by Kepler, Lars
‘I can take your zones,’ he says.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘If you want to draw, read, eat—’
‘Is that what you think I’m talking about?’ she snaps. ‘That I want to sit and draw instead of doing my duty?’
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ he says.
‘Well, it bothers me!’ Lumi says, snatching her binoculars from the table.
She walks past Joona, stops at the window next to the filing cabinet and opens the shutter.
Beside the partially collapsed outbuilding behind the workshop the drainpipe sticks up like a huge straw.
An old tractor tyre is lying on the edge of the field. The lights of cars on a minor road in the distance flicker between the tree trunks.
Everything is peaceful.
Lumi closes her shutter and puts the binoculars down. She can’t bring herself to say the name of the zone she’s just checked. Instead she crosses the room, pulls the curtain aside, and walks out.
Joona moves on to zone 5, looks through the binoculars, lingering on the neighbouring farm in the distance, where an old bus is parked up in the yard.
In his notes to Nathan Pollock he asked him to leak information to the evening tabloids as soon as Jurek Walter was dead and Nils Åhlén had categorically confirmed the death.
At least once a day Joona checks every page of the papers’ online editions, but there’s been nothing so far, which means that Jurek is still alive.
And Joona knows what Jurek is capable of.
He keeps hearing him whisper that he’s going to take his wife and daughter, that he’s going to trample him into the dirt.
But Joona can understand his daughter. For the past two years she’s been living her own life, a life she could only have dreamed about before.
And to her, Jurek Walter isn’t a real threat.
He wasn’t dead, as they had believed when they left their hiding place in Nattavaara, and nothing had happened to her.
She’s been living the sort of life any young, independent woman might.
Joona checks the farmyard and bus in the distance again before closing the shutter and putting the binoculars down.
He goes to the kitchen to get coffee, past the curtain and stairs down to the ground floor, opens the door and blinks in the bright light.
Lumi is standing by the worktop with her phone clutched to her ear. Her cheeks are red as she defiantly meets his gaze. He marches over to her, snatches the phone, and ends the call.
‘I need to speak to my boyfriend – and you can’t—’
Joona throws the phone on the floor and stamps on it, smashing it to pieces.
‘You’re mad!’ she yells. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re so fucking cool the whole time, but you’re really just scared, like some old guy hiding in a bunker with loads of guns and tinned food, so you can survive some fucking war that isn’t even real.’
‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but I had no choice,’ Joona says with sombre calm, pouring the last of the coffee from the jug.
Lumi hides her face in her hands and shakes her head.
‘You think everything I do is dangerous,’ she mutters.
‘I’m worried about you.’
She takes a deep, shaky breath.
‘I didn’t mean to shout, but it makes me so angry, because this isn’t working, in fact it’s totally fucking claustrophobic,’ she says quietly, sitting down at the kitchen table.
‘We don’t have a choice,’ Joona replies, drinking some of the bitter coffee.
‘I haven’t told you about Laurent,’ she goes on in a calmer voice. ‘I’m in a relationship with him, he’s important to me.’
‘Is he an artist too?’
‘He’s involved in video art.’
‘Like Bill Viola.’
‘Well done, Dad,’ she says in a subdued voice. ‘Like Viola, only more modern.’
Joona walks over to the sink and rinses his mug.
‘You can’t do that again,’ he says.
‘I can’t bear the thought of him panicking – I mean, what’s he supposed to think when I suddenly vanish?’
Lumi’s hair has come loose from her ponytail, and the tip of her nose is red.
‘If you call Laurent, Jurek will kill him, and before he dies he’ll reveal the number you called him on.’
‘You’re mad,’ she says, and swallows hard.
Joona doesn’t respond, just goes back to the surveillance room. He picks up the binoculars, opens the shutter for zone 1 and starts again.
54
It’s almost dark enough to have to swap the binoculars for the night-vision rifle-sights in order to keep watch over the flat landscape around the workshop.
Joona is checking the boarded-up main house and abandoned garden furniture.
He hears Lumi enter the room and glances over at her. She’s stopped just inside the curtain, with her hand on a stack of chairs.
He goes back to watching, checking the barrier and narrow track that leads off to the main road.
‘Are you OK? Are you sure you’re really OK, Dad?’ Lumi asks, wiping tears from her cheeks. ‘It’s not that long since you got out after spending all that time in prison … all you said was that you had to help an old friend, but I’m guessing it was really about Jurek.’
‘No,’ he replies, and moves on to zone 2.
He checks the immediate vicinity through the binoculars, first the dark bushes along the dyke, then he raises the binoculars towards the distant greenhouse.
‘It’s always him, whenever you lose your judgement,’ Lumi goes on. ‘I know what happened to Samuel Mendel, and how badly that affected you, that you felt you had to sacrifice us to—’
‘Quiet,’ Joona interrupts sharply.
