by Kepler, Lars
‘There was nothing else on the coffin lid,’ Nathan says.
‘Jurek probably threatened to kill Cornelia to make the churchwarden cooperate,’ Saga says, checking that the ringtone of her phone isn’t switched off.
‘So what was he thinking in the coffin?’ Pollock goes on. ‘He must have realised he was going to die, that was why he wrote the message, he hoped someone would find the grave and rescue his sister.’
‘Jurek must have terrified him to make sure he wouldn’t tell the police the truth … perhaps he’d already been given a taster of the grave, or had seen his sister in one … his dementia developed pretty rapidly after I first met him.’
They’re driving past meadows edged with pine forest, and pass beneath the E18.
Nathan’s left hand is holding the bottom of the wheel. Despite his impending divorce, he’s still wearing his slim wedding ring.
Saga forces herself not to tell him to call and put pressure on the dog handler.
According to the car’s satnav, they’ve got less than five kilometres to go.
As they drive they receive a few brief updates over the comms terminal in the car: Cornelia isn’t answering her phone, and in the past month a number of bills have been passed to the bailiffs due to non-payment.
Before she retired, she worked as a nurse at Norrtälje Hospital.
Cornelia is seventy-two years old, and single.
The screen shows a broad-shouldered woman with short white hair and reading glasses hanging on her chest.
‘Who interviewed her?’ Nathan asked.
‘No one,’ Saga replies. ‘I shot Jurek six months before the churchwarden found the body. There was no reason to think there was any connection between him and the sister.’
‘But she lives less than twenty kilometres from where he disappeared.’
‘I know, but we knew that Jurek was dying – how far could he get? We spoke to everyone who lived within ten kilometres of the river … that alone meant seven hundred interviews.’
She remembers that they discussed expanding the search area to twenty kilometres, but that would have included the built-up area of Norrtälje and would have increased the number of interviews by more than twentyfold.
‘I mean later, though, when the body was found and the churchwarden developed dementia,’ Nathan says, glancing quickly at her.
‘I phoned and spoke to her,’ Saga says. ‘She hadn’t been in touch with her brother for ten years, and had nothing of interest to say.’
They turn off onto a narrow gravel road with a strip of frosted yellow grass in the middle that leads directly into the thick forest.
Saga stares at the dark tree trunks slipping past.
Maybe Jurek is keeping Valeria and her dad on Cornelia’s land.
Her mouth goes dry and she reaches for the plastic bottle of mineral water.
That’s not impossible, it wouldn’t be unlike him to gather the graves in groups.
She’s always wondered how he managed to remember all those unmarked graves.
‘What are you thinking?’ Nathan asks, giving her a sideways glance.
‘Nothing – what do you mean?’
‘You’re shaking.’
She looks at the bottle in her hand, drinks some more, then puts it down in the cup-holder in the central console and squeezes her hands between her thighs.
‘I’m worried about my dad,’ she says.
‘I can understand that,’ Nathan replies.
Saga turns to look at the green-black fir trees and the scrappy heather and blueberry twigs.
She can’t bear the thought that she exposed her dad to this. It’s all her fault, it’s her responsibility and she has to save him.
They’re several kilometres from the other houses when the dark forest opens out into a clearing. Nathan slows down as a red house with white eaves and windows comes into view.
‘The dog handler knew it was urgent, right?’ she says.
‘She set off immediately,’ Nathan says.
‘There ought to be dogs closer, though. Maybe in Norrtälje?’
‘Amanda’s the best,’ he replies patiently.
They roll slowly towards the little house. A muddy Jeep Wrangler from the 1980s is parked in a carport with a canvas roof, beside a wall of stacked birchwood.
Saga draws her Glock from her shoulder holster and feeds a bullet into the chamber.
They stop on a weed-ridden gravel drive leading up to the house. Saga gets out of the car without a word, holding her pistol close to her body, pointed at the ground, as she strides forward.
She hears Nathan shut the car door behind her.
She’s fairly confident that Jurek isn’t here; that wouldn’t fit his way of operating, far too easy to trace.
She moves off to one side, looking for bare soil, signs of recent digging. Her eyes roam anxiously towards the edge of the clearing, in behind the carport, to the bare bushes beside the house.
Without waiting for Nathan, she hurries round to the shaded rear of the house. The ground is drier there, covered with pinecones.
In the lawn between the house and the dark edge of the forest are two huge fir trees, with heavy, contorted branches.
There’s a stepladder lying in the grass behind the larger of the trees.
Saga walks past a water-filled wheelbarrow and looks inside a small greenhouse full of dead plants. She can’t see any obvious sign of graves, no vegetable patch, or bare corner of the garden.
‘Saga? Talk to me,’ Nathan says as he comes round the corner.
‘They could be buried in the forest,’ Saga says.
‘I know how it feels, but we need to do this in the right order, we start by talking to Cornelia.’
Nathan returns to the front of the house, leaving Saga to gaze out at the trees for a while.
