annika’s neck.

  “How lovely,” Annika whispered, feeling tears of exhaustion welling up in her eyes.

  They did their shopping in the Co-op at the corner of Kungsholmsgatan and Scheelegatan under slightly chaotic circumstances. Ellen dropped her candy on the floor, where they were promptly run over by a stroller, and Kalle had another little outburst about them not buying any soda.

  Annika’s forehead was beaded with sweat as she hauled the last bag of groceries into the hall from the elevator.

  “If you put the television on, the children’s programs will be on in a little while,” she called after the children.

  She hung up their outdoor clothes and lined their boots up under the bench in the hall, then carried the shopping into the kitchen and unpacked it on the countertop.

  Damn, she’d forgotten to get any salt.

  She peeled the potatoes, chopped some onions, and cut the pork chops into strips. As the potatoes came to the boil she fried the onions until they were transparent, then put them at the bottom of an ovenproof dish. Then she fried the meat together with some bacon, seeing as she didn’t have any salt, then made use of the salt left in the pan by diluting it with a bit of cream.

  She’d just laid the table and lit the candles when Thomas got home.

  He came into the kitchen, his jacket flapping as he loosened his tie.

  “I think I’m halfway there,” he said, giving Annika a quick kiss. “This job’s made for me. My CV is perfect, and with my personal contacts in the department, I can’t see how anyone could beat me. Haven’t you done any salad?”

  He was standing by the table, looking at what she had made.

  “I thought we’d agreed to have something green with every meal,” he said, turning toward her.

  “We did,” Annika said.

  My day’s been absolutely great as well, she thought. I’ve been out to the Karolinska Institute and talked to a murder victim’s work colleagues. The police are about to arrest a group of German terrorists and I went shopping and made dinner.

  Out loud she said:

  “Can you get the kids while I chop up some salad?”

  She went over to the fridge with tears burning in her throat.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12

  Jemal Ali Ahmed was wrenched from sleep and found himself at the center of earsplitting noise and blinding light. He knew at once what had happened, his whole being was shouting it out to him: this was a direct hit. The war had come and his house was exploding, unless it was his parents’ house, his childhood home in the mountains above Al Azraq ash Shamali, he could hear the goats screaming and the beams collapsing.

  The children, he thought, stretching his hands into the burning light, Allah, protect my girls, look after my daughters …

  He got to his feet and tumbled helplessly out of the trundle bed onto the floor before he realized where he was—thank heavens, of course he was in the flat.

  His surprise loosened for a moment the grip panic had on his heart. What on earth was happening to his home? And where was his wife?

  “Fatima,” he called, but the smoke muffled his voice.

  He was surrounded by a terrible, blinding light that dissolved all his senses. The noise rumbled in waves around the room, never ending. There was a terrible pain in his nose and his eyes were streaming.

  “Jemal,” his wife cried somewhere to the left of him, “the house is burning! It’s on fire!”

  This isn’t a fire, he thought. This is something else.

  “Jemal,” she screamed, her asthmatic voice panic-stricken. “The girls, Jemal, save the girls …”

  He shut his eyes against the terrible light and crawled in his pajamas toward the living-room door. Whatever this was he had to get the girls out, as long as he wasn’t already too late! It was so difficult to move, like in a nightmare. He tried calling for his daughters but his voice caught in his throat and no sound came out. He started to sob and reached out to the doorframe for support.

  “Sabrina,” he cried, “Daddy’s coming,” and a moment later he realized that it was no doorframe, just a faceless dark shape aiming an automatic rifle at him, and he screamed, roaring until he felt his bodily functions give way and his bowels emptied in his pajama trousers.

  Thomas was sitting with the sports section of the morning paper demonstratively held up as a shield against the rest of the world, as the children squabbled over a sandwich. Annika was trying to read the news section, but gave up when Ellen spilled her chocolate milk across the floor.

  “Do you know what?” Annika said. “You can clear that up together, then go and get washed and dressed.”

  “Why should I do it?” Kalle said. “She was the one who knocked it over.”

  “Paper,” Annika said, passing him several sheets of paper towel. “Wipe it up. Ellen, paper. Wipe it up.”

  “You remember we’re going for mulled wine today?” Thomas said behind the paper.

  The children wiped up the mess and threw the paper into the garbage can, and Annika took her sandwich, a cup of coffee, and the morning paper and went and sat in the living room. She spread the paper out on the coffee table and switched on the television.

  An army of police in riot gear filled the screen, rushing past the camera into an apartment. The picture shook and there was a lot of noise and then the screen went completely white. In the top-left corner stood the text: BANDHAGEN THIS MORNING.

  “What the hell …?” Annika said, putting her sandwich down. “Thomas! Have you seen this?”

  In response she heard the shower start.

  An impersonal voice announced that the police’s national response unit had broken down the door of a rented property in Bandhagen at 6:18 on Saturday morning. Officers in riot gear had stormed the flat and found the suspected terrorists asleep inside. The head of the cell had been caught on a trundle bed in the living room, while both teenage daughters in the family had been asleep in their respective bedrooms.