A light is flickering at the top of the binoculars’ lenses, like a blue rainbow. Only for an instant. He looks through the window past the binoculars and just catches sight of a mobile phone going dark in a large hand.
‘Wake, Rinus, we’ve got visitors,’ he says in a low voice as he identifies two figures in the darkness.
Lumi hurries out of the room, simultaneously drawing her pistol.
Joona can make out the curve of the taller man’s head against the slightly lighter background. The figure is moving towards the workshop before disappearing behind something.
He hears Lumi come back with Rinus.
‘I can’t see them any more, but they’re close,’ Joona says.
‘How many?’ Rinus asks.
‘Two.’
Lumi quickly takes a semi-automatic rifle from a wooden crate, inserts a full cartridge and puts the gun on the table, then takes out another one, inserts a cartridge and lays it next to the first.
‘I don’t think it’s Jurek,’ Joona says, looking Rinus in the eye.
Lumi moves over to the monitor as she checks the emergency bag containing her passport, cash, water, emergency flares, and a pistol.
Joona raises the binoculars again and quickly scans the whole sector before moving on to the next.
The weak light of the monitor is lighting up Lumi’s anxious face. She’s concentrating on the external cameras that show what’s happening in the immediate vicinity of the workshop and garage.
The low light makes the images grey and grainy.
Suddenly two figures emerge from the darkness.
Their pale outlines move along the side of the workshop and step over something lying on the ground.
‘I can see them,’ she says.
Rinus goes and stands next to her as he fastens his protective vest.
The diodes that piece together the image from the infrared heat-sensitive cameras make it look like the two figures are moving through a snowstorm.
They seem to be emitting a kind of pale dust.
They stop in front of the large garage doors.
Lumi catches a glimpse of them on the cameras inside the building as the loose door sways in the wind.
Jo
ona is moving round the zones so they’re not taken by surprise by any more intruders.
Rinus picks up one of the semiautomatics from the table.
It isn’t possible to see what the two men are doing outside the garage.
On the monitor Lumi sees one of them hold the door open for the other.
‘They’re coming in,’ she says under her breath.
Joona and Rinus are standing beside her watching the screen.
The two intruders turn round and the monitor flares white when one of them raises a camera and takes a picture.
Joona releases the reinforced shutter.
It slams shut instantly behind the intruders, the clang echoing off the walls.
The two men cry out and stumble backwards against the solid wall, scrabbling around it in panic.
Rinus switches the floodlights on and Lumi and Joona see that they’ve caught two youths. One is hammering against the door with his hands, and his hat has fallen off. He has a full red beard and torn jeans. The other is gasping for breath. He’s shorter, with dark hair, and is wearing a denim jacket with a fleece lining.
They turn round in the enclosed space with a look of abject fear on their faces, trying to understand what’s going on.
Rinus opens one of the firing holes and the young men’s agitated voices suddenly sound louder.
He calls out something in Dutch and the two men stop at once and put their hands in the air.
‘Don’t frighten them,’ Joona says.
The men follow a series of short commands from Rinus. They turn to face one wall, kneel down, put their hands behind their backs, and then lean forward to rest their chests and one cheek against the wall.
That’s one of the best ways to control an enemy – when they’re in that position, it takes them much longer to launch any sort of counter-attack.
Joona realises that the two youngsters are nothing to do with Jurek, but seeing as they could still be dangerous he keeps them covered with one of the semiautomatics while Rinus goes down to them.
One of them gets so frightened when the door opens that he almost loses his balance.
Rinus walks in, lowers his pistol, puts it back in its holster, then goes over and pats them down.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘We’re looking for a good place to hold a party,’ the bearded man says in a subdued voice.
‘Stand up.’
They both get cautiously to their feet, and their breathing speeds up when they see Rinus’s scarred face.
‘A party?’ he asks.
‘Factory Dive – one night, one stage, three acts,’ the younger one in the denim jacket says.
‘Sorry,’ the bearded man blurts out. ‘We thought the place was abandoned. We live in Eindhoven, we’ve driven past it loads of times.’
‘It says private property on the signs.’
‘They always say private property and no trespassing,’ the shorter man says.
55
Saga puts her phone and pistol down on her kitchen table. It’s late evening. The wind is blowing so hard against the window that it’s rattling. A strip of dark glass is visible between the curtains.
She’s felt oddly vacant since her conversation with Nils Åhlén.
She has nothing to negotiate with now, and needs to change her strategy.
It isn’t easy to understand why Joona took the body.
Joona has always responded to Jurek with unexpected harshness, and has been prepared to do things no other police officer would do.
Jurek has a very orderly mind, and his only mistakes have happened when he lost control for a moment.
Joona probably took the body to prompt another of those moments.
He’ll have buried it somewhere, unless maybe he froze it.
Joona could never have predicted that she would need it.
If only he would get in touch, Saga thinks, trying to eat some of her cold food.
She’s just wondering about phoning Nils again to ask about the cold store at the Karolinska Institute when her mobile starts to buzz on the table.
