The Hanging Girl

51

Carl woke with his face pressed against the cement floor. His entire body was throbbing and buzzing. His heart was pumping so much that he felt sick and had to regurgitate.

“What happened?” he said and threw up, but no one answered.

He looked down at his body. His arms were still shaking, but they were free. Now he noticed that there were bits of cable spread all over the floor. There was also a wire cutter a little farther away, and the door to the corridor stood wide open.

“Assad, are you there?” he asked with a shaky voice.

“Pirjo, why aren’t you doing anything? The place is on fire!!” he heard someone shouting out in Swedish.

Then someone screamed. From inside the office came the sound of more and more hectic footsteps.

“Don’t touch anything!” someone shouted. “She’s dead!”

After that, the screams became deeper and more intense.

“Help,” Carl tried to shout, but he couldn’t make himself heard above the commotion.

He tried to roll out of his position, but he couldn’t.

A dark shadow covered the light from the office, and then he heard footsteps approaching.

“Help!” he shouted again, feeling muscle group after muscle group beginning to relax. He became extremely hot as the blood began to rush, and it bloody well hurt. It was almost as if all his veins and arteries had hardened and couldn’t let the blood pass.

The outline of a body stood in the room. “There are two men lying on the floor here in the control room. Something’s definitely not right, their feet are tied together,” screamed the voice suddenly.

* * *

For some time, Carl anxiously watched his unconscious friend being given mouth-to-mouth in the room they’d been moved to.

Outside, people shouted for more water and makeshift firefighting equipment. Some people were trying to get hold of Atu, but without any success it would seem.

They said that the body by the desk was Pirjo, and that she was dead. Someone had covered her with a cloth that’d been lying on the table in the reception. Probably Nisiqtu because she was standing totally paralyzed, white as a ghost, crying at her side.

There were quite a few people in there, standing passively and watching. Men and women dressed in white who no doubt realized that the dream was over. They were probably dumbstruck, unable to take it all in.

“Look at his hand,” one of them whispered, pointing at Assad’s severely burned hand and black thumb.

Carl observed the men who were working on Assad, with gratitude. They knew what they were doing, that was for sure, so God bless them for that.

“He’ll make it,” one of them said. “The heart’s beating fast and hard, but it’s beating.”

Carl took a deep breath. As long as they helped Assad, he’d be all right himself.

He sipped from the glass of water that a compassionate soul gave him, but found it very difficult to swallow. For a moment, he had to hold his head steady to stop it from moving from side to side like a pendulum in a clock. His left ankle ached as if it had been cut, and his lungs produced mucus as if they were inflamed. But despite the discomfort and pain, and the aftereffects that might come, he was alive and knew that everything would be okay. And only ten minutes later, he was already feeling better.

Assad had saved him.

If only they could save Assad now.

* * *

The sirens had been going for some time before they were turned off right outside the windows. Ambulances, police, fire engines—a whole regiment of rescue workers had mobilized to action.

Carl was on his feet now, giving his version of events as much as his voice would allow. In the meantime, a pair of their Swedish colleagues routinely checked his and Assad’s ID on the telephone. Hopefully, they’d get hold of Lars Bjørn, and hopefully he’d get a shock.

Over on the sofa, Assad had exclaimed a couple of inarticulate sounds, but when the doctor gave him his injection, he woke suddenly, looking confused at the horde of people around him.

When he saw Carl, he smiled gently. Carl could easily have cried.

Fifteen minutes later, when the doctor had treated Assad’s hand with a provisional dressing, and put a bandage around Carl’s ankle, they listened to the preliminary report from the police.

They’d been discovered in the control room, lying on the floor with multiple injuries, tied by their feet with cables. Who’d cut them free, nobody knew, but it could hardly have been that woman who’d bled to death.

The doctor deemed it necessary to admit them for observation at Kalmar Hospital, even though they’d seemingly escaped any life-threatening injuries. Apart from Assad’s thumb, which would in all probability have to be amputated, and which he seemingly didn’t react to.

Carl assumed he must be in shock, putting his hand on Assad’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. He couldn’t express with words how he felt about Assad sacrificing himself. For all the pain he’d endured.

“Thanks, Assad,” he said. It didn’t seem enough.

He nodded. “I wanted to save myself, too, Carl, don’t read too much into it,” he said gaspingly.

They were asked to identify the dead woman as the person who’d knocked them out and tied them up. Afterward, the technicians came and took pictures. The forensic pathologist wrote a temporary death certificate, but was convinced the cause of death was extreme blood loss caused by bleeding during premature labor. He put a stethoscope to her stomach and shook his head after a few seconds. The child was no longer alive either.

