Last Will

by Liza Marklund

  He stared at the frozen door without really understanding what he was looking at, noting the emergency release switch and freezer apparatus to the left of the door.

  “Janet?” he said.

  There was a clicking sound and the fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered and everything turned black.

  “Janet!” he shouted into the darkness. “The door’s closed!”

  He put his hands out in front of him, fumbling in the air and dislodging a glass retort that crashed to the floor. He felt his way to the door and pressed the emergency release switch.

  Nothing happened.

  He pressed again, harder.

  “Janet!”

  He pushed against the door with his whole weight. It didn’t budge.

  He screamed and screamed and screamed and then all was silent.

  The Kitten sighed and tugged at the yellow-and-white striped apron with the elastic cuffs. The fastener was chafing against the back of her neck. Cilla’s sandals were too big, flapping when she walked. She pushed the dark-framed false glasses onto her nose, checked the time and sighed again.

  She’d been playing at being a lab rat in this getup for too long now—she was sick of it.

  Another quarter of an hour.

  She glanced through the window in the airlock door; the gloomy corridor outside was empty. The spring evening was getting dark, no longer reaching far into the long corridors of the lab building.

  God, she was so sick of all this! And she really, really needed a cigarette!

  She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and forced herself to focus on the rest of the chain of events. This whole damn job was a matter of timing and waiting, and the latter was without a shadow of a doubt her weakest point.

  She was utterly sick of this city and this whole business. Basically everything about this bastard North Pole sucked. At least the last job had been a bit rock ’n’ roll, but this was just a drag. Her ambivalent attitude toward the country wasn’t just the result of the scar on her cheek and the pain in her leg. There was something about the blandness of the architecture and the landscape, the naïveté of the people, the hopeful expressions on their faces.

  A self-satisfied people, she thought. A gang of imbeciles wandering about looking at the world around them through a haze of insipid loveliness. Here we come: if everyone were as lovely as us there’d be peace on earth, hallelujah—bastard fucking morons.

  The cretinous blabbermouth in the freezer was no exception. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and just look how that turned out. What a stroke of luck that she kept hold of her wingman’s cell phone! For safety’s sake she’d kept it switched on and charged, an intuitive precaution that turned out to be entirely justified.

  Little Yappy had sent the first text just as she finished cleaning up after the pisshead doctor in communist hell. The message had been sent from the blabbermouth’s private number, short and possibly the result of a degree of panic: Call me! I want to talk!

  Naturally she hadn’t replied, but presumed he must have his cell phone set to inform him when messages were delivered, because the next text said: I know you’re there. I know what you did. Call me!

  Waiting for his next move had become a sort of hobby. Of course she never replied, just let him sit and stew in his bloody igloo.

  Then, on Tuesday, it stopped being fun.

  Ok. Fine. I’m going to the police.

  She had gathered her things, left the apartment in her own good time, locking it carefully behind her and making her way to the airport. That same evening she had searched his student room. There was a draft of the letter in his computer, an anonymous letter to the police explaining what Yappy himself had done, how much money he had been paid, what her wingman had done (so pathetically clumsy!), and information about the phone number her wingman had been using.

  She left the document as it was. The boy didn’t have broadband in his room, and she hadn’t found a modem, so he couldn’t use the Internet. She had kept Yappy under close observation for the rest of the week. He hadn’t posted any letter; she had gotten to him in time.

  With a deep sigh she struggled over to the carbon dioxide cylinders to the right of the lab door. The pain below her left knee flared up every time she put any weight on the leg. The bone had healed crooked, because that bastard communist quack had been so useless.

  She wondered if anyone would notice that both normal cylinders were empty. Probably—scientists were so fucking picky about their precious little samples. Her walks through the lab building pushing a cleaner’s cart had taught her exactly how fussy they were. They were bound to notice the cylinders and talk about them, but not about the cleaner who had been in there, wiping and disinfecting. No one sees cleaners; no one would be able to describe her afterward.

  She opened the door to the corridor and listened. No one but Yappy had booked a lab that evening or overnight, but you couldn’t be too careful. You could still smell the gas in the corridor, which wasn’t good, but there was nothing she could do about that. Not that carbon dioxide was particularly dangerous—she’d checked—but she’d emptied out the contents of two full cylinders, so it would be a few hours before the air returned to normal.

  She looked at the time and sighed again.

  He’d managed to down the whole bottle in the end, but what sort of man doesn’t like lager? Okay, so the chemicals made it taste pretty crappy, there was no getting away from that, but it wasn’t bad enough for a thirsty young man to turn his nose up at it.

  Really, though, it was pretty damn rich that she should have to clear up other people’s mistakes like this. She wasn’t the one who had hired Yappy, she’d been sure to point that out: that had been her wingman’s mistake, the fucking amateur.

  Oh well, there was no serious harm done, which was something to be grateful for.

  She looked at the time again.

  One hour and fifty-three minutes.

