Last Will (19 page)

He knocked Thomas playfully on the shoulder.

“Hell,” he said, “it’ll be a breeze.”

Thomas smiled and gulped.

Annika left the paper’s office with her head spinning slightly, her feet not really touching the ground. The air was milder today, almost warm, and the wind embraced her like a damp towel. For some reason an old memory surfaced, the first day of the summer holidays, the first wonderful, endless day of the rest of her life when she ran over Grandma’s meadow down toward Hosjön Lake, grass and leaves scratching her heels and calves as she headed for the first proper swim of the year.

I’m not going to look around, she thought. I’m not going to turn around and look at the entrance. I might not be coming back, and I want
to remember it the way it looked when I still belonged here, when there was still a place for me …

She stopped and shook her head to clear it of that sort of sentimentality.

Slowly and a little uncertainly she headed over to the bus stop; the pavement was treacherously slippery. The next bus was due in thirteen minutes. She wondered whether to walk home or sit down and wait. But what did she have to hurry for?

She sat down on the wooden bench and pulled out her cell phone.

Whom to call?

Thomas’s cell phone was switched off.

Anne Snapphane didn’t answer.

She hesitated for a few seconds, then dialed Detective Inspector Q’s direct line.

He answered.

“Hello, it’s the headline-chasing bitch here,” Annika said. “I’ve been sent on gardening leave. Your disclosure ban has got me indefinite leave on full pay.”

“Congratulations,” Q said. “Should I get you a cake?”

“No,” Annika said, “but I thought I might bring one up for you. Are you in this afternoon?”

“In and out. I don’t like marzipan.”

The bus pulled up, a couple of minutes early.

“Good,” Annika said. “I’ll bring one with marzipan.”

She got on, showed her monthly ticket, and settled down on the backseat.

Rålambshov Park spread out on the other side of the window with a complete absence of color. Beyond it, the gray waters of Riddarfjärden were scarcely visible through the mist.

This is a terrible time of year, Annika thought, and there are months to go before it changes.

She got off by Sankt Erik’s Eye Clinic on Fleminggatan and walked down Polhemsgatan toward Police Headquarters. Q must have said something to the receptionist, because she was let in at once and headed straight for his office, with its view of Kungsholmsgatan.

“Where’s the cake?” the inspector said, gesturing toward a chair on the other side of the desk.

“Damn,” Annika said, pulling off her jacket. “I forgot. How are things?”

“Our youngest girl’s got another ear infection, but otherwise things are okay,” he said. “How about you?”

“You haven’t got a daughter, have you?” Annika said, sitting down.

He looked at her in surprise.

“No,” he said, “you’re right.”

“You see,” Annika said. “I know everything but say nothing.”

“And now you’ve got the sack and it’s my fault.”

“Exactly,” Annika said. “So I thought you could tell me if it was worth the trouble.”

“What, you keeping quiet? God, yes, absolutely worth it.”

The inspector stood up, and Annika noticed that he was wearing a pair of pink gabardine trousers.

“You’re a real Europop man, aren’t you?” she declared in surprise. “Are you a member of the Eurovision fan club as well?”

“I’m on the committee,” he said. “Milk and sugar?”

She nodded and looked round the inspector’s office as he disappeared into the corridor to get coffee. His excessive taste for Hawaiian shirts and noisy Europop music hadn’t left any noticeable traces on his workplace.

Almost ten years had passed since she had first met Q. Back then he had been leading the investigation into the murder of a stripper, Josefin Liljeberg, a young girl with dreams of becoming a journalist who was found strangled behind a headstone in the Jewish Cemetery in Kronoberg Park. Over the years, they had exchanged a wealth of information, often, but not always, to their mutual advantage. He had occasionally told her that it was over, but the breaks never lasted long. Annika had no illusions about why.

Q needed a public mouthpiece in the media. He knew that she almost always got her articles in where she wanted to, which meant that he could plant any information he needed to for the good of his investigations in a relatively reliable way.

“There you go, don’t say we don’t work hard,” he said, putting a cup
of coffee down on the desk in front of her, and managing to spill some on the way.

