‘Give me a hand.’
We slowly lifted Eva onto the sleeping bag, zipped it up and wrapped the blankets around her.
‘We call it a wrap, keeps her from getting any colder.’
‘Are you a nurse?’
‘As near as it gets in this godforsaken place. Out here you need to learn to take care of yourself. There’s no backup.’
‘Will she be OK?’
Margit didn’t answer. She gave Eva a gentle mouth to mouth, looking up at me between breaths, but keeping her mouth close to Eva’s.
‘Why are you doing that? She’s already breathing.’
‘To warm her up from the inside.’
I nodded.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Eva.’
‘Your wife?’
‘No.’
‘Girlfriend?’
I shook my head.
‘What then?’
I wasn’t sure what to say, especially as our relationship was the least of our worries at that point. The priority was to save her life. I looked at her as Margit resumed the mouth to mouth. Eva was motionless and whiter than a sheet.
‘She’s wounded.’
The woman looked up.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the stomach.’
‘Is it bleeding?’
‘I think it has stopped.’
‘Let’s wait for the chopper.’
‘I don’t want to lose her.’
‘She’s very cold.’
‘She’s alive.’
‘Barely.’
‘Why don’t we take her in? It’s warmer.’
She’d already told me, but instinctively I still wanted to get her inside.
‘The helicopter shouldn’t be long. I just hope the weather holds up.’
‘She looks dead.’
I was paralysed by panic. One second I said she was alive, the next that she was dead. She was on the cusp and I’d dragged her into this.
‘Where did it happen?’
‘What?’
‘Going through the ice.’
‘Coming over from Åland.’
‘You crossed on a snowmobile?’
‘On an ice yacht.’
‘Whose snowmobile is this then?’
She was becoming nosy. I’d been too honest, too exhausted to lie.
‘A man lent it to us.’
‘Who?’
She was still looking at the machine.
‘Don’t know. When he saw Eva’s state, he just told us to leave it here. We’d never have got here without him.’
At least the last bit was true. The woman scrutinised me and I could tell she didn’t believe me, but saying I’d terminated the man with a rusty spade certainly wouldn’t have earned me any brownie points.
Eva barely reacted when I rearranged the wrap. I wanted to make sure the least possible heat was lost. Her eyes were hardly moving and I wasn’t sure if the minute life signs were real or my imagination. I couldn’t bear having to wait passively for the chopper. I’d fought like never before to save her, like a tiger, not a Swedish tiger, a real tiger, a Siberian tiger. I wasn’t going to lose her now.
77
The helicopter landed on the ice after the longest 20 minutes in my life. Eva was transported to the chopper on a stretcher. When her temperature was taken in her ear it was only 28°C and she was immediately hooked up to a warm air inhalation unit. I pointed to her wound and the doctor turned to me while examining it. I couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying, because of the ear-splitting engine noise. He had to shout.
‘WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?’
‘Yesterday!’
He instructed his assistants and barked something into the cockpit, but I couldn’t hear what the medical team were saying. The events were surreal. How had I ended up in this? I was in a daze, with the deafening noise of the military helicopter distancing me even more from the situation. I bit my lip very hard, until there was blood.
The iced-in archipelago unfolded beneath us as the giant mechanical dragonfly lifted over the trees into the brightness of this perfect day. As far as the eye could see there was an infinite icescape dotted with islands. The blue sky was immaculate, the sunshine flawless, but I was blind to the scenery. I didn’t see that the Swedish mainland had been hit by bad weather and that the helicopter was being diverted. I was locked in a dark tunnel, staring at Eva being treated by the doctor. It could have been a dream trip, a happy ending, but it was a nightmare. I was so focused on Eva that I completely forgot where I was. All I could do was hold her hand and look into her eyes. I was clinging on to her as if my own life depended on it.
The flight to the hospital only took about 20 minutes and she should have been fine. Her temperature was taken every five minutes and although the warm air inhalation gave her violent, back-arching convulsions, she relaxed as her temperature went up. Attempting to connect the IV fluid, the doctor couldn’t push the needle into her cold, collapsed veins, but the warm air briefly brought her back to consciousness and she opened her eyes without speaking. The doctor had predicted that a basic recovery could take up to an hour and her temperature had already gone up from 30 to 35°C. She was critical but on the mend, even having the odd sip of blueberry soup.
I smiled for the first time in two days – she was going to make it. I was relieved, my body invaded by pain. The physical agony had been blocked out by my survival mode, but I didn’t care about the pain returning, because it was nothing compared to what I’d felt at the idea of losing her. I would never have forgiven myself for leading her to her death. I didn’t care if I lost a foot in the process. I’d been prepared to give anything to keep her alive. I’d done it.
