Anders Roslund - Box 21 aka The Vault

‘Shit! Sven!’

Sven Sundkvist seldom got irritated with his boss, unlike the rest of them. Most of his colleagues disliked Ewert Grens, some even hated him. As for himself, he had decided simply to accept, the good and the bad, to put up or shut up. And so he put up.

With one exception.

‘For the record. The person who has interrupted the interrogation of the witness Lisa Öhrström is Ewert Grens, DSI at the City Police, Stockholm.’

‘Sven, I’m sorry. It just… it’s bloody urgent.’

Sven leaned over to the tape recorder, switched it off, then gestured at Ewert. OK, talk away.

‘That woman. You know the one we carried out of the flat in the Atlas district. She was unconscious.’

‘Flogged?’

‘Yes. She’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

Ewert nodded.

‘She was admitted to one of the surgical wards and was here until very recently. I had a call from Control. She’s not there any more. And she’s armed with a handgun. Knocked out the guard assigned to look after her. She’s probably still somewhere in the hospital, ready to shoot.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I only know what I’ve just told you.’

Lisa Öhrström put photograph number 32 back on the table. Then she looked first at one policeman and then the other, and pointed at the ceiling.

‘Up there.’

‘What?’

‘Up there, next floor. The surgical wards.’

Ewert stared at the white ceiling and was on his way out of the room he had just barged into when Sven grabbed his arm.

‘Stop. Wait. We just got a one hundred per cent clear, unhesitating identification of Jochum Lang.’

The large, clumsy man stopped, nodded at Lisa and smiled at his colleague.

‘Now we’ll see. Won’t we, Anni?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Never mind.’

Sven stared uncomprehendingly at Ewert and then turned to Lisa, putting his hand lightly on the young doctor’s shoulder.

‘Ewert. Dr Öhrström needs to have protection.’

It was just after lunch on Wednesday 5 June.

Ewert Grens and Sven hurried up one of the hospital’s many staircases, from the sixth to the seventh floor.

It had been a strange morning.

They had been restless for a few minutes, all five of them. Carefully moved a leg, slowly tilted a head against a shoulder. As if their bodies were aching, as if they didn’t dare attract her attention, and for precisely that reason were unable to sit still.

Lydia sensed their fear and left them to it. She knew how hard it was even to breathe when you were sitting down, looking up at someone who had just claimed the right to your body. She remembered the Stena Baltica ferry and how the threat of death silenced your instinct to cry for help.

Suddenly one of them collapsed and fell forward on his face.

One of the young men, a medical student, had lost his balance and fallen out of the circle around the body.

Lydia quickly aimed the gun at him.

He lay bent over, face down, his knees still on the floor, his hands tied behind his back. His body shaking, being upright required too much effort. He was weeping with fear. He had never imagined anything like this before; life had just happened. He was young and everything was eternal; only now did he realise that it might end instantly, when he was only twenty-three years old. His body kept shaking. He wanted to live for much longer.

‘On knee!’

Lydia went over and pressed the muzzle against the back of his neck.

‘On knee!’

Slowly he straightened up, still trembling, tears running down his cheeks.

‘Name?’

Silence. He just stared at her.

‘Name!’

He found it hard to speak; the words stuck, didn’t want to come.

‘Johan.’

‘Name!’

‘Johan Larsen.’

She leaned over him and pressed the muzzle against his forehead. Like the men on the Stena Baltica had done. She kept it there while she addressed him.

‘You, on knee! If again… boom!’

He sat up straight now. Held his breath. His body…he couldn’t get it to stop trembling, not even when the urine started trickling down his leg, staining his trousers without him being aware of it.

Lydia looked them over, one by one. Still no one met her eyes, they didn’t dare. She felt around inside the plastic bag with the supermarket logo, pulling out the explosive and the detonators. There was a small stainless-steel table next to the trolley and she divided up the pale brownish dough, kneaded it, still holding the gun in her good hand, until the mass had became soft and pliable enough to fix round the door she had only recently come in through and the other two doors in the room. She used half of it. She divided up the remaining half, putting a fifth of it on each of the people kneeling on the floor in front of her, around the trolley containing a dead, naked body. When she had finished, they carried death between their shoulders, a pale membrane of plastic explosive stuck at the back of their necks.

She had been in the mortuary for over twenty minutes now. It had taken her about ten minutes to get from the surgical ward on the seventh floor down to the basement.

She realised that her disappearance would have been discovered some time ago, that the police would have been alerted and be looking for her.

Lydia went over to the female student, the one who looked like her, with her reddish-blonde hair and thin body. The one who had tied the others up.

‘Police!’

Lydia held the doctor’s mobile phone up in front of the student’s face. Then, after putting her hand on the explosive taped to the other woman’s shoulder as a reminder, she cautiously loosened the ties.

‘Police! Call police!’

The student hesitated, frightened that she might have misunderstood. She looked around anxiously and tried to make eye contact with the greying doctor.

He spoke to her, keeping his voice calm and steady, hiding his own fear. ‘She wants you to call the police.’

The student had understood and nodded. The older man made his voice sound reassuring, he obviously had to force himself. ‘Do it. Just do what she asks. Dial one, one, two.’

Her hand shook, she dropped the phone, picked it up again, dialled the wrong number, looked quickly at Lydia and said sorry. Then she got it right: one, one, two. Lydia heard the line connecting. She was satisfied and indicated to the student that she should lie down on her stomach. She took the handset from her, went over to the doctor and pressed the phone to his ear.

‘Talk!’

He nodded, waited. His forehead was glistening with sweat.

The room was silent.

One minute.

Then a voice answered. The doctor spoke with his mouth close to the phone.

‘Police.’

Silence, waiting. Lydia stood at his side, holding the phone. The rest of them had closed their eyes or were looking at the floor in front of them, lost, far away.

A new voice.

The doctor replied.

‘My name is Gustaf Ejder. I am a senior registrar at the Söder Hospital. I am calling from the hospital mortuary, in the basement. I was here with four medical students when a young woman dressed as an inpatient came and took us all hostage. She is armed with a gun and is aiming at our heads. She has also put what I think is plastic explosives on our bodies.’

The student called Johan Larsen, the young man who had collapsed a little earlier, shaking uncontrollably, suddenly shouted at the phone.

‘It is plastic explosive! I know! It’s Semtex. Almost half a kilo. There will be a big fucking bang if she detonates it!’

Lydia’s first reaction was to swing the gun towards the shouting man, but then she relaxed.

She had picked up the word Semtex and his voice had been so wild that the message would get across to whoever was listening at the other end.