think about words and what they meant. Not now. Not with a gun to her head.
‘Last time! Lock!’
The older doctor understood. Cautiously, he turned his head to the student, made eye contact and spoke to her softly.
‘She wants you to tie us up.’
The young woman looked at him, but didn’t move.
‘She wants you to tie us up with that string.’
His voice was calm. She seemed to listen and met his eyes before turning to look at Lydia with a scared expression.
‘I don’t think she’ll shoot. Do you understand? If you tie us up she won’t shoot.’
She nodded, slowly, slowly. Then she repeated the movement towards Lydia, to show that she had understood, and leaned forward to pick up the ball of string. Using the knife that had just made an incision into the abdomen of the cadaver, she cut a length of string, which she wound round her teacher’s wrists.
‘Hard! Very hard! You lock hard!’
Lydia took another step forward and waved with the gun. She watched until the string had been pulled tight enough to cut into the flesh.
‘Lock!’
The young woman went on, moved round with the knife, tied everybody’s wrists together and didn’t stop pulling at the string until blood showed at every knot. When she had finished she turned to Lydia. She was breathing heavily and waited until they made eye contact.
Lydia pointed with the gun. The student was to turn round and kneel. Using her weak left hand, Lydia managed to tie the student’s wrists as hard as she could.
The whole thing had taken six to seven minutes, a little longer than Lydia had planned. True, she hadn’t expected five of them. One or two, yes, but not five.
Someone must have found the guard by now, realised that she was missing and probably alerted the police.
She didn’t have much time.
She quickly searched the pockets of all five white coats, then the trouser pockets. Everything she found was piled up on the floor: key rings, wallets, loose change, ID cards, plastic gloves, half-empty packets of throat tablets. The doctor had a mobile phone. She tested it and noted that it was almost fully charged.
Five people kneeling in front of her, hands tied behind their backs, cowering before the gun in her hand.
One dead man, partly dissected, on a brightly lit trolley.
She had hostages.
Hostages mean that you can make demands.
She was crying.
It was a long time since he had made her cry. She hated him for it. Lisa Ohrstrom hated her brother.
The bloody call he had made from the metro station just two days ago, she could still hear his voice in her head, wheedling as usual when he was trying to make her give him money. She had refused, as she had been told to do at the courses for relatives.
Tears, a lump in her throat, her trembling body. She had picked him up so often from care homes and clinics. Every time he had promised it was the last time, he would never touch it again. He had caught her the way only he could do, looked into her eyes and, as time passed, unknowingly sucked her dry, sapped all her strength and wasted bloody years and years of her life.
Now he was lying there, slumped in a stairwell at her work.
This really was the last time, and just for a moment she felt almost relieved that he wouldn’t bother her any more, until it dawned on her that this was the one feeling she would never learn to live with.
Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): I know that to you Hilding Oldйus was not just another patient. However, I must ask you to answer my questions about him.
Lisa Ohrstrom (LO): I was just going to phone my sister.
IL: Believe me, I do understand that it is hard for you. But you were the only one here. The only eyewitness.
LO: I want to speak to my sister’s kids. They adored their uncle. They only saw him when he was just out. He was clean then and nicely dressed. His face had some colour. They’ve never met the man who is lying on the stairs.
IL: I need to know how close you got to the other person. The visitor.
LO: I was going to phone just now. Aren’t you listening? I’m trying to explain to you.
IL: How close?
They were sitting on hard wooden chairs in the ward sister’s glass booth. It was located in the middle of the sixth-floor corridor.
Lisa couldn’t stop crying and her dignity was slipping away. She tried hard to hang on to it, but felt her grip on life was weakening.
He was her brother.
She simply couldn’t deal with this any more.
The last few times he had come to her for help she had refused, and all the tears in the world could not wash away that guilt.
Sven Sundkvist paused and watched her. Her white coat looked rumpled; her eyes were half closed. He continued to wait while she blew her nose and pulled her fingers through her long hair. He had met her before. Not her, but people like her. He often had to interview them, the women who stood hovering in the background, supportive souls who always felt guilty and exposed. He thought of them as guiltridden and knew only too well that they could cause trouble. Their capacity for blaming themselves often complicated things, even for an experienced interrogator. They behaved as if they were the culprits and interpreted whatever you said as an accusation; actually, every one of them construed her life as one long accusation. Even when completely innocent, their anxieties obstructed investigations, which had to move on.
LO: Was it?
IL: Was it what?
LO: My fault?
IL: Look, it’s only natural that you feel guilty. I understand. But I can’t help you. It’s something you have to deal with yourself.
Lisa looked at him, the policeman sitting in front of her with one leg crossed over the other and demanding something from her.
She disliked him.
He seemed nicer, gentler than the older man, but she disliked him all the same. The police had some kind of perennial aura of authority, and this wasn’t a proper interrogation, more like a confrontation, the start of a quarrel she couldn’t bear to take part in.
IL: The man who was here, he was probably the one who killed your brother. How close did you get to him?
LO: As close as you and I are now.
IL: In other words, close enough to get a good look at him?
LO: Close enough to feel his breath.
She turned, glancing at the glass wall. What an unpleasant place this was. Whoever passed by could see them there, curious eyes disturbing her sense of privacy. She found it hard to concentrate and said she was going to sit with her back to the window.
