The Sandman (36 page)

‘No,’ Nikita says. ‘He fled because he was afraid of reprisals, and he would certainly have ended up in the gulag, probably the Siblag work camp … but instead he turned up in Sweden.’

Nikita Karpin falls silent and slowly stubs his cigarette out on a small porcelain saucer.

‘We kept Vadim Levanov and the twins under constant surveillance, and obviously we were prepared to liquidate him,’ Karpin goes on quietly. ‘But we didn’t need to … because Sweden treated him like garbage, and arranged a special gulag for him … The only work he could get was as a manual labourer in a gravel quarry.’

Nikita Karpin’s eyes flash cruelly.

‘If you’d shown any interest in what he knew, Sweden could have been first into space,’ he laughs.

‘Maybe,’ Joona replies calmly.

‘Yes.’

‘So Jurek and his brother arrived in Sweden at the age of ten or so?’

‘But they only stayed a couple of years,’ Nikita smiles.

‘Why?’

‘You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.’

‘Do you know what happened?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes.’

Nikita Karpin gazes out of the window and wets his lips. The low winter light is shining in through the uneven glass.

Today Saga is first into the dayroom, and immediately gets onto the running machine. She manages to run for four minutes, and has just lowered the speed and started to walk when Bernie comes in from his room.

‘I’m going to start driving a taxi when I’m free … Bloody hell, like some fucking Fittipaldi … and you can ride for free, and I’ll get to touch you between—’

‘Just shut up,’ she cuts him off.

He nods, looking wounded, then walks straight over to the palm leaf, turns it over and points at the microphone with a thin grin.

‘Now you’re my slave,’ he laughs.

Saga jabs him hard, making him stumble back and sit down on the floor.

‘I want to escape as well,’ he hisses. ‘I want to drive a taxi and—’

‘Shut up,’ Saga says, checking over her shoulder to see if the guards are on their way in through the airlock.

But no one seems to be watching them on the monitor in the security control room.

‘You’re going to take me with you when you escape, do you hear—’

‘Shut up,’ Jurek interrupts behind them.

‘Sorry,’ Bernie whispers quietly at the floor.

Saga didn’t hear Jurek come into the dayroom. A shiver runs down
her spine when she realises that he may have seen the microphone under the palm leaf.

Maybe her cover is already blown?

Maybe it’s going to happen now, she thinks. The crisis she’s been dreading is happening now. She feels adrenalin rushing through her, and tries to visualise the plan of the secure unit. In her thoughts she moves quickly through the marked doors, the different zones, the best places to take temporary shelter.

If Bernie blows her cover, she’ll have to barricade herself in her room to start with. Ideally she needs to get hold of the microphone and shout for immediate backup, get them to come and rescue her.

Jurek stops in front of Bernie, who’s lying on the floor whispering his apologies.

‘You’re to pull the lead off the running machine, then go to your room and hang yourself from the top of your door,’ Jurek tells him.

Bernie looks up at Jurek with fear in his eyes.

‘What? What the fuck …?’

‘Tie the lead to the handle on the outside, throw it over the door and pull your plastic chair over,’ Jurek explains curtly.

‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ Bernie says, his lips trembling.

‘We can’t have you alive any longer,’ Jurek says calmly.

‘But … what the fuck, I was only joking, I know very well that I can’t come with you … I know it’s just your thing … just your thing …’

Nathan Pollock and Corinne Meilleroux both stand up from the table when the situation in the dayroom becomes more acute.

They realise that Jurek has decided to execute Bernie, and are hoping that Saga won’t forget that she has no police responsibilities or rights.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Corinne whispers.

Slow, thunderous rumbling sounds emerge from the speakers. Johan Jönson adjusts the sound levels and scratches his head anxiously.

‘Give me a punishment instead,’ Bernie whimpers. ‘I deserve a punishment …’

‘I can break both his legs,’ Saga says.

Corinne wraps her arms round herself and is trying to control her breathing.

‘Don’t do anything,’ Pollock whispers to the speaker. ‘You have to trust the guards, you’re only a patient.’

