The Sandman (50 page)

‘Very impressive,’ Corinne smiles, and gives her a hug.

Saga and Corinne get out of the lift and walk side by side down the corridor leading to their boss’s large office. Nathan Pollock, Carlos Eliasson and Verner Zandén are already waiting for them. On the table is a bottle of Taittinger and five champagne glasses.

The door closes and Saga shakes hands with the three men.

‘Let’s start with a minute’s silence in memory of our colleague Samuel Mendel and his family, and all the other victims,’ Carlos says.

Saga lowers her head and has trouble maintaining a steady gaze. In front of her she can see the first pictures of the police operation in the industrial estate where the old brickworks used to be. Towards morning it had become clear to everyone that no victims were going to be found alive. In the muddy snow the forensics officers had started placing numbered signs by the fourteen different graves. Samuel Mendel’s two sons had been found tied together in a shaft covered by a sheet of corrugated metal. Rebecka’s remains were found buried ten metres away in a drum fitted with a plastic air-tube.

The voices drown in Saga’s tinnitus and she shuts her eyes and tries to understand.

The traumatised twins made their way to Poland, where Roman killed a man, took his passport and became Jurek Walter. Together they caught a ferry from Swinoujscie to Ystad, and then travelled up through Sweden.

Now middle-aged, the brothers returned to the place where they had been separated from their father, to barrack number four in the guest workers’ accommodation at a quarry in Rotebro.

Their father had spent decades trying to trace the boys, but couldn’t travel to Russia himself because he’d be sent to the gulag. He had written hundreds of letters in an effort to find his children, and waited for them to come back, but just one year before the brothers arrived in Sweden the old man gave up and hanged himself in his cellar.

Before Saga left the hospital, Joona had closed his eyes and tried
to sit himself up as he explained that finding out about his father’s suicide had wrecked what little was left of Jurek’s soul.

‘He started to draw up his circle of blood and revenge,’ Joona said, almost soundlessly.

Everyone who had contributed to the break-up of his family would experience the same fate. Jurek would take their children from them, their grandchildren and wives, sisters and brothers. The guilty parties would be left as alone as their father in the quarry, they would have to wait year after year, and only when they had killed themselves would those of their relatives that survived be allowed to return.

That was why the twins didn’t kill their victims – it wasn’t the people who were buried who were being punished, but those left behind. During the wait for the suicides, the victims were placed in coffins or drums with air-tubes. Most of them died after just a few days, but some lived for years.

The bodies that were found in Lill-Jan’s Forest and in the vicinity of the Albano industrial estate cast a cruel light on Jurek Walter’s terrible revenge. He was following an entirely logical plan, which was why his actions and the choice of victims didn’t seem to fit the pattern followed by other serial killers.

It was going to take a while for the police to fill in all the details, but it was already apparent who the victims were. Apart from Reidar Frost, who revealed the boys to the foreman in the quarry, they included those responsible at the Child Welfare Commission, and the case-officers at the Aliens Department.

Saga thinks about Jeremy Magnusson, who was a young man when he dealt with the twins’ case at the Aliens Department. Jurek took his wife, son and grandson, then finally his daughter Agneta. When Jeremy eventually hanged himself in his hunting cabin, Jurek went to the grave where Agneta was still being kept alive to let her out.

Saga repeats to herself that Jurek actually had disinterred her, just as he’d told Joona. He had opened the coffin, sat by the graveside and watched her blind fumbling. In this terrible circle, she was a version of him, a child doomed to return to nothing.

Joona explained that Jurek’s brother was so psychologically damaged that he lived among their father’s old possessions in the abandoned barracks. He did everything that Jurek told him to do, learned to handle sedatives and helped him to seize people and watch over the graves.
The shelter that their father had built in anticipation of a nuclear war acted as a sort of holding cell before the victims could be placed in graves.

Saga is torn from her thoughts by her boss tapping a glass and asking for silence. With great solemnity he fetches a blue box from the safe, snaps it open and takes out the gold medal.

A wreathed star on a blue-and-yellow ribbon.

Saga’s feels her heart clench unexpectedly when she hears Verner say that she has demonstrated remarkable courage, bravery and intelligence.

