You may think us incompetent for not having been able to come up with a clearer picture of his case. But we were working in difficult circumstances from the start. I think it is fair to say that we did make some progress. At the end of June he was given back his down jacket, which he had been asking for, and that seemed to make him feel secure. It’s true that he was always asking for alcohol—probably because he was getting fewer sedatives—but there were some nights when he no longer seemed to hear voices, and his night terrors also improved.
I recall that both Henrik and I left for our respective holidays feeling reasonably confident. We felt that we were on the right track, both with him and the clinic generally.>
I’m sure you did, Nyman thought. But it still led to the death of Nima Rita, and it was absolutely clear that the management at the clinic had underestimated his determination to get away. It was reasonable for him to be allowed on the terrace. But it must have been against all the rules that he should be there alone, with no staff present.
During the afternoon of July 27, he disappeared. The evidence was a small scrap of material torn from his trousers when he squeezed through the narrow gap between the roof and the terrace’s tall railings. After that we can only assume he climbed down the steep cliffs beyond and vanished from Årstaviken. He must then have found somewhere to live in the area around Mariatorget.
Yet the most shocking thing of all was that no-one reported it until Henrik Alm returned from his holiday on August 4, and even then no-one alerted the police because, as Dr. Mansoor also wrote, “It had been very clearly laid down that any new developments and incidents involving the patient were to be reported to the stipulated contact person.” What a load of gobbledygook, she thought, it positively reeked of classified information. In any event, it was patently obvious that something significant was being withheld. Once she had done a little more research on the South Wing clinic, and having had a long conversation with Chief Inspector Bublanski, she did precisely the same as before.
She rang Blomkvist.
* * *
—
Blomkvist had not yet answered Catrin’s question. He was having a Guinness at the Tudor Arms on Grevgatan and trying to draw up a plan of action. He should get hold of Svante Lindberg. Blomkvist was increasingly convinced that he was a key person in the drama. But something told him that before he did so he needed more to go on. Forsell himself would be the best source, but Blomkvist had no idea what sort of condition he was in, and in any event he could not get hold of either him, or Rebecka Forsell, or even his press secretary, Niklas Keller. In the end he decided to take a break to organize somewhere to stay. He had to find a place where he could work and sleep and not endanger his host. Then he could continue. But just then his mobile rang.
It was Nyman, saying that she had discovered something interesting. He asked her to hang up, and sent a text message telling her to install the Signal app, which would allow them to talk on a secure line.
<Can’t. Don’t understand. Hate apps> she answered. <They drive me nuts>
<Don’t you have teenagers in the house who spend all their time on their mobiles?>
<Is the Pope a Catholic?>
<Get them to do it for you. Tell them to help Mamma become an undercover detective>
<Ha! I’ll give it a go> she wrote.
There was a pause and he sipped his Guinness and kept an eye on the street where two women passed with prams, and he let his thoughts drift until he got a text in a new language.
<R u Mikael Blomkvist, I mean 4 real?>
He decided to show what a techie he was and sent a selfie of him giving a thumbs-up.
<Cool>
<Actually not that cool>
<And Mamma’s gonna be a secret agent?>
<For sure> he answered, and got a smiley back. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this after all, he thought, careful not to send a red heart this time. That would land him on the Expressen breaking-news posters. Instead he began to explain to the girl, the one called Amanda, what she needed to do. Fifteen minutes later, Nyman called on the app, and he went out into the street to speak to her.
“I’ve just gone way up in my daughters’ estimation,” she said.
“Well, at least I’ve done one useful thing today. What did you want to tell me?”
* * *
—
Nyman poured herself a glass of white wine and told Blomkvist what she had discovered.
“So nobody has yet said how or why he ended up there in the first place,” he said.
“There’s some kind of confidentiality around the whole thing. Military secrecy, I think.”
“As if it had something to do with national security?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or else it’s designed to protect certain individuals, rather than the country.”
“It could be that,” Nyman said.
“Isn’t it all a bit strange?”
“Certainly is,” she answered slowly, “and a huge scandal too. He seems to have been locked up in a small room there for several years, without even seeing a dentist, or anybody else as far as I can tell. I’m not sure if you know the place.”
“I read Gustav Stavsjö’s manifesto once upon a time,” he said.
“It all sounded great, didn’t it? The sickest of us would get the best care. The dignity of a society is defined by the way it looks after its weakest members.”
“He felt very strongly about his cause, didn’t he?”
“But those were different times, and his faith in dialogue and therapy was naïve, at least for patients with such severe symptoms, and psychiatry generally was also moving in a different direction, wasn’t it, towards more medication and coercive measures. The clinic, which is so beautifully located by the water and looks like some sort of mansion, became more and more of a depository for hopeless cases, especially refugees traumatized by war, and it grew increasingly difficult to recruit people to work there. The clinic got a lousy reputation.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
“There were ambitious plans to close it down and integrate the patients into the county council’s health-care system. But the sons who ran the Gustav Stavsjö Foundation managed to prevent it by persuading Professor Alm, who had a good reputation, to take over. He began to modernize the clinic and rebuild the organization, and it was in that context that he and his colleague became aware of Nima, or Nihar Rawal, as he was known in his medical records.”