  The screen showed footage of a woman in a nightdress being led off to a police van.

  “Damn it,” Annika said, staring at the screen. “They’ve gone mad. Look at that woman, she’s got nothing on her feet. Thomas!”

  The newscaster came back on screen and explained that that morning’s arrests were directly linked to the attack on the Nobel banquet, although the police hadn’t yet said precisely what the link was. The security police had said very little about the whole operation.

  The police had evidently videotaped their successful operation and distributed the tape to both Swedish Television and TV4 in time for it to be shown on the late-morning bulletins.

  Thomas came into the living room, still brushing his teeth.

  “Wot’sh habbened?” he asked.

  “Go and spit that out,” Annika said, and Thomas disappeared into the bathroom.

  A prerecorded item came on, someone from the security police explaining that the operation was being carried out fully in accordance with national police regulations governing such situations.

  “Any police authority must immediately inform the National Police Service through the national communication center if a terrorist act has been committed or is believed to be imminent within that authority’s jurisdiction,” the man from the security police said.

  “So there was no doubt in this instance?” an unseen reporter asked respectfully.

  “None whatsoever,” the officer said. “Because a terrorist act was feared, and because paragraph three of the regulations states that the principle duty of the national emergency unit is ‘to combat acts of terrorism within national boundaries,’ there was no doubt at all.”

  He concluded by pointing out that the operation had been judged 100 percent successful.

  Then the dramatic footage was shown in full once more.

  To be
gin with, the building lay in complete darkness, hardly visible against the black night sky.

  Then the shock grenade detonated on the second floor, a gigantic explosion that flared in the lens and turned the screen white for a moment. Shadows moved in the windows; the camera shook. A row of armored police vans drove up at top speed and braked sharply outside the door, and police in riot gear poured out of them, automatic weapons at the ready.

  Kalle came into the room and crept up next to her; she put her arms around him without looking away from the screen.

  “What are they doing, Mommy?” the boy asked, seeing her concentration.

  “The police have picked up a family to ask them some questions,” Annika said.

  “Is the family dangerous, Mommy?”

  Annika sighed.

  “I don’t know, darling, but I don’t think so. Not the girls, anyway. What do you think? Do you think they look dangerous?”

  Two half-naked teenagers in handcuffs were shown being pushed into separate police vans.

  The boy shook his head.

  “I think they look scared.”

  The phone rang and the boy took that as his signal to run off.

  It was Berit.

  “Have you heard about Bandhagen?” she asked.

  “It’s on television now,” Annika replied. “So what’s this link to the Nobel murders that they’re going on about?”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” Berit said. “You haven’t heard anything?”

  “Me?” Annika said, surprised. “I’ve only just got up. What are the police saying?”

  “‘Internal surveillance.’”

  “Oh no,” Annika groaned. “Someone’s put the squeeze on them to come up with results.”

  “Probably,” Berit said, “unless the mother just happens to look exactly like the photofit picture you helped them to come up with. The footage is pretty poor quality, but maybe you can see her face?”

  Annika drew breath to reply, but stopped herself.

  What could she say? How much was she allowed to confirm or deny?

  “The photofit picture has been made public, and you can see it doesn’t look at all like her,” she said carefully. “And I don’t know if I’m allowed to say anything.”

  Berit sighed quietly.

  “This is really tricky,” she said. “I can see you’re in an impossible position, but it’s making things difficult for the rest of us. We’re having to tiptoe round you, trying to find out things that you already know.”

  “Look,” Annika said, sitting up on the sofa. “I don’t really know anything except that a woman stood on my foot when I was dancing in the Golden Hall. The police haven’t said anything to me about Bandhagen or Berlin; I’ve got no idea what they’ve managed to cook up. The fact that I just happened to be there doesn’t stop me from working on the story.”

  She could hear Berit rustling something at the other end of the line.

  “I know,” she said quietly. “But I think you might as well take it a bit easy this weekend. Patrik’s covering the police and I’m doing the rest, so shall we say we’ll see you on Monday?”

  A shocked silence vibrated over the line for a moment.

  “Sure,” Annika said. “Fine.”

  She hung up with an indefinable feeling of emptiness.

  When had anyone ever called to say that she didn’t have to work?

  “Who was that?” Thomas said from the doorway, drying his freshly shaven chin with a towel.

  “Berit from the paper, she …”

  Thomas dropped the towel on the floor.

  “That’s bloody typical,” he exclaimed. “Because we agree to go and have mulled wine with my parents today, naturally you have to work. I knew it!”

  “Actually I don’t,” Annika said, getting up. She picked up Thomas’s towel and held it out to him, she saw that he’d left some blood on it from where he’d cut himself shaving. He turned away without taking it, and she watched his broad shoulders disappear into the bathroom again. She stood there for a few moments as a jumble of contradictory feelings churned in her gut. How much she wanted to reach him. How much she hated his growing self-satisfaction. How much she hated the thought of him together with that little blond whore from the county council, Sophia Grenborg.

