Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [130]
Apart from the police and emergency services, the only other people to arrive on the scene that morning were – miraculously – a doctor, who happened to be passing in her car and stopped to administer first aid, and a forty-one-year-old photographer named Lennart Wennberg, then working for the Swedish newspaper Expressen. The bus had already been hoisted back up by the time Wennberg arrived. ‘I was at the scene of the accident for maybe half an hour,’ he told Joel McIver. ‘I took about twenty pictures. I can’t recall speaking to anyone. The police didn’t mind me taking pictures, but there was someone in the band’s entourage who felt I should stop taking pictures.’
Had he noticed any ice on the road?
‘It was said that this may have been a cause of the accident. Personally, I consider that out of the question. The road was dry. I believe the temperature had probably been around zero degrees Celsius during the night, but slippery? No.’ At the police station in central Ljungby, the driver, who Wennberg describes as ‘around fifty, well built, normal height’, was grilled for several hours by police investigators but later released without charge. Wennberg also took pictures of the band when they arrived by police car from the hospital and entered the Hotel Terraza in Ljungby. He recalled: ‘The manager came down to me and the Expressen reporter in the hotel lounge to do an interview. But after a few minutes he got a phone call and never came back.’
Bobby Schneider had already given the reporter his version of events at the hospital. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating. ‘We were asleep when the crash happened…when I managed to get out of the bus I saw Cliff lying there in the grass. He must have died immediately, because he went right through the window. It all went so quickly that he couldn’t have felt anything, and that’s a kind of comfort.’ He added, ‘None of the guys in the band is able to play now. We just want to get back home as quickly as possible and make sure that Cliff gets a decent funeral.’ John Marshall, lying in a bed next to Bobby in the Emergency Room, was equally dazed, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. ‘I remember Bobby lying next to me as they were taking blood pressure and stuff, and saying, “Cliff’s gone, you know?” All of a sudden, the reality of everything hit me. Right then, I looked above, at the ceiling, and thanked whoever was up there that nobody else had been seriously hurt, and that it hadn’t turned out even worse than it was.’ James Hetfield wasn’t about to say thank you for anything. When Bobby began rounding everybody up after they’d been patched up by the doctors, saying: ‘Okay, let’s get the band together and take them back to the hotel,’ all James could think was: ‘The band? No way! There ain’t no band. The band is not “the band” right now. It’s just three guys.’ For once, Lars had nothing to say. He just couldn’t take in what was happening. ‘I remember being at the hospital and a doctor coming into the room that I was staying in, telling us that [Cliff] had died. We couldn’t grasp it; it was too hard, too unreal…’
By now both Peter Mensch and the Danish promoter for the Copenhagen show, Erik Thomsen, had also arrived at Hotel Terraza. Bobby Schneider was arranging for the whole party to travel to Copenhagen the next day, the nearest major city with an international airport, while he stayed on an extra day. ‘Something about staying and dealing with the body or something like that,’ he says now, sifting through the confusing memories of that day. ‘And I also