  That would have to do. The combination of the cold and the drugs would kill an elephant within two hours. It was time to pick up the cell phone and clear the contents of a computer over in the student residences.

  She pulled off her protective clothing and glasses and put them in the bag with the empty beer bottles. She kept the latex gloves on: she had already wiped any surface she had touched with her bare hands, and she had no intention of doing it again.

  She quickly pulled on her boots and denim jacket, then went off to Yappy’s office, checked through his things, and grabbed his cell phone. Then she left the door ajar, just as she had found it.

  Finally she took out the key and went back to the freeze room. She listened at the door for a few seconds, even though she knew she wasn’t going to hear anything.

  Then she put the key in the lock and turned it.

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 26

  Annika was walking along a path in the forest. The wind was warm, the sun was shining, almost hot, and she was treading lightly because she was on familiar territory. This was the path to Lyckebo, her grandmother’s cottage in the woods beside Lake Hultsjön.

  Suddenly she caught sight of a woman ahead of her, a blond woman with a page cut who was moving slowly through the pines, almost floating. She was wearing a white dress with wide sleeves, so long that they almost touched the ground.

  Then the woman laughed, a laugh that sounded like birdsong, and realization struck Annika with enough force to make her lose her breath.

  First she took my husband, and now she wants to take my grandmother from me as well!

  Annika screamed, rushing after Sophia Grenborg, screaming so loudly that it echoed through the forest—she would soon catch up with her. Then Annika realized that she was holding a pistol in her hand, a Walther 7.65, loaded with Israeli soft-tipped bullets.

  “You bitch!” Annika yelled.

  Sophia turned around slowly and Annika realized that the pistol in her hand wasn’t a pistol at all but a metal pipe, the metal pipe she had killed Sven with, and she raised the pipe and br
ought it down so hard she could taste blood in her mouth.

  But when the pipe struck the woman on the temple she realized that it wasn’t Sophia Grenborg at all, but Caroline von Behring, and she wasn’t a woman but an angel, with long white wings that almost reached the ground.

  She woke up not knowing where she was. The sun was shining right onto her bed; the heat had left the sheets damp with sweat. Some sort of bird was singing like mad outside the window, and she groaned loudly and pulled the pillow over her head to shut out reality.

  She was lying in the bedroom of their house out in Djursholm.

  Of course.

  She sighed and got up from the sweaty sheets. Thomas had already left—she knew that without even looking at his side of the bed. He got to work before seven each morning, the official reason being to avoid rush hour. The real reason was that his love of this wonderful job was greater than his love for his thoroughly ordinary family. At least that was what she thought in her darker moments.

  She pulled on her thoroughly ordinary terry-cloth dressing gown and went downstairs into the kitchen to make breakfast for her thoroughly ordinary children. The sun was streaming in, making the parquet floor shine, and the cherry tree outside the window was in full flower. She stood at the window staring at the little tree.

  This house isn’t ordinary, she thought. I ought to be happy. After all, I’ve finally found a home.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and put two mugs of milk in the microwave to make hot chocolate. She made some toast and spread it with peanut butter. Then she sliced a banana, cut two oranges into segments, and put it all onto two plates. The microwave bleeped four times when the milk was hot, and Annika yanked the door open, annoyed—everything made so much noise out here. If it wasn’t the birds outside the bedroom window, it was household gadgets. Her microwave in the city only bleeped three times, and that was what she was used to. But four bleeps?

  She put the plates and the hot chocolate on the table and went to wake Ellen and Kalle.

  Getting the children into their new nursery school had been a nuisance. To begin with, the council had kicked up a fuss and said they couldn’t start until the autumn, but Annika had employed a combination of research and lobbying and had found a private kindergarten that had both a nursery school and a class for six-year-olds, and which was keen to attract more pupils, so both children had gotten in. The groups were big, much bigger than in the city, but on the other hand they had much more space out here. As far as the other children were concerned, suburban children weren’t much different from inner-city children back home on Kungsholmen. They guarded their territory and weren’t going to let any new kids in just like that. Kalle, in particular, was having problems: none of the other boys wanted to play with him. But generally the most obvious difference was that there weren’t any immigrants.

  She drove the children to kindergarten in her new SUV, a slightly smaller version of the monster Thomas had gone for. As usual, the children argued about who was going to sit in the front, which ended up with them both having to sit in the back. Kalle cried quietly all the way, so hard that he was shaking, and Annika felt her anxiety wrenching at her stomach.

  “Hey, how are you doing, Kalle-Balle?” she asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t call me that, you stupid cow!”

  Annika braked sharply and pulled over to the side of the road. When the vehicle had stopped she turned round and looked sternly at her son.

  “What did you call me?”

  The boy looked at her wide-eyed, taken aback by the fact that they had stopped so abruptly.

  “You were the one who started it,” he said sulkily.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you by calling you Kalle-Balle, but I’ve always called you that. But if you want me to stop, then of course I’ll stop.”

  “Well, you were the one who started it,” the boy said crossly once more, and swiped at the air in front of her.