She’s about to turn round and follow him when there’s a crunching sound at the edge of the forest. Saga spins on her heel and raises the pistol, squeezing the trigger until she feels it catch; she focuses her gaze, scanning for movement.
All she can see are tree trunks.
She moves slowly sideways and hears the crunching sound again. She thinks it must be an animal foraging in the undergrowth, and moves cautiously towards the edge of the forest.
She stops and stands completely still for a moment, scanning the trees.
Seeing nothing, she turns and starts to walk back to the front of the house, but stops and looks towards the trees again where she heard the noise before carrying on round the house.
Nathan rings the doorbell and takes a step back.
Saga stands next to him and notices a sign indicating that a duty nurse lives here.
Cornelia’s been running a private nursing clinic from her home, she thinks.
Nathan rings the bell again. The sound is clearly audible through the walls. He waits a moment, then tries the door.
It’s not locked, and swings silently open on its three hinges.
‘Put your pistol away,’ he says.
Saga wipes the sweat from her hand on her jeans, but keeps her pistol in her hand as she follows him into a waiting room containing a television, two hard sofas, and a magazine rack.
They cross the pale grey linoleum floor, check the visitors’ toilet, then carry on through the door to the treatment room.
There are two large paper fans blocking the views from the windows facing the carport. The sun is only just reaching above the treetops. The windowpanes are dirty and there are dead flies on the sills.
Along one wall is a bunk covered with coarse protective paper, and on the other a desk with a computer, phone, and printer.
Beyond the desk is a door with a frosted-glass window at face height.
The room behind the door is dark.
Saga sees her own hazy reflection in the clouded glass as she approaches and opens the door. The only thing visible in the darkness is the metallic glint of a strip of evening sunlight.
She reaches in with one hand, feeling acros
s the wall, and the thought that someone could be standing in there watching her flits through her head. Her fingertips find the light-switch, she presses it, and raises her pistol.
She walks slowly inside and shivers as she looks round.
Cornelia’s living room with its open fireplace has been turned into an operating theatre. The curtains are closed and held shut with clothes pegs.
Motes of dust sparkle in the air in the glare of the ceiling light.
Nathan stops next to Saga and looks at the well-used equipment.
The operating table may only be around ten years old, but the ECG machine isn’t even digital, and prints out its readings on graph paper.
There’s a round operating lamp next to a drip-stand, and a stainless steel trolley. On top of the trolley are a capnograph and cylinders of oxygen, medicinal air and carbon dioxide.
‘This is too advanced for a nurse’s clinic,’ Nathan says beside her.
‘I’m starting to realise where we are,’ Saga replies.
48
Saga walks through the operating room with her pistol raised and pushes open a door that leads to a small bedroom. The bed is neatly made, with a crocheted bedspread. There’s a pill box on the bedside table, next to a Bible.
They go into the kitchen, which contains a pine table and four rib-backed chairs with red cushions tied to them. Above the sink is an old-fashioned storage unit, with glass-handled scoops for flour, sugar and oats tucked into wooden cubbyholes. A stained coffee-cup and a plate with crumbs on it are standing in the sink.
‘He’s taken her,’ she says.
‘Amanda will be here with the dogs in an hour,’ Nathan says.
Saga lowers her pistol, pauses for a few seconds, then puts it back in her holster. She walks slowly over to the window and looks out at the huge pine tree and the stepladder lying in the grass.
The forest isn’t particularly large, possibly no more than a thousand hectares, but it’s started to get dark and the search will take time.
They return to the living room and stop in front of the protective plastic that’s been spread out on top of the fitted carpet beneath the operating table.
‘Should we call forensics?’ Nathan asks.
‘Yes,’ she sighs.
Saga looks at the closed curtains. The strip of light has almost vanished now. Someone could already be standing outside watching them without them knowing.
‘So this was where Jurek ended up after you shot him,’ Nathan says.
Saga nods and goes over to a tall glass-fronted cabinet. She studies the array of saws, scalpels, hooked suture needles, and haemostats. On the top shelf is an old-fashioned, bound journal.
The acrid smell of disinfectant hits her as she opens the cabinet and takes the book out.
In the ‘admission date’ column, Cornelia has entered the date Saga thought she had killed Jurek Walter, and in the column for ‘name and place of abode’ she has written ‘Andersson’.
The most common surname in Sweden.
That’s followed by a fifteen-page handwritten account of the first four months, followed by three pages of sporadic notes of treatment leading up to this summer.
As Saga and Nathan stand side by side reading about everything that happened in this room, they grow more and more astonished at the accuracy of Joona’s guesses.
Cornelia had been standing smoking in the car park of the Bergasjön nature reserve when her dog picked up a scent. A body had been swept along on the current and had got stranded in the shallows just before a wide curve in the river.
She thought he was dead when she backed her Jeep down the gentle slope and out into the water. It wasn’t until she lifted the man onto the back of the Jeep that she realised he was conscious.
In spite of the cold and the severity of his injuries, he had somehow managed to persuade her not to take him to hospital.
She must have realised from the gunshot wounds that he was probably wanted by the police, but still saw it as her duty to try to save his life.
