Last Will (55 page)

Ebba looked at her and tried to smile.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “This really wasn’t your fault. I’m very glad you came over this evening.”

She paused.

“And don’t worry about the other neighbors. They’ll settle down.”

Q led the woman from the room and out to the waiting ambulance.

Annika stayed on the sofa as two police officers came and collected Francesco. They treated the dead dog with such touching respect.

“Do you want to go to hospital as well?” Q said as he came back into the room.

Annika shook her head and brushed the hair from her face.

“Now, tell me what you’re doing here,” she said, glancing up at him.

“Your neighbor called,” he said.

Annika blinked.

“Wilhelm Hopkins?” she said, astonished. “How did he know that Bernhard Thorell was here?”

“Your neighbor called the emergency desk to report a car parked illegally, according to him. He had the registration number written down and rattled it off to the operator.”

Annika leaned her head back against the sofa and shut her eyes.

“How did you get into the house?”

“The door wasn’t locked,” Q said. “I got your email, or rather Caroline’s email. We knew Bernhard Thorell had been in Djursholm at the time of Ernst’s murder, and in Fågelbrolandet when Lars-Henry was killed, so he was already in our sights even before we received Caroline’s account of what had happened.”

Annika’s head was spinning.

“How could you know that?” she said. “How could you know where Bernhard’s been?”

Q didn’t answer, and she looked up to see him staring at her.

“His cell phone, of course,” he said. “Criminals are often very stupid. He called from his own phone on both occasions. Speaking of stupid criminals, the FBI picked up a purveyor of violent services in San Diego yesterday evening. He’d erased his hard drive and thought he was home free, but three and a half hours later the lads there had restored it, and Bernhard’s name popped up on there as well. He used his company’s money to hire the services of the Kitten on two separate occasions.”

She shut her eyes again.

“So you’re telling me you were actually looking for Bernhard Thorell?”

“And his car, which the duty officer in the emergency room had just received a national alert about. He could hardly believe it when our officious old friend on Vinterviksvägen called and read out the same number.”

She laughed, utterly joylessly.

So Wilhelm Hopkins had helped save her life. How absurd.

“But how did you know we were here?”

“I have to say, you really do keep an eye out for each other out here. Mr. Hopkins knew exactly where you were. But what was Bernhard Thorell doing here?”

“He really was after that painting,” Annika said. “All because he thought he was like Beatrice Cenci, the avenger of wronged innocence and downtrodden justice.”

She looked at Q and felt like crying and crying.

“He was raped by his father,” she said. “And he killed him for it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Q said.

Annika stared up at the ceiling.

“The other murders were just about money,” she said. “A Nobel Prize in Medicine would have been worth fifty billion dollars for Medi-Tec. It would have become one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. You know, my children are asleep over there.”

She pointed toward her house.

“Can we take the questions tomorrow?”

Q looked at her for a few seconds, then nodded.

“Have you got anyone to look after you? Is Thomas going to be home to take care of you?”

She smiled through her tears.

“Of course,” she said. “Thomas will take care of me. I’ll write something for the paper and mail you a copy. No disclosure ban?”

“Yes,” he said, “but I daresay you’ll do as you like anyway.”

And she walked out of the house and across the grass and into her own house and up the stairs, where she found the children fast asleep in the double bed, then closed the door on them and collapsed on the floor of the landing.

THURSDAY, JUNE 3

She must have fallen asleep, because suddenly it was night and everything was silent around her. She sat up guiltily, giddy and disorientated, got to her feet, and looked in on the children.

Ellen’s thumb was in her mouth and Annika went over and gently pulled it out. She stroked the girl’s hair and she snuffled in her sleep. Kalle was fast asleep with his mouth open, making little snoring sounds.

He’s coming back, she thought. Daddy’s coming back home to us again.

She couldn’t bear the thought that there might be any other alternative. She pushed her pain aside the only way she knew how, by going into the office and turning on the computer.

And she wrote—she wrote about it all, about Caroline’s blackmail, her secret, and her shortcomings, about what Bernhard had said, Ebba’s reactions, her own conclusions, the arrival of the police.

Then she mailed the text to two recipients: Q and Jansson. As a heading to the email she typed
Please note: disclosure ban!

They could do whatever they wanted with it.

She switched off the computer, then sat and stared out of the window for a few minutes. The summer night outside was blue, breezy but warm. There were still lights on in old Hopkins’s house, in the kitchen and the basement. Ebba’s house was dark; presumably she wasn’t back from the hospital yet.

I’m not going to be able to get to sleep, she thought, her eyes stinging.

She headed to the bathroom, then paused in the doorway, staring at the bathtub. It was empty and clean; she’d polished the enamel with chamois leather. She wasn’t going to have any more dead women in there.

She took a deep breath, a gasp that turned into a long sigh, then finally a sob.

He’ll come back, she thought. He has to come home to us again. Dear God, please,
let him come home to me again!

She slumped onto the toilet seat and leaned her head in her hands, listening to her own heavy breathing. Her pulse was throbbing in her ears, her arms shaking.

I need you, she thought. I love you. Forgive me.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.

And she cried, with her head in her hands, until she couldn’t cry any more, until the house was completely silent and she was completely empty inside.

She stayed there for another minute or so, then finally stood up, giddy and drained.

It’ll sort itself out, she thought. Somehow this will all sort itself out.

