by Kepler, Lars
Her vision is still shaky.
With three short steps he’s in front of her, squeezing her cheeks together and pushing the short barrel into her mouth. Then he pulls the trigger.
The gun clicks, but it isn’t loaded, he’s removed the bullet.
She gasps and feels sweat trickling between her breasts.
‘I don’t know where Joona Linna is,’ she manages to say.
‘I know,’ Jurek says. ‘You don’t even know which continent he’s on right now, I know him, he doesn’t tell anyone anything, it’s the only way … If I thought there was the slightest possibility that you knew something about Joona, I wouldn’t hesitate to cut your face off, piece by piece.’
‘So why have you taken my dad, then?’
‘I don’t mean any harm,’ he says. ‘I’m almost done with you, you helped me get out of the secure unit, that was your only function.’
She wipes the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Her whole body is shaking with shock.
‘So what are you doing here?’ she asks.
‘My brother has no grave, nothing,’ he says. ‘I want to know where he is.’
‘They might have scattered his ashes in the garden of remembrance somewhere?’ Saga suggests in a hoarse voice.
‘I’ve tried to find out.’
‘I have absolutely no idea. In certain special cases they keep the location secret to avoid it becoming a place of pilgrimage, but that—’
‘That’s as may be, but I want to know where he is,’ Jurek says. ‘There must be documentation … Naturally, I don’t believe in God, but I’d have liked to bury my brother for my parents’ sake … Igor had a difficult life, those years in the children’s home in Kusminki broke him … And the Serbski Institute made him who he was …’
‘I’m sorry,’ Saga whispers.
‘You have almost full access within both the Security Police and the National Operational Unit,’ he says slowly. ‘I’ll give you your father in exchange for my brother.’
‘I want my father alive.’
The wrinkles in Jurek’s face deepen into what might be a smile.
‘I want my brother alive … But it will be sufficient if you can provide documentation showing where he’s buried.’
Saga nods and thinks that the only reason Jurek could have reacted so quickly in the kitchen was that he wasn’t looking at the tap at all when he was pouring a drink, it was just a ruse to find out where the gun was hidden.
‘You’re going to do this for me,’ Jurek goes on. ‘Even if it means surrendering classified material, even if you have to break the rules.’
‘Yes,’ she whispers.
‘Tomorrow – we’ll meet around the same time, somewhere else.’
‘How will I know where?’
‘I’ll send you a text.’
52
As soon as Jurek has gone, Saga locks the door, limps to the gun-cabinet, checks that her Glock is loaded and puts her holster on. She checks the door and windows once more, looks in the wardrobe and under the bed, then goes into the bathroom to inspect her injuries.
She washes her face, rinses her mouth and dries herself, then tosses the bloody towel in the bath and goes and sits on her bed with all the lights on, and starts to search through the Security Police database.
She gives up after three hours.
It’s morning by the time she stops.
She can’t find any information about where Jurek Walter’s dead twin brother is.
Saga feels how sore her body is when she gets up from the bed and pulls on a pair of jeans and a soft sweater.
Before she leaves the flat, she makes another attempt to conceal the bruises on her face and neck with make-up.
The large investigation room at the National Operational Unit is deserted. Saga walks past the map of Europe that covers almost the whole of one wall and stops in front of the blurred pictures of the Beaver from the Belarusian security-camera footage.
Every detail they’ve noted so far takes on a completely new meaning now that they know Jurek is behind everything.
They had thought they were looking for a murderer who was trying to cleanse society, who saw himself as some sort of superhero. In reality, the Beaver was no more than a slave, a domesticated butcher.
Saga can hear voices in the corridor. Nathan is exchanging a few words with a colleague over by the coffee machine as he waits for his espresso.
The preliminary investigation has suddenly become the largest in the country and they’ll shortly be meeting the leadership team. They have almost unlimited resources, but Saga knows that isn’t going to save her dad.
She has to find Jurek’s twin brother’s remains.
Nathan comes in and drops his heavy bag on the floor before he looks at her.
‘What happened to you?’ he asks, putting his cup down on the desk.
‘Oh, you know, I went through the forest with Amanda and the dogs … wrong clothes entirely.’
‘You look like you’ve been in a boxing match.’
‘Feels a bit like it too,’ she says, then turns her face away.
Nathan drinks some coffee, then sits down.
‘I stopped off at the lab and picked up two reports.’
‘Have you had time to read them?’ Saga says in a hoarse voice.
‘I’ve only leafed through them, but they’re fairly confident they’ve identified Cornelia’s cause of death.’
‘She hanged herself?’
He pulls out a thick folder from his bag, opens it and takes out the two preliminary pathology reports. He puts his reading glasses on, leafs through one of them and traces the lines with his forefinger.
‘Let’s see,’ he murmurs. ‘Yes, here it is … “The cause was total blockage of arterial flow to the brain.”’
‘Can I look?’
Saga sits on the edge of the desk and starts to go through the material. She stops when she reads that Cornelia’s brother had been lying in his grave behind the churchwarden’s cottage on Högmarsö for at least three months, but died of dehydration one week after Cornelia committed suicide.