  They’d had an affair, but Annika had put a stop to that.

  It’s over, she thought. Everything’s all right again.

  Mulled wine with her parents-in-law out in Vaxholm was as strained as she had feared. Their turn-of-the-century villa was full to bursting with enthusiastic suburbanites in blazers and well-polished shoes. Annika went around holding a child in each hand. They were dressed up and neatly combed and subdued. The crush at each doorway was so great that blockages soon built up. She felt sweat break out under her breasts and on the children’s hands; soon they’d be so slippery that she wouldn’t be able to hold on to them.

  A lot of the guests came from the suburb’s active business association. Thomas’s father had been on the board for more than thirty years. There was talk of tourists: how many, how to attract more. There was grumbling about businesses that only opened during the summer months, taking customers from the people who kept their businesses open all year round. There was talk of the Christmas market that was on at the moment for another week.

  And, just for once, there was talk of current affairs.

  “It’s a good job they’ve caught those Nobel terrorists,” a blue-haired woman was saying to a white-haired one as Annika walked past on a hunt to find something for the children to eat.

  “Imagine, al Qaeda in Stockholm!” one man was saying. “Who knows, they could even be here in Vaxholm!”

  She carried on, steering the children toward the kitchen.

  “Yes, but I have to say, those Nobel banquets are seriously over-rated … The food is always stone-cold by the time you get it.”

  These words came from one of the younger guests, an overweight man who worked in the same bank as Thomas’s first wife.

  “No it isn’t,” Annika said, stopping. “That’s a myth spread by people who’ve never been invited.”

  The conversation around her died and a group of men stared at her in surprise.

  “I see,” the overweight man said, looking hard at her black jeans and the jacket that was too big for her. “So you know better?”

  “The food’s warm. Inedible, but warm,” Annika said, then pulled the children with her out into the kitchen.

  That was full of people too, mostly women in sensible shoes and neat dresses. They were chatting and laughing and waving their wineglasses around, now filled with burgundy after the obligatory mulled wine.

  “Annika,” Doris, her mother-in-law, said. “Can you give me a hand to carry out these trays? I’d do it myself, but you know what my hip’s like …”

  Beside her stood Eleonor, Thomas’s former wife. Eleonor and her mother-in-law had kept in touch after the divorce, which only served to exacerbate Annika’s feelings of inadequacy.

  “The children need something to eat first,” Annika said, pretending not to see Eleonor. “Then I’ll be happy to serve your guests. Can I make some sandwiches?”

  Doris’s thin lips grew even paler.

  “But my dear,” she said flatly, “there’s plenty of food here.”

  Annika looked down at the trays on the countertops: herring canapés, prawn canapés, mussel canapés.

  She leaned down toward Kalle.

  “Have you seen Daddy?” she asked quietly, and her son shook his head.

  She took the children’s hands again and set off once more into the sea of people.

  When she finally found Thomas down in the wine cellar her back was sticky with sweat. He was standing talking to Martin, Eleonor’s new husband.

  Martin looked amused, but Thomas seemed ill at ease and slightly drunk.

  “The problem isn’t that the police are bugging criminal groups,” he said, slightly too loudly, spilling some of his fortified
mulled wine as he tried to emphasise the importance of his argument. “The problem is that their activities aren’t regulated, and can’t be controlled, and we have no legislation governing how the police should handle the mass of surplus information they get these days …”

  “Thomas,” Annika said, trying to get his attention. “The children have to have something to eat. I’m going to go and buy something for them.”

  “Pretending that we don’t need any new legislation is just sticking our heads in the sand …”

  “Thomas!” Annika said. “Thomas, I’m going to take the children home now. Do you think you’ll be able to get a lift back into town with someone later?”

  He turned to look at her, annoyed at the interruption.

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “The children have to eat. They won’t eat herring and mussels.”

  Martin followed the exchange with amusement, crossing his arms and leaning back, the rich entrepreneur enjoying the paltry concerns of the middle classes.

  “Can’t you give them something else, ask if you can make them a sandwich or something?”

  Thomas was evidently embarrassed at her showing up in the cellar. Annika swallowed her anger and sense of not being good enough.

  “Do as you like,” she said.

  She turned and walked away, with the children trailing after her.

  Annika stopped at the McDonald’s on the E18 on her way into Stockholm. The children got a Happy Meal each, but she couldn’t force herself to eat anything. After they had eaten most of their hamburgers and pulled their plastic toys apart, she sent them off to play in the ball pit.

  She bought a coffee and sat down with the evening papers next to the play area.

  The other paper had managed to put together a special supplement, and had a picture of the arrest of the family in Bandhagen on the front cover. Bosse had written the article. She traced his name with her fingertip, then looked round in embarrassment to check that no one had seen her.

  The Evening Post had nothing, at least not in the early edition she had gotten hold of. She had no illusions that her paper would have shown any better judgement or held any other opinion of what the main news of the day was: they just hadn’t had time.