by Kepler, Lars
‘I don’t know … I want you to imagine that he’s actually saying something … even if it isn’t audible,’ Joona replies, smiling at his own answer.
‘I can certainly try.’
‘Isn’t it possible to raise and lower the sound until we know for certain if there’s anything in that silence or not?’
‘If I increase the sound pressure and intensity a few hundred times, the footsteps on the running machine would burst our eardrums.’
‘So get rid of the footsteps.’
Johan Jönson shrugs and makes a loop of that segment, stretches it out and then divides the sound into thirty different curves, ordered by hertz and decibels. Puffing his cheeks out, he highlights some of the curves and gets rid of them.
Each removed curve appears on a smaller screen instead.
Corinne and Pollock get up. They go outside onto the balcony and freeze for a while as they gaze out across the rooftops and the Philadelphia Church.
Joona remains seated and watches the painstaking work.
After thirty-five minutes Johan Jönson leans back and listens to the cleaned-up loop at various speeds, then removes another three curves and plays the result.
What’s left sounds like a heavy stone being dragged across a concrete floor.
‘Jurek Walter sighs,’ Johan Jönson declares, and stops the playback.
‘Shouldn’t those be lined up as well?’ Joona says, pointing to three of the removed curves on the smaller screen.
‘No, that’s just an echo that I removed,’ Johan says, then looks suddenly thoughtful. ‘But I could actually try to remove everything except the echo.’
‘He could have been facing the wall,’ Joona says quickly.
Johan Jönson highlights and moves the curves of the echo back again, multiplies the sound pressure and intensity by three hundred and replays the loop. Now the dragging sound resembles a shaky exhalation as it’s repeated at just under normal speed.
‘Isn’t there something there?’ Joona asks with renewed concentration.
‘There could be,’ Johan Jönson whispers.
‘I can’t hear it,’ Corinne says.
‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a sigh now,’ Johan Jönson admits. ‘But we can’t do any more to it, because at this level the longitudinal soundwaves start to blur with the transversal … and because they’re running at different rates, they’ll only cancel each other out.’
‘Try anyway,’ Joona says impatiently.
124
Johan Jönson presses his lips together in a way that makes him look like August Strindberg as he surveys the fifteen different curves.
‘You’re not really supposed to do this,’ he mutters.
With fingertip precision he adjusts the timing of the curves and extends some of the peaks to longer plateaux.
He tries replaying the loop, and the room is filled with strange, underwater sounds. Corinne stands with her hand over her mouth as Jönson stops it, makes some more adjustments, pulls certain sections further apart, then plays it again.
Sweat has broken out on Nathan Pollock’s forehead.
There’s a deep rumble from within the loudspeakers, followed by a long exhalation divided into indistinct syllables.
‘Listen,’ Joona says.
What they can hear is a slow sigh that’s been unconsciously formed out of a thought. Jurek Walter isn’t using his larynx, just moving his lips and tongue as he breathes out.
Johan Jönson moves one of the curves slightly, then gets up from his chair with a grin as the loop of the whisper repeats over and over again.
‘What’s he saying?’ Pollock says in a tense voice. ‘It sounds a bit like Lenin?’
‘Leninsk,’ Corinne says, wide-eyed.
‘What?’ Pollock says, almost shouting.
‘There’s a city called Leninsk-Kuznetsky,’ she says. ‘But because he was just talking about red clay, I think he means the secret city.’
‘A secret city?’ Pollock mutters.
‘The cosmodrome at Baikonur is well-known,’ she explains. ‘But fifty years ago the town was called Leninsk, and it was top secret.’
‘Leninsk in Kazakhstan,’ Joona says quietly. ‘Jurek has a childhood memory from Leninsk …’
Corinne sits down at the table, her back straight, tucks her hair behind her ear and explains:
‘Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union in those days … and it was so sparsely populated that they could build an entire town without the rest of the world noticing anything. There was an arms race going on, and they needed research bases and launch sites for rockets.’