She told him she was a nurse, and that she could patch him up enough for him to be able to get to a doctor he trusted, but once they got to her house he asked her to conduct the necessary operations herself.
The journal doesn’t say how she got hold of the equipment – maybe she had a set of keys to the store at her former hospital.
In the journal she gives a scrupulous account of the patient’s condition and care.
He had three life-threatening injuries, and a number of less serious wounds.
The shots fired by Saga are all accounted for.
Two or three high-velocity projectiles had ruptured the front lobe of his left lung, and fractured his left shoulder blade.
Cornelia wrote that she wasn’t qualified to administer strong sedatives, but that the patient had refused even basic painkillers.
He lost consciousness several times during the operations that followed.
She describes the patient’s condition as critical until she saved his lung and stopped the bleeding from his upper arm.
‘She gave him her own blood … because she’s blood group O, she knew she could give blood to anyone no matter what group their blood was,’ Saga says.
‘Unbelievable,’ Nathan whispers.
Later that night she began to operate on his injured hand. Large parts of it had been destroyed by the shot, literally torn away.
Traumatic injury to the artery, a complete rupture. There was no way of saving it.
‘She amputated his hand,’ Saga whispers.
Moment by moment, Cornelia describes how she removed the hand without specialist equipment, using a Gigli saw, filed the exposed bones, isolated the blood vessels and nerves, inserted a double catheter for drainage, then shaped the stump using a flap of tissue and skin.
‘Why didn’t Jurek destroy the journal, burn the house down, something like that?’ Nathan wonders when they finish reading.
‘Because he knows that none of this could lead back to him until he’d carried out his plan,’ Saga replies. ‘Jurek isn’t afraid of prison or secure psychiatric care, that wasn’t why he escaped.’
She walks out of the house and looks off along the road through the forest.
A crow is crying in the distance.
She looks in the Jeep in the carport, then circles the house. She stops in front of the curtained window of the operating room and imagines how things unfolded.
Fairly soon after the operation Jurek must have started to look for a man the same age and build as himself.
He probably drove around in Cornelia’s Jeep long before he had recovered, searching among beggars and the homeless.
When he found the right person, he shot him in the same places he had been shot, then let him die.
Perhaps he had the whole thing planned from the start, perhaps it occurred to him when his own hand had to be amputated.
Despite the large quantities of antibiotics, Jurek suffered a secondary infection in the afflicted arm which led to gangrene.
Cornelia fought the infection as long as she could, but eventually decided to perform a second amputation, above the elbow. By this point Jurek must already have left his hand and the stranger’s torso to rot in the sea.
In the spring following the second amputation, Jurek took the decayed body parts to Cornelia’s brother, the churchwarden. Jurek forced him to photograph the torso, cut the finger from the hand, put it in alcohol, and cremate the rest of the remains.
The idea was probably that the churchwarden would contact the police to inform them of the body he’d discovered, but before he had time to do that he met Saga on the shore.
The wind blows through the trees, knocking more pine cones to the ground.
Saga stands still in the garden.
The water in the wheelbarrow is as black as pitch.
The Earth has continued to turn, and the last of the evening sun lights up the large pine tree from a different angle – and now Saga sees a new shadow on the g
rass.
It reveals what’s been hidden at the back of the tree.
A body is hanging from a high branch.
That’s why the stepladder is lying where it is.
Saga walks round the tree and looks up at the dead woman with the rope around her neck.
Cornelia has hanged herself.
Her wellingtons have fallen to the ground beneath her.
She has ingrained blood on her fingertips and on her chest.
She must have done it around three weeks ago, kicking the stepladder away, then fighting instinctively to get free.
She was probably already dead by the time the churchwarden scratched his message in the coffin lid.
He was the hostage, so that Jurek could force Cornelia to do what he wanted – not the other way round.
He needed her, not the churchwarden.
The last entry in Cornelia’s journal concerns trials of a YK prosthesis, with a functioning grip in the hand controlled by wires.
Perhaps that was when she realised he was planning to kill more people, and that she had saved the life of a sadistic serial killer.
49
Seven hours later the dog handler drops Saga off on Timmermansgatan. She runs the last block to her building on Tavastgatan, rushes up the stairs, gets in her flat, locks the door behind her, checks it, then pulls the curtains in all the windows.
The sky is black above the rooftops.
She goes into the kitchen and starts calling colleagues involved in the search for her dad. No one has anything to report yet, but one tells her he’s going to be getting the results from eight base stations tomorrow.
Saga swallows an impulse to shout and swear at him.
Instead she explains very calmly that her dad has been buried alive, and that he might not survive the night.
‘Please, try to put more pressure on them,’ she pleads. ‘I need the results this evening, it could make all the difference.’
She hangs up, wipes the tears from her cheeks, takes off her dirty clothes and tosses them in the laundry basket, then has a quick shower to clean the wounds on her legs and arms before they get infected.
She cut herself badly in the undergrowth behind Cornelia’s house.
It was already dark by the time the dog handler arrived.
