Last Will (31 page)

“Are you going to get into trouble because I’m here?” Annika said in a low voice.

Ebba was looking through a pile of envelopes.

“I doubt it,” she said without looking up. “There are so many people coming and going that no one will notice you.”

She put all the envelopes except one back in her pigeonhole.

“Just a load of junk mail,” she said, slipping the chosen envelope into her handbag.

The corridor felt cramped and dark, even though the walls were white and the floor light gray. Annika could see daylight further ahead, but it didn’t reach far into the passageway.

“Shall I tell you a bit about what we do here?” Ebba said, glancing at Annika over her shoulder.

Without waiting for a reply she pulled open the first door on the left.

“The centrifuge room,” she said, and Annika followed her—yes, she could recognize centrifuges. They looked like washing machines, only bigger.

“What do you need them for?” Annika asked.

“We use centrifugal force to separate substances from the medium they’re suspended in,” Ebba said. “Suppose I want to extract a particular protein from a solution. I’d put it in a centrifuge and the proteins would form a lump at the bottom.”

Annika stared at the machines.

“The heaviest elements end up at the bottom?” she asked.

“Exactly. Very practical when you’re trying to get at things held inside cells and membranes, for instance.”

The door opened and a plump little woman came into the room,
her hennaed hair all over the place. Annika recognized Birgitta Larsén at once, the professor who had been friends with Caroline von Behring.

“Ebba,” the woman said, handing the scientist a polystyrene box. “Can you be a dear and send this out, please? Thanks so much—remind me that I owe you lunch one day. By the way, we need to get onto the messengers about those missing antibodies—have you put in a claim yet?”

She moved quickly through the narrow space without waiting for a reply, passing close to Annika without appearing to notice her.

“I did it on Monday,” Ebba said in answer to the professor’s question.

They went out again, passing a huge photocopier surrounded by polystyrene boxes.

“For when we need to send things,” Ebba said. “Most of our stuff needs packing in dry ice to keep it cool. I’ll just make sure that this one gets sent out.”

Somewhere behind Annika a door opened and the sound of male voices laughing rolled along the corridor. She turned to see three men in suits come around a corner and along the narrow corridor; they were focused entirely on each other, talking loudly in English. Annika recognized the man in the middle but she couldn’t quite place him.

“Wait here,” Ebba said, disappearing into a small room.

Thirty seconds later she was back, without the package.

“Our professor hasn’t quite worked out that we’ve got people who do this for us,” she said.

Annika was standing in the corridor watching the loud men disappear.

“Who were those guys?”

She pointed at the door where they had vanished.

“Bernhard Thorell and his fan club,” Ebba said. “They’ve been here all week. This is my room.”

She tapped her four-figure code into the keypad to unlock the door, then let Annika into the smallest office she had ever seen. Three desks piled high with computers and heaps of paper were crammed into just seven square meters.

“And I thought I’d had some cramped offices!” Annika said.

Bernhard Thorell, she thought, the head of the American pharmaceutical company who was at the press conference in the Nobel Forum last winter.

“I gather this used to be the smoking room,” Ebba said, “so at least we’ve got good ventilation. Would you like to see my lab?”

“You have your own?” Annika said, starting get a grip on the perspectives of the research world.

“I share it with seven other people. Left, then the first corridor on the left.”

Annika let Ebba go first and followed her with a slight sense of claustrophobia. The corridor was pressing in on her from every angle, above, below, and on each side. Admittedly, it was a bit lighter here, all the lab doors had round windows in them, but the feeling of being shut in was worse. Maybe it was because of the bookshelves, computers, and printers that had been squeezed in between the different offices, with rows of test tubes and petri dishes and flasks. There were posters and notices taped up all over the place. Some of the lab doors had timetables on them, for people to book time on.

“This is an air lock,” Ebba said. “You have to change shoes and put on protective clothing before going inside the cell lab. Here you go—it fastens at the back of the neck.”

