To the left of the house was a small rock garden. It lay in shadow most of the day, except for early in the morning, and Annika had wondered about trying to get hold of some plants that might thrive there. But in general the plot didn’t exactly offer any great opportunities to commune with nature. In front of the house was a small flower bed which wasn’t doing much, but the real problem was the grass. It was completely rutted with wheel tracks from when the neighbors had used it as a shortcut while the house was empty, the very thought of which made Annika livid. She had no idea what to do to put it right—maybe some truckloads of topsoil? Some rolls of turf? Cover the whole damn lot with Tarmac?
She switched off the ignition and got out of the SUV. They’d bought their new vehicles when the money had first arrived, and she had to admit that she was very fond of hers already.
“Good morning!”
Annika spun around to see a young woman jogging toward her. She had a dog running alongside her, shadowing her every move without a leash. The woman slowed down and stopped beside Annika. She was wearing a sweatband and a padded jacket, and was sweating profusely.
“So you’ve moved in, then?” she said with a wide smile.
Now Annika recognized her: it was the woman in the house diagonally across from them. The one with the dog whom she had met back in the winter.
“Yes, we’re in,” Annika said, smiling back, remembering her decision to be nice to the neighbors.
“Welcome to the area. How do you like it so far?”
Annika laughed slightly awkwardly.
“I don’t really know yet, we haven’t really done much so far except unpack …”
“I know what you mean,” the woman said. “I moved in five years ago and I’m still finding boxes I haven’t opened yet. Why do we keep hold of so much unnecessary stuff? If I haven’t missed those things for the past five years, why on earth did I buy them in the first place?”
Annika couldn’t help laughing.
“That’s so true,” she said, searching her memory. What was the woman’s name? Eva? Emma?
“Would you like to come over for a cup of tea?” the woman said. “Or coffee? I only live …”
“I know,” Annika said. “I remember. Coffee would be great, thanks.”
Ebba, that was it. Ebba Romanova. So there had to be something foreign in her background. And the dog’s name was something Italian.
Annika bent over and patted him.
“Francesco, isn’t it?” she said.
Ebba Romanova nodded and scratched the dog behind the ear.
“I just need to grab a shower,” she said. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
She jogged off down Vinterviksvägen and stopped at her gate, opened it, then was swallowed up by greenery.
Annika stood where she was, looking around. In winter you could see parts of most of the neighboring houses, but today they were all hidden by hedges and foliage. She could just make out the dark façade of Ebba’s house with its veranda and summerhouse.
So what the hell am I going to do about the grass? she thought as her eyes reached her own little plot.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
She jumped at the angry voice behind her.
A thickset man with a beer belly and a cap was standing behind her, hands on his hips, staring at her arrogantly and antagonistically.
“What?” Annika said, aghast. “What have I done?”
“You’re blocking the traffic! No one can get past if you leave your tank in the middle of the road.”
Annika stared at her car in astonishment, parked as it was off to the far side of the road, and then looked up and down the empty road.
“But there’s no ban on parking here,” she said.
The man took a few steps toward her, his impressive gut forcing him to walk with his legs far apart, feet turned out. His eyes were small and deep set, his face verging on deep red.
“Move the car!” he snarled. “It’s no parking here—how much clearer do I have to be: no parking!”
“I’m sorry,” Annika said, blinking. “I haven’t seen any signs …”
“You’re going to move that car, right now, because that’s the way it’s always been out here. It’s an old tradition.”
He clenched his fists a few times, flexing his fingers.
“Okay, okay. Damn it …” Annika said.
She got in the car, turned the key, and let it roll into the drive of her house.
“Happy now?” she asked as she got out again.
To her astonishment she saw that the man was walking across her lawn. He was following the wheel tracks, kicking at the ground, and vanished into the neighboring plot.
The man in the Merc, Annika thought. Chairman of the villa owners’ association.
Ebba Romanova had changed into black jeans and a white blouse. She’d put on some mascara and pink lipstick.
“Come in,” she said, throwing the door open. “I see you’ve met Wilhelm?”
“Did you see what he did?” Annika said. “He walked right over my grass to get to his house.”
“I heard him,” Ebba said. “He gets very upset if anyone parks on his road. He was born in that house and seems to think he owns the whole neighborhood. And he’s deeply racist against anyone who can’t trace their roots back at least seven generations in Djursholm.”
Annika tried to laugh.
“So he can’t stand you either?”
“Oh, he tolerates me, because he’s got it into his head that I must be related to the Russian royal family. I’m not. It was coffee, wasn’t it? Sit yourself down while I get it.”
She gestured toward a tall pair of double doors, then disappeared into the kitchen. Annika looked around the entrance hall, taken momentarily aback. The house was enormous, the ceilings more than three meters high. The décor, as far as she could make out, wasn’t far from the style of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. All the furnishings were fine old antiques, and paintings in heavy frames adorned the walls.
