Anders Roslund - Box 21 aka The Vault

They had stood around her bed. One of them was a little older than the rest; he wore large glasses and his hair was going grey. This was the doctor who had examined her after she had been admitted. This morning he had returned with his four medical students to show them her injuries, shown her body to them, pointed at the wounds on her back and talked a great deal, about things like the cattle-whip and how wide and long the gashes were and how well they might heal, or not. The four students had listened in silence, wondering how many body defects they would have to learn about in order to understand and be able to treat them.

The group was standing in the middle of the room, quite a bit away, but Lydia could make out more now. They were gathered round a trolley with a body on it, lit by the focused light from two large lamps in the ceiling. She guessed it must be a dead body, it was so pale and still. No breathing movements. The grey-haired man with the large glasses was pointing with the same kind of laser torch that he had used on her. The four medical students were as silent and grim-looking in front of the corpse as in front of a living human being who had been humiliated and wounded.

Lydia hung back in the anteroom. They hadn’t seen her. Then she took eight steps into the room before they discovered she was there. She stopped two or three metres away from them.

They saw her and yet did not see her.

They recognised the female patient with the lash wounds who had smiled so sadly from her bed that morning, but this woman, who looked quite similar, had a very different aura. She wanted something. Her eyes demanded their attention. She raised her gun and pointed it at them while she took a few more steps forward. The overhead light illuminated her face, which looked badly hurt, but showed no pain. This woman was intense and calm at the same time. The grey-haired doctor had been interrupted and in a deliberate manner began a new sentence about some part of the cadaver, but soon stopped again.

The woman had released the safety catch on the gun and raised it until the muzzle was pointing straight at his face. And then at the other faces, the gun moving from one pair of eyes to the next.

Each time she held it long enough for every one of them to feel that terrifying cramp in the stomach which she knew from when Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp had aimed at her temple.

No one spoke. They waited for her to say something.

Lydia pointed to the floor with the gun.

‘On knee! On knee!’

They knelt, all five of them, in a ring round the trolley containing the remains of what had once been a living person. She tried to gauge how frightened they were, but no one met her eyes, not one of them. The only female student and one of the men had closed their eyes. The rest stared straight past her or through her. They didn’t have the strength to do anything else, not even their teacher. Not even him.

She was nine years old again, back in that room with the military police, the gun pressed against her head, and her dad, his hands tied behind his back, was forced to kneel, then to lie face down on the floor. She remembered how he fell forward, the thud when his face hit the concrete, a heavy fall, and that he bled from both nostrils afterwards.

And now here she was, holding the gun.

Lydia took one last step forward.

She stumbled, almost lost her balance and realised that she had to be careful, not just because Dimitri had kicked her hard enough to make her limp, but because her sense of balance had been funny for almost two years. One of the punters had wanted to do something extra, slap her around a bit; he had promised to pay twice as much to hit her in the face and she had said yes. He hit her across her left ear and the pain had been unbearable. She lost some of the hearing on that side for ever and the mechanism inside the ear to do with balance was damaged. She didn’t quite understand the connection, but whatever it was had taken more of a beating than it could stand.

She managed to steady herself in mid-step, stumbling but not falling, all the time keeping the gun trained on the five people crouching in front of her.

It was important to keep her distance, she knew. A couple of metres away, no more, no less. She made certain that they had both knees on the floor and then stuck her gun hand quickly inside her coat and pulled the carrier bag out from her panties and away from her stomach. Dropped it to the floor.

She used her foot to rummage in the bag, rolled out the ball of string and kicked it across to the trolley.

The gun swung to aim at the female student.

Lydia screamed at her.

‘Lock! Lock!’

She watched the terrified woman, who tried to make herself as small as possible. They looked quite similar; both were blonde, with a tinge of red in their shoulder-length hair; they were almost the same height and more or less the same age. Not long ago the student had been standing and looking down at Lydia.

Lydia nearly smiled. Now it was the other way around, she thought. Now she is the one lying down. Now I am the one standing up, watching from above.

‘Lock!’

The young woman stared vacantly ahead. She was aware of someone holding a gun to her head, and that someone was screaming. But she couldn’t hear anything, she couldn’t bear to listen and take it in. She couldn’t think about words and what they meant. Not now. Not with a gun to her head.

‘Last time! Lock!’

The older doctor understood. Cautiously, he turned his head to the student, made eye contact and spoke to her softly.

‘She wants you to tie us up.’

The young woman looked at him, but didn’t move.

‘She wants you to tie us up with that string.’

His voice was calm. She seemed to listen and met his eyes before turning to look at Lydia with a scared expression.

‘I don’t think she’ll shoot. Do you understand? If you tie us up she won’t shoot.’

She nodded, slowly, slowly. Then she repeated the movement towards Lydia, to show that she had understood, and leaned forward to pick up the ball of string. Using the knife that had just made an incision into the abdomen of the cadaver, she cut a length of string, which she wound round her teacher’s wrists.

‘Hard! Very hard! You lock hard!’

Lydia took another step forward and waved with the gun. She watched until the string had been pulled tight enough to cut into the flesh.

‘Lock!’

The young woman went on, moved round with the knife, tied everybody’s wrists together and didn’t stop pulling at the string until blood showed at every knot. When she had finished she turned to Lydia. She was breathing heavily and waited until they made eye contact.

Lydia pointed with the gun. The student was to turn round and kneel. Using her weak left hand, Lydia managed to tie the student’s wrists as hard as she could.

The whole thing had taken six to seven minutes, a little longer than Lydia had planned. True, she hadn’t expected five of them. One or two, yes, but not five.

Someone must have found the guard by now, realised that she was missing and probably alerted the police.

She didn’t have much time.

She quickly searched the pockets of all five white coats, then the trouser pockets. Everything she found was piled up on the floor: key rings, wallets, loose change, ID cards, plastic gloves, half-empty packets of throat tablets. The doctor had a mobile phone. She tested it and noted that it was almost fully charged.

Five people kneeling in front of her, hands tied behind their backs, cowering before the gun in her hand.

One dead man, partly dissected, on a brightly lit trolley.

She had hostages.

Hostages mean that you can make demands.

She was crying.

It was a long time since he had made her cry. She hated him for it. Lisa Öhrström hated her brother.