‘Why hasn’t anyone come in?’ Johan Jönson says. ‘The guards must have noticed what’s going on, for God’s sake?’

‘If she acts, Jurek will kill her at once,’ Corinne whispers, the stress making her French accent come to the fore.

‘Don’t do anything,’ Pollock pleads. ‘Don’t do anything!’

Saga’s heart is pounding in her chest. She can’t make any sense of her thoughts as she gets off the running machine. It’s not her job to protect other patients. She knows she mustn’t step out of her role as a schizophrenic patient.

‘I can break his kneecaps,’ she tries. ‘I can break his arms and fingers and—’

‘It would be better if he just died,’ Jurek concludes.

‘Come on,’ she says quickly to Bernie. ‘The camera’s hidden here—’

‘Snow White, what the fuck?’ Bernie snivels, moving closer to her.

She grabs hold of his wrist, pulls him closer and breaks his little finger. He screams and sinks to his knees, clutching his hand to his stomach.

‘Next finger,’ she says.

‘You’re both mad,’ Bernie sobs. ‘I’ll call for help … my skeleton slaves will come …’

‘Be quiet,’ Jurek says.

He walks over to the running machine and removes the lead, yanking it out from the skirting board, sending a shower of concrete dust over the floor.

‘Next finger,’ Saga tries.

‘Just stand back,’ Jurek says, looking her in the eye.

Saga remains where she is, with one hand against the wall, as Bernie follows Jurek.

The situation feels absurd as she watches Jurek tie the lead round the handle on the side of the door facing the dayroom and throw it over the top of the door.

She feels like shouting out.

Bernie looks at her beseechingly as he climbs onto the plastic chair and puts the noose round his neck.

He tries to talk to Jurek, smiling and repeating something.

She stands there, immobile, thinking that the staff must surely see them now. But no guards come. Jurek has been in the unit for so long that he’s learned their routines by heart. Maybe he knows that this is when they have a coffee break, or change shifts.

Saga moves slowly towards her own room. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, can’t understand why no one’s come in.

Jurek says something to Bernie, waits a while, repeats the words, but Bernie is shaking his head as tears spring to his eyes.

Saga keeps walking backwards with her heart pounding. A sense of unreality is spreading through her body.

Jurek kicks the chair away, then walks through the dayroom straight into his own room.

Bernie is dangling in the air, with his feet only just off the floor, trying to pull himself up with the lead, but he isn’t strong enough.

Saga goes into her room, walks over to the door and its reinforced glass window. She kicks at it as hard as she can, but all she can hear is a muffled thud from the metal. She pulls back, turns and kicks again, backs up and kicks, then kicks again. The solid door vibrates slightly, but the heavy sound of her kicks carries into the concrete walls. She goes on kicking, until finally she hears agitated voices in the corridor, followed by rapid footsteps and the whirr of the electric lock.

The lights in the ceiling go out. Saga is lying on her side in bed, with her eyes open.

God, what should I have done? She’s burning up with anguish.

Her feet, ankles and knees ache from the kicks.

She doesn’t know if she could have saved Bernie by intervening. Maybe she could have, maybe Jurek wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

But there was no doubt that she would have exposed herself to danger and ruined any chance of saving Felicia.

So she went into her room and kicked at the door. Which had been desperate and pathetic, she thinks.

She kicked on the door as hard as she could, hoping that the guards would wonder where the noise was coming from and finally glance at their monitors.

But nothing happened. They didn’t hear her. She should have kicked harder.

It felt like an eternity before any voices and footsteps approached.

She’s lying on her bed and trying to tell herself that the staff got there in time, that Bernie is now in intensive care, that his condition is stable.

The outcome depends on how tightly the noose squeezed the arteries in his neck.

She’s thinking that Jurek might have tied a bad noose, even though she knows that wasn’t the case.

Since Saga returned to her room all she’s done is lie on her bed, feeling frozen. Dinner was dished out by the girl with the piercings, but she’s only eaten the peas and two mouthfuls of potato from the fish gratin.

