The tyres thunder as Police Constable Jasim Muhammed pulls up alongside the railway line. His partner, Fredrik Mosskin, has just contacted their colleagues on the bridge over the radio.
The wind is making so much noise in the microphone that it’s almost impossible to hear the voice, but it’s clear that someone was walking across the railway bridge very recently.
The car stops and the headlights illuminate a steep rock face. Fredrik ends the call and stares blankly ahead of him.
‘What’s happening?’ Jasim asks.
‘Looks like he’s heading this way.’
‘What did they say about blood? Was there much blood?’
‘I didn’t hear.’
‘Let’s go and look,’ Jasim says, opening his door.
The blue lights play upon the snow-covered branches of the pine trees.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ Fredrik says.
There’s no crust on the snow and Jasim sinks in up to his knees. He pulls out his torch and shines it towards the tracks. Fredrik is slipping on the verge, but keeps climbing.
‘What sort of animal has an extra arsehole in the middle of its back?’ Jasim asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Fredrik mutters.
There’s so much snow in the air that they can’t see the glow of their colleagues’ torches on the other side of the bridge.
‘A police horse,’ Jasim says.
‘What the...?’
‘That’s what my mother-in-law told the kids.’ Jasim grins, and heads up onto the bridge.
There are no footprints in the snow. Either the man is still on the bridge, or he’s jumped. The cables above them are whistling eerily. The ground beneath them falls away steeply.
The lights of Hall Prison are glowing through the haze, lit up like an underwater city.
Fredrik tries to contact their colleagues, but the radio just crackles.
They head slowly further out across the bridge. Fredrik is walking behind Jasim, a torch in his hand. Jasim can see his own shadow moving across the ground, swaying oddly from side to side.
It’s strange that their colleagues from the other side of the bridge aren’t visible.
When they are out above the frozen inlet the wind from the sea is bitter. Snow is blowing into their eyes. Their cheeks feel numb with cold.
Jasim screws up his eyes to look across the bridge. It disappears into swirling darkness. Suddenly he sees something at the edge of the light from the torch. A tall stick-figure with no head.
Jasim stumbles and reaches his hand out towards the low railing, and sees the snow fall fifty metres onto the ice.
His torch hits something and goes out.
His heart is beating hard and Jasim peers forward again, but can no longer see the figure.
Fredrik calls him back and he turns round. His partner is pointing at him, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. He looks scared, and starts to fumble with the holster of his pistol, and Jasim realises that he’s trying to warn him, that he was pointing at someone behind his back.
He turns round and gasps for breath.
Someone is crawling along the track straight towards him. Jasim backs away and tries to draw his pistol. The figure gets to its feet and sways. It’s a young man. He’s staring at the policemen with empty eyes. His bearded face is thin, his cheekbones sharp. He’s swaying and seems to be having trouble breathing.
‘Half of me is still underground,’ he pants.
‘Are you injured?’
‘Who?’
The young man coughs and falls to his knees again.
‘What’s he saying?’ Fredrik asks, with one hand on his holstered service weapon.
‘Are you injured?’ Jasim asks again.
‘I don’t know, I can’t feel anything, I...’
‘Please, come with me.’
Jasim helps him up and sees that his right hand is covered with red ice.
‘I’m only half... The Sandman has taken... he’s taken half...’
14
The doors of the ambulance bay of Södermalm Hospital close. A red-cheeked auxiliary nurse helps the paramedics remove the stretcher and wheel it towards the emergency room.
‘We can’t find anything to identify him by, nothing...’
The patient is handed over to the triage nurse and taken into one of the treatment rooms. After checking his vital signs the nurse identifies the patient as triage-level orange, the second highest level, extremely urgent.
Four minutes later Dr Irma Goodwin comes into the treatment room and the nurse gives her a quick briefing:
‘Airways free, no acute trauma... but he’s got poor saturation, fever, signs of concussion and weak circulation.’
The doctor looks at the charts and goes over to the skinny man. His clothes have been cut open. His bony ribcage rises and falls with his rapid breathing.
‘Still no name?’
‘No.’
‘Give him oxygen.’
The young man lies with his eyelids closed and trembling as the nurse puts an oxygen mask on him.
He looks strangely malnourished, but there are no visible needle marks on his body. Irma has never seen anyone so white. The nurse checks his temperature from his ear again.
‘Thirty-nine point nine.’
Irma Goodwin ticks the tests she wants taken from the patient, then looks at him again. His chest rattles as he coughs weakly and opens his eyes briefly.
‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ he whispers frantically. ‘I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to, I’ve got to...’
‘Where do you live? Can you tell me where you live?’
‘Which... which one of us?’ he asks, and gulps hard.
‘He’s delirious,’ the nurse says quietly.
‘Have you got any pain?’
‘Yes,’ he replies with a confused smile.
‘Can you tell me...’
‘No, no, no, no, she’s screaming inside me, I can’t bear it, I can’t, I...’
His eyes roll back, he coughs, and mutters something about porcelain fingers, then lies there gasping for breath.
Irma Goodwin decides to give the patient a Neurobion injection, antipyretics and an intravenous antibiotic, Benzylpenicillin, until the test results come back.
She leaves the treatment room and walks down the corridor, rubbing the place where her wedding ring sat for eighteen years until she flushed it down the toilet. Her husband had betrayed her for far too long for her to forgive him. It no longer hurts, but it still feels like a shame, a waste of their shared future. She wonders about phoning her daughter even though it’s late. Since the divorce she’s been much more anxious than before, and calls Mia far too often.
Through the door ahead of her she can hear the staff nurse talking on the phone. An ambulance is on its way in from a priority call. A serious RTA. The staff nurse is putting together an emergency team and calling a surgeon.
Irma Goodwin stops and goes back to the room containing the unidentified patient. The red-cheeked auxiliary nurse is helping the other nurse to clean a bleeding wound in the man’s thigh. It looks like the young man had run straight into a sharp branch.
Irma Goodwin stops in the doorway.
‘Add some Macrolide to the antibiotics,’ she says decisively. ‘One gram of Erythromycin, intravenous.’
The nurse looks up.
‘You think he’s got Legionnaires’ disease?’ she asks in surprise.
‘Let’s see what the test—’
Irma Goodwin falls silent as the patient’s body starts to jerk. She looks at his white face and sees him slowly open his eyes.
‘I’ve got to get home,’ he whispers. ‘My name is Mikael Kohler-Frost, and I’ve got to get home...’
‘Mikael Kohler-Frost,’ Irma says. ‘You’re in Södermalm Hospital, and—’
‘She’s screaming, all the time!’