‘They each helped Jurek, and now they’re both dead,’ she says, slipping down from the table.
She thinks about all the deals Cornelia and Erland must have made with Jurek. Their attempts to be helpful in order to save themselves and each other could well have been the cause of their deaths.
They had no idea how dangerous he was.
Joona used to say that every deal you make with Jurek only leads you deeper into the mire.
Saga imagines an old-fashioned fishing net in shallow water, where wooden rings form a tunnel you can’t escape from. Each section is designed to make it easy for the fish to swim into easily, but impossible to get out of.
Saga’s mobile buzzes. A text saying that the police have issued a national alert, and that Interpol have been brought in.
‘A national alert,’ she says in a subdued voice.
‘Yes, I heard.’
‘They still haven’t identified the Beaver?’
‘No.’
Saga goes over to the map of Lill-Jans Forest and the Albano industrial estate. She looks at the railway line and distribution of burial sites. Once upon a time Jurek kept a large number of victims buried alive there.
She stares at the markers on the map, trying to understand how Jurek could keep track of all the graves, spread out across something like three million square metres.
And this was just one of his cemeteries.
He must have had maps somewhere, or lists of coordinates.
But in all their years of searching, they’ve never found anything like that.
They haven’t even found where he actually lived.
The flat where he was registered was evidently no more than a façade.
And there was no trace of Jurek in the old workers’ barracks where Jurek’s brother was hiding out. Forensic experts and teams of dogs searched the whole quarry, the surrounding bui
ldings and bomb shelters, but it was as if Jurek had never even been there.
‘Nathan, what actually happened to Jurek Walter’s twin brother?’ she asks. ‘To his body, I mean, where is it now?’
‘No idea,’ he replies, laying out photographs on the table.
‘If the body still exists, I’d like to take a look at it,’ Saga says, when she’s confident she can keep her voice steady. ‘At the injuries, you know, the old scars on his back.’
Nathan shrugs his shoulders.
‘There’s a comprehensive report from the Karolinska, and at least a thousand pictures in the archive.’
‘I know, but I’d like to take a look with my own eyes. It’s not important, though … Do you know who was in charge of the post-mortem?’
‘I don’t actually remember, but probably Nils.’
‘OK.’
Nathan rolls his chair over to the computer and logs in, sits in silence for a while, types something, then clicks the mouse.
‘Nils Åhlén,’ he confirms.
‘Can I see?’ she asks, going over to stand behind him.
He gestures towards the computer and moves out of the way. She pulls up a chair and starts looking for information about whether the body was retained for some reason, but finds nothing. Just tables documenting all the injuries, the weight and condition of every organ.
She tells herself she’s going to have to call Nils when she gets a moment to herself. Maybe she should go into the bathroom and call him now?
From the corner of her eye she sees Nathan pinning the pictures from Jurek Walter’s file on the wall.
His official police photographs show him from the front and in profile.
He’s got older, has more scars and is missing his left arm. But the calmness in his wrinkled face and pale eyes is unchanged.
‘The meeting’s about to start,’ Nathan says.
Her phone rings as she’s switching the computer off.
‘Bauer,’ she says as she takes the call.
‘We’ve found your dad’s car,’ a female officer tells her, panting as if she’d run to give her the news.
Barkarby Flying Club, the road and the area around Lars-Erik’s car have been cordoned off. The police haven’t found any visible signs of a struggle, but they discovered his smashed mobile in the frozen mud ten metres from the vehicle.
The crime scene investigators have been through the mechanics’ sheds, the green hangars housing the small sports planes, the club building and overgrown landing strip.
The search party looking for Lars-Erik sets off from the gravel road beyond the fluttering cordon-tape.
The winter grass is stiff with cold. Red- and yellow-brick buildings rise up above the treetops, like sombre witnesses to the search.
Saga hasn’t been able to get hold of Nils Åhlén. He’s on a plane, flying back from a conference in Melbourne, and won’t be home until eight o’clock that evening. The thought that Nils might know something about Jurek’s brother is the only thing stopping her from panicking right now.
Police officers with dogs and volunteers from the Missing Persons organisation form long chains. They’ve all been told to look out for pipes sticking up from the ground, or soil that seems to have been disturbed recently.
Ninety people in yellow vests start to move across the grass, through patches of woodland, poking at dense patches of undergrowth with sticks, searching alongside roads and along paths.
When they come to a halt after searching the sandy slopes of the nearby motocross course, Saga walks off to one side and calls Randy. He doesn’t answer, and a heavy feeling of loneliness fills her chest.
‘They’ve found Dad’s car, I’m going to stay out here as long as the search is going on … please, call me when you get this,’ she says in her message, then goes back to her place in the chain and carries on across Järvafältet with the others.
It’s eight o’clock in the evening, and Saga is waiting in the Falafel Bar. She slips down from her high stool and takes the bag of food from the counter.
The search was called off at half past six, when they still hadn’t found any trace of her dad.
Saga knows she needs to find out where Jurek’s brother’s remains are to stand any chance of getting her father back.
