Killer's Island Read online

  “I’m leaving my husband. Are you satisfied now? I’m in crisis. I need to sleep so I can think clearly and make the right decision.”

  “Okay.” Her explanation gave him the alibi he needed. “I’ll write out a prescription now for ten pills, and I’ll set up a new appointment for you in a week’s time.” He saw the disappointment in her face and steeled himself against making any further concessions. She snatched the prescription out of his hand as soon as he’d lifted his pen from the paper.

  “Next time we see each other I won’t be your patient. I’ll be your colleague.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Her bearing was straight and proud and she was out of the door before he’d had time to rise out of his chair.

  Anders Ahlström grabbed his tape recorder and dictated his journal entry. The next patient was waiting and had already been waiting forty-five minutes. Lunch was out of the question. He was all right with that. The worst thing was his craving for a cigarette. He’d promised himself and also Erika, whom he’d met in a bar, to stop smoking. She hated the smell of smoke. Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray, she’d said with fierce emphasis. He wanted to make a good impression. As a doctor he knew all about the damaging effects of smoking, but logic does not help very much once the pleasure center is stimulated. He smoked on the sly, so his daughter Julia wouldn’t worry. “I don’t want you to die like Mommy, then I won’t have anyone left,” she used to say. One time Julia had almost caught him when the steering wheel smelled of smoke from his hands. He had to stop, but right now he felt he wouldn’t be able to concentrate at all unless he had a few drags. He’d finished his last pack the day before and intentionally not bought another one. He searched his jacket pockets and the briefcase. Nothing. Maybe he could borrow a cigarette from someone? Lisa, the receptionist, smoked, but she’d left and Siv was on vacation. Damn it! His hands were shaking and he couldn’t think of anything else. Outside the window he saw a homeless man hanging round by the waste paper basket with a cigarette butt in his mouth. Without hesitation, Anders headed for the exit. This was an emergency. The man looked up, startled, as the doctor came steaming toward him in his white coat. With his foot he pushed the plastic bag from the liquor store into the nearest bush and prepared himself for a lecture on the dangers of smoking so close to the entrance.

  “You wouldn’t have a cigarette I could buy off you, would you?”

  “What?” The man smiled broadly, exposing a row of worm-eaten teeth. Then thoughtfully rubbed his nose. “What!”

  “Have you got a smoke?”

  “I’ve run out, but you can have the butt.” He took a deep drag. The cigarette was filterless and glowed two centimeters from his grubby thumb before he passed it over. “It’s on me.”

  “Thanks, very decent of you.” Anders Ahlström took the last drag on it and waited for the rewarding stimulation in his brain. “That was good, damn good.”

  “It was you who told my buddy to stop smoking? Poor schmuck had a heart attack and dropped dead last week.”

  “Probably was, yeah.” In your moment of humiliation it’s best to just come clean. “I should stop as well, but it’s not so easy.”

  The old man agreed. “You’re right there. Goddamn nightmare.”

  “A real goddamn nightmare.” Anders felt strangely comforted by their understanding.

  CHAPTER 6

  HE WASN’T REALLY so afraid of death. He just didn’t want to die unless he had to. That was the reason why Harry Molin was sitting there – and suffering – in the health center waiting room. Through the window he could see his good-for-nothing doctor having a smoke with one of the down-and-outs, in spite of the fact that smoking was prohibited outside the entrance. At the turn of the last century pharmacies had sold ready-stuffed pipes as a remedy for asthma and hysteria, but surely science had moved on since then?

  Anxiety about one’s health must be like wanting a smoke, Harry reflected to himself. The kick when the nicotine hits your brain is like the euphoric relief you feel when you get confirmation that you’re not suffering from a deadly disease. A short moment of bliss. But no long-term happiness. The need is still there, looking for new kicks. It’s a beast that always wants more.