Annika took the yellow-and-white striped tunic, which reminded her of the surgical outfits she had seen in ER. It had long sleeves with tight, elastic wrists. On a shelf to the right of the door was a row of white wooden sandals next to a pair of large gas canisters.

“Which ones should I use?” Annika asked, reading the names above the shoes.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ebba said.

They went into the laboratory.

An Asian woman was crouching in a fume cupboard, concentrating hard on dripping something into a test tube with a large pipette. She was wearing the same yellow-and-white protective clothing, with gloves that covered her wrists.

“There are loads of Chinese people here,” Ebba said, then said hello to the woman. She didn’t answer.

“What’s she doing?” Annika asked.

“Don’t know,” Ebba said, glancing quickly at her. “She’s so tense, I think she must be preparing cells to try and detect proteins with the help of antibodies. Antibodies are expensive, a big experiment can cost up to sixty thousand kronor. And a whole delivery has only just gone missing …”

She moved a bit closer to Annika and lowered her voice.

“You never ask what other people are doing,” she said. “And you never tell anyone else what you’re doing. It’s best not to get your own research mixed up with anyone else’s.”

Ebba stepped away, and went back to her usual tone of voice.

“My cells are in this incubator.”

She opened something that looked like a normal fridge, but inside it was warm rather than cold.

“They need 37 degrees to thrive. Add a bit of nutrient and five percent carbon dioxide, and they almost always do what you want them to. Unless something happens, of course.”

“Like what?” Annika asked.

“It could be something as simple as picking up the wrong bottle when you’re working on an experiment,” Ebba said. “There are any number of ways of messing things up, like confusing different growth cultures. So many of the bottles look the same.”

She closed the door of the incubator and went over to a large bucket with a lid.

“This is where I keep the cells when I’m not using them,” she said, unscrewing the lid and pulling out the insulation. “This is liquid nitrogen, minus 196 degrees.”

White vapor drifted out of the container and Annika instinctively took a step back.

“Talking about cold,” she said, “could I see the freeze room?”

Ebba replaced the polystyrene container and screwed the lid back on.

“Sure,” she said. “It’s in the next corridor along. We’ll have to go through the air lock again.”

The freeze room was at the far end of a section of corridor that received no natural light at all. Shadows from the doors along the corridor cast strange patterns over the walls.

“As you can see, light and temperature are controlled from out here,” Ebba said, pointing to a large control panel to the right of the door. A display indicated that the temperature inside was minus 25 degrees.

“What was he doing in there?” Annika asked.

“I suppose he was fetching something,” Ebba said. “We store a whole load of samples in there, as well as quite a bit of useless stuff, like waste blood and so on. We can go in for a moment, but I have to warn you, it really is extremely cold.”

She pressed a switch to turn the lights on and pulled the door open. The cold hit them, making Annika gasp.

“I think we’ll leave the door open,” Ebba said.

The room was very narrow, lined with shelving on both sides. Bottles and flasks and boxes were piled up to the ceiling; every inch of space seemed to have been used.

“How on earth could he have got stuck in here and frozen to death?” Annika said, fighting against claustrophobia.

“The emergency door opener has been a bit temperamental before—I was almost shut in once,” Ebba said. “And rumor has it that he was under the influence of alcohol and something else, so his wits probably weren’t at their sharpest.”

Annika looked around the room, feeling that she would soon have to get out.

“But there’s an alarm over there,” she said, pointing to a button close to the floor at the far end. “Why didn’t he press it? And why didn’t he yell until someone came and opened up?”

“He was on his own here on a Saturday evening. His lab was the only one booked.”

Annika looked at Ebba and couldn’t help asking: “How do you know that?”

Ebba stopped and looked at her calmly and blankly for a few seconds.

“The booking timetables are pinned up outside the air locks,” she said breezily. “Anyone who can read can see who’s booked in. Shall we go back out?”

Annika stepped quickly out into the corridor and breathed out quietly, relieved, as the door closed behind them. A moment later there was
a commotion behind them in the corridor. Ebba stepped quickly to one side as a man in a gray cardigan stormed past them.

