Last Will Read Online Free PDF Page A

off,” Q said, and she clicked to end the signal.
    It was Jansson, of course.
    “Was it done on purpose, you being trodden on?”
    She put down her mobile, now on silent, and looked up in surprise.
    “Definitely not,” she said. “There was a big fat man trying to boogie right next to us, and he knocked into the woman and she bumped into me.”
    Something happened in Q’s eyes, a little flicker of interest.
    “Did she say anything when she bumped into you?”
    Annika looked down the bookcase, to a leather-bound volume of council protocols from 1964, the way she had looked down at the woman, the woman with the shoulder straps.
    “She was looking for something in her bag,” Annika said. “The strap was quite short so she had to lift her arm up a bit to fish it out, like this …”
    She raised her right arm and showed how she was looking for something in an imaginary evening bag.
    “What color was the bag?”
    “Silver,” she said, to her surprise and without hesitation. “It was matte silver-colored. The shape of an envelope, like an electricity bill or something.”
    “What did she take out of her bag?”
    Annika looked away from the protocols from 1964, searching and searching.
    Nothing, just the pain in her foot.
    “It hurt,” Annika said. “I let out a yelp. She looked up at me.”
    Annika nodded hesitantly.
    “Yes,” she said, convincing herself, “she looked up at me, right at me.”
    “Did she say anything?”
    Annika gazed out across the polished table.
    “She had yellow eyes,” she said. “Completely cold, yellow eyes, almost golden.”
    “Yellow?”
    “Yes, golden yellow.”
    “And how was she dressed?”
    She shut her eyes again and heard the throb of the music, seeing the shoulder strap before her. It was blood-red, unless it was the bleeding woman’s dress that was red? Or the blood? Unless the shoulder strap was white, maybe, white as snow against brown skin, unless the shoulder was pale and the strap dark?
    “I don’t know,” she said, perplexed. “My memories are sort of black and white, and then they change, like they’re negatives or something, I really don’t know …”
    “Yellow eyes, could they have been lenses?”
    Lenses? Yes, of course they could have been lenses, unless they weren’t actually yellow, but green?
    Q’s cell phone started to vibrate, and a genuine Eurovision song rang out, “My Number One,” the Greek song that won a few years ago. The detective inspector glanced at the display and muttered “have to take this.” He switched off the tape recorder and turned toward the closed door as he spoke.
    He went on and on, his voice rising and falling. Annika had to get up and move away, drawn by the sound of traffic seeping in through the gaps between the windows. Slowly she breathed out onto the cold windowpane, and the view vanished for a moment, and when it returned she could see Hantverkargatan, the street she lived on, and beyond that the Klara district of Stockholm, trains thundering past, and the old Serafen health center over to the left.
    Her health center! Her doctors, where she had been with Kalle only that morning, another ear infection.
    So close, in another reality, just four blocks from home.
    She felt her throat constrict—oh God, I don’t want to move!
    “The victims have been identified,” Q said, pulling her back into the room. “Maybe you recognized them?”
    She went back to the chair on shaky legs, perched on the edge and cleared her throat.
    “The man was one of the prizewinners,” she said. “Medicine, I think. I don’t remember his name off the top of my head, but I’ve got it in my notes.”
    She reached for her bag to indicate that she could find out, just an arm’s length away. She stopped halfway through the gesture.
    “Aaron Wiesel,” the detective said. “An Israeli, he shared the prize with an American, Charles Watson. The woman?”
    Annika shook her head.
    “I’d never seen her before.”
    Q rubbed his hand