  The last time he came he was sure he’d contracted MS. He had all the symptoms. First the twitching in one of his eyelids, the giddiness and the shaking hands. He’d held them in front of him for a long time, and then they’d started shaking uncontrollably. Later there was the numbness and the pricking sensations, and he may possibly have had a slightly worse sense of feel in his right leg than his left. It was a close call, but after squeezing them for a long while that’s how it seemed to him. He also needed to pee a lot. The doctor thought this was caused by nervousness. But you couldn’t be sure about it, could you? Nor could his insupportable tiredness be explained away by the fact that he’d lain awake worrying about his symptoms. It was difficult trusting this young doctor. He didn’t run all the necessary tests. You could read on the Internet exactly how the tests should be done. And in Poland there was a doctor who ran extra tests, just to be on the safe side.

  The doctor had been just as nonchalant that time Harry came to see him because of his suspicion that he’d caught HIV. His Alsatian had snapped at him, so there was a little cut; afterward, he’d accidentally touched a coin. There could have been infected blood on that coin. After that he felt his immune system weakening. He ran a fever, had swollen lymph glands and a sore throat and that’s how it all starts when you catch HIV. One long-drawn cold after another had followed as winter turned to spring, and he’d been hard-hit by the flu. Could things be any clearer than that? His immune system had started running amok. Already at that point he’d started thinking about changing his doctor. Doctor Ahlström saw no need for an HIV test. For an hour and a half, Ahlström had gone through all the symptoms and explained them away. And the agreed conclusion was that if it weren’t HIV it had to be something else, and it was this that had occupied Harry ever since. It had to be something. He just didn’t feel healthy.

  Things had been better while Doctor Wallman was there, before Ahlström arrived. Wallman had actually been a surgeon; he was a man of action. If you came to ask about a mole he had no problem removing it. True, he never had time to wait for the local anaesthetic to take effect before he picked up the knife, but you felt better afterwards. Sixteen moles had been removed by the time Wallman retired, and since then there had been a total stop. Ahlström never thought any of Harry’s moles looked dangerous. As if he could tell. Somewhere a few cells start changing and it takes time before the human eye can tell. Surely it’s better getting rid of the mole before the cancer has time to spread. It was the same with antibiotics. Wallman had never been stingy about prescribing them. The same went for painkillers. If you’re in pain you’re in pain. It’s a subjective experience. Of course it would be best just to stay on antibiotics the whole time. In that way you’d avoid infections. Antibiotics should be a supplement, a way of enriching one’s diet, quite simply. Every kind of antibiotic in a cocktail.

  “That would avoid a lot of sick days,” he’d commented to Doctor Ahlström.

  “And we’d have lethal illnesses springing up which we couldn’t treat because of the bacteria growing resistant to antibiotics,” Ahlström had countered. Sometimes he was a bit drastic, that doctor. The real problem with antibiotics was that they gave you diarrhea. You didn’t know if your bowels were loose because of the antibiotics or if you had some other illness. It could be salmonella or some inflammatory illness of the intestine or cholera or campylobacter from improperly handled mince meat. How do you know what’s a side effect and what’s a new disease? It’s absolute hell sorting it all out.

  “Harry Molin, please come in.” Harry stood up and reluctantly shook the doctor’s hand. Once he’d asked if the doctor really disinfected his hands after every consultation. Ahlström laughed and said that if the King and Silvia survived shaking hands with hundreds of people at bridge inaugurations and
the official openings of new concert halls without dropping dead, then maybe one needn’t agonize so much about it. The immune system had to be kept sharp. It was an answer that had annoyed Harry. Now he didn’t dare ask; nor could he been seen to be avoiding handshakes and thus making himself look ridiculous.

  Anders Ahlström sat down at the desk where Harry’s medical file, all four thick files of it, had landed in a pile. There was really little point in running to and from the records storage with them all the time. They might as well just stay in the bookshelf.

  “What can I do for you, Harry?”

  “This time it’s really serious, doctor. Really bad.” Harry paused and thought about how to begin. He had to make himself understood this time, had to be taken seriously. The nurses had tittered behind his back when the receptionist said: “So it’s you again, Harry. Have you missed us?” So humiliating. If he’d been in a position to choose the company he kept, it would hardly be that moronic receptionist person and the other nurses. Right now she was at the top of the list of people he’d bite if he caught rabies. That’s exactly what he told her, too. If he’d been healthy, he’d go to work with an easy mind and socialize with friends in his spare time. Instead he had to humiliate himself time and time again because he was ill, and pay a lot of money, too, out of his hard-stretched reserves. There were certainly better ways of enjoying one’s money.