She reached for her toothbrush, only to discover that the toothpaste tube was empty. So she brushed her teeth with water instead, then washed her face with her expensive soap and brushed her hair. She looked into her own eyes in the mirror, puffy and distant. She leaned forward over the basin until the light above her threw dark shadows over her features.

She closed her eyes, pulled away from the shadows and looked around the bathroom.

Scrubbed and shining, with an antiseptic smell of bleach.

She switched out the light and went onto the landing. Darkness enveloped her, and she breathed out and relaxed.

It’s up to me, she thought. I can do this, if I try. It’s no worse than that.

She had gotten halfway along the landing when the crash came. The sound reached her as if in a dream, unreal and far away; it didn’t scare her, just came as a surprise, a huge crash followed by a crystal rain of shattered glass.

What the hell … ?

She walked toward the stairs and was met by a gust of wind; the picture window next to the front door gaped jaggedly against the night beyond. She took several steps before realization and fear struck. Some-one
had broken her window in the middle of the night, someone had walked up to her house and smashed her big picture window …

Her heartbeat exploded and she started breathing as if she’d been on a forced march, taking the steps three at a time and landing in the middle of all the glass splinters just as the second crash shook the house. She stopped midstride—it was above her this time.

The window of Ellen’s room.

She turned and raced up the stairs again, yanking open the door to the girl’s room, and at that moment something flew through the smashed window, something dark and heavy and rectangular, with a little sparkling tail.

The instant before it hit the floor she realized what it was.

A large glass bottle, full of liquid, sealed with a burning rag. A Molotov cocktail.

She slammed the door shut as the bottle shattered on the floor and the room exploded in fire. Annika could feel the heat smash against the door, hitting her like a shock wave. She staggered back, her arms flailing in the air, hearing the flames roar on the other side of the thin sheet of wood. Oh God, this can’t be happening. The next moment the window of Kalle’s room crashed in, and through the half-open door Annika saw a brick land on the boy’s bed. She saw it lying there and knew she should be heading toward it but her body wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t obey her, and she felt her own distorted face stare at the shattered window, watching the same heavy bottle fly through the room, the same rectangular darkness with its burning tail, unless it was another bottle—was there more than one?

The plume of flames in Kalle’s room hit the ceiling the moment the glass bottle shattered against the wall above the boy’s bed. The gasoline vaporized in an instant, the fire riding on its back, throwing itself at the blue curtains with cars on them, the picture books on the Billy bookcases from IKEA.

Annika stared at the flames, unable to move; she felt the heat hit her hair and skin and stumbled backward instinctively, against the closed bedroom door.

The children.
Oh God, the children!

She managed to get the door open and staggered in, closing the door behind her. She saw the hazy shapes under the covers, out, now, at once!

It was the smoke that was most dangerous, it was smoke that killed, not the flames, at least not at first. She glanced at the closed door and saw the deadly gases already rolling in under it, then threw herself at the bed and dragged the covers off Ellen.

“
Kids!!
” she screamed, throwing the covers onto the floor by the door, stamping on it to block the crack at the bottom, then ran back to the bed again.

“Ellen!” she shouted, pulling the child upright. “Ellen, we’ve got to get out of here.”

The girl stared at her in horror, still groggy with sleep. Annika picked her up and ran over to the window, with Ellen’s little body feeling slippery and hot under her pajamas.

“Ellen,” Annika whispered, scarcely able to breathe. “There’s a fire, I’m going to help you get out, and when you do I want you to run over to the hedge and sit there and wait for me and Kalle. Got it?”

The girl started to cry, loud and scared.

“Mommy,” she howled, “Mommy, no, Mommy …”

Annika peeled the girl’s arms away from her neck and put her down on the floor by the window. She ran back to the bed and pulled off Kalle’s covers.

“Kalle!” she shouted, shaking the boy as she pulled the sheet off Thomas’s side of the bed. “Kalle, go and stand over there with Ellen, the house is on fire!”

The boy sat up, blinking, his hair standing up. The white bandage on his forehead shone in the darkness. Annika could hear the fire roaring on the other side of the door.

“Kalle, over here!”

She rushed back to her daughter, winding the sheet into a thick rope that she tied around the girl’s stomach as the child shrieked—she didn’t want to have a sheet tied around her stomach, she wanted Daddy, and she ran for the door. Annika caught her and swept her up into her arms.

“Ellen!” she shouted. “Ellen, listen to me, Ellen, we’re going to die if you don’t do what I tell you!”

Kalle had started to howl over by the window, the whole of his little frame shaking. From the corner of eye Annika saw a dark stain spread over his pajama trousers as he wet himself.

“Mommy!” he cried. “I don’t want to die!”

I can’t do this, Annika thought fleetingly. We’re going to die here, this is impossible.

And somewhere she knew that was the wrong thought, it was entirely up to her, she just had to seize control and take the children with her. The same as always.

She made her way to the window and put the little girl down next to her brother, then crouched down beside them and hugged them both.

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “We’ll start with you, Kalle, because you’re a big boy and I know you can do this, it’s going to be easy. I’m going to tie this sheet around your tummy, it’ll be like a big rope, and then I’m going to lower you down to the terrace, and then I want you to wait there and help your little sister when she comes down, okay?”

“I don’t want to die,” the boy sobbed.

“Kalle,” Annika said, lifting his chin with her hand and looking him in the eye. “Listen to me, Kalle, you have to help me now. You’re a big boy and you have to help your little sister when I lower her down, do you hear me? She’s still very little.”

“I’m not little,” Ellen said.

Annika stroked her daughter’s cheek and tried to smile.