The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,85

seven in the evening and Bublanski should have gone home long ago. But he was still in his office, staring into a young face brimming with a kind of angry idealism. He could see some people might find it irritating, but he actually liked the attitude, and maybe he had been the same at that age; had perhaps felt that the older generation was not taking life as seriously as it deserved to be taken. He gave the young woman a warm smile.

She smiled stiffly in return, and he suspected that humour was not her strongest suit, but that her fervour would certainly stand the world in good stead. She was twenty-five years old and her name was Else Sandberg. Her hair was cut in a bob and she wore round spectacles, and worked as a medical intern at St. Göran’s hospital.

“Thanks for taking the time.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said.

It was Modig who had found the woman, after getting a tip-off that the Sherpa had put up papers at the Södra station bus stop. She had then assigned colleagues to talk to pretty much everyone who regularly caught their bus from there.

“I understand you don’t remember much, but every single thing you do recall would be valuable to us,” he said.

“It was hard to read. There was very little space between the lines and basically it looked like paranoid delusion.”

“The signs are that it was just that,” he said. “But I’d be grateful if you could try to remember.”

“It was very guilt-ridden.”

Dear, sweet child, please don’t try to interpret it for me, he thought.

“What did it say?”

“That he went up a mountain. ‘One more time,’ he wrote. But that he couldn’t see. There was a snowstorm and he was in pain and freezing. He thought he was lost. But he heard cries that guided him.”

“What sort of cries?”

“Cries of the dead, I think.”

“What was that supposed to mean?”

“It was hard to understand, but he wrote that there were spirits accompanying him all the time, two spirits I think, one good and one evil, a little…”

She giggled, and Bublanski was delighted that Else Sandberg had suddenly revealed a human side.

“Like Captain Haddock in the Tintin books, you know? He has a devil and an angel hovering above his shoulders when he’s longing for a drink.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s a great metaphor.”

“It didn’t seem like a metaphor to me. I got the impression that for him it was real.”

“I only meant to say that it sounded familiar. Good and evil voices whispering to me when I’m tempted by something.” He looked embarrassed. “What did the evil spirit say?” he said.

“That he should leave her up there.”

“Her?”

“Yes, I think that’s what he wrote. It was a she, a madam, or a mam-something who’d been left on the mountain. But then there was something about the valley of rainbows, Rainbow Valley, where the dead hold out their hands and beg for food. It really was all very strange. Then it clearly said that Johannes Forsell appeared. Very weird. That’s as far as I got, to be honest. The bus came, and there was some bloke arguing with the driver, and I had my mind on other things. In any case I’d already guessed by then that the man was a paranoid schizophrenic. He wrote that he never stopped hearing those cries in his head.”

“You probably don’t need to be a schizophrenic to feel like that.”

“What do you mean?”

What was he trying to say now?

“I mean…” he said. “That I recognize that too. There are certain things you never get rid of. They gnaw and clamour inside you, year after year.”

“Yes,” she said, more hesitant now. “That’s true.”

“Can you hang on a moment while I do a quick search?”

Else Sandberg nodded and Bublanski logged onto his computer and put three words into Google. He turned the screen to face her.

“Do you see this?”

“That’s awful,” she said.

“Isn’t it? It’s Rainbow Valley on Mount Everest. I never knew anything about this world before. But I’ve been reading up on it these last few days, and I recognized it as soon as you mentioned it. Rainbow Valley’s just a bit of slang of course. But it does come up quite a lot, and it’s easy to see why. Have a look.”

He pointed at the screen and wondered if he was being unnecessarily brutal. But he wanted her to understand how serious this was. Image after image showed dead climbers in the snow above twenty-six thousand feet,