Box 21 aka The Vault Read online

And now here she was, holding the gun.

  Lydia took one last step forward.

  She stumbled, almost lost her balance and realised that she had to be careful, not just because Dimitri had kicked her hard enough to make her limp, but because her sense of balance had been funny for almost two years. One of the punters had wanted to do something extra, slap her around a bit; he had promised to pay twice as much to hit her in the face and she had said yes. He hit her across her left ear and the pain had been unbearable. She lost some of the hearing on that side for ever and the mechanism inside the ear to do with balance was damaged. She didn’t quite understand the connection, but whatever it was had taken more of a beating than it could stand.

  She managed to steady herself in mid-step, stumbling but not falling, all the time keeping the gun trained on the five people crouching in front of her.

  It was important to keep her distance, she knew. A couple of metres away, no more, no less. She made certain that they had both knees on the floor and then stuck her gun hand quickly inside her coat and pulled the carrier bag out from her panties and away from her stomach. Dropped it to the floor.

  She used her foot to rummage in the bag, rolled out the ball of string and kicked it across to the trolley.

  The gun swung to aim at the female student.

  Lydia screamed at her.

  ‘Lock! Lock!’

  She watched the terrified woman, who tried to make herself as small as possible. They looked quite similar; both were blonde, with a tinge of red in their shoulder-length hair; they were almost the same height and more or less the same age. Not long ago the student had been standing and looking down at Lydia.

  Lydia nearly smiled. Now it was the other way around, she thought. Now she is the one lying down. Now I am the one standing up, watching from above.

  ‘Lock!’

  The young woman stared vacantly ahead. She was aware of someone holding a gun to her head, and that someone was screaming. But she couldn’t hear anything, she couldn’t bear to listen and take it in. She couldn’t 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 Öhrström 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 Öhrström (LÖ): 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.

  LÖ: 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.

  LÖ: 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.

  LÖ: Was it?

  IL: Was it what?

  LÖ: 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 s
ome 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?

  LÖ: As close as you and I are now.

  IL: In other words, close enough to get a good look at him?

  LÖ: 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.

  IL: Can you describe his build?

  LÖ: He was frightening.

  IL: Height?

  LÖ: Much taller than me and I’m quite tall, one metre seventy-five. Maybe like your colleague. Another ten centimetres.

  Lisa nodded towards the end of the corridor, where Ewert was standing at the top of the stairwell, next to the medical examiner, staring at the dead body on the floor. Sven automatically turned the same way and mentally measured Ewert.

  IL: His face?

  LÖ: Strong. Nose, chin, forehead.

  IL: And hair?

  LÖ: He didn’t have any.

  There was a knock at the door. Lisa Öhrström had been sitting with her back to it, so she hadn’t noticed someone approaching and therefore got a fright. A uniformed policeman opened the door and came in. He handed over an envelope and then left.

  IL: I’ve got some photos for you to look at. Pictures of different people.

  She got up from her chair. No more. Not now. She didn’t want to have anything to do with the brown envelope in the centre of the desktop.

  IL: Please sit down.

  LÖ: I’ll have to get back to work.

  IL: Lisa, look at me. It wasn’t your fault.

  Sven rose too, took a step forward and put his arm round the shoulders of the woman who wanted to return to her guilt and grief. He pushed her gently down on the chair, moved two case-note folders aside to make more free space on the desk and emptied out the contents of the brown envelope.

  IL: Please, try to identify the visitor, the man whose breath you felt in your face.

  LÖ: I suspect you know who he is.

  IL: Please, concentrate on the photos.

  She picked them over. One at a time, she had a good look, then put them to the side systematically, face down. After some thirty photos of men standing against a white wall, she suddenly had a sensation of something tightening in her chest. It was the same feeling as when she was little and scared of the dark. She had described it then as a jittery, dancing feeling, as if her fear was light and lifted her.

  LÖ: That’s him.

  IL: Are you certain?

  LÖ: Quite certain.

  IL: For the record, the witness has identified the visitor as the man in photograph thirty-two.

  Sven was silent for a while, uncertain of his reactions. He knew well that grief eats people from inside and that this woman was almost suffocating with sadness, but even so he had forced her to keep her feelings at arm’s length and carry on nonetheless. He had known that she could break down at any moment and had ignored it, because it was his duty.

  But now, now she pointed to the person they had wanted her to pick out.

  He only hoped she was strong enough.

  IL: You have identified a man who is generally thought to be very dangerous. From experience, we know that witnesses who identify him are always subjected to threats.

  LÖ: What’s the implication?

  IL: That we are considering giving you personal protection.

  That was something she did not want to hear. She wanted to undo the whole thing, to go back home, undress and go to bed, sleep until the alarm went, wake up, have breakfast, get dressed and go to work at Söder Hospital.

  It wouldn’t happen. Not ever again.

  The past would never cease to be, no matter how much she wanted it to.