Saga lies in the darkness thinking about Bernie’s face as he shook his head with a look of total helplessness in his eyes. Jurek moved like a shadow. He conducted the execution dispassionately, simply doing what he had to, kicking the chair away and then walking to his room without hurrying.

Saga switches on the lamp by her bed, then sits up and puts her feet on the floor. She turns her face towards the CCTV camera in the ceiling, towards its black eye, and waits.

As usual, Joona was right, she thinks as she stares at the camera’s round lens. He thought there was a chance that Jurek would approach her.

He had actually started talking to her in such a personal way that even Joona ought to be surprised.

Saga thinks of how she broke the rule about not talking about her parents, her family. She just hopes that the officers listening don’t think she lost control of the situation. She persuades herself it was an attempt to deepen the conversation,. She was perfectly aware of what she was doing when she told serial killer Jurek Walter about one of the most difficult periods of her life.

She’s never forgotten what Jurek Walter has done, but she hasn’t felt threatened by him. That’s probably benefitted the infiltration, she thinks. She’s been more scared of Bernie. Up until the moment when Jurek hanged him with the lead.

Saga massages her neck with her hand, and goes on staring at the eye of the camera. She must have been sitting like that for over an hour now.

Anders Rönn has logged in and is sitting in his room trying to summarise the day’s events in the unit journal.

Why is everything happening now?

The same day every month the staff go through the medicine store and other perishable goods.

It takes no longer than forty minutes.

He, My and Leif were outside the medicine store when they suddenly heard the noise.

Deep rumbling, echoing within the walls. My dropped the inventory list on the floor and ran to the surveillance control room. Anders followed her. My reached the large monitor and cried out when she saw the image from patient room 2. Bernie was hanging lifeless against the door to the dayroom. Urine was dripping from his toes, forming a puddle beneath him.

Anders’s skin is still crawling. As a result of the suicide in the ward he was summoned to a crisis meeting of the hospital committee. The hospital manager came straight from a children’s party, annoyed to have been called away in the middle of a game. The manager had looked at him and said that perhaps it had been a mistake to allow an inexperienced doctor to assume the role of senior consultant. His round face with its deeply dimpled chin quivered.

Anders gulps and blushes when he recalls how he stood up and
apologised, stammering and trying to explain that, according to his medical notes, Bernie Larsson had been extremely depressed, and that he had found the transfer difficult.

‘Are you still here?’

He starts and looks up to see My standing in the doorway, smiling wearily at him.

‘The hospital management want the report first thing tomorrow morning, so you’re probably going to have to put up with me for a few more hours.’

‘Tough shit,’ she says with a yawn.

‘You can go and lie down in the rest-room if you like,’ he says.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘I mean it. After all, I have to be here anyway.’

‘Are you sure? That’s really sweet of you.’

He smiles at her.

‘Get a couple of hours’ sleep. I’ll wake you when I’m ready to leave.’

Anders hears her walk down the corridor, past the changing room and into the rest-room.

The glow from the computer screen fills Anders’s little office. He clicks to open the calendar, then adds some newly arranged meetings with relatives and care workers.

His fingers pause above the keyboard as he thinks about the new patient again. He feels caught in that moment, the seconds when he was in her room, pulling down her trousers and underwear, and saw her white skin turn red after the two injections. He touched her as a doctor, but he looked between her thighs at her genitals, her blonde hair and closed vagina.

Anders makes a note about a rearranged meeting, then clicks to open up past assessments, unable to concentrate properly.

He reads through the report for Social Services, then gets up and goes out to the surveillance control room.

As he sits down in front of the large screen to look at the nine squares, he immediately notices that Saga Bauer is awake. Her bedside light is switched on. She is sitting quite still and staring at him, directly into the camera.

Feeling a peculiar weight inside him, Anders looks at the other cameras. Patient rooms 1 and 2 are dark. The airlock and dayroom are
quiet. The camera outside the room in which My is resting shows nothing but a closed door. The security company’s staff are beyond the first security door.