‘Kazakhstan is a member of Interpol,’ Pollock says.
‘If they can give us Jurek Walter’s real name, we can start to uncover his background,’ Joona says. ‘Then the hunt would really be on …’
‘It shouldn’t be impossible,’ Corinne says. ‘I mean … now we have a location and an approximate time for his birth. We know he arrived in Sweden in 1994. We’ve got pictures of him, we’ve documented the scars on his body and …’
‘We even have his DNA and blood type,’ Pollock smiles.
‘So either Jurek’s family belonged to the local Kazakhstan population, or they were among the scientists, engineers and military who were sent there from Russia …’
‘I’ll put everything together,’ Pollock says quickly.
‘I’ll try to get hold of the NSC in Kazakhstan,’ Corinne says. ‘Joona? Do you want me to …?’
She falls silent and gives him a quizzical look. Joona stands up slowly, meets her gaze and nods, picks up his coat from a chair and starts walking towards the hall.
‘Where are you going?’ Pollock asks.
‘I need to talk to Susanne Hjälm,’ Joona mutters, and keeps walking.
125
When Corinne was talking about the scientists who were sent to the test facility in Kazakhstan, Joona was suddenly reminded of his conversation with Susanne Hjälm in the police car. Just before her daughter started shouting from the ambulance, he had asked if Susanne could remember the address on Jurek’s letter.
She had said it was a PO box address, and was trying to remember the name when she said it wasn’t Russian.
Why had she said the name wasn’t Russian?
Joona shows his ID to the guard and explains who he wants to see. They walk through the women’s section of Kronoberg Prison together.
The well-built guard stops outside a thick metal door. Joona looks in through the window. Susanne Hjälm is sitting motionless, eyes closed. Her lips are moving, as if she is praying under her breath.
When the guard unlocks the door she starts and opens her eyes. She begins rocking her upper body when she sees Joona come in. Her broken arm has been fixed up, and the other is wrapped round her waist, as though she were trying to hug herself.
‘I need to talk to you about—’
‘Who’s going to protect my girls?’ she asks desperately.
‘They’re with their father now,’ Joona tells her, looking into her anguished eyes.
‘No, no … he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know … no one knows, you have to do something, you can’t just leave them.’
‘Did you read the letter Jurek gave you?’ Joona asks.
‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘I did.’
‘Was it addressed to a lawyer?’
She looks at him, and starts to breathe more calmly.
‘Yes.’
Joona sits down beside her on the bunk.
‘Why didn’t you post it?’ he asks quietly.
‘Because I didn’t want him to get out,’ she says, sounding distraught. ‘I didn’t want to give him the slightest chance. You could never understand, no one could.’
‘It was me who arrested him, but—’
‘Everyone hates me,’ she goes on without listening. ‘I hate myself, I couldn’t see anything, I didn’t mean to hurt that police officer, but you shouldn’t have been there, you shouldn’t have been trying to fi
nd me, you should—’
‘Do you remember the address on the letter?’ Joona interrupts.
‘I burned it, I thought it would end if I did, I don’t know what I thought.’
‘Did he want it sent to a law firm?’
Susanne Hjälm’s body is shaking violently, and her sweaty hair hits her forehead and cheeks.
‘When can I see my children?’ she wails. ‘I have to tell them I did everything for them, even if they never understand, even if they hate me—’
‘Rosenhane Legal Services?’
She looks at him, wild-eyed, as if she’d already forgotten he was there.
‘Yes, that was it,’ she slurs.
‘When I asked you before, you said the name wasn’t Russian,’ Joona says. ‘Why would it have been Russian?’
‘Because Jurek spoke Russian to me once …’
‘What did he say?’
‘I can’t bear it any more, I can’t bear it …’
‘Are you sure he was talking Russian?’
‘He said such terrible things …’
126
Susanne stands up on the bed, beside herself, and turns to face the wall as she sobs, trying to hide her face with her one good hand.
