Sven looked down at Ewert. He hadn’t been listening and was already heading down the stairs.
‘Listen, we’ve got a prostitute who’s pointing a gun at the people down there, so please excuse me, Sven. Let’s talk about this some other time.’
One floor down. Sven caught up with him.
‘Hey, Sven.’
‘Yes.’
‘A negotiator. I need someone who is good at hostage negotiations.’
‘He’s on his way.’
‘What?’
‘It was her only demand.’
Ewert stopped in mid-step. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I just heard when I phoned in your request for reinforcements. She got one of the hostages to speak for her, a senior doctor. He described the mortuary situation on her behalf, as it were. She doesn’t speak Swedish and not much English either.’
‘And?’
‘When he was done with the preliminaries, she made him read out a name she’d written down for him on a piece of paper. Bengt Nordwall.’
‘Bengt?’
‘Yep.’
‘Why?’
‘Search me. Control took it to mean that she wanted him here. I would’ve come to the same conclusion.’
Ewert hadn’t come across Bengt on police business for a long time. Then, yesterday, there he was outside that broken-down door. Now they were to meet again, only a day later. He preferred their private relationship, talking in the rain, breakfasts. His one friendship out of uniform.
They hurried through the ground floor, following a few hundred metres of corridor leading straight to Casualty. They gave cursory nods to the hospital staff they met, hoping to escape their questions. No time to stop and explain, not yet. Along to the front door and out on to the ramp where the ambulances usually pulled up several times daily, unloading heavy stretchers and injured people.
This was the point where all available patrol cars had been told to meet up. Not much time had passed since the alert went out, but already Sven counted fourteen cars parked in the large waiting area. Or fifteen, including the one coming through the large automatic gates with its blue light still rotating.
Ewert waited for another five minutes. Eighteen marked cars, pulled up side by side. He had unfolded a map of metropolitan Stockholm across the roof of the nearest one.
The men gathered behind him. No one said much. They were all waiting for him to speak. He was the boss here, Gold Command, a large, noisy DSI with thinning grey hair, a slight limp and a stiff neck after a tricky encounter with a wire noose. Said to be a peppery old bastard. They had all heard of him, but no one had worked with him or even seen him in action. He was known to skulk in his room, working on his investigations alone and listening to Siw Malmkvist. Not many people were allowed in, but then, hardly anyone fancied knocking on his door in the first place.
They waited patiently until he turned round and looked thoughtfully at them. Seconds went by before he started to speak.
‘We have a female perpetrator. Yesterday she was carried unconscious from her pimp’s flat. She was brought to this hospital and has been cared for here. So far, so good. So far, we’ve come across this kind of thing before.’
He looked around. They were listening intently. How young they are, he thought. Good-looking and strong, but what do they know? They probably hadn’t come across this kind of thing before.
‘But, for some reason, at lunchtime today, she recovers enough to do something we could never have foreseen. She gets hold of a handgun, God knows from where. She can hardly move but all the same she damn well manages to knock her guard out cold and walks off, gun in hand. Finds her way to the mortuary in the basement and steps inside, locking the door behind her. And then she takes the five people who were down there hostage. Then she sticks plastic explosive all over them and phones us.’
Ewert Grens spoke calmly, addressing colleagues he had never seen before and who had probably never seen him.
He knew what he had to do, what was expected of him.
He arranged for an even bigger evacuation. According to the information from the mortuary, she had about half a kilo of explosives and detonators, but she could have rigged some more or hidden it anywhere. She had passed through large parts of the hospital on her way down there and could have stuffed the shit into all sorts of nooks and crannies.
He extended the area to be cordoned off outside the hospital. Not only was the access road closed, but he also had tall wire-net barriers erected along the ring road, the whole way, where the commuter traffic was just now growing dense.
Through the proper channels, he also asked for assistance from the national police force, especially that the Flying Squad should be available and prepared for a possible raid within the hour. He had phoned one of the squad’s senior men, John Edvardson, whom he had met several times and knew to be a clever man, as well as a Russian speaker. They talked through the situation. Even with Bengt there, Ewert felt it was important to have a second man on hand who could communicate in the language they would be negotiating in.
Sven was standing a couple of metres away watching his colleagues clustering at the ramp and taking orders from Ewert. They were there, completely alert. Truly present. Concentrating on the situation at hand and nothing else.
He wasn’t. Deep down he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the prostitute from across the Baltic, pointing her gun at five medics who had had the bad luck to be in the mortuary at the wrong time, or that Jochum Lang had just been identified as Hilding Oldйus’s killer, a few floors up.
Sven didn’t mind his job. It wasn’t that. He even liked it and still set out for work with a light heart in the morning. True, he had considered doing something else, something that didn’t mean having to deal with the consequences of violence, something a little easier to live with. But he had always rejected the idea, tried to think of it as a game or a dream. He liked being a policeman, and had no real urge to start over in another job.
But right now, he wasn’t there.
He wanted to go home. Today he belonged with Anita and Jonas. He had promised. This morning he had kissed their sleeping cheeks and whispered that he’d be home soon after lunch. They could enjoy being a family again then.
He backed away a little further. Partly hidden behind a waiting ambulance, he phoned home. Jonas answered, as always stating his full name, Hello, my name is Jonas Sundkvist. Sven explained that he wouldn’t be coming home and felt awful, and Jonas started to cry because he had promised, and Sven felt even worse and then Jonas shouted that he hated him, because Mummy and Jonas had made everything nice, with a cake and candles. By now Sven couldn’t take much more, so he just held the phone out in front of him and looked over at Ewert, who was nearing the end of his briefing, and at the massed colleagues, who were starting to disappear quickly in all directions. Sven took a few deep breaths and pulled himself together enough to mumble ‘Please forgive me’ into the electronic void that is created when someone hangs up.
It was June and high summer, so when a major hospital in central Stockholm was evacuated and the main traffic arteries were blocked and lined with tall wire fences, there were whoops of joy in the media. They could smell blood and chaos, some real news to satisfy a distrustful public, bored by silly-season trivia. The flashing blue lights of eighteen cars converging on the hospital had been noted and followed. Now the newshounds were mingling with the general public outside the two narrow Exit-Only passages, where uniformed police were opening and closing the barriers for hospital staff who were still coming out.
Ewert Grens had asked the police and hospital press officers to organise a press conference as far away as possible, and then to give away as little as possible to the journalists. He wanted to have some peace in the room that had been set aside as a centre of operations, and total calm in the basement corridors near the mortuary. He recalled with horror a hostage drama on the west coast a few years ago, when the hostage-takers had been ensconced in a private villa and kept the hostages covered with high-calibre weapons. The perpetrators had been violent men, well known to the police, and they had just entered negotiations and were waiting for the next call when a journalist from one of the national TV channels, who had managed to find out who the negotiator was and get his mobile phone number, called during a direct broadcast and tried to blag himself an interview.