78
I hadn’t. Halfway through the helicopter journey, she lapsed back into unconsciousness. Her temperature sank back to 29°C and the doctor’s spontaneous diagnosis was that the increased flow of cold blood from the limbs to the heart had caused a heart problem. Too late did he realise that the relapse was due to the warm air inhalation unit’s battery going flat. Its air temperature and flux had fallen, which meant that there had been insufficient warm air to keep Eva stable. She would have been fine – if the charger hadn’t been taken in for repair the previous night, and if the back-up battery hadn’t been flat. If only…
Without the warm air, Eva deteriorated rapidly and didn’t regain consciousness. The doctor kept applying mouth to mouth and we were only minutes away from the hospital, so there was still hope. Hypothermic patients weren’t considered dead until back to normal body temperature, and they often regained consciousness as the temperature went up.
The helicopter landed on the hospital roof and Eva was rushed into the building on a stretcher. I followed, never taking my eyes off her, but I was stopped as we reached the doors of the operating theatre. I’d watched ER on television and this was nothing like it. This was a Swedish emergency unit in a provincial hospital. Their purpose was not to create added dramatic tension in people’s lives. They remained calm and considered life and death natural phenomena that didn’t require additional dramatisation.
The television set in the waiting room was turned onto a Swedish regional channel. Being a Londoner, Swedish life seemed to happen in slow-motion. The presenter announced that a new motorway was being built. Where to? What for? Sweden was vacant. There were reports of an unidentified smell of broccoli in a town. Or was it cauliflower? The interviewed locals weren’t sure. Another town protested against EasyJet opening up a new route. The concern seemed to be noise pollution. Who would hear it? The moose? I couldn’t help thinking that it was to do with the cauliflower. English bullies smell blood, Swedes cauliflower. When the smell of cauliflower is a menace to society, it might have become too safe.
Someone switched channels to news about the King coming to Mariehamn to open the multicultural festival. Once again, I was amazed by the Scandinavians’ splendid isolation. Another bomb had probably exploded in Baghdad, a bus disintegrated i
n Tel-Aviv, a Palestinian village had been bombed flat in retaliation, but Scandinavia remained in Pippi-Longstocking-mode. That’s why I cherished the expression ‘Meanwhile in Sweden’. It suggested that whatever crises erupted on the rest of the planet, Swedes were unperturbed in their skinny dipping and moose riding. But my image of Sweden was changing. In spite of the Swedish fairy tale of King’s and Queens and the innocence displayed on television, I’d landed in a Swedish nightmare, a parallel Sweden, which seemed to have lost its cloud-cuckoo dimension. It was a Sweden questioning the idyll, a Sweden where I had to wait over an hour before hearing from the doctors about Eva.
79
Andri was only supposed to ring if there was a problem, and there was – they were alive. The local guy had tracked them down, but Andri found him with his head bashed in.
Driving inland, Andri talked to an old lady who’d seen them too. Eva had been rushed to hospital in a helicopter and definitely wouldn’t interfere any more, but Magnus was still alive. Andri was closing in on him and promised to eliminate him once for all, which was all Boeck needed to know.
He would rather have taken care of it personally, but Boeck had no choice. Priorities were priorities, and he had an important termination to attend to. Essential change couldn’t be achieved democratically. Violence was a necessity and his exhibition would guarantee it wouldn’t be a gratuitous act. History would be Boeck’s judge – he knew he acted in the best interest of the nation. Most people were ants working away in their limited realities, without any grasp of the wider or longer term picture, whereas he’d spent his life developing his national sense. He knew what he was doing. And Sweden was going to benefit.
Although he hated the Bernadottes, this wasn’t really about them. They were only the symptom. He’d come to realise that the monarchy was fundamentally flawed. By definition the only eligible bride for a Swedish King was foreign, as marrying Swedish commoners watered down the royal blood. However, to marry royalty, Kings had to marry overseas. This was understandable in the past – for diplomatic and strategic reasons – but monarchy in its present incarnation was past its sell-by date and needed to be re-evaluated. Did it still have a function? Boeck thought it did, but quintessential Swedish values had to be brought back to the fore. When the Frenchman Bernadotte was made King, all basic principles were ignored. Being the Swedish King became a joke, a job, not the symbol of a great nation. History was soiled.
80
I couldn’t believe I was going to lose Eva and that our hellish journey had been for nothing. The female doctor who came out to tell me looked like she’d barely passed her A-levels, not a day over 18.
‘How is she?’
The doctor paused to look me into the eyes. Was she really there or was she thinking about her next patient? Maybe I was unfair, but I felt she was only going through the motions. Why did she even pretend to care? Next.
‘It’s too early to say. We’re doing our best, but it’s not looking good.’
I didn’t know what to do or where to go. It was if I’d suddenly been emptied of everything. I didn’t know what to say.
‘We need to be able to notify the family and would appreciate if you could give us their details – just in case.’
Not the most reassuring line and I ignored it. Eva was critical, but she wasn’t dead yet, was she? Besides, I didn’t know how to get hold of Riita and I certainly wasn’t going to give her Boeck’s number.
‘How bad is she? Tell me.’
‘She’s still extremely cold and hypothermia puts everything on hold. We’ll know once she warms up.’
‘Can I see her?’