The double doors led into a large library, and Annika stepped carefully onto its thick rugs. The wall to her right was dominated by an open fireplace the height of a person; Annika had only ever seen anything like it before in old British films. The sofas were brown or deep red, with lots of cushions in various patterns and materials. The walls were covered with built-in bookcases, made from some exotic and probably now banned wood, filled with plenty of modern books. Her eyes fell on a copy of Who Makes the Decisions About Your Life by Åsa Nilsonne. It was good, she’d read it herself.
There were novels and thrillers and some nonfiction in English, and one whole bookcase contained nothing but Russian novels, in Russian. A lot of them were leather bound; Annika traced a finger along the Cyrillic lettering on their spines.
“Milk or sugar?” Ebba called from the kitchen.
“A little milk, please,” Annika called back.
The room contained just one painting, a small, dark picture hanging in a glass cabinet in the far wall. Annika went over and peered at it.
The paint looked old, covered by a barely noticeable tracery of fine cracks. The subject was a somber young woman with a look of intense sadness in her eyes. She was looking over her shoulder, right into the eyes of the observer. Her lips were slightly parted. She wasn’t much more than a child.
“Who is she?” Annika asked as Ebba came up behind her with a mug of coffee in each hand.
“Beatrice Cenci,” Ebba said, looking up at the picture. “She was executed in Rome on September 11, 1599. Beheaded.”
She passed a mug to Annika.
“A bit of milk, no sugar …”
Annika took the coffee without taking her eyes off the girl’s face.
“Thanks. What had she done?”
Ebba sat down on one of the sofas, pulling her feet up under her.
“She killed her father. Pope Clement VIII condemned her to death. The painting’s a real antique, and this is hardly the ideal environment to keep it in, but i
f you look carefully you’ll see the cabinet has sensors and thermostats to maintain the temperature and humidity.”
“You’ve got a lovely house,” Annika said, sitting on the sofa opposite Ebba. “Do you live here on your own?”
The woman blew on her coffee and took a cautious sip.
“Just with Francesco,” she said. “Do you think that’s vulgar?”
Annika almost choked on her coffee.
“Not at all, just … unusual. Do you know, I’ve only ever seen rooms like this in films.”
Ebba smiled.
“A lot of the furniture’s inherited,” she said. “It belonged to my mother. She’s dead now. Alzheimer’s.”
“I’m sorry,” Annika mumbled. “Was it recent?”
“Five years ago, just before I bought the house. She would have liked it. I got rich just before she died.”
Annika drank her coffee and didn’t know what to say. Okay, you got rich, great—I got rich too. Was that the sort of thing you said over coffee out here in the suburbs?
“I sold my business,” Ebba went on. “Or, rather, I got chucked out of a business that I helped set up. So I suddenly had a lot of money I wasn’t expecting, at least not just then … But tell me, what do you spend your days doing? I understand that you’ve got children?”
Annika put her mug down on an elaborate marble-topped table; it really did feel odd to be sitting here like this. What a difference the move had made to the sort of neighbors she had.
“Two,” she said. “Kalle and Ellen. Six and four. We’d lived in the city for years, but decided it made sense to move now, before the children start school. I’m a journalist, and my husband works in the Justice Department …”
She fell silent and stopped herself, worried she was sounding arrogant. It was bad enough that Thomas was going around boasting to everyone he met about his lovely new job.
“What sort of business was it?” she asked quickly, to change the subject.
“A biotech company,” Ebba replied. “I studied medicine, then got into research after graduation. While I was a postgraduate, I discovered an entirely new type of adjuvant—that’s a substance that improves the effect of vaccines—and when I combined it with something known as a vaccinia vector I got fantastic results. I already had the patent by the time I finished my doctorate.”
“Wow,” Annika said, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say.
“My fiancé was at the School of Economics at the time, and it was his idea to set up the business, ADVA Bio it was called, if you’ve ever heard of it?”
Annika shook her head.
“It was just when SARS was starting to spread, and the first people in Southeast Asia were getting bird flu, so anything to do with vaccines was really hot,” Ebba went on. “My fiancé and a friend of his gave up their courses and started negotiating with various multinationals about the rights to the patent. The first offer was ten million dollars, and the second was fifty. Around about that time the boys realized they no longer needed me. I wasn’t contributing anything substantial to the company, as they put it. By then the company was valued at seventy-five million dollars, more than half a billion in Swedish kronor. They bought me out for 185 million kronor.”
Annika had to lean back in the sofa. And she’d been thinking she was rich …
“Were you happy to be bought out?” she asked.
Ebba gave a wry smile.
“I didn’t really have much choice,” she said. “But now, in retrospect, I’m not too upset about it. The week after I got my money my former partners flew to the USA to negotiate and agree terms with a multinational pharmaceutical company. Xarna was its name. The first evening they drank so much champagne that my fiancé, or rather my ex-fiancé, fell asleep on a sofa in the company’s R & D department. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that his partner didn’t fall asleep, but sat chatting to the researchers and management, showing off about the patent and about how my discovery worked, until he’d pretty much explained how to get round it altogether. The next day they were shown the door, without a single penny.”
“Never!” Annika said.
Ebba shrugged lightly.