  “Tell me. What’s the matter?” The doctor wasn’t sounding sarcastic. Harry felt a vague spark of hope that maybe, in spite of all, the doctor was interested.

  “It’s my stomach acting up. Yesterday I read about colon cancer in a newspaper… and everything fits.”

  Anders Ahlström couldn’t stop himself groaning out aloud. He’d also read that blazing article and reflected on the costs to the taxpayers and the growing lines for those who actually needed treatment. Just a lot of scaremongering: “You could have cancer of the intestine. We know the symptoms. Read the full list!”

  “You don’t believe me!” Harry felt a lump in his throat. He was close to tears. He was so anxious that he couldn’t sit still. He had to be properly checked out, even if it turned out to be really unpleasant. Rectoscopy, coloscopy, gastroscopy: he’d read about the procedures and they were not the sort of thing you exposed yourself to without good reason.

  “Sorry.” Anders quickly noted down the patient’s concerns. “I’m groaning about the evening papers. Nothing else. I believe what you’re telling me and I’m listening.”

  Harry drummed up some courage. What he was about to say sounded really stupid, but he had to say it.

  “I’m passing feces as thin as pencils. If you have changing intestinal functions this could be a red flag that you need to seek treatment. I read about it in a medical journal on the Internet. Of course I felt very nervous about it, so I read everything I could find on the net. It described in detail what sort of surgical procedures are done. Sometimes they use radiation, sometimes both surgery and radiation. I couldn’t sleep. I went to the toilet many times.”

  “Did you see if there was any blood in your feces?” Doctor Ahlström made notes in his pad to help him remember. His thoughts had a tendency to drift. Right now he was thinking about how to get hold of cigarettes before Erika met him after work. He was dying for a smoke; it was almost more than he could stand.

  “It could be such a small amount of blood that it’s not visible to the naked eye. That thing about feces thin as pencils isn’t normal, is it? I had to know if it was dangerous. But everything was closed on Friday night except the emergency room. So I thought I’d go over to my neighbor, Linn, she’s a nurse. It was almost midnight but she comes home late and I was hoping she hadn’t already gone to bed. I didn’t want to call and disturb her, in case she was already sleeping, so I went over to see if there were any lights on. I knocked on the door, but no one opened, so I tried peeking in through the window to see if she was in the living room.”

  “What did you say? You did what?” Anders had to ask to make sure he’d heard him right. Of course it could be a coincidence, but nurse Linn Bogren and Harry Molin lived on the same street.

  “I went over to my neighbor to see if her lights were on. What’s so special about that? We’re talking about colon cancer here. That’s what’s important.” Harry shook his head. This doctor was really slow on the uptake sometimes.

  “Did you put your face to the window? Is your neighbor called Linn Bogren?”

  “Yes, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. Carry on. Did she open the door? What did she say?” Anders Ahlström remembered Linn’s story clearly. So the frightening experience had a natural explanation.

  “I thought she’d be awake. She came home late and seemed groggy or slightly drunk. Apparently she ran into three men in the street. Seemed upset about something. When I got to her place every window was dark and I let her sleep and went home. But I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

  “Okay, this is how we’re going to do this. I’ll give you three small envelopes to take home, and I want you to leave three stool tests, on consecutive days if possible. If there’s no blood in the excrement there’s no danger. We’ll test it when you come back here, we can get the result right away.”

  “If you’ve been constipated you can have a bit of blood, anyway. I don’t want an operation if there’s no reason for it.” Harry felt at a loss and more and more worked up. In one sense it was better to be opened up so they could check what was wrong, but some surgeons weren’t as skilled as others.

  “Of course not. Obviously we’ll carry on investigating if there’s blood. But right now it’s enough to know if there is or isn’t.”

  “Before I go I have a tip for you, doctor. A new promising drug has come out for people who want to stop smoking. It’s called Fumarret.”