Then the paramedics put the body on a stretcher and carried it out.

The amount of blood around the area she’d been sitting in and under the table was awful. So much blood from such a small woman was hard to fathom.

“She’s confessed to attacking you. Look here,” said one of the officers, pointing at the computer screen on the desk.

Carl read. It was in Swedish, and made for horrifying reading.

“What does it say exactly, Carl?” asked Assad, looking concerned. “I don’t read Swedish too well.”

Carl nodded. Of course he didn’t. How much could you expect from someone who allegedly didn’t understand a word of Danish sixteen years ago.

“It reads: I confess my deeds. I’ve killed two officers in the solar power control room. I killed Wanda Phinn. She’s buried down in Gynge Alvar, about eight hundred meters from where the path stops, and then a hundred meters to the right. I pushed a German woman in front of a car down at the ferry terminal in Karlskrona. Her name was Iben. I drowned Claudia, who was found in Poland. I don’t remember their surnames at present. It all started with Alberte on Bornholm, where Atu, called Frank at the time, began . . .”

And there her confession ended with a mass of “n”s and some spaces. Her finger must’ve fallen there when she lost consciousness. Carl pointed to the “n” key on her keyboard. Exactly one key above the space bar.

“Where’s Atu?” Carl asked around the room.

People shrugged. Everything pointed to the rat having abandoned the sinking ship.

“His car’s not there,” someone said.

So he’d slipped away before everything came burning down around him.

“I think he’s directing a massive accusation at himself, running away while his chosen one, Pirjo, was sitting here dying and the buildings were on fire,” said Carl.

“Yes, but what she wrote . . . can be understood in several ways,” said Assad.

Carl nodded. “It can. It can also mean that she’s trying to make him responsible for Alberte’s death. We can’t know from what’s here. We don’t know anything about what her motivation was. Maybe she was insane. But the fact that he ran away, leaving his fiancée and lifework in flames, speaks volumes.”

“Then we need to find him, right?”

Carl nodded. But where? And how? Now they were being taken to the hospital. Assad’s injuries weren’t the sort you could ignore. Just taking a couple of steps, he looked like a zombie. His limbs were obviously stiff and were with all probability damn painful, just like his own. And then there was his hand; it was almost unbearable to think about.

“We’ll put a call out for Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi and his car,” said one of the Swedish plainclothes officers.

“Good. Listen, we need to find our car keys and cells,” said Carl. “Otherwise . . .”

“You’ll have to leave that for someone else, because you won’t be doing that now,” interrupted the doctor. “We’ve got some patients to transport and ambulances waiting outside.”

* * *

Out in the courtyard, there was a multitude of flashing blue lights and people in uniform, lost in a fog of smoke and damp. Not far from there, it was still possible to see black clouds rising, but the fire had already been brought under control, according to the on-site commander.

Carl looked over the body that only an hour and a half ago had been a smiling and happy woman with Atu’s cape over her shoulders and sunstones in her hands. Her deathly white face hadn’t yet been covered, and many white-clad men and women stood around her, totally lost and crying.

Then a team of stretcher bearers approached from the area of the fire. People whispered, put their hands to their faces, and followed the unraveling events in disbelief.

“Shirley!” some of them said.

The woman they were carrying was still alive. A man walked alongside them, holding a drip, while another held an oxygen mask over her mouth. She held out her hand a couple of times to the people they passed on their way, touching their hands. She didn’t get much back, but there were a few who stroked her fingers as she was hurried past them.

“She’ll take one ambulance, and the dead woman the other. The Danish officers can be driven in one of the emergency cars,” said the on-site commander.

The battered woman on the stretcher was placed alongside the dead one. They took her mask off and spoke to her. She coughed, but was seemingly in a fit state to answer questions. Then a rescue worker came to rinse the area around her eyes of soot. Even her hair was black with soot, just like her skin. Everything was black. Amazing that she’d survived. They must have rescued her in the nick of time.

She looked extremely sad, lying there. Maybe she hadn’t reckoned with getting out of that place alive. She was presumably still in shock.

Then she turned her head toward the other stretcher, trying to focus. She blinked a couple of times before she really understood what she saw.

And then something strangely grotesque happened that Carl knew he’d never be able to forget.

With her eyes on the corpse, she began to laugh. To laugh so uncontrollably and resoundingly loud that everyone in the courtyard stopped, frozen to the spot.