reach. Then he said something, quite loudly, to his companion, another man. She recognised his light, slightly nasal voice. She had heard it from close quarters.
He was one of them. One of the men who liked to hit her. Here, he wore a white coat. In a matter of moments they would be face to face; he kept walking straight ahead and so did she, and the length of corridor that separated them was brightly lit and had no doors.
She slowed down even more, her eyes down, her right hand on the gun inside the billowing hospital coat.
She almost touched him as they passed each other.
He smelt the way he had when he pushed into her.
One brief moment and he was gone.
He hadn’t noticed her at all. The woman he had paid to penetrate every fortnight for a year usually wore a black dress and underwear of his choice. Her hair was loose, her lips red. He hadn’t ever seen the real her, the woman he had just passed in the corridor. Her face was bruised and beaten; one of her arms was in plaster. She walked in white slippers with the hospital logo stamped on them. He didn’t see her now either.
Afterwards she was surprised, more than anything else. Not frightened, hardly panicked, but surprised, verging on angry. He just walked around here, like everyone else, and nothing showed on the outside.
The last stretch of hospital corridor. Lydia stopped at the door she was about to open.
She had never been in a mortuary before. There was an image in her mind of what it would look like, but she knew it was made up from scenes in American films she had seen in Lithuania. It was all she had to go by, and what she had based her plans on. From her sketch in the notebook she had an idea of its size and how many rooms there were. Now she was about to go in and she had to be very calm, stay calm and cope with both the living and the dead.
She hoped there would be someone alive in there. Preferably more than one.
She opened the door. It resisted, as if she was pushing against a draught, but there were no windows, she knew that. She heard voices, but the sound was muffled and seemed to come from the room next door. She stood still. They were alive and in there. Now it was up to her. She had the gun and the explosives that Alena had managed to get for her. Lydia had already knocked the guard out and found her way here. The voices told her that she had been lucky, there were people there.
She took a deep breath.
She had to do what she had planned.
She would make sure that it would never happen again.
There were at least three voices, maybe more. She couldn’t understand what they were saying, an odd word here and there perhaps, but it didn’t help. Her Swedish was nonexistent and it made her angry with herself now. She freed the gun from the tape and took it in her good hand. Slowly she walked towards the voices, through the empty room she had entered. It was long and narrow, a little like a hall in a flat, and unlit.
Then she saw them.
She stopped on the dark side of the doorway and watched. They were busy with each other, observing something which she couldn’t see at first.
There were five of them and she realised that she had seen them all only a few hours ago.
They had stood around her bed. One of them was a little older than the rest; he wore large glasses and his hair was going grey. This was the doctor who had examined her after she had been admitted. This morning he had returned with his four medical students to show them her injuries, shown her body to them, pointed at the wounds on her back and talked a great deal, about things like the cattle-whip and how wide and long the gashes were and how well they might heal, or not. The four students had listened in silence, wondering how many body defects they would have to learn about in order to understand and be able to treat them.
The group was standing in the middle of the room, quite a bit away, but Lydia could make out more now. They were gathered round a trolley with a body on it, lit by the focused light from two large lamps in the ceiling. She guessed it must be a dead body, it was so pale and still. No breathing movements. The grey-haired man with the large glasses was pointing with the same kind of laser torch that he had used on her. The four medical students were as silent and grim-looking in front of the corpse as in front of a living human being who had been humiliated and wounded.
Lydia hung back in the anteroom. They hadn’t seen her. Then she took eight steps into the room before they discovered she was there. She stopped two or three metres away from them.
They saw her and yet did not see her.
They recognised the female patient with the lash wounds who had smiled so sadly from her bed that morning, but this woman, who looked quite similar, had a very different aura. She wanted something. Her eyes demanded their attention. She raised her gun and pointed it at them while she took a few more steps forward. The overhead light illuminated her face, which looked badly hurt, but showed no pain. This woman was intense and calm at the same time. The grey-haired doctor had been interrupted and in a deliberate manner began a new sentence about some part of the cadaver, but soon stopped again.
The woman had released the safety catch on the gun and raised it until the muzzle was pointing straight at his face. And then at the other faces, the gun moving from one pair of eyes to the next.
Each time she held it long enough for every one of them to feel that terrifying cramp in the stomach which she knew from when Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp had aimed at her temple.
No one spoke. They waited for her to say something.
Lydia pointed to the floor with the gun.
‘On knee! On knee!’
They knelt, all five of them, in a ring round the trolley containing the remains of what had once been a living person. She tried to gauge how frightened they were, but no one met her eyes, not one of them. The only female student and one of the men had closed their eyes. The rest stared straight past her or through her. They didn’t have the strength to do anything else, not even their teacher. Not even him.
She was nine years old again, back in that room with the military police, the gun pressed against her head, and her dad, his hands tied behind his back, was forced to kneel, then to lie face down on the floor. She remembered how he fell forward, the thud when his face hit the concrete, a heavy fall, and that he bled from both nostrils afterwards.
And now here she was, holding the gun.
Lydia took one last step forward.
She stumbled, almost lost her balance and realised that she had to be careful, not just because Dimitri had kicked her hard enough to make her limp, but because her sense of balance had been funny for almost two years. One of the punters had wanted to do something extra, slap her around a bit; he had promised to pay twice as much to hit her in the face and she had said yes. He hit her across her left ear and the pain had been unbearable. She lost some of the hearing on that side for ever and the mechanism inside the ear to do with balance was damaged. She didn’t quite understand the connection, but whatever it was had taken more of a beating than it could stand.
She managed to steady herself in mid-step, stumbling but not falling, all the time keeping the gun trained on the five people crouching in front of her.
It was important to keep her distance, she knew. A couple of metres away, no more, no less. She made certain that they had both knees on the floor and then stuck her gun hand quickly inside her coat and pulled the carrier bag out from her panties and away from her stomach. Dropped it to the floor.
She used her foot to rummage in the bag, rolled out the ball of string and kicked it across to the trolley.
The gun swung to aim at the female student.
Lydia screamed at her.
‘Lock! Lock!’
She watched the terrified woman, who tried to make herself as small as possible. They looked quite similar; both were blonde, with a tinge of red in their shoulder-length hair; they were almost the same height and more or less the same age. Not long ago the student had been standing and looking down at Lydia.
Lydia nearly smiled. Now it was the other way around, she thought. Now she is the one lying down. Now I am the one standing up, watching from above.
‘Lock!’
The young woman stared vacantly ahead. She was aware of someone holding a gun to her head, and that someone was screaming. But she couldn’t hear anything, she couldn’t bear to listen and take it in. She couldn’t
