Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander

Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1.30 in the morning.
“What ? he said confused.
“Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. He woman has a gunshot wound.”
“Al right,” Jonasson said wearily.
He felt groggy although he had slept for only half an hour. He was on the night shift in A.&E. at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. Since he had come on duty at 6.00 p.m., the hospital had received four victims of a head-on collision outside Lindome. One was pronounced D.=.A. He had treated a waitress whose legs had been scalded in an accident at a restaurant on Avenyn, and he had saved the life of a fur year old boy who had arrived at he hospital with respiratory failure after swallowing the wheel of a toy car. He had patched up a girl who had ridden her bike into a ditch that he road repair department had chosen to dig close to the end of a bike path; the warming barriers had been tipped into the hole. She had fourteen stitches in her face and would need two new front teeth. Jonasson had also sewn par part of a thumb back on to a enthusiastic carpenter who had managed to slice it off.
By 12.30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients, and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6.00 in the morning, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light.
Nurse Nicander handed him a cup of tea. She had not been given any details about the incoming cases.
Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Göteborg.
He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squalls down towards he helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of view and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup.
From the book “The girl who kicked the hornets’ nest.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

Her nose itched and she turned her head

Her nose itched and she turned her head so that she could rub it against the pillow. She was sweating. It was airless and hot in the room. She had on a simple nightdress that was bunching up beneath her. If she moved her hips she could just hold the cloth with her first two fingers and pull the nightdress down on one side, a couple of centimetres at a time. She did the same on the other side. But there was still a fold under the small of her back. He mattress was lumpy. Her isolation sharply amplified all the tiny sensations that she would not otherwise have noticed. The harness was loose enough that she could change position and lie on her side, but that was uncomfortable because then she had to keep one hand behind her, which kept making her arm go to sleep.
She was not afraid . But she did feel a great, pent-up rage.
At the same time she was troubled by unpleasant fantasies about what was going to happen to her. She detested this helplessness. No matter how hard she tried to concentrate on something else – to pass the time and to distract her from the situation she was in – the fear came tricking out. It hovered like a cloud of gas around her, threatening to penetrate her pores and poison her. She had discovered that the most effective method of keeping the fear at bay was to fantasize about something that gave her a feeling of strenth. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of petrol.
He was sitting in a car with the window rolled down. She ran to the car, poured the petrol through the window, and lit a match. It took only a moment. The flames blazed up. He writhed in agony and she heard his screams of terror and pain. She could smell burnt flesh and a more acrid stentch of plastic and upholstery turning to carbon in the seats.
From the book “The girl who played with fire.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

Salander decided that she did not like advocat Bjurman.

Salander decided that she did not like advocat Bjurman. She studied him furtively as he read through her casebook. Age: over fifty. Trim body. Tennis on Tuesdays and Fridays. Blond. Thinning hair. A single cleft in his chin. Hugo Boss aftershave. Blue shuit. Red tie with a gold tiepin and ostentatious cufflinks with the initials N.E.B. Steelrimmed glasses. Grey eyes. To judge by the magazines on the side table, his interes were in hunting and shooting.
During the years she had known Palmgreen, he had always offered her coffee and chatted with her. Not even her worst escapes from foster homes or her regular truancy from school had ever ruffled his composure. The only time Palmgreen had been really upset was when she had been charged with assault and battery after that scumbag had groped her in Gamla Stan. Do you understand wuat you’ve done? You have harmed another human being, Lisbeth. He had sounded like an old teacher ans she had patiently ignored every word of his scolding.
Bjurman did not have time for small talk. He had immediately concluded that here was a discrepancy between Palmgreen’s obligations, according to the regulations of guardianship, and the fact that he had apparently allowed the Salander girl to take charge of her own household and finances. Bjurman started in on a sort of interrogation: How much do you earn? I want a copy of your financial records. Who do you spend time with? Do you pay your rent on time? Do you drink? Did Palmgreen approve of those rings you have on your face? Are you careful about hygiene)
Fuck you.
From the book “The girl with the dragon tattoo.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

