door shut and put on your snowsuits and all the blankets. Sivving and Bella are coming in the morning. Wait for them. Are you listening, Sara? I’m just going to have a little rest.”
Nothing hurts anymore. But her hands are ice cold. She loses her grip on Sara’s sleeve. Their faces drift away. She is sinking down into a well; they are standing at the top in the sun, looking down at her. And all the time it’s getting darker and colder.
Sara and Lova crouch down on either side of Rebecka. Lova turns to her older sister.
“What did she say?” she asks.
“I thought it sounded like ‘Will you receive me?’ ” replies Sara.
The winter wind was tearing frantically at the spindly birch trees outside the hospital in Kiruna. Pulling at their gnarled arms, reaching up into the blue black sky. Snapping their spindly, frozen fingers.
Måns Wenngren hurtled straight past the intensive care reception desk. The cold glare of the fluorescent lights bounced off the polished surface of the floor and the pallid cream walls of the corridor, with their indescribably ugly pattern in wine red. His whole being was revolted by the impression. The smell of disinfectant and cleaning fluid mixed with the stale, creeping stench of crumbling bodies. The constant clatter of metal trollies delivering food, samples or Lord knows what.
At least it isn’t Christmas, he thought.
His father had had his final heart attack on Christmas day. It was many years ago now, but Måns could still see the hospital staff’s unfortunate and unsuccessful attempts to create a festive atmosphere on the ward. Cheap, mass-produced ginger biscuits served with afternoon tea on paper serviettes with a Christmas motif. A plastic tree at the far end of the corridor, its needles pointing the wrong way and squashed flat after a long year in its box up on a shelf in the storeroom. Odd baubles dangling from the branches on a piece of thread. And beneath the lower branches, gaudy packages that you knew had nothing in them.
He shook off the memories before they got as far as his parents. Swung around without pausing, his wool coat streaming out behind him like a cloak.
“I’m looking for Rebecka Martinsson,” he roared. “Is anybody working here, or what?”
That morning he had been woken by the telephone. It was the police in Kiruna, wondering if it was true that he was Rebecka Martinsson’s boss. Yes, it was true. They hadn’t managed to find any records of close relatives. Perhaps the firm knew if she had a partner or boyfriend? No, the firm didn’t know that. He had asked what had happened. The police had finally told him Rebecka was undergoing an operation, but they refused to part with any more information.
He had phoned the hospital in Kiruna. They hadn’t even been prepared to confirm that she’d been admitted. “Classified” was the only word he could get out of them.
Then he’d phoned one of the two female partners in the firm.
“Måns, darling,” she’d said, “Rebecka is your assistant.”
In the end he’d taken a taxi to the airport at Arlanda.
Halfway down the corridor a nurse caught up with him. She followed him, a torrent of words spilling out as he opened various doors and looked in. He registered only fragments of her babble. Classified. Unauthorized. Security.
“I’m her partner,” he bluffed as he carried on opening doors and looking in.
He found Rebecka alone in a four-bed room. Next to the bed was a drip with a plastic bag half full of clear fluid. Eyes closed. Face deathly white, even her lips.
He pulled a stool up to the bed, but didn’t sit down. Instead he turned and growled at the little woman who was pursuing him. She disappeared at once, her Birkenstocks clattering frantically down the corridor.
After a moment another woman wearing a white coat and white trousers came in. In two strides he was right in front of her, reading the small name badge pinned to her breast pocket.
“Right, Sister Frida,” he said aggressively, before she’d even managed to open her mouth, “would you be so kind as to explain this to me?”
He pointed at Rebecka’s hands. Both were securely tied to the sides of the bed with gauze bandage.
Sister Frida blinked in surprise before she answered.
“Come out here with me,” she said softly. “Then we can calm down and have a little chat.”
Måns waved his hand in front of him as if she’d been a fly.
“Fetch the doctor who’s responsible for her,” he said angrily.