Free The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson Page B

keys in the engineer’s cupboard and sneaked down to the big garage and into the chemicals cupboard next to the electrical station. There she found a nearly full seven-gallon barrel of ethylene glycol. She poured a gallon into the bucket she’d brought along and returned to the girls.
    ‘Here you go – this is plenty, with some to spare,’ she said.
    Nombeko and the girls decided that they would start by mixing a very mild dose into the dog food to see what would happen, and then they would increase the dose until all eight dogs were off sick without causing the guards to become suspicious.
    Therefore the Chinese girls lowered the dose from two cups to one and three-quarters, upon Nombeko’s recommendation, but they made the mistake of letting the little sister take care of the dosing itself – that is, the one sister of the three who had been too little in the good old days. Thus she mixed in one and three-quarters cups of ethylene glycol per dog in the first, conservative round. Twelve hours later, all eight dogs were as dead as those in Parktown West a few years earlier. Furthermore, the guard commander’s food-sneaking cat was in a critical condition.
    One characteristic of ethylene glycol is that it rapidly enters the bloodstream via the intestines. Then the liver turns it into glycolaldehyde, glycolic acid and oxalate. If there is enough of these, they take out the kidneys before affecting the lungs and heart. The direct cause of death in the eight dogs was cardiac arrest.
    The immediate results of the youngest Chinese girl’s miscalculation were that the alarm was sounded, that the guards went on high alert, and that it was, of course, impossible for Nombeko to smuggle herself out in a rubbish bin.
    It was only day two before the girls were called in for interrogation, but while they were sitting there and flatly denying involvement, the security personnel found a nearly empty bucket of ethylene glycol in the boot of one of the 250 workers’ cars. Nombeko had access to the garage, thanks to the engineer’s key cupboard, of course; the boot in question was the only one that happened to be unlocked, and she had to put the bucket somewhere. The owner of the car was a half-ethical sort of guy – on the one hand, he would never betray his country; on the other hand, as luck would have it, he had chosen that very day to swipe his department director’s briefcase and the money and chequebook it contained. This was found alongside the bucket, and when all was said and done, the man had been seized, interrogated, fired . . . and sentenced to six months in prison for theft, plus thirty-two years for an act of terror.
    ‘That was close,’ said the little sister once the three sisters were no longer suspects.
    ‘Shall we try again?’ the middle sister wondered.
    ‘But then we’d have to wait for them to get new dogs,’ said the big sister. ‘The old ones are all gone.’
    Nombeko didn’t say anything. But she thought that her prospects for the future weren’t much brighter than those of the director’s cat, who had started having convulsions.

CHAPTER 4
    On a Good Samaritan, a bicycle thief and a wife who smoked more and more
    Since Henrietta’s money was gone, Ingmar had to do most of his hitchhiking from Nice back to Södertälje without eating. But in Malmö, the dirty, hungry junior post office clerk happened to meet a soldier of the Salvation Army who was on his way home after a long day in the service of the Lord. Ingmar asked if the soldier could spare a piece of bread.
    The Salvationist immediately allowed himself to be governed by the spirit of love and compassion, so much so that Ingmar was allowed to come home with him.
    Once there, he served mashed turnips with pork and then settled Ingmar in his bed; he himself would sleep on the floor before the stove. Ingmar yawned and said that he was impressed by the soldier’s friendliness. To this the soldier replied that the explanation for his