The atmosphere in the room is one of gentle solemnity.

Carlos’s eyes are moist, and Nathan smiles at her with a sombre look in his eyes.

Saga takes a step forward and Verner attaches the medal to her chest.

Corinne claps her hands and gives her a big smile. Carlos opens the champagne, firing the cork at the ceiling.

Saga drinks a toast with them, and receives their congratulations. Every so often her hearing is interrupted by a howl of tinnitus.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Pollock asks.

‘I’m on sick leave, but … I don’t know.’

She knows there’s no way she can sit around in her dusty flat with its withered pot-plants, guilt and memories.

‘Saga Bauer, you have done a great deed for your country,’ Verner says, then goes on to explain that unfortunately he’s going to have to keep her medal locked in the safe, seeing as the whole case is confidential and already erased from all public records.

He carefully removes the medal from Saga again, puts it back in its box and closes the safe door securely.

The sun is shining in a hazy sky when Saga emerges from the underground into the swirling snow.

After they arrested Jurek, Samuel Mendel and Joona Linna ended up on his revenge list. His twin brother seized Samuel’s family, and was closing in on Summa and Lumi when they were killed in a car crash.

The only conceivable explanation as to why Mikael and Felicia
were kept in the capsule was that Jurek never had time to give his brother any orders about where they were to be buried. Whereas Samuel Mendel’s family was buried, Mikael and Felicia were held captive for all the years that Jurek was in solitary confinement in the secure psychiatric unit. His brother gave them scraps of food and made sure they couldn’t escape while he waited for orders from Jurek, as usual.

Presumably Jurek hadn’t foreseen how restrictive the verdict of the Court of Appeal would be.

An unlimited sentence and no contact with the outside world, locked away in the secure unit of the Löwenströmska Hospital.

Jurek Walter bided his time and formulated a plan as the years passed. The brothers had probably each been trying to work out a solution when Susanne Hjälm chose to give Jurek a letter from a lawyer. It’s impossible to know what the encrypted letter said, but the evidence suggests that Jurek’s brother simply gave him a status report about Joona Linna.

Jurek needed to get out, and realised that there was a chance to make a dent in his isolation if he could only smuggle a letter out to the PO box that the brothers sometimes used to communicate to each other.

The twins had learned advanced cryptography from their father, and Jurek managed to make his letter look like a plea for legal help. In actual fact it was an order to release Mikael. Jurek knew the news would reach Joona Linna, and that the police would contact him to try to find out where Felicia was. He didn’t know what form this contact would take, but he was convinced it would give him the opportunity he had been waiting for.

Because no one had attempted to negotiate with him about finding the girl, he realised that one of the unit’s new patients must be a police officer, and when Saga tried to save Bernie Larsson, he knew for certain that it was her.

Jurek had been watching the young doctor, Anders Rönn, as he overstepped his authority and enjoyed the power he wielded in the secure unit.

When Jurek noticed his undisguised fascination for Saga, he knew how his escape could be accomplished. All he had to do was lure the young doctor – with his keys and pass card – into Saga’s cell. There was no way the doctor would be able to resist this sleeping beauty.
Jurek spent several nights wetting toilet paper, drying it against his face, and creating a head that would make it look as if he was asleep in his bed.

Saga stops outside the bakery in the cold wind sweeping along Sankt Paulsgatan, unsure whether she feels up to going in right now.

She recalls what Joona had said about Jurek lying to everyone. Jurek listened and pieced together everything he found out, using it to his own advantage, and mixing lies with truth to make his lies stronger.

Saga turns and makes her way across Mariatorget towards Hornsgatan. She walks through the swirling snow as if she is isolated in a tunnel of grief with only the winter light and her memories of herself as a little girl.

She didn’t want to kill her mum, she knows that, it wasn’t intentional.

Saga carries on walking slowly, thinking about her dad. Lars-Erik Bauer. A cardiologist at Sankt Göran Hospital. She hasn’t spoken to him properly since she was thirteen years old. Yet Jurek made her remember how he used to push her on the swing at her grandparents’ when she was little, before Mum got ill …

Suddenly she stops, and feels a shiver run down her neck and through her arms.

A man walks past, pulling a little girl on a sledge as it scrapes along the ground.

