The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер

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!’

      Irma leaves the treatment room and half-runs to her office. She closes the door behind her, puts on her reading glasses, sits down at her computer and logs in. She can’t find him in the health service database and tries the national population register instead.

      She finds him there.

      Irma Goodwin unconsciously rubs the empty place on her ring finger and rereads the information about the patient in the emergency room.

      Mikael Kohler-Frost has been dead for seven years, and is buried in Malsta cemetery, in the parish of Norrtälje.

       15

      Detective Inspector Joona Linna is in a small room whose walls and floor are made of bare concrete. He is on his knees while a man in camouflage is aiming a pistol at his head, a black SIG Sauer. The door is being guarded by a man who keeps his Belgian assault rifle trained on Joona the whole time.

      On the floor next to the wall is a bottle of Coca-Cola. The light is coming from a ceiling lamp with a buckled aluminium shade.

      A mobile phone buzzes. Before the man with the pistol answers he yells at Joona to lower his head.

      The other man puts his finger on the trigger and moves a step closer.

      The man with the pistol talks into the mobile phone, then listens, without taking his eyes off Joona. Grit crunches under his boots. He nods, says something else, then listens again.

      After a while the man with the assault rifle sighs and sits down on the chair just inside the door.

      Joona kneels there completely still. He is wearing jogging trousers and a white T-shirt that’s wet with sweat. The sleeves are tight across the muscles of his upper arms. He raises his head slightly. His eyes are as grey as polished granite.

      The man with the pistol is talking excitedly into the phone, then he ends the call and seems to think for a few seconds before taking four quick steps forward and pressing the barrel of the pistol to Joona’s forehead.

      ‘I’m about to overpower you,’ Joona says amiably.

      ‘What?’

      ‘I had to wait,’ he explains. ‘Until I got the chance of direct physical contact.’

      ‘I’ve just received orders to execute you.’

      ‘Yes, the situation’s fairly acute, seeing as I have to get the pistol away from my face, and ideally use it within five seconds.’

      ‘How?’ the man by the door asks.

      ‘In order to catch him by surprise, I mustn’t react to any of his movements,’ Joona explains. ‘That’s why I’ve let him walk up, stop and take precisely two breaths. So I wait until he breathes out the second time before I—’

      ‘Why?’ the man with the pistol asks.

      ‘I gain a few hundredths of a second, because it’s practically impossible to do anything without first breathing in.’

      ‘But why the second breath in particular?’

      ‘Because it’s unexpectedly early and right at the middle of the most common countdown in the world: one, two, three …’

      ‘I get it.’ The man smiles, revealing a brown front tooth.

      ‘The first thing that’s going to move is my left hand,’ Joona explains to the surveillance camera up by the ceiling. ‘It’ll move up towards the barrel of the pistol and away from my face in one fluid movement. I need to grasp it, twist upwards and get to my feet, using his body as a shield. In a single movement. My hands need to prioritise the gun, but at the