Anders Rönn is still at the hospital, even though it’s evening now. He wants to check up on the third patient, the young woman.
She’s come direct from Karsudden Hospital, and shows no sign of wanting to communicate with the staff. Her medication is extremely conservative, considering the findings of the psychiatric evaluation.
Leif has gone home and a well-built woman named Pia Madsen is working the evening shift. She doesn’t say much, mostly sits there reading thrillers and yawning.
Anders finds himself staring at the new patient on the screen again.
She’s astonishingly beautiful. Earlier in the day he stared at her for so long that his eyes started to dry out.
She is regarded as dangerous and an escape risk, and the crimes she was convicted of in the District Court were deeply unpleasant.
As Anders watches her, he can’t believe it’s true, even though he knows it must be.
She’s as slight as a ballet dancer, and her shaved head makes her look fragile.
Maybe she was only prescribed Trilafon and Stesolid at Karsudden Hospital because she’s so beautiful.
After his meeting with hospital management, Anders almost has a senior consultant’s authority over the secure unit.
For the foreseeable future he makes the decisions about the patients.
He has consulted Dr Maria Gomez in Ward 30. Usually an initial period of observation would be advisable, but he could go in and give her an intramuscular injection of Haldol now. The thought makes him tingle, and he is filled with a heavy, remarkable sense of anticipation.
Pia Madsen returns from the toilet. Her eyelids are half-closed. A bit of toilet paper has got stuck to one of her shoes and is trailing after her. She’s approaching along the corridor with shuffling steps, her face lethargic.
‘I’m not that tired,’ she laughs, meeting his gaze.
She removes the toilet paper and throws it in the bin, then sits down at the control desk next to him and looks at the time.
‘Shall we sing a lullaby?’ she asks, before logging on to the computer and switching out the lights in the patients’ rooms.
The image of the three patients stays on Anders’s retina for a while. Just before everything went dark Jurek was already lying on his back in bed, Bernie was sitting on the floor holding his bandaged hand to his chest, and Saga was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking angry and vulnerable in roughly equal measure.
‘They’re already part of the family,’ Pia yawns, then opens her book.