Last Will by Liza Marklund Read Free Book Online Page A

authority and the passport register had both closed their archives to the public, getting hold of pictures of victims was a recurring problem, another consequence of the fallout from September 11, the new age.
    “Both von Behring and Wiesel were very public people, so there are plenty of pictures of them. Picture Pelle has pulled out a frame from the live broadcast from the Blue Hall as well, where they’re sitting next to each other at the table, laughing and raising their glasses. The quality’s not great, but it’s on six and seven … Then we’ve got the royal couple and their reaction, of course they didn’t see a thing but Berit’s managed to make it sound dramatic as hell. They were sitting in the Prince’s Gallery talking to some of the prizewinners when the shots were fired. If you measure the distance between the killer and the royal couple, it’s actually no more than a few dozen meters, even if half of that is thick stone walls …”
    “What about the cover of the first editions?” the editor in chief interrupted.
    “We’re waiting for the photofit picture, the headline will be ‘Face of the Killer,’ or something like that.”
    Anders Schyman felt his tired brain implode and shrink to a tiny raisin at the top of his spinal cord.
    “We’re waiting for a photofit that our reporter helped produce but which we can’t print because a fucking police state says we can’t do our fucking job, informing the public …”
    He slumped onto his chair again and waved his hand.
    “Out you go, get the paper finished,” he said. “But I want to see the front page before it goes to press.”
    As his two colleagues gathered their things and left the room he got up and went over to the window to see what the Russian soldier was doing.
    The guard’s shack was empty.
    The soldier had gone.
    Annika went into her room and wrote down everything she could remember. She noted exactly what had happened, just as she remembered it, including dancing with Bosse. All the details, what the police had said, everything she had seen and what she had felt.
    She ended up with a poor, rather confused text, but it would never be published. She wanted to have a prop for her memory; she’d sat through enough trials to know that witnesses forget. Their memories change over time, and she wanted to have access to her original experiences.
    So that no traces of the text were left on the newspaper’s server, she wrote it directly onto her electronic archive on the net, a mailbox on the Internet under the address [email protected]. That was where she usually left texts that she needed access to from other computers, or things she wanted to keep secret from the paper.
    She sat for several minutes after switching off her computer, looking out over the newsroom. Her body was shrieking with exhaustion, but it was still pretty doubtful that she’d be able to get to sleep tonight.
    She saw Jansson heading over to the smoking booth with a cigaretteand cup of coffee, and she grabbed her outdoor clothes and hurried over to him.
    “Well, he was in a bloody awful mood,” Jansson said, glancing at Annika, who sat beside him with a cup of her own.
    “He gets like that when I’m around,” Annika said, looking down at her coffee. “He’s furious about what I wrote about our proprietors and TV Scandinavia. You heard he didn’t get to be chair of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association?”
    Jansson lit his hundredth cigarette of the night and blew the smoke onto his coffee.
    “I think you’re taking it too personally. He’s a grown-up, after all, with a whole load of different responsibilities. If he spent his time worrying about things like that he’d never get anything done.”
    Annika could feel the heat of the drink through the thin plastic and moved her fingers to stop them from getting burned.
    “I know Schyman,” she said quietly. “Better than a lot of people realize. I know what his beliefs are, and trust me, this is