Jan doesn’t give up; he carries on to the place where they rehearsed the other day. The door is closed, but he can hear the sound of guitars coming from inside, and the beat of the snare drum. It makes Jan feel forgotten, excluded.
He knocks, but nothing happens.
Then he bangs on the door with the flat of his hand, but the music continues. In the end he opens the door and sticks his head inside.
The music stops. First the guitars, then the drums. Four heads turn towards him.
‘Hi, Jan.’ Lars Rettig has decided to acknowledge him, after a brief silence.
‘Hi, Lars. Could we have a quick word, please?’
‘Sure — come on in.’
‘I meant... just the two of us.’
Jan feels as if they are all staring at him. The musicians behind Rettig have stopped in mid-movement; they are ready to carry on playing as soon as Jan leaves. Carl, the drummer, is a new face, but Jan thinks he has seen him somewhere before.
‘OK,’ Rettig says. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
The Gang of Four, Jan thinks. Perhaps the members of the Bohemos all work at St Psycho’s.
He recognizes Carl now. The guard dog with the big jaws. He was the one who met little Josefine as she came out of the lift, with a canister of tear gas on his belt.
Carl is staring at the door, his expression grim. Jan moves back, but no doubt Carl has already seen him.
Rettig comes over. ‘I haven’t got much time, Jan, just a couple of minutes... Let’s go outside.’
They walk along the deserted pavement for about ten metres before Rettig stops. ‘OK, we can talk here.’
Jan finds confrontation difficult, but he pulls himself together. ‘Who died last night?’
Rettig just looks at him. ‘Who died?’
‘We heard this morning, they said someone had died at St Patricia’s.’
Rettig seems to hesitate, but eventually he replies. ‘It was a patient.’
‘A man or a woman?’
‘A man.’
‘One of the letter-writers?’
Rettig looks around, then leans closer. ‘Don’t mention the letters.’ He smiles at Jan, but it is a tense smile.
Jan wonders if Rettig knows that he slipped an extra letter into the envelope, a message for the patient he thinks is Alice Rami. There is always that risk.
‘I just want to know what this business with the letters is all about,’ he says. ‘Why they’re important to you. Can you tell me?’
At first Rettig doesn’t answer, but then he lowers his gaze. ‘My brother is inside,’ he says. ‘My half-brother, Tomas.’
‘At St Patricia’s?’
Rettig shakes his head. ‘Prison. Tomas is in Kumla, he got eight years for robbery with violence. And he would really like to receive letters, lots of letters... but most are stopped. And I’m not allowed to have any contact with him at all, or that’s the end of my job.’ He sighs. ‘So I’m doing something on the sly for those poor bastards in St Patricia’s instead.’
Jan nods. Perhaps this is true. ‘But the person who died... was he one of the letter-writers?’ he asks again. ‘Or someone who got a letter last night?’
‘No.’ Rettig sounds weary as he replies. ‘He was a paedophile who was in there because he’d been sectioned; he certainly didn’t have any pen friends. He only had one friend left, and that was an extra head attached to his left shoulder. He was quiet and pleasant, but his extra head wasn’t nice at all. Of course he was the only one who could see it... but he said it was the head that made him want to do things to little girls. He had no contact with anyone outside the hospital; even his lawyer couldn’t bring himself to visit him, so he just got more and more depressed.’
‘What did he do?’
Rettig shrugs his shoulders. ‘Well, this morning he got a fresh burst of energy. He and his extra head managed to get into a room without any bars at the window, then they threw themselves out, straight down on to the stone terrace from the fifth floor.’
‘This morning?’
Rettig begins to move back towards the rehearsal room. ‘Yup. We found him at half past six, but the doctor thought he’d probably jumped at around four. That’s when the loneliness gets to us the most, don’t you find?’
Jan has no answer to that; just hearing about the suicide is making him feel bad, as if it were his fault. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m asleep then.’
26
The concrete wall by the pre-school carries with it a feeling of hopelessness. Hopelessness and brutality. Sometimes Jan is filled with those feelings when he stares at the wall, so when he is out in the playground with the children he often looks across at the school’s other neighbours, the rows of terraced houses.
Everyday life goes on over there — cars come and go, children walk to school, lights are switched on in bedrooms on dark mornings and switched off at night. The people in the houses have their daily routines, just as everyone in the pre-school does.
It is the middle of October, and dark clouds come scudding across from the coast. The children are playing outside, but suddenly icy raindrops begin to spatter the ground, and Jan quickly takes everyone into the playroom. It will soon be time for their health assessment anyway. Hanna Aronsson, who turns out to have trained as a nurse in the past, calls the children into the staffroom one by one and checks them over, examining their pupils and measuring their blood pressure and heart rate.
‘Fit as fleas,’ she says afterwards.
They gather in the snuggle room, where Marie-Louise leads the weekly suggestion session. The children always have lots of requests.
‘I’d like a pet,’ says Mira.
‘Me too!’ Josefine shouts.
‘But why?’ asks Marie-Louise. ‘You’ve got your cuddly toys, haven’t you?’
‘We want real animals!’
‘Animals that move!’
Mira looks at Marie-Louise and Jan, her eyes pleading. ‘Please... please can we have a pet?’
‘I want stick insects!’ Leo shouts. ‘Lots of stick insects!’
‘A hamster,’ Hugo says.
‘No, I want a cat,’ says Matilda.
The children are excited, but Marie-Louise is not smiling. ‘Animals have to be looked after,’ she says.
‘But we will look after them!’
‘They have to be looked after all the time. And what happens when there’s nobody here?’
‘Then they can live here on their own, in a cage,’ says Matilda with a smile. ‘We’ll just lock them in with loads of food and water!’
Marie-Louise still isn’t smiling; she shakes her head. ‘Animals shouldn’t be left locked up.’
That evening Jan is alone with two of the children, and they both fall asleep quickly. From this week it is only Leo and Mira who will be staying overnight; Matilda now has a foster family who pick her up at five o’clock each day. There is an elderly woman and a man in a grey cap; they seem friendly and reliable. Jan can only hope this is true. But how can you know? He thinks back to Rettig’s comment on the patient who killed himself: He was quiet and pleasant, but his extra head wasn’t nice at all.
We have to be brave enough to trust people. Don’t we? Jan is very trustworthy — except for those few minutes at night when he leaves the sleeping children alone and takes the lift up to the hospital.
He does it again this evening, his heart pounding. The memory of hearing someone coming down in the lift and walking out through the pre-school lingers on, but nothing has happened since, and he is trying hard to forget that night.
His pulse rate increases in the empty visitors’ room, because there is a new envelope waiting for him under the sofa cushions with the instruction OPEN THIS AND POST CONTENTS! Jan would like to open the envelope in the staffroom at the Dell, but he can’t take the risk; it’s twenty to ten, and any minute now Hanna will be arriving to take over.