Fifteen per row. That made forty-five boxes with people inside. Chilled bodies, resting. She couldn’t grasp it, didn’t want to.
She thought of Vladi, as she sometimes did. She missed him. They had grown up together, gone to the same school, had liked walking hand-in-hand. They went for long walks together, making plans to leave Klaipeda. Sometimes, if they reached the edge of the town, they would turn round to look at it, the massed houses and tower blocks, and together dream for something else.
She thought of him as hers. He thought of her as his.
Lydia crossed the hard floor. Large grey tiles. She hadn’t seen Vladi for three years and wondered where he was, what he was doing, if he ever thought about her.
She thought about her parents. Her dad in the Lukuskele prison. Mum in the Klaipeda flat. They had both done their best. There hadn’t been much love, perhaps, but there hadn’t been any hatred or violence. They each had their own things to deal with. She wondered if they too had had dreams once, if they had walked to the edge of the town and looked around, longing for something different.
It was good that her mum didn’t know where she was now, a beaten-up whore in a mortuary who was using a gun to threaten people. It was good too that Vladi wouldn’t know. She wondered if he would’ve understood, and thought he might. He would have realised that when someone has been kicked around for long enough, there comes a time when she has to kick back. That’s just the way it was. You simply reached a certain point and there was nowhere else to go.
It took a few seconds before she registered that the telephone was ringing. The one on the wall in the other room, near the trolley with the dead person. She guessed it had rung four times, maybe five.
She ran past the cold boxes, opened the grey metal door, picked up the receiver and waited. She was in pain; the chemical effect of the morphine was starting to wear off and she found it harder to move now. She realised it could only get worse.
A moment or two later, a voice spoke in Russian and she was unprepared for that. A man was speaking Russian with a Scandinavian accent and it didn’t twig until he had introduced himself.
‘Bengt Nordwall. I’m a policeman.’
She swallowed. She had not expected this. Hoped, yes, but hadn’t dared to believe.
‘You demanded that I came here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your name is Lydia? Is that right? I will listen as long as you-’
She interrupted him at once, tapped the receiver with one finger and spoke loudly.
‘Why did you cut the phones?’
‘We have-’
She rapped the receiver again.
‘You can call me, but I can’t call you. I want to know why.’
He paused, and she realised that he was looking to the other policemen around him for support. No doubt they were nodding at each other, making gestures.
‘I don’t know what you mean. We haven’t cut off any phones. We have evacuated large parts of the hospital because you have taken hostages. But we haven’t blocked any lines.’
‘Explain better.’
‘Lydia, we’ve evacuated the hospital switchboard too. That’s probably why you’ve got problems with your telephone.’
‘Telephones! Not one, both of them. Do you think I’m stupid? Some stupid whore from Eastern Europe? I know how telephones work! And now you know I will hurt people if I need to! So don’t give me that crap! You’ve got five minutes. I want the lines connected. Exactly five minutes for you and your mates to fix it. If you don’t, I’ll shoot one of the hostages. And this time it won’t be in the legs.’
‘Lydia, we-’
‘Don’t try to get in here, or I’ll blow up the whole lot. The hostages and the hospital.’
He hesitated, looked at his colleagues again. Then he cleared his throat.
‘If we fix the phones, Lydia, what do we get in return?’
‘What do you get? You’re spared finding a dead hostage. Four minutes and fifteen seconds to go now.’
Ewert Grens had listened in to the call and Edvardson had given a simultaneous interpretation. When it ended, he put his earphones down between Sven and Hermansson and drank what was left of his last cup of cold coffee.
‘What do you think?’
He looked at each of them in turn. Sven, Hermansson, Edvardson and then Nordwall.
‘Well? Is she bluffing?’
John Edvardson was dressed exactly like the men he had just positioned in the hospital. Black leather boots, camouflage-patterned uniform trousers with large square pockets on the thighs, grey waistcoat laden with spare magazines for the gun he had put down on one of the trolleys, and underneath it a flak jacket. The room they were in had already become overcrowded and hot. John was sweating, his forehead glistened and his shirt had large dark stains under the armpits.
‘She has demonstrated that she’s prepared to injure the hostages.’
‘OK. But is she bluffing this time?’
‘She doesn’t have to. She has the advantage.’
‘Why risk losing it?’
‘She won’t. If she shoots one she has still got three more to go.’
The two men’s eyes met. Ewert shook his head.
‘Why the hell take hostages in the mortuary? No windows. No other escape routes at all. Even if she shoots the whole lot, we will get her in the end. As soon as she tries to escape, or one of the marksmen gets her in his sight. She must realise that, must have known it from the outset. I don’t get it.’
Hermansson was sitting in the middle of the room, but had so far been silent. Ewert had noticed that she had said very little since she arrived. Perhaps chattering wasn’t her thing, or perhaps being the only woman made her reticent, as the men were all experienced and automatically took all the space they needed.
But now she stood up and looked straight at Ewert.
‘There is another possibility.’
He liked her broad dialect, it inspired trust. He felt he had to take what she said seriously.
‘Explain.’
She paused. She wasn’t going to let this thought go: she was confident she was right. Still, there was that odd feeling of insecurity. She detested it but couldn’t suppress it, not when they looked at her like that, like she was a little girl. She knew they didn’t think of her like that, yet that was how she felt.
‘Grajauskas is badly injured and must be in pain. She can’t hold out for much longer. But I don’t think she thinks like you. She has gone beyond the limit already and done things she probably thought herself incapable of. I think she’s made up her mind. My feeling is that she has no intention of trying to come out of the mortuary.’
Ewert stood very still, a rare sight. He constantly had to fight his restlessness, his heavy body was always pacing about, and even when he sat down he moved his arms or his feet, stamping or gesticulating or twisting his torso from side to side. Never still.
But now he was. Hermansson had just said what he should have understood himself.
He sighed, started moving again, circled their temporary desk.
‘Bengt.’
Bengt was standing in the doorway, holding on to it.
‘Yes?’
‘Bengt, I want you to phone her again.’
‘At once?’
‘I have the feeling we’re in a bloody hurry.’
Bengt went off to the phone in the middle of the room, but didn’t sit down at once. Precious seconds were slipping away and he had to fight down the awful sense of dread, the same feeling he had had in the garden when her torn back had haunted him.
He knew who she was.
He had known ever since he stood outside the flat at Völund Street.
The feeling of unease, of dread, was worse now.
Bengt glanced at the paper on the wall to check the number he was to use, then at Ewert, who was putting the earphone in place.
He dialled. Eight rings went through. Nothing.