  Sitting there on the hard chair, she tried to cry again, tried to expel a part of whatever it was that was eating her from inside. It didn’t work. Crying, damn it, wasn’t an option. Sometimes, it just isn’t.

  She was about to get up again and walk off somewhere else, just away, when the door to the ward sister’s glass booth opened.

  Pulled open by someone who didn’t bother to knock, just stepped straight in.

  She recognised the older policeman, who had held her hand for a little too long when they met. His face was flushed, his voice loud.

  ‘Shit! Sven!’

  Sven Sundkvist seldom got irritated with his boss, unlike the rest of them. Most of his colleagues disliked Ewert Grens, some even hated him. As for himself, he had decided simply to accept, the good and the bad, to put up or shut up. And so he put up.

  With one exception.

  ‘For the record. The person who has interrupted the interrogation of the witness Lisa Öhrström is Ewert Grens, DSI at the City Police, Stockholm.’

  ‘Sven, I’m sorry. It just… it’s bloody urgent.’

  Sven leaned over to the tape recorder, switched it off, then gestured at Ewert. OK, talk away.

  ‘That woman. You know the one we carried out of the flat in the Atlas district. She was unconscious.’

  ‘Flogged?’

  ‘Yes. She’s disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  Ewert nodded.

  ‘She was admitted to one of the surgical wards and was here until very recently. I had a call from Control. She’s not there any more. And she’s armed with a handgun. Knocked out the guard assigned to look after her. She’s probably still somewhere in the hospital, ready to shoot.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘I only know what I’ve just told you.’

  Lisa Öhrström put photograph number 32 back on the table. Then she looked first at one policeman and then the other, and pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘Up there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Up there, next floor. The surgical wards.’

  Ewert stared at the white ceiling and was on his way out of the room he had just barged into when Sven grabbed his arm.

  ‘Stop. Wait. We just got a one hundred per cent clear, unhesitating identification of Jochum Lang.’

  The large, clumsy man stopped, nodded at Lisa and smiled at his colleague.

  ‘Now we’ll see. Won’t we, Anni?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Sven stared uncomprehendingly at Ewert and then turned to Lisa, putting his hand lightly on the young doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘Ewert. Dr Öhrström needs to have protection.’

  It was just after lunch on Wednesday 5 June.

  Ewert Grens and Sven hurried up one of the hospital’s many staircases, from the sixth to the seventh floor.

  It had been a strange morning.

  They had been restless for a few minutes, all five of them. Carefully moved a leg, slowly tilted a head against a shoulder. As if their bodies were aching, as if they didn’t dare attract her attention, and for precisely that reason were unable to sit still.

  Lydia sensed their fear and left them to it. She knew how hard it was even to breathe when you were sitting down, looking up at someone who had just claimed the right to your body. She remembered the Stena Baltica ferry and how the threat of death silenced your instinct to cry for help.

  Suddenly one of them collapsed and fell forward on his face.

  One of the young men, a medical student, had lost his balance and fallen out of the circle around the body.

  Lydia quickly aimed the gun at him.

  He lay bent over, face down, his knees still on the floor, his hands tied behind his back. His body shaking, being upright required too much effort. He was weeping with fear. He had never imagined anything like this before; life had just happened. He was young and everything was eternal; only no
w did he realise that it might end instantly, when he was only twenty-three years old. His body kept shaking. He wanted to live for much longer.

  ‘On knee!’

  Lydia went over and pressed the muzzle against the back of his neck.

  ‘On knee!’

  Slowly he straightened up, still trembling, tears running down his cheeks.

  ‘Name?’

  Silence. He just stared at her.

  ‘Name!’

  He found it hard to speak; the words stuck, didn’t want to come.

  ‘Johan.’

  ‘Name!’

  ‘Johan Larsen.’

  She leaned over him and pressed the muzzle against his forehead. Like the men on the Stena Baltica had done. She kept it there while she addressed him.

  ‘You, on knee! If again… boom!’

  He sat up straight now. Held his breath. His body…he couldn’t get it to stop trembling, not even when the urine started trickling down his leg, staining his trousers without him being aware of it.

  Lydia looked them over, one by one. Still no one met her eyes, they didn’t dare. She felt around inside the plastic bag with the supermarket logo, pulling out the explosive and the detonators. There was a small stainless-steel table next to the trolley and she divided up the pale brownish dough, kneaded it, still holding the gun in her good hand, until the mass had became soft and pliable enough to fix round the door she had only recently come in through and the other two doors in the room. She used half of it. She divided up the remaining half, putting a fifth of it on each of the people kneeling on the floor in front of her, around the trolley containing a dead, naked body. When she had finished, they carried death between their shoulders, a pale membrane of plastic explosive stuck at the back of their necks.

  She had been in the mortuary for over twenty minutes now. It had taken her about ten minutes to get from the surgical ward on the seventh floor down to the basement.

  She realised that her disappearance would have been discovered some time ago, that the police would have been alerted and be looking for her.