“At 2.15, a few minutes after Harriet came home, a dramatic accident occurred out there on the bridge. A man called Gustav Aronson, brother of a farmer at Östergarden – a smallholding on Hedeby Island – turned on to the bridge and crashed head-on with an oil truck. Evidently both were going too fast and what should have been a minor collision proved a catastrophe. The driver of the truck, presumably instinctively, turned his wheel away from the car, hit the railing of the bridge and the tanker flipped over; it ended up across the bridge with its trailer hanging over the edge. One of the railings had been driven into the oil tank and flammable heating oil began spurting out. In the meantime Aronsson sat pinned inside his car, screaming in pain. The tanker driver was also injured but managed to scramble out of his cabin.”
The old man went back to his chair.
“The accident actually had nothing to do with Harriet. But it was significant in a crucial way. A shambles ensued: people on both sides of the bridge hurried to try to help; the risk of fire was significant and a major alarm was sounded. Police officers, an ambulance, the rescue squad, he fire brigade, reporters and sightseers arrived in rapid succession. Naturally all of them assembled on he mainland side; here on the island side we did what we could to get Aronsson out of the wreck, which proved to be damnably difficult. He was pinned in and seriously injured.
“We tried to prise him loose woith our bae hands, and that didn’t work. He would have to be cut or sawed out, but we couldn’t do anything that risked striking a spark, we were standing in the middle odf a sea of oil next to a tanker truck on its side. If it has exploded we would have all been killed. It took a long time before we could get help from the mainland side; the truck was wedged right across the bridge, and climbing over it would have been the same as climbing over a bomb.”
From the book “The girl with the dragon tattoo.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland
