She nodded, understood. The prostitute, who spoke only Russian and was threatening people with a gun, would not be able to call the shots. They would manage the means of communication and she would have to accept their terms.
Ewert Grens went over to the kettle that someone had put on a stool, and filled it with some water from the jug on the floor beside it. Then he took a plastic cup from the pile and heaped in three teaspoons of instant coffee.
‘So now we decide if there’s going to be any talking. Now we are the ones stressing her out. We make her wait. Not the other way round.’
He didn’t wait for an answer.
‘And Bengt, where is he?’
Bengt had held on to her. His hands had grabbed her belt, and when he couldn’t hold on any longer, she had been dragged away, out of the van while it was still moving.
Twenty-five years. Almost. He was close.
When this mortuary business was done.
There was a witness upstairs. Finally, the sentence Lang had deserved for so long. His punishment for Anni.
Sven pointed in the direction of the door.
‘Nordwall is sitting out there, in the waiting room. Sharing a sofa with some of the last Casualty patients.’
Ewert looked, and waited before he spoke.
‘I want him in here. In half an hour we’ll have the Flying Squad boys in place outside the mortuary. That’s when he’ll make the first contact.’
The kettle hissed angrily. He turned it off, filled his cup with hot water and gave it a stir with the spoon before blowing on it and attempting to sip the scalding, dark-brown fluid. Then a phone rang, the one that had been put on a cupboard in the middle of the room and had only one designated function.
Hermansson had just had time to get through to the hospital switchboard to tell them about disabling the mortuary phone, but the police emergency call centre had recognised the number and transferred the call, just as they had been instructed.
Ewert checked the caller’s number on the screen.
He stood still, letting it ring.
Fourteen signals. He counted them.
When they stopped, he was smiling.
Lydia Grajauskas looked at the clock above one of the doors. She had just tried to ring again. As before, the female student had dialled the number and then held the handset to the doctor’s ear.
Fourteen rings. She had waited as the dull note rang out again and again. No reply. It bewildered her. Maybe the call hadn’t got through, or maybe the police had simply ignored it.
She had made the hostages line up with their backs to a wall and was now sitting on a chair in front of them, about three metres away. It seemed a good distance; she had full control without getting too near. No one had said a word since the first phone call; they had all withdrawn into themselves and kept their eyes closed a lot of the time. They were afraid. You could always tell.
She looked around. The mortuary, she knew, consisted of several rooms.
There was the narrow room, like a hall, where she had stood for a while, steeling herself before taking the gun out of the plastic bag and marching into the big room where five white coats had been examining a corpse.
In the wall behind the five kneeling hostages a door opened into an even larger room. A storeroom of some kind, with filing cabinets and trolleys and electronic equipment.
She had known all this before she came here. She had studied the information brochure that the Polish nurse had lent her, and then drawn the ground plan in her notebook and ripped the page out.
There was another room, behind her, and she knew about that too.
She hadn’t been in there yet; she had had enough to do with the hostages, who must be made to respect her enough to obey her and had to be watched. But she knew what was behind the large grey metal door. It was the biggest of the rooms, the cold store where the used bodies were kept.
Suddenly one of the male students, the young medic who had wept earlier, started to gasp for breath faster and faster until he was hyperventilating.
She stayed where she was, lowered her gun and looked on as he fell forward again, with his hands tied behind his back. He was shaking badly where he lay, his face pressed against the floor.
‘Help him!’ The doctor who had spoken for her on the phone earlier sounded hoarse now. He shouted but he couldn’t move. He stared at her, his cheeks and neck red with distress.
‘Help him! Help!’
Lydia hesitated and observed the man shaking on the floor. Then she got up, raised the gun again and went over to him. Her eyes scanned the others to check they stayed put, backs against the wall, as they were meant to be.
Which was why she didn’t notice.
Didn’t notice that his hands were free.
He was lying there, shaking, face down, with his untied hands behind him.
She bent down, ready to press her plaster cast against the back of his neck, and that was when he threw himself at her and she fell over backwards. He kept hitting her head with one hand, while trying to pull the gun from her grip.
He was much stronger than her. He was like the rest of them. The men who had lain on top of her, hitting her, raping her, men she hated and would never allow to abuse her again.
That must have been what gave her strength.
At least that was what she thought later.
His hand was tugging at the gun, but she was able to hold on for long enough, until her finger squeezed the trigger and the shot echoed in the quiet room. The man who was humiliating her suddenly let go, fell over sideways. His body was heavy when he hit the floor, his face contorted with the pain that radiated from his leg.
The bullet had hit him just below the kneecap.
He wouldn’t walk again for a long time.
A team of men from the Flying Squad were investigating positions in the basement when a faint voice called out from just outside the door to the mortuary suite. Even as they got closer, it was hard to make out any words, it was more like groans. When they saw him, he was lying on his side across the corridor, face down and with his head just outside the mortuary door. He was bleeding from his knees and his head. It was obvious that he was in need of immediate medical care due to blood loss.
They belonged to an elite group and moved slowly, step by measured step, taking every precaution as they had agreed earlier. The bleeding man might have been set up as bait, but they had to bite. Nothing happened when they reached him and lifted his damaged body on to a field stretcher.
Twelve minutes later they carried the casualty into the operations centre, where Ewert was waiting impatiently. He had been informed about an incident involving a man, a medical student called Johan Larsen, who had been one of the five hostages. The former patient had used a large-calibre weapon to shoot him through both kneecaps and then repeatedly used the butt of the gun to hit his face, especially his forehead. As soon as the stretcher arrived, Ewert went over to it, but was brusquely shoved out of the way by the A &E doctor who told him to hold it, the patient needed medical care.
He had so many questions.
He needed so many answers.
Lydia sat back down in the chair, watching the four remaining hostages. She felt tired. It had been a horrible few minutes.
As soon as she had shot him, she had understood that it wasn’t enough. From the start she had demanded their respect, tried to impress on them that she was serious. It hadn’t worked. When he was on top of her, pushing her down, just like all the other men, she had realised exactly what she had to do.
Push down, push down, again and again. She must keep her grip on power and they must be made to fear her.
She didn’t want any more rebellions. They might succeed next time.