The Final Word by Liza Marklund Read Free Book Online

to Genzélius. ‘Go on.’
    The lawyer turned to Nina. ‘No, you’re not a forensic crime-scene investigator. Your task is merely to analyse material and write reports, isn’t it?’
    Nina straightened her back again. She had no intention of allowing herself to be belittled.
    Martha Genzélius picked up a bundle of papers and flipped through them. She read, then leafed back a few pages. A wave of unease ran down Nina’s spine. ‘If we could return briefly to the case of Viola Söderland,’ the lawyer eventually said, putting her papers down. ‘The witness with the dog, who made a note of the number plate of the car parked outside his neighbour’s house on the twenty-third of September, twenty-one years ago, did he give any specific time for his observation?’
    ‘It was around midnight.’
    ‘Exactly. And how reliable is that recollection, twenty-one years on?’
    ‘The witness can’t know that,’ Crispinsson said.
    ‘Let the defence lawyer finish,’ the judge said.
    Nina waited while the defence lawyer tilted her head.
    ‘The lecture in Sandviken,’ she went on, ‘didn’t finishuntil just after ten p.m. My client stayed behind to sort out the hall with the organizers, had a cup of coffee and refuelled his car. Do we agree on that?’
    ‘That’s correct.’
    ‘Which means that he is supposed to have driven from Sandviken to Stockholm in less than forty-five minutes, which in turn implies an average speed of approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.’
    Nina was about to reply when she was cut off again. Martha Genzélius was addressing the judge: ‘I would like to remind the court that there wasn’t even a motorway between Gävle and Uppsala in those days. The E4 ran through the centre of various built-up areas with speed limits of both seventy and fifty kilometres per hour.’ She looked at Nina again. ‘Do you think that sounds plausible?’
    There was nothing she could do, except get it over with as smoothly and quickly as possible. ‘No,’ Nina said.
    The lawyer looked directly at her, in complete silence, for a long time. Then she very slowly put her pen down on the table. ‘Thank you. No further questions.’
    Elegant.
    The judge turned towards Nina and asked if she had incurred any expenses as a result of her attendance in court. Nina said she hadn’t, then got to her feet and left the courtroom through a tunnel that led to the prosecution’s windowless anteroom. An intangible feeling of anxiety and powerlessness went with her as she left the court.

    Because a heatwave was supposedly on its way, the air-conditioning in the newsroom had been switched on. Evidently it only had one setting, somewhere just below freezing, and Annika had to put her jacket on before she switched on her laptop.
    In spite of the cold, her fingers were burning as she looked through the notes and list of witnesses. Here they were, the liars who’d seen to it that Josefin had never got any justice. She recognized some of the men’s names, but others were new to her. Ludvig Emmanuel Eriksson must be Ludde, who used to work behind the bar at the club, and Robin Oscar Bertelsson was presumably the Robin responsible for security there, but who had left shortly after Josefin was murdered. Annika had never met him, but Joachim had mentioned him several times. She had always suspected he was one of the witnesses, and now she knew.
    She remembered Ludvig Emmanuel Eriksson as a fairly quiet, sullen guy. He had thin blond hair and pale eyes, and used to stare at her breasts shamelessly. She looked him up on Google and found him at once. Cancer Research, donation via debit card or PayPal. A picture showed him already marked by the disease, his hair cropped and his eyes exhausted. He had lived to be just thirty-two, horribly sad.
    Berit put her bag down on the desk. ‘Why’s it so cold in here?’
    Annika looked away from poor dead Ludde, and gestured towards the ventilation unit in the corner. ‘Did Nina