Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [125]
“I was wondering when you’d think of that,” Edklinth said.
“I’d like permission to go through the personnel files from the ’50s,” Figuerola said.
“No,” Edklinth said, shaking his head. “We can’t go into the archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat, and we don’t want to attract attention until we have more to go on.”
“So what next?”
“Mårtensson,” Edklinth said. “Find out what he’s working on.”
Salander was studying the vent window in her room when she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It was past 10.00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.
She had measured the window and discovered that her head would fit through it and that she would not have much problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would dispose of that problem.
She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had knickers, a hospital nightshirt and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Göteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.
Jonasson sat in the visitor’s chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.
“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m sorry I’ve not come to see you the past few days, but I’ve been up to my eyes in A. & E. and I’ve also been made a mentor for a couple of interns.”
She had not expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.
He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature was steady, between 37 and 37.2 degrees, and for the past week she had not taken any headache tablets.
“Dr Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?”
“She’s alright,” Salander said without enthusiasm.
“Is it O.K. if I do an examination?”
She nodded. He took a pen torch out of his pocket and bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently around her neck and turned her head back and forth and to the sides a few times.
“You don’t have any pain in your neck?” he said.
She shook her head.
“How’s the headache?”
“I feel it now and then, but it passes.”
“The healing process is still going on. The headache will eventually go away altogether.”
Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was healing, but there was still a small scab.
“You’ve been scratching the wound. You shouldn’t do that.”
She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.
“Can you lift it by yourself?”
She lifted her arm.
“Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?”
She shook her head.
“Does it feel tight?”
“A little.”
“I think you have to do a bit more physio on your shoulder muscles.”
“It’s hard when you’re locked up like this.”
He smiled at her. “That won’t last. Are you doing the exercises the therapist recommended?”
She nodded.
He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart and took her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.
“Cough.”
She coughed.
“O.K., you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From a medical standpoint, you’re just about recovered.”
She expected him to get up and say he would come back in a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.
“Do you