I’d asked automatically, but did I really want to see her? Of course, it reflected my desire to see her, to be with her, the living Eva, not the dead. Although she wasn’t dead, the doctor had given me little room for hope and I was afraid of what I would see. I was dazed and confused. If she died it would be the fifth dead person I faced in a couple of days. They were falling like dominos. After my father, the church guard, Anna and the snowmobile driver, Eva’s turn was approaching ominously. It wasn’t right.
The young doctor guided me to Eva, who was lying on a bed surrounded by equipment – warm air inhalator was attached to her face, a warm air blanket covered her body. At first I thought I could hear her breathing, but it wasn’t Eva. It was the blanket puffing warm air onto her skin. Blood was also being taken from her arm and circulated through a heat-exchanger before being returned to her body. The display on the heat-exchanger showed 30°C and I knew by now that this meant she was in deep hypothermia. The ECG curve was flat, except for some irregular glitches that seemed due to more to defective equipment than any real signs of life. I put my head next to hers, listening out, feeling for any breathing and suddenly I thought I heard wheezing, but the next second it was gone. I must have imagined it. She was looking at peace as I caressed her cheek.
‘I’m sorry.’
Speaking the words, I realised that although the doctors hadn’t declared Eva dead yet, she was already slipping away. What we’d been through together was so different from my daily life that it would soon seem unreal. There wouldn’t be any tangible traces, which made me even more determined to remember her always. I mustn’t lose her, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.
While the doctor was standing by the door, awaiting my farewell, I stood still, looking at Eva, or not looking at all, simply staring into space. I felt empty, lost, torn, panicked, angry, everything and nothing at the same time. There was a storm raging inside, but I was calm on the surface, almost apathetic, as if resigned to accepting fate. I could have stayed there forever: days, weeks, months, centuries. I felt no urge to leave, because everything seemed so pointless after the struggle to escape the killers and to save Eva.
I’d killed her.
All I’d been through since arriving on Åland flickered past in my head – Anna and now Eva on the cusp, locking myself out of the car, the helicopter exploding, killing the snowmobile driver with a spade... More had happened in the last 48 hours than in my whole life previously. I was completely drained and just wanted to sit down, do nothing.
‘Your foot!’
I’d completely forgotten the doctor. A puddle of blood surrounded my injured foot. The wound had opened again and I was reminded of the pain. It was as if the shock of Eva’s death had opened the wound again.
‘We need to have a look at that.’
As the doctor cleaned my wound – her name was Kerstin Larsson, I can still see the name on her badge – she tried to reassure me, telling me that of course she couldn’t promise anything, but every year there were miraculous recoveries. A child had even survived after spending 40 minutes under the ice. There was still a slight chance Eva could make it. She was in that infamous ‘metabolic ice box’ Boeck had talked about, with the main organs temporarily on hold.
‘Nobody is dead until they’re warm and dead.’
I didn’t really care whether she was warm, cold or in the box. Dead was dead and I wasn’t sure what Dr Larsson thought she was doing giving me false hope when it was obvious the only life going on in that room was the beat of the life support machines. When Boeck had resuscitated Anna he’d done it immediately, whereas Eva had been cold for almost 24 hours. And she was injured. The odds were stacked against her and I didn’t believe in miracles.
My wound was finally dressed, but Dr Larsson told me that as it was on the ankle and in constant movement, the healing would take a long time, unless I kept still, which was unlikely. I thanked her and promised to be more careful next time a gun was aimed at me. She didn’t flinch when I mentioned the gun, which should have alerted me, as no one had asked about the bullet wound, but all I could think of was Eva. And Boeck – my main and only priority was to deal with him, the man who’d killed his own stepdaughter. There was nothing more I could do at the hospital. I had to stop him. But Dr Larsson asked me to wait.
‘For what?’
‘Formalities, won’t take long
.’
I didn’t want to wait. Cleaning the wound had taken long enough; first Dr Larsson couldn’t find the right disinfectant (was there such a thing as a ‘wrong’ disinfectant?); then she’d had to fetch bandage from another ward. Were they trying to keep me in the hospital? Had they called the police? It wouldn’t have surprised me, considering Eva’s gun shot wound. If that was the case it was fine – I would tell the police what happened. It was probably the best solution anyway. I wasn’t cut out for this. I’d just been about to go after Boeck again, but I wasn’t an action hero and it would be irresponsible, verging on stupid to pretend I was, especially with Carrie waiting back in London. We had a life, a family for which I had to do the right thing. Only the police could stop Boeck. Only they knew how to deal with a murderer of his ilk. I decided to sit down and wait for the hospital to finish whatever they wanted from me. My action hero days were over.
81
My name was called just as I’d sat down in the waiting room. That was quick at least.
‘Magnus Sandberg?’
I looked up. It was a different doctor.
‘Please follow me.’
He addressed me without even bothering to look at me. I only saw him from behind, which confirmed my impression that Swedes weren’t always the most graceful of social beings, but judging from his voice this one seemed old enough to have a medical degree at least. I followed him to an examination room, where he leafed through some papers with his back to me.
‘If you can just lie down.’
I was about to follow instructions, when I realised there must be a misunderstanding, as my wound had already been dressed.
‘But I’m fine.’
The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) Page 17