Pretend?
We’re leaving.
Are you crazy?
I want to tell you everything—and I can’t here.
Tell me what?
Everything.
They had been writing quickly, taking turns with the same pen. Now Johannes hesitated and looked at her with the same sad and bewildered look as before, but it also showed a streak of what she had been missing for so long, his fighting spirit, and that made her feel more than just fear.
She had no intention of running away with him, still less of leaving the hospital with all the guards and soldiers, and the paranoia surrounding him. But it would be wonderful if he really did want to talk, and it would do him good to get some exercise. His pulse was higher than normal but stable, and he was strong. They would surely be able to sneak off and find a corner, somewhere they could talk and not be overheard.
At the same time she knew they would gain nothing if she simply unplugged him from his drip and the hospital equipment and they fled, so instead she wrote:
I’ll call the staff and explain.
She rang the bell and he wrote:
We’ll find a place where no-one will disturb us.
Stop it, she thought. Just stop it.
What are you running from? she wrote.
The people at Must.
Is it Svante?
He nodded, or at least she thought he nodded. She wanted to shout: I knew it, and when she wrote again her hand was shaking. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry.
Has he done something?
He neither answered nor nodded. He just looked out of the window towards the motorway, and she took that as a yes. She wrote:
You have to report him.
He gave her a pitying look which said, You don’t understand.
Or go to the media. Mikael Blomkvist just called. He’s on your side.
“My side,” he muttered, and pulled a face. He reached for the pen and scribbled a couple of illegible lines on the pad. She stared at the words.
Can’t read, she wrote, even though she probably could, so he clarified:
Not sure that’s a good side to be on.
That triggered a new urge for self-preservation, as if Johannes were distancing himself from her with those words. As if they were no longer an obvious couple, a we, but two people who no longer necessarily belonged together. She wondered if she should not be running from him instead.
She glanced at the guards outside the room and tried to come up with a plan. But just then she heard steps in the corridor and the doctor, the one with the red beard, came in and asked what they wanted. She said—it was all she could think of—that Johannes was feeling a little better now, and was strong enough to take a walk.
“We’re going down to the shop to buy a newspaper and a book,” she said in a voice which did not sound like her own, but which carried a surprising note of authority.
* * *
—
It was half past seven in the evening and Bublanski should have gone home long ago. But he was still in his office, staring into a young face brimming with a kind of angry idealism. He could see some people might find it irritating, but he actually liked the attitude, and maybe he had been the same at that age; had perhaps felt that the older generation was not taking life as seriously as it deserved to be taken. He gave the young woman a warm smile.
She smiled stiffly in return, and he suspected that humour was not her strongest suit, but that her fervour would certainly stand the world in good stead. She was twenty-five years old and her name was Else Sandberg. Her hair was cut in a bob and she wore round spectacles, and worked as a medical intern at St. Göran’s hospital.
“Thanks for taking the time.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said.
It was Modig who had found the woman, after getting a tip-off that the Sherpa had put up papers at the Södra station bus stop. She had then assigned colleagues to talk to pretty much everyone who regularly caught their bus from there.
“I understand you don’t remember much, but every single thing you do recall would be valuable to us,” he said.
“It was hard to read. There was very little space between the lines and basically it looked like paranoid delusion.”
“The signs are that it was just that,” he said. “But I’d be grateful if you could try to remember.”
“It was very guilt-ridden.”
Dear, sweet child, please don’t try to interpret it for me, he thought.
“What did it say?”
“That he went up a mountain. ‘One more time,’ he wrote. But that he couldn’t see. There was a snowstorm and he was in pain and freezing. He thought he was lost. But he heard cries that guided him.”
“What sort of cries?”
“Cries of the dead, I think.”
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“It was hard to understand, but he wrote that there were spirits accompanying him all the time, two spirits I think, one good and one evil, a little…”
She giggled, and Bublanski was delighted that Else Sandberg had suddenly revealed a human side.
“Like Captain Haddock in the Tintin books, you know? He has a devil and an angel hovering above his shoulders when he’s longing for a drink.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s a great metaphor.”
“It didn’t seem like a metaphor to me. I got the impression that for him it was real.”
“I only meant to say that it sounded familiar. Good and evil voices whispering to me when I’m tempted by something.” He looked embarrassed. “What did the evil spirit say?” he said.
“That he should leave her up there.”
“Her?”
“Yes, I think that’s what he wrote. It was a she, a madam, or a mam-something who’d been left on the mountain. But then there was something about the valley of rainbows, Rainbow Valley, where the dead hold out their hands and beg for food. It really was all very strange. Then it clearly said that Johannes Forsell appeared. Very weird. That’s as far as I got, to be honest. The bus came, and there was some bloke arguing with the driver, and I had my mind on other things. In any case I’d already guessed by then that the man was a paranoid schizophrenic. He wrote that he never stopped hearing those cries in his head.”
“You probably don’t need to be a schizophrenic to feel like that.”
“What do you mean?”