‘Please, sit down,’ Joona says gently.
‘He mustn’t, he mustn’t …’
‘You shut your family away in your cellar because you were frightened of Jurek.’
Susanne looks at him, then starts pacing up and down on the bed again.
‘No one would listen to me, but I know he speaks the truth … I’ve felt his fire on my face …’
‘I would have done the same as you,’ Joona says seriously. ‘If I believed I could protect my family from Jurek that way, I would have done the same thing.’
She stops with a curious look in her eyes, and wipes her mouth.
‘I was supposed to give Jurek an injection of Zypadhera. He’d been given a sedative and was lying on his bed … he couldn’t move. Sven Hoffman opened the door, I went in and gave Jurek the injection in his buttock … As I was putting a plaster on it, I simply explained that I didn’t want anything to do with his letter, I wasn’t going to send it, I didn’t say I’d already burned it, I just said …’
She falls silent and tries to pull herself together before continuing. She holds her hand to her mouth for a while, then lets it fall:
‘Jurek opened his eyes and looked straight at me, and started to speak Russian … I don’t know if he knew I could understand, I’d never told him I once lived in St Petersburg.’
She breaks off and lowers her head.
‘What did he say?’
‘He promised to cut Ellen and little Anja open … and let me choose which one would bleed to death,’ she says, then smiles to stop herself going to pieces. ‘Patients can say the most terrible things, you have to put up with all sorts of threats, but it was different with Jurek.’
‘Are you sure he was speaking Russian, not Kazakh?’
‘Jurek Walter spoke an unusually refined Russian, as if he were a professor at Lomonosov.’
‘You told him you didn’t want anything to do with his letter,’ Joona says. ‘Were there any other letters?’
‘Only the one he replied to.’
‘So he received a letter first?’ Joona asks.
‘It was addressed to me … from a lawyer who was offering to review his rights and options.’
‘And you gave it to Jurek?’
‘I don’t know why, I suppose I was thinking that it was a human right, but he isn’t …’
She starts crying and takes a few steps back on the soft mattress.
‘Try to remember what—’
‘I want my children, I can’t bear it,’ she whimpers, pacing on the bed again. ‘He’s going to hurt them.’
‘You know that Jurek is locked up in the secure …’
‘Only when he wants to be,’ she interrupts, and stumbles. ‘He fools everyone, he can get in and out …’
‘That’s not true, Susanne,’ Joona says gently. ‘Jurek Walter hasn’t left the secure unit once in thirteen years.’
She looks at him, then says through white, cracked lips:
‘You don’t know anything.’
For a moment it looks as though she’s going to start laughing.
‘Do you?’ she says. ‘You really don’t know anything.’
She blinks her dry eyes and her hand is shaking violently as she raises it to brush her hair from her face.
‘I saw him in the car park in front of the hospital,’ she says quietly. ‘He was just standing there, looking at me.’
The bed creaks under her feet and she puts her hand out to steady herself against the wall. Joona tries to calm her down:
‘I appreciate that his threats were—’
‘You’re so stupid,’ she yells. ‘I’ve seen your name written on the glass …’
She takes a step forward, slips off the bed, hits her neck on the edge of the bed and collapses in a heap on the floor.
127
Corinne Meilleroux puts her phone down on the table and shakes her head, sending a waft of expensive perfume all the way over to Pollock.
He’s been sitting there waiting for her to conclude the call, and has been thinking of asking if she’d like to have dinner with him one evening.
‘I’m not getting a sausage,’ she says.
‘A sausage,’ he repeats with a wry smile.
‘Isn’t that what you say?’
‘It’s not too common these days, but …’
‘I spoke to an Anton Takirov at Kazakhstan’s security police, the NSC,’ she says. ‘It only took a second. He told me that Jurek Walter isn’t a Kazakh citizen quicker than I can open my laptop. I was very polite and asked them to conduct a new search, but this Takirov just seemed insulted and said that they did actually have computers in Kazakhstan.’
‘Maybe he’s not good at talking to women.’
‘When I tried to tell Mr Takirov that DNA matching can take a bit of time, he interrupted me and explained that they had the most modern system in the world.’
‘So basically they don’t want to help.’
‘In contrast to the federal security service of the Russian Federation. We have a good relationship with them these days. Dmitry Urgov just called me back. They’ve got nothing that matches what I sent them, but he said he’d personally ask the national police to look through the pictures and check their DNA register …’
Corinne closes her eyes and massages her neck. Pollock looks at her, trying to suppress the urge to offer to help. He’d be more than happy to stand behind her, gently softening up the muscles in her back.
‘I’ve got warm hands,’ Pollock says just as Joona Linna comes in.
‘Can I feel?’ he asks in his deep Finnish accent.
‘Kazakhstan aren’t making things easy for us,’ Corinne tells him. ‘But I—’
‘Jurek Walter comes from Russia,’ Joona says, taking a handful of sweets from a bowl.
‘Russia,’ she repeats blankly.
‘He speaks perfect Russian.’
‘Would Dmitry Urgov have lied to me …? Sorry, but I know him, and I really don’t believe that …’
‘He probably doesn’t know anything,’ Joona says, putting the sweets in his pocket. ‘Jurek Walter’s so old that it must have been in the days of the KGB.’
128
Pollock, Joona and Corinne are leaning over the table, summarising the situation. Not long ago they didn’t have anything. Now, thanks to Saga’s infiltration, they have a location. Jurek Walter let slip something when he whispered ‘Leninsk’. He grew up in Kazakhstan, but because Susanne Hjälm heard him talking educated Russian, it seems highly likely that his family came from Russia.
‘But the security police there didn’t know anything,’ Corinne repeats.
Joona takes out his phone and starts looking for a contact he hasn’t called for years. He can feel himself getting excited as he re
alises he might finally be on the trail of the mystery of Jurek Walter.
‘What are you doing?’ Corinne asks.
‘I’m going to talk to an old acquaintance.’
‘You’re calling Nikita Karpin!’ Pollock exclaims. ‘Aren’t you?’
Joona moves away, holding the mobile to his ear. The phone rings with a hissing echo, and a fair while later there’s a crackle.
‘Didn’t I thank you for your help with Pichushkin?’ Karpin asks abruptly.
‘Yes, you sent some little bars of soap—’
‘Isn’t that enough?’ he interrupts. ‘You’re the most persistent young man I ever met, so I might have guessed you’d phone and disturb me.’
‘We’re working on a very complex case here, which—’
‘I never talk on the phone,’ Nikita interrupts.
‘What if I organise an encrypted line?’
‘There’s nothing we couldn’t crack in twenty seconds,’ the Russian laughs. ‘But that’s beside the point … I’m out of it now, I can’t help you.’
‘But you must have contacts?’ Joona tries.
‘There’s no one left … and they don’t know anything about Leninsk, and if they did they wouldn’t say so.’
‘You already knew what I was going to ask,’ Joona sighs.
‘Of course. It’s a small country.’
‘Who should I talk to if I need an answer?’
‘Try the dear old FSB in a month or so … I’m sorry,’ Karpin yawns. ‘But I have to take Zean out for his walk, we usually go down the Klyazma, on the ice, as far as the bathing jetties.’
‘I see,’ Joona says.
He ends the call, and smiles at the old man’s exaggerated caution. The former KGB agent doesn’t seem to trust that Russia has changed. Maybe he’s got a point. Maybe the rest of the world has simply been tricked into thinking that things are moving in the right direction.
It wasn’t exactly a formal offer, but coming from Nikita Karpin it was almost a generous invitation.
Nikita’s old Samoyed dog Zean died when Joona was visiting eight years ago. He had been invited to give three lectures on the work that led to Jurek Walter’s capture. At the time the Moscow police were in the middle of the hunt for serial killer Alexander Pichushkin.