  She caught his clenched fist.

  “Do you know what the difference is? I didn’t mean to hurt you, but you called me a stupid cow just because you wanted to make me angry and upset, didn’t you?”

  Kalle looked down and kicked at the seat in front of him.

  “Stop kicking and look at me,” Annika said, managing to keep her voice more or less calm. “We don’t call each other things like that in this family. Now you’re going to say sorry to me, and you’re never going to call me stupid cow ever again—is that clear?”

  The boy looked up at her guiltily and nodded. He was on the point of tears again.

  “Sorry, Mommy,” he said.

  “Oh, darling!” Annika said, undoing his seatbelt. “Come here …”

  She pulled the boy between the seats and put him on her lap, rocking and comforting him and blowing gently into his hair.

  “There, there,” she whispered, “you’re the best little boy in the world, you know that. I love you more than all the other little boys in the whole world. Do you know how much I love you?”

  “Right up to the stars?” the boy said, curling up in her arms.

  “Much further than that, right up to the angels! Now you’re going to have a really lovely time today, you hear! Singing and playing soccer and eating lovely food and being nice to the other children, isn’t that right?”

  He nodded into her chest.

  “Can I sit in the front now?”

  “Not a chance. Into the back with you.”

  A woman drove past far too close and honked her horn in annoyance. Annika gave her the finger.

  “I’m never going to call anyone a stupid moo,” Ellen said.

  When she had finally managed to deliver the children in a mature, natural, and relaxed manner to their respective classes, she felt completely drained. She leaned back against the SUV and looked at the nursery school with an indefinable ache in her heart. A low, single-story building with large windows to let in the light, and big, bright-green lawns, colorful jungle gyms, some swings swaying gently in the breeze, a clutter of tricycles near the fence. The sun was shining in that wonderfully hesitant way it did in spring; there was a smell of soil and grass and she felt her anxiety throbbing inside her.

  What a terrible responsibility she had assumed the day she brought children into the world. How could she guarantee that they would have decent lives? They were already part of a world to which she would never have access; they were busy shaping their own fates. Maybe their future traumas had already been created, and her chances of averting them were so slight.

  What could she do if someone the same age as them was mean to them? If some insecure bastard decided to grab a bit of power and prestige at their expense? If someone exploited their fantastic faith in life?

  Clearly it was going to happen; it had happened to her and probably to most other people as well. Parts of it had been damned awful—she’d worked through thirty-three years of life and still couldn’t see what the point of all this crap was.

  Maybe I’m depressed, she suddenly thought, then felt ashamed of herself.

  God, I’m so spoiled, she thought.

  She’d been able to stay at home all spring on full pay, packing and clearing out their old apartment in peace and quiet; she’d started jogging again, and had joined a gym. How many people had such a luxurious life?

  And the reward for finding that money had been paid out a few weeks earlier, on May 1, just as she had been promised. She hadn’t really believed it would happen until she was standing outside the bank with the notification in her hand: 12.8 million kronor had been paid into her account.

  Really, it should have been a moment to savor, but she could only think of it with unease. Her conversation with Thomas out on the pavement had gone all wrong.

  “We ought to invest the money,” Thomas had said. “I’ve got some old friends who are investment advisers; they can make sure we get the best dividends. I’ll give them a call this afternoon.”

  “What do you mean, ‘bes
t dividends’?” Annika had replied. “In what sense? Do you mean weapons exports, or child labor, or …”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Thomas said.

  “… unless there’s something even more lucrative? Some really shitty factory where they keep the workers in chains to die if the place catches fire?”

  Thomas picked up his briefcase and started walking toward a taxi. Annika had rushed after him, wanting to hold him in her arms the way she did with Kalle.

  “Money doesn’t come from nowhere,” she called after him. “There’s always someone working to make it, any money you get from a good tip-off is the result of someone else’s hard work. Don’t you get it?”

  “That’s just sentimental bullshit,” Thomas said, jumping into a taxi, slamming the door and heading off to his damned job.

  He wasn’t very happy with the house.

  It was better than their apartment in the city, but he missed “the classical style.”

  “As if your 1960s’ house out in Vaxholm was so damn classical,” Annika had retorted.

  She put her hand over her eyes as she thought about the way they were behaving toward each other.

  I’ve got to be happy sometime, she thought. I’ve got to pull myself together.

  I’ll find something to do, even if it doesn’t involve me working. I’ll be nice to the neighbors and stop fantasizing about murdering Sophia Grenborg.

  She got in the SUV and drove off toward Vinterviksvägen.

  The house sat there on its corner plot, shimmering in the morning sun—her lovely house, her very own house.

  She parked on the road so she could take a look at it from the outside, the way other people saw it.

  In an area like this it was nothing particularly special, but it had been built with the best materials and was well designed. The plot had once been a patch of common land, but the council had sold it off when it needed to bring in some extra money. There were no mature trees around the house, which was a shame, but the previous owners had planted fruit trees and some small oaks, which would look good in a few years.