Юхан Теорин - The Asylum

Fifteen minutes later she came into the dining room, after everybody else, when Jan was already eating at a table by the window. But Rami went and sat on her own at a corner table. That’s the way things had been over the past few days — the more time they spent together, the less often they ate together. It was as if their liaison had to be kept secret from everyone else in the Unit.

But she looked at him from time to time, across the tables. Both of them knew what they wanted.

Jan went back to his room after dinner and stared at the white wall.

You’re going home soon .

But he didn’t want to go home. There were no friends waiting for him at home, just the Gang of Four.

He heard the door of Rami’s room open and close about half an hour later.

He waited a bit longer. At nine o’clock the lights in the corridor were dimmed, and at quarter past nine he crept out of his room to Rami’s door. He could hear a low murmuring from inside; Rami was talking on the stolen telephone. Jan waited until everything went quiet, then he knocked.

She opened the door a fraction, saw who it was and let him in.

‘Who were you talking to?’ Jan asked.

‘My sister. She says she’s waiting for me. She needs me.’

‘So you’re off to Stockholm?’

‘You already know that.’

‘When?’

‘First thing tomorrow... Are you coming with me?’

Jan nodded, and took out a piece of paper. ‘This is my address,’ he said. ‘They’re saying I have to go home, so just in case... I’m not allowed to stay here.’

Rami tucked the piece of paper in the pocket of her jeans. ‘Do you want to stay here?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes... Everything’s so calm in here. And you’re here.’

She held out her arms, and he went to her.

‘We’ll take care of the Psychobabbler and the Gang of Four,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘I promise.’

Crazed attack by mountain lake.

Jan is sitting in his apartment reading the headline in an old newspaper cutting; he reads it over and over again.

Crazed attack . He thinks about the term. An attack carried out by a crazy person. Someone else. Not the person who writes the words, and not the person who’s reading them.

Someone else. But who?

It’s Friday evening and he’s back from work. There is exactly one week to go until the fire drill, and Lilian is still determined to go ahead with her plan to take Ivan Rössel to task in the visitors’ room. She and Hanna have started whispering to Jan as well now, not only to each other. Now he knows what is going on, they obviously want to be sure he is with them.

Jan has only promised not to tell on them, nothing else.

As he was cycling past the hospital on his way home, he saw Dr Högsmed striding along by the wall. The doctor recognized him and raised his hand; Jan waved back with a smile, and watched him disappear through the steel door. Perhaps he was going up to his office to try out the hat test on someone.

Högsmed is probably a good psychiatrist, Jan thinks, but he has no idea what goes on in the hospital at night. He doesn’t know about the secret route from the pre-school, or the secret letters and the meetings in the visitors’ room. Högsmed thinks that everything at St Patricia’s is ticking along nicely, just the way he and the board have planned it.

But Jan believes the desire to kick against routine is part of human nature; both children and adults are constantly tempted to bend the rules.

A week to go. Time cannot be stopped.

Jan feels stressed by the ticking clock, just like when he was at Lynx.

He takes out the old diary again — the one Rami gave him in the storeroom at the Unit. He looks at the picture on the front, the Polaroid Rami took the very first time they met. He is surprised at how young and healthy he looks, bearing in mind how close to death he had been the day before the picture was taken. First almost completely dehydrated in the sauna, then drugged with sleeping tablets, bleeding from wounds inflicted with a razor, and almost drowned in a pond. And yet he is staring straight into the camera, with his head up.

The diary contains not only his own memories and thoughts. There are also some folded newspaper cuttings, and perhaps they are the reason why he has kept the diary. He has taken them out and read them from time to time, late at night.

The first is an entire page, with a big black and white picture of a rock jutting out several metres above the shining surface of a lake, with that headline, CRAZED ATTACK BY MOUNTAIN LAKE, followed by a subheading: Two boys killed on camping trip .

Jan has read the article time and time again over the past fifteen years or more, and he practically knows it by heart at this stage.

Two boys aged fifteen and sixteen were attacked and killed last night by an unknown assailant. The boys were camping on a rocky outcrop above a mountain lake twelve kilometres outside Nordbro when they were attacked.

According to the police the murderer appears to have slit the tent open with his knife, then inflicted multiple stab wounds on both boys before rolling them up in the tent and pushing it into the lake. The severely injured boys were unable to get out of the tent, and drowned.

The article continues for two more columns, with comments from a detective inspector and a certain amount of speculation.

There is another cutting from the following day:

It seems likely that a hit and run driver is responsible for the condition of a 16-year-old boy who was found in a shallow ditch outside Nordbro early on Wednesday morning. The boy was unconscious and was suffering from head injuries, multiple lacerations and several broken bones. He was taken to the emergency department at the Western Hospital, but has yet to regain consciousness .

The police are not ruling out a connection between this tragic event and the double murder of two teenage boys near a mountain lake just a few kilometres away .

‘ Evidently these three boys were on an overnight camping trip together when someone attacked them with a knife,’ says Inspector Hans Torstensson .

He was not prepared to comment or speculate on the suggestion that the same person might have murdered the two boys, then deliberately driven into the third boy as he tried to flee from the scene of the crime along the main road .

‘ The investigation will continue until all the outstanding issues are resolved .’

Did anyone else remember those events after fifteen years, Jan wonders? The families of the boys would remember, of course, but they have probably moved on by now. Parents and siblings have gritted their teeth and gradually come to terms with their grief — unless they are like Lilian, of course. The police will definitely have put the investigation on the back burner, in spite of the inspector’s assurances. They will have put the final details of the unsolved crimes in some file and archived the whole thing.

Perhaps it is only Jan who still wonders what happened.

Two murdered, one severely injured.

But by whom?

The questions about the identity of the perpetrator have been in Jan’s mind all these years, long after the sense of relief faded away.

Jan has not written in the diary for about a week now, so he turns to a clean page and begins to write a situation report to himself. He writes about the Dell, about the staff and about his secret excursions to the hospital. Finally he writes:

I came to Valla to make contact with Rami again — but that wasn’t the only reason. I wanted to work with vulnerable children, and to make them feel better about themselves.