he didn’t lose consciousness, at least not properly. He could hear voices and screaming, probably from the stupid fucker who had driven into him. Where the hell had he come from, anyway?
Got to get up, he thought. Got to get away from here.
But his body wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t even lift his head from the tarmac. All of a sudden his skull seemed full of cement, impossible to move or even turn. Was he paralysed? A cripple?
Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!
Slowly he tried to open his mouth to get a bit of air. It was like trying to breathe porridge yet everything seemed to be happening in ultra-rapid time. The voices were coming closer, getting clearer.
‘… bastard … threw something … the Volvo down there … called the cops.’
Suddenly his paralysis eased and he managed to take a deep breath.
The pain came from everywhere at once. His head, his legs, and his hands more than anything else hurt like hell, but the agony, surprisingly, made him feel better. If you could feel things, you weren’t paralysed, that seemed fairly logical.
His vision cleared slightly and from the corner of his eye he could make out several dark silhouettes leaning over him where he lay with his face embedded in the tarmac.
From somewhere in the distance there was the sound of sirens.
He tried to get up and this time it went a bit better. He raised one hand towards the men to get some help, but none of them moved. Then a flashing blue light was right alongside him.
‘It was him!’ one of the shadowy figures yelled, but HP was still having trouble focusing enough to see which one. With an effort he heaved himself up into a kneeling position. Then someone suddenly grabbed hold of his arms and a moment later he was lying across a car bonnet.
‘Take it easy, lad,’ said the voice of authority in his ear.
‘You’re under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder.’
And for a few seconds he thought he was eighteen again.
Flashing blue lights, she remembered them. But that was pretty much it.
Rebecca had only vague memories of the rescue operation. She had almost no recollection of the early part of it, when the firemen rolled the car the right way up and cut the roof off to get them out. She remembered fragments of a trip in an ambulance, probably to St Göran’s Hospital. An oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, a plastic collar round her neck. Pain in her head, chest and face. People in white and green coats. The sounds of running and urgent shouting. Occasionally she thought she could hear familiar voices among all the strangers, but she wasn’t altogether sure. She made an effort to hear what they were saying, but no matter how hard she tried the words merged together into a single monotonous mumble. The world didn’t start to get clearer until she was eventually wheeled into a room in the hospital, whichever one it was, and the doctor started to examine her.
‘Lucky’ was one of the first things that sank in properly. ‘You were lucky, Rebecca.’
She didn’t really understand what he meant.
What did he mean, lucky?
Someone had smashed their windscreen and it was only thanks to Kruse’s decisive action that they hadn’t collided with the Prime Minister’s car and everything had gone completely to hell.
Then they had crashed through the barrier and the car was so badly wrecked that they had to be cut out of it.
So exactly what did this idiot mean when he said she was lucky?
‘Concussion, but fairly mild, a couple of minor cuts to your scalp and face that will need stitches, and a few cracked ribs. But that’s pretty much it. Considering what happened, you were lucky,’ he concluded, simultaneously answering her question.
‘My partner?’ she managed to say, although it felt like her head and mouth were full of cotton-wool. ‘How’s Kruse?’
‘I’m afraid he wasn’t quite as fortunate. Sometimes it isn’t always a good thing to be big and heavy, and car accidents are precisely one such occasion.’
The doctor adjusted his glasses and gave her a knowing look. Her head suddenly felt like it was about to burst and for a moment she considered pulling out her Sig and asking him again, considerably less politely this time. But she bit her tongue and waited patiently for the answer.
He leafed through his notes.
‘Head injuries, broken arms and ribs are what we’ve got so far. Your partner is still in intensive care. It looks as if the roof crumpled mainly on his side.’
He looked up and smiled.
‘Like I said, you were …’
‘Lucky,’ she interrupted, and suppressed another urge to draw her gun, this time to blow his head off.
Flashing blue lights, handcuffs, then the plain-clothes arrived and it was the backseat of an unmarked police car. They must have been very close by.
He suddenly remembered that a lot of cops used to stop for coffee at the Shell garage not far away.
Typical of his miserable fucking luck!
Both of the detectives were thickset men, with shaved heads and bull-necks. One of them beside him, the other at the wheel.
‘So, you’re the sort who throws stones at police cars, are you?’ the gorilla next to him said as soon as they had set off.
HP didn’t answer, now if ever was a time to keep quiet. His head ached and he felt like he was going to be sick. The pain in his lower arm was hardly helped by the fact that his hands had been bent up behind his back.
The cops grinned and exchanged knowing glances in the rear-view mirror. They turned off the motorway and headed into Kungsholmen. Next stop, Police Headquarters in Kronoberg.
Bollocks!
Everything had gone completely to hell. He’d been careless and not looked round properly. And had missed that fucking idiot who rammed him. How stupid could you be?
He gulped a couple of times to suppress the urge to throw up. Now he had to keep quiet and ask for a lawyer as quickly as possible. He knew the routine. There was no point talking to the orcs in the car, they didn’t have any say in anything.
‘What’s the matter, can’t you speak?’ the same gorilla said in a mocking tone which for some reason made HP feel even more uneasy.
He stuck to his strategy and kept quiet.
‘No problem, lad,’ the cop chuckled, giving his colleague in the driver’s seat another look in the mirror.