She goes back to her flat, locks the door, puts the bag of food down on the kitchen table, checks all the windows and cupboards, looks under the bed, pulls the curtains, switches all the lights off and then calls Nils Åhlén.
‘I’ve literally just switched my phone back on,’ Nils says in his nasal voice. ‘The plane’s not finished taxiing.’
‘I need to ask you something.’
‘We’ll be done with the post-mortems tomorrow or—’
‘Listen,’ Saga interrupts. ‘I’m calling because you did the post-mortem on Jurek Walter’s twin brother.’
‘Igor.’
‘What happened to his remains?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Nils mutters. ‘But I assume we followed the usual procedure.’
‘Can you find out?’
‘Someone stole the body from the cold store,’ he says in a subdued voice.
‘Stole?’
‘Right after we’d finished the post-mortem.’
‘Why would someone want to steal his body?’ she whispers.
‘I don’t know.’
Saga takes a few pointless steps forward, then turns and lean against the window, feeling the cool of the glass against her sweaty back.
‘Could it be a coincidence?’ she asks. ‘Medical students messing about? Someone who just wanted a dead body?’
‘Why not?’ he replies.
‘Nils, please tell me what you know, this is really fucking important.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ he says slowly. ‘And that’s the truth … but I only mentioned the theft to one person, the only person I thought needed to know about it … I thought he’d be upset, but he took it very calmly.’
She stares into space, aware that he’s talking about Joona, and that he’s the one who for some reason took the body.
‘Do you have any idea where the body might be now?’
‘I haven’t made any attempt to find out, because there was no practical need to,’ Nils replies bluntly.
They end the call, and Saga stands in silence for a while.
The body is gone.
She had been sure Nils would be able to help her, that there was a reasonable explanation for where the body had ended up.
Her dad has been buried alive, and she has nothing to offer in exchange for his release.
She takes the plastic carton of falafel out of the bag, gets out some cutlery and sits down at the kitchen table.
Saga looks at her mobile. She hasn’t called Pellerina today, because she doesn’t feel up to lying to her again. She needs to rescue their dad first.
53
Darkness will soon fall on the fields and meadows; the colours of the landscape are already diluted and watery.
As usual the wind is blowing from the southwest, and the bare branches of the weeping willow are swaying gently.
Joona and Lumi are on their last shifts of the day while Rinus rests in his room.
They’re in the surveillance room, the largest in the building. They’ve put their empty coffee mugs down on a box of ammunition.
The regimented timetable and monotonous tasks mean that days in the safe house tend to blur together.
‘Zone 2,’ Lumi says, closing the shutter over the opening.
She puts her binoculars down on the plain wooden table with its fixed felt covering, rubs her eyes and looks at the time.
Zone 2 covers the fields towards Eindhoven and a distant greenhouse.
All the zones overlap, and take account of the idiosyncrasies of the landscape.
It’s impossible to keep an eye on the whole of their surroundings at all times, but as long as they stick to the plan, the risk of anyone approaching the workshop without being spotted i
s kept to a minimum.
‘Zone 3,’ Joona says, looking at his daughter.
She’s sitting on her chair, staring at the floor.
‘Ninety minutes to go before we wake Rinus,’ Joona says.
‘I’m not tired,’ she mumbles.
‘You should still try to get some sleep.’
Lumi doesn’t answer, just stands up and walks past the table where Joona’s phone is charging.
She stops in front of the large monitor screen. It’s divided into sections, showing the workshop and the inside of the garage from various angles.
The smooth reinforced walls blur together in the gloom.
Rinus has repainted the pillar that had been worn smooth by the hydraulic shutter.
The old, crooked door is swaying in the wind.
Lumi walks back, past the row of hatches covering the firing holes looking down on the garage, and sits on her chair again without looking at her dad.
‘How long are you planning to keep us in hiding?’ she asks after a pause.
Joona looks out through one of the openings with his binoculars, lingering on a dense patch of bushes in front of a water-filled dyke.
‘This is starting to feel like Nattavaara,’ Lumi goes on. ‘I mean, if Saga hadn’t found us we’d still be there – wouldn’t we?’
Joona lowers the binoculars and turns towards her.
‘What am I supposed to say to that?’ he asks.
‘I’d never have gone to Paris.’
Joona raises the binoculars and scans the next part of the sector, a furrowed field and the clump of trees where the underground passageway emerges.
‘What if the high-ups in the police didn’t listen to Nathan?’ Lumi goes on, talking to his back. ‘What if they don’t believe you? I mean, then Valeria wouldn’t have any protection … would she be OK if that’s the case?’
‘No,’ Joona says.
‘And you don’t care – I can’t get my head around that.’
‘I couldn’t stay, I had to leave in order to …’
‘To save me – I know,’ she says.
‘You’re on zone 4.’
‘Dad,’ Lumi says as she gets to her feet. ‘I’m doing all this because I promised I would, because it matters to you, but this isn’t going to work forever … I’m already falling behind at college, I’ve got a social life, this is so fucking useless, on every level.’