She starts, then smiles with relief when she sees that it’s Randy.
She nudges the tub of cold food aside and picks up the phone.
‘Randy?’ she says.
‘I’ve only just heard your message, I’ve been in the dark-room – how are you doing?’
‘Fairly good, under the circumstances,’ she murmurs.
‘Shall I come over?’
‘No, I—’
‘I’d be happy to.’
‘I have to work,’ she says.
‘It’s past eleven o’clock,’ Randy says quietly.
‘I know.’
‘Can I ask what’s going on?’
After talking to Randy, Saga drags the armchair from the living room into the hall, turns the volume of her ringtone up as far as it will go, puts it on the dresser, makes a quadruple espresso, puts her shoes and coat on, then sits down on the armchair and stares at the front door with her pistol in her hand.
Randy told Saga to call him whenever she wanted, if she wanted to talk, or – if she felt like having company – he could come and sleep on the sofa.
But Saga is starting to realise that she needs to deal with this on her own.
Otherwise she won’t get her dad back.
They’ve finished searching the woodland around Cornelia’s house with dogs, and have been across Järvafältet with lines of officers and volunteers.
It’s almost unbearable.
He could be lying in a coffin like the churchwarden, struggling to get enough air through a narrow tube.
The strong coffee has gone cold by the time Saga drinks it. She puts the cup down, glances quickly over her shoulder, then settles down to watch the door again.
She knows she ought to be exhausted after the exertions of the past twenty-four hours, but it’s as if her brain can’t relax.
If Jurek does get in touch tonight, she’s going to say she’s expecting information about his brother’s remains tomorrow.
She can’t tell him that Joona took the body.
She’s not going to negotiate with Jurek, but at the same time she needs to let him know that he’ll never find out where his brother is if her dad dies.
By two o’clock in the morning she’s almost fallen asleep when her phone suddenly buzzes to say she’s got a text message.
Her hands start to shake as she takes the phone off the dresser and tries to see what it says. The bright light of the screen makes her pupils contract. The letters slide sideways as she reads: Hasselgården, entrance C1, ward 4, 2.30.
With a feeling that everything is happening too slowly, she goes and gets a sheet of paper from the printer, writes down the address and time and leaves the sheet on the kitchen table.
If she doesn’t come home or get in touch, someone will find the note.
She snatches up her pistol and two cartons of ammunition.
As she runs down the stairs she looks up Hasselgården and discovers that it’s a care home for people with dementia, run by a private company whose website proclaims care of the elderly to be a growth market.
Saga pulls the tarpaulin off, starts her motorbike, and rides away from Södermalm into the cold winter’s night.
She changes up to fifth gear on the straight part of Bergslagsvägen, and her head jerks back as the bike accelerates.
The lights on the tall posts in the middle of the road flash past.
The name Hasselgården, with its suggestion of hazel trees, makes her think of a red wooden building from the last century with creaking floorboards and traditional fireplaces, but as Saga approaches the home she finds a dirty high-rise block with salmon-pink plaster and brown window frames.
She stops and turns her bike round fifteen metres from entrance C1, puts her pistol in her pannier, and leaves her helmet on the handlebars.
The door of the main entrance is unlocked.
She glances at the plan of the buildin
g and fire escapes, then takes the lift up to the fourth floor.
The machinery whirrs into action with a hiss.
Saga thinks that she misjudged Jurek, he was stronger and faster than she could ever have imagined.
The only reason she’s still alive is that he wants something.
Maybe it is just to reclaim his brother’s remains, but she has to be prepared for the possibility that he wants something more.
She’ll listen to him, talk to him – she needs him to believe that he’s messing with her head, finding his way into the darkness inside her.
But as soon as she finds out where her dad is, she’ll dispatch a rescue team, and then she’ll do everything she can to stop Jurek.
She knows she can’t afford any more mistakes, the next time she reaches for a gun she needs to be certain that she’s going to kill him.
He’s extremely dangerous, but not to her, not at the moment.
She can exploit the fact that he’s interested in her.
This isn’t a fairy tale about Beauty and the Beast.
He isn’t in love with her, but she can tell that he sees something special in her.
That was what Joona meant, that Jurek is interested in what’s going on inside her, her inner catacombs.
She needs to exploit that.
Saga repeats to herself that she mustn’t let herself be drawn out, mustn’t let herself be provoked, but that she’s going to have to let him inside, just a little, to prompt him to reveal anything.
It might well be dangerous, but she has no choice.
She succeeded last time, and she’s planning to succeed again.
She’s going to stick to the truth.
Exchange darkness for darkness.
She looks at herself in the lift mirror. Her eyes are dark and impassive. Her face is bruised, it looks like someone else’s.
56
The lift doors slide open and Saga steps out onto the fourth floor. Three metres in front of her is a glass door with a sign saying Ward 4. She can see the illuminated lift and her own reflection in the door, but it’s hard to make out the corridor beyond.
