The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,116

torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would dispose of that problem.

She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had knickers, a hospital nightshirt and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Goteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.

Jonasson sat in the visitor's chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.

"Hello, Lisbeth. I'm sorry I've not come to see you the past few days, but I've been up to my eyes in A.&E. and I've also been made a mentor for a couple of interns."

She had not expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.

He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature was steady, between 37 and 37.2 degrees, and for the past week she had not taken any headache tablets.

"Dr Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?"

"She's alright," Salander said without enthusiasm.

"Is it O.K. if I do an examination?"

She nodded. He took a pen torch out of his pocket and bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently around her neck and turned her head back and forth and to the sides a few times.

"You don't have any pain in your neck?" he said.

She shook her head.

"How's the headache?"

"I feel it now and then, but it passes."

"The healing process is still going on. The headache will eventually go away altogether."

Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was healing, but there was still a small scab.

"You've been scratching the wound. You shouldn't do that."

She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.

"Can you lift it by yourself?"

She lifted her arm.

"Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?"

She shook her head.

"Does it feel tight?"

"A little."

"I think you have to do a bit more physio on your shoulder muscles."

"It's hard when you're locked up like this."

He smiled at her. "That won't last. Are you doing the exercises the therapist recommended?"

She nodded.

He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart and took her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.

"Cough."

She coughed.

"O.K., you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From a medical standpoint, you're just about recovered."

She expected him to get up and say he would come back in a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.

"Do you know why I became a doctor?" he said.

She shook her head.

"I come from a working-class family. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I'd actually thought about becoming a psychiatrist when I was a teenager. I was terribly intellectual."

Salander looked at him with sudden alertness as soon as he mentioned the word "psychiatrist".

"But I wasn't sure that I could handle the studies. So when I finished school I studied to be a welder and I even worked as one for several years. I thought it was a good idea to have something to fall back on if the medical studies didn't work out. And being a welder wasn't so different from being a doctor. It's all about patching up things. And now I'm working here at Sahlgrenska and patching up people like you."

She wondered if he were pulling her leg.

"Lisbeth... I'm wondering..."

He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander almost asked what it was he wanted. But she waited for him to speak.

"Would you be angry with me if I asked you a personal question? I want to ask you as a private