“Maybe not in this office,” Annika said, “but I’m sure that’s not always the case.”

Detective Inspector Q sighed, threw himself into his chair and put his feet up on the desk.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re quite right. A third of all police officers solve almost all crime, and the rest do pretty much nothing. It’s a hell of a problem, the fact that young police officers leaving the academy these days are so much smarter than their bosses.”

Annika blew on her coffee. It was boiling hot and tasted like tar.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“In the good old days it was so hard to fill the courses that pretty much anyone was accepted. Nowadays only one in every ten applicants is taken on, so only the elite are becoming police officers. And that means that the standard within the police force is extremely uneven. The younger officers are talented and highly motivated, the older ones slower and duller.”

“And the way to solve this is to close down all the police stations out in the suburbs and out in the countryside?” Annika said.

“Do you know,” Q said, “the problem isn’t that we’re closing down police stations all over Sweden, the problem is the ones that are still open.”

“Really?” Annika said.

“They’re open every other Tuesday between ten and twelve, and the rest of the time all the staff sit there doing crosswords, at best. Obviously the sensible thing would be to close those stations, get rid of the worst officers, and replace them with more talented people.”

“And then you’d have been able to solve cases like the killings at the Nobel banquet?” Annika said.

“We have the resources,” Q said.

“I know,” Annika said. “Neue Jihad and a family out in Bandhagen.”

“Nothing to do with the Nobel killings,” Q said. “We know pretty much what happened now.”

Annika opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.

“Seriously?” she said.

“We know the killer got in through the main entrance at 10:41
PM
. By then the dinner was over and the dancing had started; the first guests had already left the party and were on their way out through the courtyard.”

“It was quite chaotic then,” Annika said. “The staff were clearing the tables, people were milling about, going to the bathroom or heading for the music in the Golden Hall … how did she get in? Did she have an invitation?”

“We think she must have read the
Evening Post
,” Q said. “You gave a description of how it all works, after all.”

Annika’s mind was a complete blank.

“What do you mean?”

“
How I Got Into the Nobel Banquet
. It was a few years ago now, but it must have been since you started working there. One of your colleagues put on an evening gown and high heels and slipped past the guards at about 10:30, saying ‘Goodness, isn’t it cold!’ She didn’t have anything remotely like an invitation but still managed to make her way right up to the royal couple without being stopped. I think you published a picture in the centerfold of her dancing with the prime minister.”

Annika tried to smile but didn’t succeed.

“Oh, that Nobel banquet,” she said.

“That’s more or less what the killer did. We presume she was carrying a forged invitation just in case, but she wasn’t called upon to use it. The officers on the main entrance remember her: she was standing smoking out on Hantverkargatan, fiddling with a cell phone, just outside the passageway into the courtyard. When she was done with the phone she hurried in, with the phone in her hand and her little evening bag dangling from her shoulder. They could see she was freezing and thought she’d gone out to make a call and have a cigarette, and was just on her way back in again.”

“And they didn’t stop her.”

“One of the guards gave her a hand to stop her slipping over on a patch of ice. She muttered ‘thank you’ in English without looking at him. He said her hand was very cold.”

“How can they be sure it was her?”

“They recognized the photofit picture.”

“Do they remember what she was wearing?”

“All the guards have extremely clear memories of her. Unfortunately they don’t match. One says she was wearing a red dress, the others that it was gray or beige. Some say she was wearing a shawl, others that her shoulders were bare. We think they’re mixing her up with two women in a group who were leaving the courtyard just as she arrived.”

“She had a shoulder strap,” Annika said. “I’m one hundred percent sure of that. You said she was smoking—did she drop the butt anywhere?”

“Ground it into a puddle of frozen dog piss. The next sighting is more vague, from the pillared walkway between the entrance and the Blue Hall. She was on her way up the stairs leading up to the council chambers and the Golden Hall. A man who had drunk his own and his neighbor’s share of the wine stopped her and asked her to dance. She looked away and tried to get past without replying. He insisted and grabbed her arm and she pushed him in the chest and slipped past. The man got angry and tried to catch up with her, but she’d already disappeared into the crowd. He got in touch after seeing the photofit picture.”

