The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер
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Jasim stumbles and reaches his hand out towards the low railing, and sees the snow fall fifty metres onto the ice.
His torch hits something and goes out.
His heart is beating hard and Jasim peers forward again, but can no longer see the figure.
Fredrik calls him back and he turns round. His partner is pointing at him, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. He looks scared, and starts to fumble with the holster of his pistol, and Jasim realises that he’s trying to warn him, that he was pointing at someone behind his back.
He turns round and gasps for breath.
Someone is crawling along the track straight towards him. Jasim backs away and tries to draw his pistol. The figure gets to its feet and sways. It’s a young man. He’s staring at the policemen with empty eyes. His bearded face is thin, his cheekbones sharp. He’s swaying and seems to be having trouble breathing.
‘Half of me is still underground,’ he pants.
‘Are you injured?’
‘Who?’
The young man coughs and falls to his knees again.
‘What’s he saying?’ Fredrik asks, with one hand on his holstered service weapon.
‘Are you injured?’ Jasim asks again.
‘I don’t know, I can’t feel anything, I …’
‘Please, come with me.’
Jasim helps him up and sees that his right hand is covered with red ice.
‘I’m only half … The Sandman has taken … he’s taken half …’
The doors of the ambulance bay of Södermalm Hospital close. A red-cheeked auxiliary nurse helps the paramedics remove the stretcher and wheel it towards the emergency room.
‘We can’t find anything to identify him by, nothing …’
The patient is handed over to the triage nurse and taken into one of the treatment rooms. After checking his vital signs the nurse identifies the patient as triage-level orange, the second highest level, extremely urgent.
Four minutes later Dr Irma Goodwin comes into the treatment room and the nurse gives her a quick briefing:
‘Airways free, no acute trauma … but he’s got poor saturation, fever, signs of concussion and weak circulation.’
The doctor looks at the charts and goes over to the skinny man. His clothes have been cut open. His bony ribcage rises and falls with his rapid breathing.
‘Still no name?’
‘No.’
‘Give him oxygen.’
The young man lies with his eyelids closed and trembling as the nurse puts an oxygen mask on him.
He looks strangely malnourished, but there are no visible needle marks on his body. Irma has never seen anyone so white. The nurse checks his temperature from his ear again.
‘Thirty-nine point nine.’
Irma Goodwin ticks the tests she wants taken from the patient, then looks at him again. His chest rattles as he coughs weakly and opens his eyes briefly.
‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ he whispers frantically. ‘I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to, I’ve got to …’
‘Where do you live? Can you tell me where you live?’
‘Which … which one of us?’ he asks, and gulps hard.
‘He’s delirious,’ the nurse says quietly.
‘Have you got any pain?’
‘Yes,’ he replies with a confused smile.
‘Can you tell me …’
‘No, no, no, no, she’s screaming inside me, I can’t bear it, I can’t, I …’
His eyes roll back, he coughs, and mutters something about porcelain fingers, then lies there gasping for breath.
Irma Goodwin decides to give the patient a Neurobion injection, antipyretics and an intravenous antibiotic, Benzylpenicillin, until the test results come back.
She leaves the treatment room and walks down the corridor, rubbing the place where her wedding ring sat for eighteen years until she flushed it down the toilet. Her husband had betrayed her for far too long for her to forgive him. It no longer hurts, but it still feels like a shame, a waste of their shared future. She wonders about phoning her daughter even though it’s late. Since the divorce she’s been much more anxious than before, and calls Mia far too often.
Through the door ahead of her she can hear the staff nurse talking on the phone. An ambulance is on its way in from a priority call. A serious RTA. The staff nurse is putting together an emergency team and calling a surgeon.
Irma Goodwin stops and goes back to the room containing the unidentified patient. The red-cheeked auxiliary nurse is helping the other nurse to clean a bleeding wound in the man’s thigh. It looks like the young man had run straight into a sharp branch.
Irma Goodwin stops in the doorway.
‘Add some Macrolide to the antibiotics,’ she says decisively. ‘One gram of Erythromycin, intravenous.’
The nurse looks up.
‘You think he’s got Legionnaires’ disease?’ she asks in surprise.
‘Let’s see what the test—’
Irma Goodwin falls silent as the patient’s body starts to jerk. She looks at his white face and sees him slowly open his eyes.
‘I’ve got to get home,’ he whispers. ‘My name is Mikael Kohler-Frost, and I’ve got to get home …’
‘Mikael Kohler-Frost,’ Irma says. ‘You’re in Södermalm Hospital, and—’
‘She’s screaming, all the time!’
Irma leaves the treatment room and half-runs to her office. She closes the door behind her, puts on her reading glasses, sits down at her computer and logs in. She can’t find him in the health service database and tries the national population register instead.
She finds him there.
Irma Goodwin unconsciously rubs the empty place on her ring finger and rereads the information about the patient in the emergency room.
Mikael Kohler-Frost has been dead for seven years, and is buried in Malsta cemetery, in the parish of Norrtälje.
Detective Inspector Joona Linna is in a small room whose walls and floor are made of bare concrete. He is on his knees while a man in camouflage is aiming a pistol at his head, a black SIG Sauer. The door is being guarded by a man who keeps his Belgian assault rifle trained on Joona the whole time.
On the floor next to the wall is a bottle of Coca-Cola. The light is coming from a ceiling lamp with a buckled aluminium shade.
A mobile phone buzzes. Before the man with the pistol answers he yells at Joona to lower his head.
The other man puts his finger on the trigger and moves a step closer.
The man with the pistol talks into the mobile phone, then listens, without taking his eyes off Joona. Grit crunches