“The multinational went on to use an alternative method to achieve the same results as me, which made ADVA Bio and my patent more or less worthless. ADVA Bio went bankrupt owing quarter of a billion kronor.
“Damn,” Annika said.
“She who laughs last …” Ebba said with a smile. “More coffee?”
“Please,” Annika said, and Ebba got up and took both mugs out to the kitchen.
Annika sat on the large sofa, with a faint buzzing in one ear and an indefinable feeling that she was being told a yarn. Why would you tell someone a story like that the first time you met them? And it wasn’t the first time Ebba had told it—that much was obvious—but why was she doing it so soon?
The whole chain of events must still be at the front of her mind, Annika realized. It must be something she thought about every day, an untreated trauma, rumbling away in her head the moment she relaxed, when she was out jogging, or taking a shower, maybe.
How important it is, Annika thought, to have a context, a place where you belong.
Ebba came in with more coffee and a plate of fruit. There was a smile on her pink lips.
“So what do you do these days?” Annika asked, when her hostess had sat back down on the sofa and was staring at the plate of fruit.
“I’m researching the signal pathways of cells,” Ebba said, taking an apple. “I’ve donated fifteen million to Karolinska to fund a research project into the causes of Alzheimer’s, with the condition that I lead the research. Our little team has been working for three years now.”
“Wow,” Annika said. “Have you found anything yet?”
“Only that an imbalance occurs in the patient’s brain,” Ebba said, taking a bite of the apple. “For some reason there are too many hyperphosphorylated proteins in these people’s brains, which means that the proteins start to cluster together inside the cells, forming tangles, and that’s one of the first stages of the illness. We’re trying to find out what causes the imbalance, and how to slow it down or stop it.”
“It would be amazing if you could manage to do that,” Annika said.
“Yes, it would,” Ebba said. “Have you ever watched someone fade away with Alzheimer’s? It’s terrible. Mom spoke seven languages apart from Russian, her mother tongue. She lost them all, along with her grasp of time, of where she was, and everything else that makes a person who they are. I just hope we might be able to find one piece of the jigsaw that will eventually get rid of the disease.”
“That sounds quite a long way from what you were doing before.” Annika said.
“Not as far as you might think,” Ebba said. “There’s one theory that suggests that Alzheimer’s develops as a result of an inflammation. We know that the interleukins of the immune system are involved, and the signal pathways in the cells are the same …”
She fell silent again and looked away.
“Is Alzheimer’s hereditary?” Annika asked.
“Only about five percent; most cases depend on something else. Obviously the goal is to find a vaccine to stop it developing at all, giving the body something that can help it prevent these proteins from clumping, and so stop the imbalance in the first place.”
“Do you think you’ll succeed?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Either we will, or someone else will. Whoever gets there first stands to make a fortune. There are two other research projects looking into this at the Karolinska Institute alone.”
“This way of getting private funding for specific research projects is becoming more and more common, isn’t it?” Annika asked, realizing that Ebba hadn’t really answered her question about whether or not they’d found anything.
“It’s very common,” Ebba said. “A number of projects in my department alone are external commissions. We got the big one last
winter, an American pharmaceutical company that’s trying to develop a vaccine against a future superbug.”
“Your old territory, then?” Annika said.
Ebba dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a pale-blue napkin. Annika saw traces of lipstick on the paper.
“Yes,” Ebba said, “in some ways. They’re trying to understand the mechanisms governing the mutation of the virus in order to control it.”
“Medi-Tec,” Annika said.
Ebba raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a huge company, conducting research into a whole load of different areas. You know it?”
“I was at the press conference,” Annika said. “The MD was there, inaugurating the project; he’s a Swede.”
“Bernhard Thorell,” Ebba said, and Annika nodded in agreement—yes, that was his name.
“Quite young,” Annika said. “Quite cute.”
“Quite unpleasant,” Ebba said. “I don’t know what it is, but I don’t trust him. Did you interview him at the press conference?”
Annika laughed rather sadly.
“I haven’t interviewed anyone at all for the past six months. I’ve been frozen out at work, on leave with full pay. I’ve got a meeting with the editor in chief tomorrow; I’m expecting him to try and buy me out.”
Ebba tilted her head and looked at her thoughtfully.
“Do you want to give up your job?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Annika said, looking down at her hands. “I’ve come into some money too, so I don’t have to work, at least not at the moment, but I don’t know …”
“Think carefully,” Ebba said, “before you let yourself be bought out. It can be hard getting over the feeling that you’re not needed.”
Yes, Annika thought, I’ve already worked that out.
“It would be nice to do something else for a while,” she said out loud. “Study, maybe, or set up my own business and start freelancing.”
“It’s always good to have options,” Ebba said. “Where do you work?”
It’s just as well to put my cards on the table, Annika thought. Either she likes me or she doesn’t.
“The Evening Post,” she said. “I mainly do crime and punishment. Sometimes I get a bit of variety—celebrity stuff, political scandals, other types of violence. My most recent job was actually the Nobel banquet, which was a bit out of the ordinary.”
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