“There’s no chance he’s trying to make something out of nothing?”

“It’s possible, but the woman should have been thereabouts at that time, so we’re presuming he’s telling the truth. But we don’t know which door she used to get into the Golden Hall, we don’t know how quickly she identified her victims, and we don’t know why she shot them.”

“Do you know what weapon she used?”

“Probably a Walther 7.65, a fairly common Belgian gun. No one saw her pull a pistol from her bag, so we can’t be sure. More coffee?”

Annika tried to conjure up the picture of the woman with her elbow raised and her hand feeling inside her bag.

“She never took it out?” Annika said. “She shot through the bag?”

“It looks like it. The ammunition was Israeli, not fully jacketed, with a soft tip. Well, I’m going to have another cup.”

Q dropped his feet to the floor and stood up.

“Dumdum bullets?” Annika said. “I thought they’d been banned?”

“Hardly,” Q said. “They’re even used by the Swedish police these days. The police union seems to think it’s more effective to use extremely deadly ammunition. We actually used to have Walther 7.65s as our service
weapons, but a lot of officers were too bad at shooting to use them. Nowadays we use nine-millimeter weapons: they’re much more powerful and can kill people even if you don’t get your shot in properly.”

“But the killer got her shots in properly,” Annika said, to drag the conversation back to the subject.

“Exactly,” Q said. “She aimed for the heart and blew out the aorta. Why don’t you cut the cake while I’m gone.”

He disappeared into the corridor again, leaving Annika with her somewhat bemused thoughts. How did Caroline von Behring fit into all this? And what did the killings have to do with Aaron Wiesel?

Restless, she got up and walked over to the window. A group of children from a nursery school, in padded trousers and woollen hats, was going past on the other side of the road, holding hands in a line. Their teachers were walking at the front and back, joking and cajoling them. The colorful procession wobbled slowly up toward Kronoberg Park, the children’s swinging arms giving away the fact that they were singing.

For some reason groups of nursery-school children out walking through the city always made her feel weepy. And here she was, watching the small children from the third floor and feeling her throat getting tight—damn it, what’s going to become of you all? How are you going to cope with life?

They were so small, their legs so short, but they had grown-ups helping them, shielding them from cars and dangerous reality. Oh God, she didn’t want to move from Kungsholmen, she didn’t want to leave the city, this was where she belonged—what on earth was she doing, moving out into an idyllic suburb?

“It doesn’t get any better,” Q said. “I’ve been standing there as well, trying to summon up the weather gods, but it hasn’t worked so far. Bad reception or something.”

Annika closed her eyes and let the children disappear, then turned round and opened her eyes to take in the detective inspector’s bright-pink trousers.

“Why von Behring?” she asked. “Why Wiesel? Did she pick them at random, or did she search them out?”

Q sat back down in his chair.

“What do you think, Einstein? Why make her way through the whole building before firing?”

Annika sat down as well.

“She went through the main entrance at 10:41.”

“Exactly.”

“And she made her way in from Hantverkargatan, across the courtyard, through the Blue Hall, up to the Golden Hall, identified the victims, and shot them, all within four minutes.”

Q took a sip of coffee and nodded, his feet back up on the desk.

“So she knew exactly who she was going to shoot and where they were,” Annika said.

“Correct.”

“How the hell could she know that?”

Q looked at her without speaking for a few seconds.

“She got a text message telling her where the victims were,” he finally said, without losing her gaze. “From someone inside the banquet. That’s how we’re looking at it, anyway.”

Annika felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“How can you know that?” she asked.

He sat in silence again for several more seconds, evaluating her with his eyes.

“A text message,” he said quietly. “A text message was sent from the relevant mast, from one pay-as-you-go phone to another, containing the words
dancing close to st erik
. Both phones were on the Telia network, bought at the same time from the Central Station in August this year. They were bought with cash rather than credit or debit card. And because the Central Station is used by about a hundred thousand people every day, the buyer can’t be traced.”