He looked at the wall, at the paper displaying the enlarged number of the mobile phone.
He tried again. Eight, ten, twelve rings. No reply.
He shook his head and put the receiver down.
‘She’s turned them off. Both of them.’
Bengt’s eyes followed Ewert, who kept walking in worried circles and whose face was bright red when he shouted.
‘A fucking prostitute!’
He was about to shout more abuse when he saw the time. He checked his watch, then he looked at the clock. He lowered his voice.
‘One and a half minutes to go.’
She knew the hostages would obey. They were sitting still. Just in case, she had a look. There they were in the storeroom, the air thick with archive dust. They were sitting silently in a row with their backs pressed against the wall, their heads turned towards the noise of the opening door and they saw her. She showed them the gun, aiming it at them for long enough to remind them how death felt.
Her dad had fallen forward. His hands had been tied behind his back. She should have run up to him then. She hadn’t dared to. There was a gun against her head; it hurt when the man who held it there increased the pressure against the thin skin over her temple.
She shut the door and checked the time. Their five minutes was up.
The receiver was off the phone on the wall, now she returned it to its cradle. She turned the mobile handset on, pressed the button with the green icon and dialled in the code the doctor had told her to use.
She waited only a few seconds.
They phoned, as she thought they would. The black telephone on the wall.
She let it ring a few times and then picked up.
‘Your time is up.’
Bengt Nordwall’s voice. ‘Lydia, we need-’
Her hand hit the mouthpiece hard. ‘Have you done what I asked?’
‘We need more time. Just a little longer. To sort out the fault on the lines.’
Cold sweat was pouring off her. Every breath seemed to whip inside her body. It was hard to keep her thoughts together and fight the pain. She used the gun to hit the mouthpiece. Several blows this time, harder and harder. She said nothing.
Bengt Nordwall waited, heard her walk away and her footsteps growing fainter. She knew he would consult with the others, the men who were listening in, standing with their earphones on and trying to understand.
He gripped the receiver and called out, as loudly as he dared.
‘Hello!’
He picked up an echo. His one word danced around the room.
‘Hello!’
And then the sound he didn’t want to hear. The noise of the gunshot drowned out everything.
She had fired in an enclosed space, and the force hitting the mouthpiece was violent.
It was hard to know. Maybe only a few seconds had passed. Maybe it was much longer.
‘Now I’ve got three live hostages. And one dead. You have another five minutes. My phone lines are to be open for outgoing calls. If they don’t work, I’ll shoot another one.’
Her voice was steady.
‘I advise you to remove the men who’re in the corridor outside. I’m about to set off a few charges.’
Ewert had heard the shot. He had waited out her silence. When she spoke he had concentrated on the sound of her voice, to sense if she was calm or just pretending to be calm. That was all he could do; he didn’t understand one word of their bloody Russian anyway.
John was leaning over to get close, mumbling the translation of what she was saying. Ewert took it in and swore.
He swung round in Sven’s direction. ‘Fix the goddam phones, Sven. She has to have her outgoing calls and as fast as hell.’ Then back to Edvardson. They agreed that his men should retreat a good bit away from the mortuary entrance. ‘No bugger is going to stand outside and get killed!’
Ewert paused for a second, breathing heavily, then put his hand on Sven’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes.
‘Sven, get a flak jacket and put it on.’
Sven almost twitched, Ewert’s hand on his shoulder; he realised he had never touched him before.
‘I want you to go down there. Down into the basement. I need to know what’s happening. Your immediate impressions. Eyes I can trust.’
Sven settled down at a point where one corridor split in two, about fifty metres from the main door to the mortuary suite. He sheltered behind the wall of the second corridor together with three men from the Flying Squad. After less than two minutes he heard the door they were guarding open and went down on his stomach, pushed himself forwards and looked in the mirror that had been positioned further down the passage.
The corridor was dark, but was lit indirectly by the strong light from behind the opened door. A man was moving about the faint circle of light, just an outline of his dark body, leaning over and pulling at something.
It took a little while before Sven realised what it was.
The man was pulling at an arm. He was dragging a body.
Sven pulled out night-vision binoculars from a bag next to a police officer, considered the risk of showing himself, crawled to the corner of the corridor and directed the binoculars at the man.
It was difficult to make out his features. But he saw him suddenly let go of the arm, disappear through the door and slam it shut.
Sven crept forward, taking deep breaths, pressing the radio to his mouth.
‘Grens. Over.’
It crackled. They always did.
‘Grens here. Over.’
‘I saw a man, just now. Dragging a lifeless body from the mortuary. He’s gone back in, left the body in the corridor. I saw the wires. We can’t go to it. It’s fused!’
Ewert was just about to reply when his voice was drowned by a strange noise. The sound of a human body exploding.
The radio went silent.
Or perhaps it hadn’t, and Sven’s cry had been there all the time.
‘She did it! Ewert! She’s blown up the person who was lying there.’
His voice was weak.
‘Did you hear me? Ewert! Shit, that all that’s left. Only shit!’
Lisa Öhrström was frightened. She had lived with a pain in her stomach for a long time, now a burning, screeching pain that forced her to stop mid-step to check if she could still breathe normally. She had seen the man who had presumably thrown the punches and let the wheelchair roll down the stairs, and knew that the images would haunt her for as long as she could endure living with them.
She hadn’t eaten anything, had tried a sandwich, then an apple, but it wasn’t any good. She couldn’t swallow, wasn’t producing any saliva.
She couldn’t quite take it in.
That he was dead now.
What she couldn’t work out was whether it was a relief to know exactly where he was, what he was not doing, that he wasn’t hurting himself or others – or was it grief? Or simply that she was preparing herself for having to tell Ylva and Mum?
She spent more time thinking about how to make Jonathan and Sanna understand than anything else. They were Ylva’s children, but she loved them like her own. They were her substitute children, the children she’d never had herself.
Your Uncle Hilding is dead.
Your Uncle Hilding was killed when he fell down a staircase.
Lisa went back to the kitchen, needing the coffee she had made this morning. One of the policemen, who had been ordered to stay behind in the ward, had given in to her pleading and, in the end, told her more than he should. She had learnt more about the visitor with the shaved skull who had killed her brother, the man she had recognised in police identification photograph thirty-two. His name was Lang; he was a professional hitman, someone who was paid to threaten and use violence. He had been charged with crimes of violence quite a few times, and in many more cases had been suspected and arrested but gone free because the witnesses had changed their minds about testifying. That was how these people worked, using threats to instil fear, because frightened people don’t talk.