Юхан Теорин - The Asylum

But the police actually are there. Not at the pre-school, but at the hospital. When Jan looks out of the kitchen window a quarter of an hour later, he sees a police car parked over by the entrance, with two uniformed officers walking along the inside of the perimeter fence. Their eyes are fixed on the damp ground, as if they are looking for something.

Only then does Jan feel a small beat of anxiety in the back of his mind. This always happens when he sees police officers, ever since what happened at Lynx.

Marie-Louise comes into the kitchen.

‘What are the police doing here?’ Jan asks.

‘I don’t know... something seems to have happened up at the hospital.’

She doesn’t sound concerned, but Jan presses her. ‘Has someone escaped?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ says Marie-Louise. ‘But I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow when the report comes out.’

She is referring to Dr Högsmed’s weekly report. It comes through to the computer in the pre-school and Marie-Louise prints it out, but so far it has made very dull reading.

Jan waits, but there is no peremptory knock on the door of the pre-school. The next time he looks out of the window the police car has gone.

He starts to relax and forgets the visit, until it is almost ten o’clock and time for Felix to be escorted to the visitors’ room. Marie-Louise comes over to him in the playroom and says quietly, ‘No visits today, Jan — they’ve been postponed.’

‘Oh?’ Jan automatically lowers his voice as well. ‘Why’s that?’

‘There’s been a death up at the hospital.’

‘A death?’

Marie-Louise nods, and whispers, ‘A patient died last night.’

‘But how?’

‘I don’t know... but it was obviously unexpected.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions; he carries on playing with the children. Tag and hide-and-seek. But his mind is elsewhere. He keeps on thinking about the letters he left in the visitors’ room last night. Love letters, but perhaps threatening letters as well.

Where does Lars Rettig live? What’s his telephone number? Jan can’t find him in the directory, and he can think of only one way of getting hold of him, so that evening after work he goes into town. First of all he calls in at Bill’s Bar, but the Bohemos are not playing tonight.

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.’

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.