  Harry blinked and stood up to say his goodbyes. His ingrown toenail hurt like hell. But he didn’t want to bother the doctor with it. It wasn’t life-threatening, he knew that, and if you wanted to be credible and have people listen to you, you couldn’t bring up too many illnesses at the same time. A little ailment can divert attention from something you really need to deal with. In that respect doctors were often bad at prioritizing, he thought. A small but visible problem often had far too much time devoted to it while the important stuff was forgotten because it seemed too far-fetched. Time ran out and you were pushed out. You have maximum one minute to capture the doctor’s attention, three minutes to explain complicated factors, and then your time’s up. Every time Harry went to the doctor he practiced carefully beforehand, both what he was going to say and how he was going to say it. Today had been a really successful appointment. You could say what you liked about Ahlström, but he wasn’t stingy about the amount of time he gave you.

  On his way out of the health center, Harry passed the magazine rack. At the top was a small brochure about tick bites. He took a copy and dropped it into his pocket, to study it once he got home. True, he was vaccinated against TBE, but you couldn’t vaccinate yourself against borrelia. You had to keep your eyes open. He must have pulled ticks out of his skin at least ten times. The dogs brought them in. When he got home he’d check the symptoms of borrelia.

  Was there a more venal sin that failing your nearest and dearest or denying your own kith and kin? If murdering a stranger could result in a life prison sentence, faithlessness to your nearest and dearest should be punished even more severely. Capital punishment. And how could we be so sure that death was a punishment? Maybe it was just a way of slipping out the back way and avoiding punishment. Wasn’t this in fact how we dealt with animals – putting them down as a way of showing how merciful we were? Because they were only animals and therefore not answerable for their own desires. Our human consciousness demanded a greater level of responsibility in us. The punishment had to calibrated. If you failed those who were nearest to you the punishment should not be death, but suffering. Not the suffering of the body, that was not the worst. But the soul.
The slow breaking down of dignity and then the shame and realization that one had directly been the cause of all the evil that had taken place. And that one could have prevented it.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SCENT OF HARRY’S cheap aftershave hung heavily over the room. Anders Ahlström banged his head against the table before he went to open the window. A passing nurse popped in with a paper to be signed. As if she were a persistent fly, he waved his hand to get rid of her. He had to have a minute to himself. He stayed by the window, breathing in the air. He felt exhausted and inadequate. If the waiting room had not been so full of people he would have dealt with Harry and his hypochondria in a better way. “Hypochondria” is not a good word. The anxiety was real. Harry really believed he was dying. And eventually, if he carried on subjecting himself to excessive medical attention, he might actually catch something. Hypochondria is a serious illness, in which the patient risks operations or inappropriate medication – or ultimately, being passed over and ignored when the appointments grow too frequent. Living with constant anxiety is corrosive to body and soul, and not being taken seriously is damaging to the self-confidence. Anders knew this better than most, maybe it had even been what made him become a doctor. An infinite number of times he had asked older medical colleagues for advice, letting on that it concerned a patient rather than himself. Not just in the early days but now as well, when he had started considering the risks of getting lung cancer. Maybe doctors are the worst hypochondriacs of all. The more knowledge there is, the greater the burden. Which did not stop him from keeping up his nicotine abuse. He had long since lost count of how many times he’d tried to give it up. Once he stopped for almost a whole year, then lost it when he had a single cigarette at a party, but mostly he couldn’t even keep it up for a single day. One early spring when he had his first bout of pneumonia he thought his life was coming to an end. It made him so nervous that he smoked twice as much as usual. This just wasn’t good enough. The new medication Harry had tipped him off about was a type of Antabus for smokers, causing nausea, heart palpitations, and giddiness – not much of a pleasure kick there. At the same time it contained dopamine, which reduced the hankering for nicotine. It was a constant reward, in other words, and a punishment if one lapsed and had a drag or two. Might be worth a try. Anders Ahlström got out his prescription pad and scribbled down the name of the acrid medicine for himself. Erika wanted him to stop smoking. In the honeymoon phase you’re still malleable. Now was the time if ever.