“Birgitta!”
he roared, the name echoing along the walls.

“Damn it,” Annika said, “what on earth’s happened?”

The man stopped outside one of the labs and stared in through the round window.

“Birgitta,” he yelled, “you goddamn collaborator! I know you’re here somewhere!”

Birgitta Larsén backed out of a room further down the corridor, holding another polystyrene box in her arms.

“Goodness, Lars-Henry,” she said, “what a terrible noise. What do you want?”

Annika recognized the man: he was the professor who had written the confused article in the
Evening Post
last winter, and who was later dragged out of that rather eventful press conference.

Birgitta Larsén walked past the angry man and came up to Ebba again.

“This one is going to the same place, darling. When do you think you’ll hear back about our claim?”

“Don’t think you’re going to get away with this,” the man shouted, waving a printout as he marched after the red-haired woman. “I want an explanation.”

Ebba took the box with a neutral expression on her face.

“My dear fellow!” Birgitta Larsén said, looking up at the man, who was at least a foot taller than her. “Why are you so upset?”

“I just got an email from PubMed and saw this,” he said. “We got a citation in the
Journal of Biological Chemistry
, and you didn’t think to mention me!”

Annika looked from one to the other in surprise.

“Hmm,” Ebba said quietly, “a case of wounded vanity, and I have a feeling it’s my fault …”

“But Lars-Henry,” Birgitta Larsén said, “things like that aren’t my business, you know that. What’s this about?”

“My doctoral student is listed as the author of the article, but not me, her supervisor! How the hell could something like this happen?”

Ebba passed the polystyrene box to Annika and walked up to the man.

“It was my decision,” she said. “I came to the conclusion that you hadn’t contributed to this research, so there was no reason for you to be listed in the article.”

“And all because I’ve been pushed out of the Assembly!” the man shouted, standing right in front of Ebba. “You all take every opportunity you can to humiliate me, but you ought to watch out!”

“I haven’t pushed you out of any Nobel Assembly,” Ebba said calmly. “I merely concluded that you’ve hardly been here over the past four months.”

The man looked up, and his eyes found Annika’s.

“Are you responsible for this?” he panted.

“She’s a reporter for the
Evening Post
,” Birgitta Larsén said, without looking at Annika. “I have no idea what she’s doing here, but I intend to find out just as soon as you finish shouting.”

Lars-Henry jabbed the printout toward Annika and Ebba.

“You should watch out,” he said. “You’re ignoring Nemesis, all of you, but remember! Just remember that I’ve warned you!”

And he marched off toward the main door and disappeared.

“What was all that about?” Annika said as the door closed behind him.

She was still holding the large box in her arms. Ebba took it from her.

“I’ll take care of this,” she said, vanishing around the nearest corner.

Birgitta Larsén took a step closer and looked at Annika thoughtfully.

“You thought I didn’t recognize you? Of course I did. What are you doing here?”

Annika looked at the woman, her eyes were bright and clear and extremely serious.

“Caroline wasn’t surprised that she’d been shot,” Annika said. “I was there, on the floor next to her—she was looking at me when she died. I can’t escape it, I keep dreaming about her at night.”

She was surprised at how agitated she sounded.

Birgitta Larsén was standing quite still, her eyes fixed on Annika’s.

“What do you dream?” she asked very quietly.

“Caroline is trying to tell me something,” Annika said, lowering her voice. “She wants to say something, but I can’t understand. What do you think it could be?
What?
”

She felt tears welling into her eyes and bit her lip. God, she’d become such a crybaby.

“Some food,” Birgitta Larsén said, turning on her heel and heading off down the corridor. “Bring Ebba, and we’ll go over to the Black Fox.”

They left the building by the main entrance and stepped out into hazy sunshine. The lawns around them were an expectant bright green, and scarcely unfurled leaves danced in the treetops. Ebba and Birgitta carried on talking about the missing consignment of antibodies and what to do next in their claim for compensation. Annika was walking behind them, looking at her surroundings.