The Sandman (9 page)

‘The life went out of me a long time ago. I’m not scared of anything. Not pain … not loneliness or boredom.’

‘But I’m looking for the truth,’ Joona said, intentionally naïve.

‘You don’t have to look for it. It’s the same with justice, or gods. You make a choice to fit your own requirements.’

‘But you don’t choose the lies,’ Joona said.

Jurek’s pupils contracted.

‘In the Court of Appeal the prosecutor’s description of my actions
will be regarded as proven beyond all reasonable doubt,’ he said, without the slightest hint of a plea in his voice.

‘You’re saying that’s wrong?’

‘I’m not going to get hung up on technicalities, because there isn’t really any difference between digging a grave and refilling it.’

When Joona left the interview room that day, he was more convinced than ever that Jurek Walter was an extremely dangerous man, but at the same time he couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that Jurek had been trying to say that he was being punished for someone else’s crimes. Of course he understood that it had been Jurek Walter’s intention to sow a seed of doubt, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that there was actually a flaw in the prosecution’s case.

The day before the appeal, Joona, Summa and Lumi went to dinner with Samuel and his family. The sun had been shining through the linen curtains when they started eating, but it was now evening. Rebecka lit a candle on the table and blew out the match. The light quivered over her luminous eyes, and her one strange pupil. She had once explained that it was a condition called dyscoria, and that it wasn’t a problem, she could see just as well with that eye as the other.

The relaxed meal concluded with dark honey cake. Joona borrowed a kippah for the prayer, Birkat Hamazon.

That was the last time he saw Samuel’s family.

The boys played quietly for a while with little Lumi before Joshua immersed himself in a video game and Reuben disappeared into his room to practise his clarinet.

Rebecka went outside for a cigarette, and Summa kept her company with her glass of wine.

Joona and Samuel cleared the table, and as soon as they were alone started talking about work and the following day’s appeal.

‘I’m not going to be there,’ Samuel said seriously. ‘I don’t know, it’s not that I’m frightened, but it feels like my soul gets dirty … that it gets dirtier for every second I spend in his vicinity.’

‘I’m sure he’s guilty,’ Joona said.

‘But …?’

‘I think he’s got an accomplice.’

Samuel sighed and put the dishes in the sink.

‘We’ve stopped a serial killer,’ he said. ‘A lone lunatic who—’

‘He wasn’t alone at the grave when we got there,’ Joona interrupted.

‘Yes, he was.’ Samuel started to rinse the dishes.

‘It’s not unusual for serial killers to work with other people,’ Joona objected.

‘No, but there’s nothing that suggests that Jurek Walter belongs to that category,’ Samuel said brightly. ‘We’ve done our job, we’re finished, but now you want to stick a finger in the air and say
.’

‘I do?’ Joona said with a smile. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Perhaps the opposite is the case.’

‘You can always say that.’ Joona nodded.

The sun was shining in through the mottled glass in the windows of the Wrangelska Palace. Jurek Walter’s legal representative explained that his client had been so badly affected by the trial that he couldn’t bear to explain the reason why he was at the crime scene when he was arrested.

Joona was called as a witness, and described their surveillance work and the arrest. Then the defence lawyer asked if Joona could see any reason at all to suspect that the prosecutor’s account of events was based on a false assumption.

‘Could my client have been found guilty of a crime that someone else committed?’

Joona met the lawyer’s anxious gaze, and in his mind’s eye saw Jurek Walter calmly pushing the woman back into the coffin every time she tried to get out.

‘I’m asking you, because you were there,’ the defence lawyer went on. ‘Could Jurek Walter actually have been trying to rescue the woman in the grave?’

‘No,’ Joona replied.

After deliberating for two hours, the Chair of the Court declared that the verdict of Stockholm Courthouse was upheld. Jurek Walter’s face didn’t move a muscle as the more rigorous sentence was announced. He was to be held in a secure psychiatric clinic with extraordinary conditions applied to any eventual parole proceedings.

Seeing as he was closely connected to numerous ongoing investigations, he was also subject to unusually extensive restrictions.

When the Chair of the Court had finished, Jurek Walter turned towards Joona. His face was covered with fine wrinkles, and his pale eyes looked straight into Joona’s.

‘Now Samuel Mendel’s two sons are going to disappear,’ Jurek said in a measured voice. ‘And Samuel’s wife Rebecka will disappear. But … No, listen to me, Joona Linna. The police will look for them, and when the police give up Samuel will go on looking, but when he eventually realises that he’ll never see his family again, he’ll kill himself.’

Joona stood up to leave the courtroom.

‘And your little daughter,’ Jurek Walter went on, looking down at his fingernails.

‘Be careful,’ Joona said.

‘Lumi will disappear,’ Jurek whispered. ‘And Summa will disappear. And when you realise that you’re never going to find them … You’re going to hang yourself.’

He looked up and stared directly into Joona’s eyes. His face was quite calm, as if things had already been settled the way he wanted.

Ordinarily the convict is taken back to a holding cell until their destination and transportation to the facility have been organised. But the staff at Kronoberg were so keen to be rid of Jurek Walter that they had arranged transport directly from the Wrangelska Palace to the secure criminal psychology unit twenty kilometres north of Stockholm.

Jurek Walter was to be held in strict isolation in Sweden’s most secure facility for an indeterminate amount of time. Samuel Mendel had regarded Jurek’s threat as empty words from a defeated man, but Joona had been unable to avoid the thought that the threat had been presented as a truth, a fact.

The investigation was downgraded when no further bodies were found.

Although it wasn’t dropped altogether, it went cold.

