“Why should it have affected him?”
“Something did rattle him, as I said. From having been the solid rock in camp he became increasingly fearful, and sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t a little scared of Svante.”
“Why would he be, do you think?”
“If I were to guess, I’d say he was frightened that Svante would tell Stan Engelman.”
“Was there anything to suggest they were in contact?”
“Maybe not, but…there was something insidious about Svante, that became ever clearer to me, and occasionally he would speak about Engelman as if he knew him. The way he called him ‘Stan’ made it sound somehow…familiar. But I may be imagining it. It’s hard to remember things like that now. All I know is that even Svante appeared less and less cocky towards the end. So he was treading very carefully indeed.”
“You mean he too was nervous about something?”
“We all were.”
“That’s natural, in those circumstances,” Blomkvist said. “But you referred to Lindberg as the big riddle at Base Camp.”
“That’s exactly how it was. Most of the time he was self-assurance personified, yet he could also be hesitant and suspicious. Extravagant and generous, but also mean. He could flatter the shirt off your back one moment, needle you the next.”
“What about his relationship with Forsell?”
“Pretty much the same, I think. There was a part of him that loved Johannes.”
“But another…”
“…that kept tabs on him. Tried to get some hold over him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not sure. But I guess I’m just influenced by all this crap in the media against Forsell.”
“Influenced in what way?”
“It all seems so unfair, and sometimes I wonder if Johannes isn’t paying for something that Svante did. But now I really am being indiscreet.”
Blomkvist gave a careful laugh.
“Maybe you are. But I’m glad you’re helping me to think, and you don’t have to worry about my story, as I said. I too love to speculate, but in my articles I have no choice but to stick to the facts.”
“Sad.”
“Ha, yes, perhaps. It’s a bit like mountaineering, I imagine. You can’t just take a guess at where the next rock ledge is going to be. You have to know. Otherwise you’re in trouble.”
“True.”
He glanced at his mobile and saw that Catrin had replied. She had answered with another question, and that was as good a reason as any to end the conversation. He said a friendly goodbye to Elin Felke and walked out into the street with his suitcase, but without any clue where to go.
* * *
—
Fredrika Nyman got back to her house in Trångsund late in the afternoon, and saw that she had got a long e-mail from a psychiatrist called Farzad Mansoor, senior physician at the closed psychiatric unit at the South Wing. Both she and the police had sent him detailed reports along with an enquiry as to whether Nima Rita had been a patient there.
Nyman had not been expecting much to come of it. The Sherpa had been in too shabby a state to have been institutionalized, she thought, even if the traces of antipsychotic drugs in his blood suggested the opposite. She was therefore eager to see what Dr. Mansoor had written—and not only because of the investigation.
Dr. Mansoor had spoken in a soft, pleasant tone on the telephone, and she liked what she saw of him online, the glint in his eye and the warmth of his smile, and even his interest in gliding, which he had written about on Facebook. But the e-mail he had sent to her and Chief Inspector Bublanski was a passionate statement, seething with anger, a clear attempt to justify the clinic’s treatment of the Sherpa.
<We are shocked and saddened, and let me say right away that the event occurred at the most unfortunate time of the year, the only week in July when neither I nor Henrik Alm, the head of our clinic, was present. Sadly the case fell between the cracks.>
Which event? Which case? Which cracks? she wanted to know, as if cross that her mild-mannered glider pilot had so completely lost his composure. But after skimming the e-mail, which was long and meandering, she gathered that Nima Rita had indeed been a patient at the South Wing, but under another name, and that he had absconded during the evening of July 27 that year. Initially his absence had not been reported, for several good reasons, most of them to do with the people in charge not having been on duty. But there had also been a special classified procedure for this patient, which had been ignored—maybe out of fear, or guilt.
Farzad Mansoor wrote:
<As you may know, Henrik and I took over the running of the South Wing in March this year. At the time, we discovered a number of unsatisfactory situations, including the fact that several patients had been kept locked up and subjected to coercive measures which, in our view, had had no beneficial effects. One patient was a man who had been admitted in October 2017, under the name of Nihar Rawal. He had no identity documents but, according to his medical records, he was fifty-four years old and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and neurological damage that was hard to assess. He was apparently from Nepal, from the mountain regions.>
Nyman looked at her daughters, who were as usual sitting on the sofa with their mobiles. Dr. Mansoor went on:
<The patient had received no dental care, nor had he been seen by a cardiologist, which should have happened as a matter of priority. Instead he had been heavily medicated and at times even been strapped down. This was totally unjustified. There was information—which I am unfortunately not at liberty to disclose—suggesting that he was vulnerable to threats. Perhaps we did not fully appreciate how serious this was, and we are in no way denying our responsibility. But you have to understand that, for Henrik and myself, the patient’s best interests were of paramount importance. We wanted to show him a little human kindness and try to build some trust. The patient was disoriented. He never really knew where he was. At the same time, there was a rage inside him, a fury at the fact that no-one had wanted to listen to his story, and so we markedly reduced his medication and started therapy. I’m afraid this was not particularly successful either.
His delusions were too severe and, however keen he was to talk, he had developed a strong suspicion of our entire unit. But we were at least able to rectify some misunderstandings. We began to call him Nima, for example, and that was important to him. We addressed him as Sirdar Nima.
We could see that he had an obsessive fixation about his late wife, Luna. In the evenings he would walk through the hospital corridors, calling her name. He said he could hear her cries for help. He would also launch into wild, incomprehensible outbursts where he talked about a Madam—or a Mam Sahib. Both Henrik and I took this to be another way in which he referred to his wife, for there were strong similarities between the stories. But now that we read your reports, we suspect that we’re not dealing with one trauma, as we thought, but two.