Saga thinks that Jurek lied to everyone.

Why does she think he was telling her the truth?

Saga sits down on a snow-covered park bench, takes her phone out of her pocket and calls Nils Åhlén.

‘Nils Åhlén, Forensic Medicine Department.’

‘Hello, Saga Bauer here,’ she says. ‘I’d like—’

‘The body’s been identified now,’ Åhlén interrupts. ‘His name’s Anders Rönn.’

‘That wasn’t what I wanted to ask.’

‘What is it, then?’

A short silence follows as Saga watches the snow blowing off the
statue of Thor raising his hammer against the Midgard Serpent, then suddenly she hears herself ask:

‘How many codeine phosphate pills would it take to kill someone?’

‘Child or adult?’ Åhlén asks, without seeming remotely surprised.

‘Adult,’ Saga replies, swallowing hard.

She hears Åhlén breathe through his nose as he taps at his keyboard.

‘It would depend on size and tolerance … but between thirty-five and forty-five pills would probably be a fatal dose.’

‘Forty-five?’ Saga asks, clutching her ear as the tinnitus flares up. ‘But if she was only given thirteen, could that kill her? Could she die from thirteen pills?’

‘No, she couldn’t, she’d fall asleep and wake up with—’

‘So she took the rest herself,’ Saga whispers, standing up unsteadily.

She can feel tears of relief in her eyes. Jurek was a liar; that was all he did, he destroyed people with his lies.

All her life she has hated her father for leaving them. For never coming, for letting her mum die.

She has to find out the truth. There’s no other option.

She gets her phone out again, calls directory inquiries and asks to be put through to Lars-Erik Bauer in Enskede.

Saga walks slowly across the square and the phone rings.

‘This is Pellerina,’ a child’s voice says.

Saga is rendered speechless, and ends the call without saying anything. She stands quite still and looks up at the white sky above St Paul’s Church.

‘Bloody hell,’ she mutters, and dials the number again.

Saga waits in the snow until the child’s voice answers a second time.

‘Hello, Pellerina,’ she says in a steady voice. ‘I’d like to talk to Lars-Erik, please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’ the girl asks, sounding much older than she is.

‘My name’s Saga,’ she whispers.

‘I’ve got a big sister called Saga,’ Pellerina says. ‘But I’ve never met her.’

Saga can’t speak. There’s a lump in her throat. She hears Pellerina pass the phone to someone and say that Saga wants to speak to him.

‘This is Lars-Erik,’ a familiar voice says.

Saga takes a deep breath, and thinks that it’s too late for anything but the truth.

‘Dad, I have to ask … when Mum died … were the two of you married?’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘We’d got divorced two years earlier, when you were five. She never let me see you. I’d got hold of a lawyer who was going to help me to …’

He falls silent and Saga closes her eyes and tries to stop shaking.

‘Mum said you’d abandoned us,’ she says. ‘She said you couldn’t deal with her illness and that you didn’t want me.’

‘Maj was ill, she was mentally ill, bipolar and … I’m so sorry you had such a bad time.’

‘I called you that night,’ she says, in a voice that sounds very lonely.

‘Yes,’ her dad sighs. ‘Your mum used to force you to call … She would call as well, all night long, thirty times, maybe more.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Where are you? Just tell me where you are. I can come and get you …’

‘Thanks, Dad, but … I have to go and see a friend.’

‘How about after that?’ he asks.

‘I’ll call.’

‘Please, Saga, make sure you do,’ he says.

She nods, then walks through the snow to Hornsgatan and hails a taxi.

Saga is waiting at reception in the Karolinska Hospital. Joona Linna is no longer in intensive care, but has been moved to a smaller room. As she walks towards the lifts, she thinks of the look on Joona’s face after Disa’s death.

The only thing he asked of her when she last visited him was to find Jurek Walter’s dead body and let him see it.

She knows she killed Jurek, but she still has to tell Joona that Carlos has sent police divers under the ice for several days without finding the body.

The door to his room on the eighth floor is half-open. Saga stops in the corridor when she hears a woman say she’s going to fetch a thermal blanket. A moment later a smiling nurse comes out, then turns back towards the room again.