Joona refused to give up, but there were too few pieces of the puzzle, and what lines of inquiry they had turned out to be dead ends. Even
though Jurek Walter had been stopped and convicted, they didn’t really know any more about him than before.

He was still a mystery.

One Friday afternoon, two months after the appeal, Joona was sitting with Samuel at Il Caffé close to police headquarters, drinking a double espresso. They were busy with other cases now, but still met up regularly to discuss Jurek Walter. They had been through all the material about him many times, but had found nothing to suggest that he had an accomplice. The whole thing was on the verge of becoming an in-joke, with the two of them weighing up innocent passers-by as possible suspects. And then something terrible happened.

Samuel’s phone buzzed on the café table next to his espresso cup. The screen showed a picture of his wife Rebecka. Joona listened idly to the conversation as he picked the crystallised sugar from his cinnamon bun. Evidently Rebecka and the boys were heading out to Dalarö earlier than planned, and Samuel agreed to pick up some food on the way. He told her to drive carefully, and ended the call with lots of kisses.

‘The carpenter who’s been repairing our veranda wants us to take a look at the carving as soon as possible,’ Samuel explained. ‘The painter can start this weekend if it’s ready.’

Joona and Samuel returned to their offices in the National Criminal Investigation Department and didn’t see each other again for the rest of the day.

Five hours later Joona was eating dinner with his family when Samuel called. He was panting and talking so fast that it was difficult to make out what he was saying, but apparently Rebecka and the boys weren’t at the house in Dalarö. They hadn’t been there, and weren’t answering the phone.

‘There’s bound to be an explanation,’ Joona said.

‘I’ve called the police, and all the hospitals, and—’

‘Where are you now?’ Joona asked.

‘I’m out on the Dalarö road, but I’m heading back to the house again.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Joona asked.

He had already thought the thought, but the hairs on the back of his neck still stood up when Samuel said:

‘Make sure Jurek Walter hasn’t escaped.’

Joona checked with the secure criminal psychology unit of the Löwenströmska Hospital at once, and spoke to Senior Consultant Brolin. He was told that nothing unusual had occurred in the secure unit. Jurek Walter was in his cell, and had been in total isolation all day.

When Joona called Samuel back, his friend’s voice sounded different, shrill and hunted.

‘I’m out in the forest,’ Samuel almost shouted. ‘I’ve found Rebecka’s car, it’s in the middle of the little road leading to the headland, but there’s no one here, there’s no one here!’

‘I’m on my way,’ Joona said at once.

The police searched intensively for Samuel’s family. All traces of Rebecka and the boys vanished on the gravel road five metres from the abandoned car. The dogs couldn’t pick up any scent, just walked up and down, sniffing and circling, but they couldn’t find anything. The forests, roads, houses and waterways were searched for two months. After the police had withdrawn, Samuel and Joona carried on looking on their own. They searched with a determination and a fear that grew until it was on the brink of being unbearable. Not once did they mention what this was all about. Both refused to voice their fears about what had happened to Joshua, Reuben and Rebecka. They had witnessed Jurek Walter’s cruelty.

Throughout this period Joona suffered such terrible anxiety that he couldn’t sleep. He watched over his family, following them everywhere, picking them up and dropping them off, making special arrangements with Lumi’s preschool, but he was forced to accept that this wouldn’t be enough in the long term.

Joona had to confront his worst horror.

He couldn’t talk to Samuel, but he could no longer deny the truth to himself.

Jurek Walter hadn’t committed his crimes alone. Everything about Jurek Walter’s understated grandiosity suggested that he was the leader. But after Samuel’s family was abducted, there could be no doubt that Jurek Walter had an accomplice.

This accomplice had been ordered to take Samuel’s family, and he had done so without leaving a single piece of evidence.

Joona realised that his family was next. It was probably only good fortune that had spared him this far.

Jurek Walter showed no mercy to anyone.

Joona raised this with Summa on numerous occasions, but she refused to take the threat as seriously as he did. She humoured him, accepting his concern and precautionary measures, but she assumed that his fears would subside over time.

He had hoped that the intensive police operation that followed the
disappearance of Samuel Mendel’s family would lead to the capture of the accomplice. When the search first got under way, Joona saw himself as the hunter, but as the weeks went by the dynamic changed.

He knew that he and his family were the prey, and the calm he tried to demonstrate to Summa and Lumi was merely a façade.

It was half past ten in the evening, and he and Summa were lying in bed reading when a noise from the ground floor made Joona’s heart suddenly begin to beat faster. The washing machine hadn’t finished its programme yet and it sounded like a zip rattling against the drum, nevertheless he couldn’t help getting up and checking that all the windows downstairs were in one piece, and that the outside doors were locked.

When he returned, Summa had switched off her lamp and was lying there watching him.

‘What did you do?’ she asked gently.

He forced himself to smile and was about to say something when they heard little footsteps. Joona turned and saw his daughter come into the bedroom. Her hair was sticking up and her pyjama trousers had twisted round her waist.

‘Lumi, you’re supposed to be asleep,’ he sighed.

‘We forgot to say goodnight to the cat,’ she said.

Every evening Joona would read Lumi a story, and before he tucked her in for the night they always had to look out of the window and wave to the grey cat that slept in their neighbours’ kitchen window.

‘Go back to bed now,’ Summa said.

‘I’ll come and see you,’ Joona promised.

Lumi mumbled something and shook her head.

‘Do you want me to carry you?’ he asked, and picked her up.

She clung onto him and he suddenly noticed her heart beating fast.

‘What is it? Did you have a dream?’

‘I only wanted to wave to the cat,’ she whispered. ‘But there was a skeleton out there.’