At 2.15, a few minutes after Harriet came home

“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

Evening. Driving back to London

Evening. Driving back to London, I pass her old house. I must have done this once a month for fourteen years (whenever I return from seeing my parents) and I have scarcely given it a glance. Her family left it years ago, and in any case the yellow brick façade, with its Victorian windows , is like a theatre set. Its memories lie unseen behind: in he passages, the sitting room, the enclosed garden.
I stop and ring the doorbell. Whoever opens the door will seem an impostor, of course, a caretaker. I ring the bell again. It makes the same noise as fourteen years ago: a dry shrillness in the bowels of the house. I know now that nobody will come, and that seems right.
I walk round to try the garden gate. It opens. In the fragrant enclosure nothing has changed. Two flagstoned steps descend from French windows into a tangle of spring flowering shrubs. The neighbours’ wall at the end shows the same patina of grey blue lichen. The whole garden is barely thirty foot deep, and narrow. Behind my back the house windows hang dark. I close the garden door softly behind and stare down the shrub-avenue. For some reason I’m frightened. Close to where I entered, everything is all right. She is watering plants in a summer dress (it’s always summer), swinging the can back and forth in her long, impatient fingers. But a few paces beyond, just out of sight of the house windows, a grass clearing laps against the patinated wall. I remember it perfectely, although I can’t see it yet. I pause among the sheltering shrubs. I feel cold and slightly sick
From ‘ Nothing has changed’ By Colin Thrubron.

The town of Shiring had a carnival air

The town of Shiring had a carnival air during sessions of the country court. All the inns around the square were busy, their parlours crowed with men and women dressed in their best clothes, all shouting for drinks and food. The town naturally took the opportunity to hold a market, and the square itself was so closely packed with stalls that it took half an hour to move a couple of hundred yards. As well as the legitimate stallholders there were dozens of strolling entrepreneurs: bakers with trays of buns, a busking fiddle player, maimed and blind him beggars, prostitutes showing their breasts, a dancing bear, a preaching friar.
Earl Ralph was one of the few people who could cross the square quickly. He rode with three knights ahead of and a handful of servants behind, and his entourage went through the melee like a ploughshare, turning the crowd aside by the force of their momentum and their carelessness for the safety of people in their way.
They rode on up the hill to the sheriff’s castle. In the courtyard they wheeled with a flourish and dismounted. The servants immediately began shouting for ostlers and porters. Ralph liked people to know he ha arrived.
He handed his reins to a groom and looked around. The castle was not a military fortification. It was more like a tavern with a courtyard, though strongly built and well guarded. The sheriff of Shiring could live here safe from the vengeful relatives of the people he arrested. There were basement dungeons in which to keep prisoners, and guests apartments where visiting judges could stay unmolested.
Sheriff Bernard showed Ralph to his room. The sheriff was the king’s reprentative in the country, responsible for collecting taxes as well as administering justice. The post was lucrative, the salary usefully supplemented by gifts, bribes, and percentatges skimmed off the top of fines and forfeited bail money. The relationship between earl and sheriff could be fractious: the earl ranked higher, but the sheriff’s judicial power was independent. Bernard, a rich wool merchant of about Ralph’s age, treated Ralph with an uneasy mixture of camaraderie and deference.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man Gwenda had ever seen. There were threads of silver now in his tawny hair, but they just made him look wise as well as strong. When he was young his broad shoulders had tapered dramatically to a narrow waist , whereas nowadays the taper was not so sharp nor the waist so slim – but he could still do the work of two men. And he would always be two years younger than she.
She thought she had changed less. She had the kind of dark hair that did not go grey until late in life. She was heavier than she had been twenty years ago, although since having the children her breasts and belly were not quite as taut as formerly.
I was only when she looked at her son Davey, at his smooth skin and the restless spring in his step, that she felt her years. Now twenty, he looked like a male version of herself at that age. She too, had had a face with no lines, and she walked with a jaunty stride. A lifetime of working in the fields in all weathers had wrinkled her hands, and given her cheeks a raw redness just beneath the skin, and taught her to walk slowly and conserve her strength.
Davey was small like her, and shrewd, and secretive: since he was little she had never been sure what he was thinking. Sam was the opposite: big and strong, not clever enough to be deceitful, but with a mean streak that Gwenda blamed on his real father, Ralph Fitzgerald.
For several years now the two boys had been working alongside Wulfric in the fields – until two weeks ago, when Sam had vanished.
They knew why he had gone. All winter long he had been talking about leaving Wigleigh and moving to a village where he could earn higher wages. He had disappeared the moment the spring ploughing began.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet