What was he trying to say now?
“I mean…” he said. “That I recognize that too. There are certain things you never get rid of. They gnaw and clamour inside you, year after year.”
“Yes,” she said, more hesitant now. “That’s true.”
“Can you hang on a moment while I do a quick search?”
Else Sandberg nodded and Bublanski logged onto his computer and put three words into Google. He turned the screen to face her.
“Do you see this?”
“That’s awful,” she said.
“Isn’t it? It’s Rainbow Valley on Mount Everest. I never knew anything about this world before. But I’ve been reading up on it these last few days, and I recognized it as soon as you mentioned it. Rainbow Valley’s just a bit of slang of course. But it does come up quite a lot, and it’s easy to see why. Have a look.”
He pointed at the screen and wondered if he was being unnecessarily brutal. But he wanted her to understand how serious this was. Image after image showed dead climbers in the snow above twenty-six thousand feet, and even though many had been lying up there for years, maybe even decades, they still looked muscular and strong. They were frozen in time, and all were dressed in brightly coloured clothes—reds, greens, yellows and blues—and strewn around them were oxygen cylinders, remains of tents or Buddhist prayer flags, also in brilliant hues. It really did look like a rainbow landscape, a macabre testimony to human folly.
“You see,” he said. “The man who wrote the screed was once a porter and guide on Mount Everest.”
“So he really was?”
“He was a Sherpa, and probably he shouldn’t have called it that. Rainbow Valley is a Western invention, a stupid piece of gallows humour. But it seems to have stuck all the same, and it became mixed up with his religious representations of spirits and gods. By now, more than four thousand people have climbed the mountain, and three hundred and thirty of them have died up there. It’s been impossible to bring all the bodies down, and I can really understand it if this man, who had climbed the mountain eleven times, felt that the dead were speaking to him.”
“But—” she began.
“There’s more,” he interrupted her. “Life up there is dreadful. The risks are significant. You can get HACE, for example, High-Altitude Cerebral Edema.”
“The brain swells up. I know.”
“It does, exactly,” he said. “You’ll know more about this than I do. The brain does swell up, and rational thought and speech become a problem. You’re liable to make terrible mistakes, and often you have hallucinations and lose contact with reality. Many perfectly sensible people, like you or me—well, certainly fitter and more reckless than me—have seen spirits or felt a mysterious presence up there. This man, he always climbed without oxygen, and that eats up your strength, both mentally and physically. During this dramatic event he was trying to describe, he had worked incredibly hard and gone up and down the mountain and saved many people. He must have been completely worn out, exhausted beyond imagination, and it’s not at all surprising that he saw angels and demons, like Captain Haddock, not in the least bit strange.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful,” Else Sandberg said, apologetic now.
“You weren’t, and I’m sure you’re right,” Bublanski said. “The man was very sick, quite simply a schizophrenic. But he may still have had something important to tell us, so I’m asking you one last time: Is there anything else you remember?”
“Nothing really, I’m sorry.”
“Anything more about what he wrote about Forsell?”
“Well, maybe.”
“What?”
“You said that the man rescued people, didn’t you? I think he wrote that Forsell didn’t want to be rescued.”
“What could that have meant?”
“I don’t know, and it’s only just occurred to me. But I’m not totally sure about it either. The bus came, and the next day the papers were gone.”
Afterwards, when the woman had left, Bublanski stayed in his office with a strange feeling that he was having to interpret a dream. He spent a long time staring at the pictures of Klara Engelman’s body, which the jet stream had torn from Viktor Grankin higher up on the mountain, and which an American expedition had photographed a year later. Klara was lying on her back with her arms frozen in a beseeching gesture, as if she were still reaching out for Grankin, or perhaps, he thought, like a child wanting to be picked up by its mother.
What had happened up there? Probably only what had already been described a hundred times. But one could not know for sure. New layers in the story were constantly coming to light. It would now seem, for example, that there was some military connection to the Sherpa, which the doctors at the South Wing were forbidden to talk about, and Bublanski had been trying to get hold of Klas Berg at Must all afternoon and evening, hoping to follow that up.
Berg had promised the police a full account the next morning, but had qualified this by saying that he too had some unanswered questions. Bublanski did not like the sound of that. He hated having to depend on the intelligence services. Not because he worried one little bit about prestige or matters of status, but because he knew that it would have a negative effect on the police investigation. He was determined to regain the upper hand.
He closed down the pictures of Klara Engelman on his computer and tried once more to phone Undersecretary Lindberg. But again Lindberg did not answer. Bublanski got up and decided to take a walk, to see if that would help clear his head.
* * *
—
Lindberg walked in through the hospital entrance. He had already been there that day and Rebecka had not made him feel welcome, so there was really no reason for him to return. But now that he knew Johannes was conscious, he had to talk to him and say…something…he was not really sure what, only that he had to get him to keep his mouth shut, come what may. He turned off his mobile because he did not want to make the chaos any worse.
He had no intention whatsoever of speaking to Mikael Blomkvist, who had been trying to reach him, or even to Chief Inspector Bublanski, who had just rung his number for the third time. He had to keep a cool head.
In his briefcase he had a bundle of classified papers about the Russian disinformation campaign. They were not especially important, at least not compared to everything else, but they would give him a pretext for a private conversation with Johannes, and he had to make sure that no-one saw him. No-one at all. He had to be strong, as always. It would all sort itself out. So he told himself.
What was that smell? Ammonia perhaps, disinfectant? He looked around the lobby, afraid that the paparazzi would be hanging about down there, afraid that Blomkvist might suddenly appear, knowing his darkest secrets. But all he could see were patients and their families and hospital staff in their white coats. An ashen-faced man who looked as if he were dying was wheeled past on a trolley bed. Lindberg barely noticed him.