Read Online CELL 8 by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström - Free Book Online

Of course, you’re making a stand, I would too.
    The prison doctor was young, thirty at most. Sven saw him coming down the long corridor and thought to himself that they always are, young, recently qualified, working in a detention center didn’t give much status, somewhere to start and get some experience, nothing more than that. Schwarz stared down at the floor and mumbled something incomprehensible while the doctor held his arm and took a blood sample for a DNA analysis. The fear in the cramped cell seemed to diminish, Schwarz wasn’t shaking anymore, wasn’t breathing as heavily, until he suddenly sprang up and shouted again, convulsing like before.
    “Not again!”
    He pointed at the doctor’s hands, at a diazepam enema that was going to be stuck up his rectum.
    “Not again!”
    The young prison doctor had taken the blood test that he’d come for and then tried to conclude his visit by giving the patient a sedative. The doctor looked at the officer who was sitting in the cell and then at Sven and Hermansson, shook his head, shrugged and threw up his hands, then put the tube of milky fluid back in his bag.
    Someone gives me medicine. Someone puts me in a sack. Someone gives me oxygen, regular breaths every two minutes.
    John Schwarz sat leaning forward on the bunk in the open holding cell. He wasn’t shouting anymore, he didn’t move. Sven Sundkvist and Hermansson had stayed until he sat down and the panic seemed to have ebbed, at least for a while. They waited a few minutes more, and took a call from Ewert Grens, who wanted them both to be present when Schwarz’s apartment was searched in a couple of hours—a routine operation to secure any evidence a forensic investigation of his clothes and shoes might give; he’d managed to leave the scene of the crime and sometimes not even a plea of guilty and several witnesses were enough for the judge on duty.
    One last look at the man who was now sitting quietly in the cell, then they left, took the lift down, and made their way to their own offices.
    “Is that normal?”
    “Schwarz?”
    “Yes.”
    Sven sifted through images from his nearly twenty years in the police.
    “No. Some seem to shrink when they get into the cell. But that—no. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a violent reaction.”
    They kept going, punched a code into a lock on the door that separated one corridor from the next, walking in silence and trying to understand how the past could spark such terror, what earlier experiences in a person’s life would be strong enough to generate such a fear of small spaces.
    “My son.”
    Sven turned to Hermansson as he spoke.
    “He’s named Jonas. He’s seven, nearly eight years old. He’s adopted. And the first few years, the first two years to be precise, we couldn’t understand it, Anita and I, he was just like Schwarz was now.”
    They were nearly there, slowed down, wanted time to finish the conversation.
    “He screamed just like that. In panic. If we held him too tight, if we hugged him for too long, if he was constricted and couldn’t move freely. We talked to everyone we could at the time. We still don’t know. But when he was a baby in the orphanage in Phnom Penh, they kept his whole body tightly bound in his blankets.”
    They had passed the photocopier, stopped outside Sven’s office.
    “I don’t know. Just something I recognized in Schwarz.”
    He looked at her.
    “I’m certain of it. He’s been confined in some way before.”

    tuesday

    MARIANA HERMANSSON HADN’T SLEPT WELL . A sound, much like the one that John Schwarz had released in the hallway outside the holding cell the day before, had woken her on at least two occasions. She didn’t know if it was her or someone else who’d passed her bedroom window. Maybe it hadn’t been there at all, maybe it had been a dream, the workings of her tired mind.
    She was twenty-five years old and had now been living in her apartment, a sublet on the west side of Kungsholmen, for six