The Sandman

by Kepler, Lars

  ‘We were talking about serial ki—’

  ‘Don’t lie!’ he yells. ‘I have to know what Karpin said!’

  Joona can hear his impatient movements behind his back, can feel him coming closer, and sees a faint shadow flit across the floor.

  ‘I have to go home now,’ Joona says.

  The man with black eyes moves quickly, presses the barrel of the pistol hard against the back of Joona’s neck, from a position just to the right of him.

  His rapid breathing is clearly audible.

  In a single movement Joona pulls his head out of the way, twists his body, moves his right arm back and knocks the gun aside, then stands up. He throws the man off balance and grabs the barrel of the pistol, twisting it down before jerking it upwards and breaking the man’s fingers.

  The man howls and Joona concludes his violent movement by ramming a knee into his kidneys and ribs. One of the man’s legs is lifted from the floor by the force of the blow, and he tumbles backwards, crushing the chair beneath him.

  Joona has already moved out of the way and turned the pistol on him when he rolls onto his side, coughing, and opens his eyes. He tries to get up but coughs again, then lies there with his cheek to the ground, inspecting his wounded fingers.

  Joona removes the magazine and puts it on the table, takes the bullet out of the chamber and then dismantles the entire pistol.

  ‘Sit down,’ Joona says.

  The man with black eyes groans with pain as he gets up. His brow is beaded with sweat, and he sits down and frowns at the pieces of the gun.

  Joona puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out a sweet.

  ‘Ota poika karamelli, niin helpottaa,’ he says in Finnish.

  The man looks at Joona in astonishment as he unwraps the yellow cellophane and pops the sweet in his mouth.

  The door opens and two men come in. One is the man with silver-grey hair, the other an older man with a full beard, wearing a grey suit.

  ‘Sorry for the misunderstanding,’ the older man says.

  ‘I need to get home urgently,’ Joona says.

  ‘Of course.’

  The bearded man accompanies Joona out of the flat. They take the lift down to a waiting car and drive off to the airport together.

  The driver carries Joona’s bag and the bearded man goes with him through check-in, the security control, all the way to the gate and onto the plane. Only when boarding is complete does Joona get his mobile phone, passport and wallet back.

  Before the bearded man leaves the plane, he hands Joona a paper bag containing seven small bars of soap and a fridge magnet of Vladimir Putin.

  Joona barely has time to send a text to Anja before he is told to switch his phone off. He closes his eyes and thinks about the bars of soap, and wonders if the entire interrogation could have been arranged by Nikita Karpin as a test to see if Joona had the sense to protect his source.

  149

  It’s already evening by the time Joona’s plane lands in Stockholm after a connection in Copenhagen. He switches his phone on and reads a message from Carlos, telling him that a big police operation is underway.

  Maybe Felicia’s already been found?

  Joona tries to get hold of Carlos as he hurries past the duty-free shops, down into the baggage collection area and through the arrival hall, then over the bridge to the garage. Tucked inside the compartment for the spare wheel is the shoulder-holster containing his black Colt Combat Target .45 ACP.

  He drives south as he waits for Nathan Pollock to answer his phone.

  Nikita Karpin said that Vadim Levanov had expected the boys to make their way to the place where they were last together if they ever tried to find him.

  ‘And where was that?’ Joona had asked.

  ‘Visiting workers’ accommodation, barrack number four. That was also where he took his own life, much later.’

  Joona is heading down the motorway towards Stockholm at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. The pieces of the puzzle have been coming thick and fast, and he’s confident that he’ll soon be able to see the overall picture.

  Twin brothers forced to leave the country, and a father who commits suicide.

  The father was a highly educated engineer, but was doing manual labour in one of Sweden’s many gravel pits.

  Joona puts his foot down as he tries to get hold of Carlos again, then Magdalena Ronander.

  Before he has time to pull up Nathan Pollock’s number, his phone rings and he answers at once.

  ‘You should be grateful I’m here,’ Anja says. ‘Every police office in the whole of Stockholm is out at Norra Djurgården …’

  ‘Have they found Felicia?’

  ‘They’re busy searching the forest beyond the Albano industrial estate, they’ve got dogs and—’

  ‘Did you read my text?’ Joona interrupts, his jaw clenched with stress.

  ‘Yes, and I’ve been trying to work out what happened,’ Anja says. ‘It hasn’t been easy, but I think I’ve managed to track down Vadim Levanov, even if the spelling of his name has been westernised. It looks like he arrived in Sweden in 1960, with no passport, from Finland.’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no mention of any children in the records.’

  ‘Could he have smuggled them in?’

  ‘During the fifties and sixties Sweden absorbed loads of visiting workers, the welfare state was being expanded … but the regulations were still very old-fashioned. Visiting workers were thought incapable of looking after their children and Social Services used to place them with foster families or in children’s homes.’

  ‘But these boys were extradited,’ Joona says.

  ‘That wasn’t unusual, especially if there was a suspicion that they were Roma … I’m talking to the National Archives tomorrow … There was no migration authority in those days, so the police, Child Welfare Commission and Aliens Department used to take the decisions, often fairly arbitrarily.’

  He turns off at Häggvik to refill the tank.

  Anja is breathing hard down the phone. This can’t be allowed to slip away, he thinks. There has to be something here that can lead them forward.

  ‘Do you know where the father worked?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ve started investigating all the gravel pits in Sweden, but it may take a while because we’re dealing with such old records,’ she says wearily.

  Joona thanks Anja several times, ends the call, and pulls up at a red light as he watches a young man push a pram along the footpath at the side of the road.

  Snow is blowing along the carriageway, swirling up into the man’s face and eyes. He squints as he turns the pram round to pull it up over a bank of snow.

  Joona suddenly remembers what Mikael said about the Sandman being able to walk on the ceiling, and other muddled things. But he had said three times that the Sandman smells of sand. It may just have been something from the old fairytales, but what if there was a connection to a gravel quarry, a sand pit?

  A car horn sounds behind Joona and he starts driving again, but pulls over to the side of the roads shortly afterwards and calls Reidar Frost.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Reidar asks.

  ‘I’d like to talk to Mikael – how is he?’

  ‘He feels bad about not being able to remember more – we’ve had the police here several hours each day.’

  ‘Every little detail could be important.’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ Reidar says hurriedly. ‘We’d do anything, you know that, that’s what I keep saying, we’re here, twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Is he awake?’

  ‘I can wake him – what did you want to ask?’

  ‘He’s said that the Sandman smells of sand … is it possible that the capsule is near a gravel pit? At some gravel pits they crush stone, and at others—’

  ‘I grew up near a gravel pit, on the Stockholm Ridge, and—’

  ‘You grew up near a gravel pit?’

  ‘In Antuna,’ Rei
dar replies, slightly bewildered.

  ‘Which pit?’

  ‘Rotebro … there’s a large gravel works north of the Antuna road, past Smedby.’

  Joona pulls out onto the opposite carriageway and drives back to the motorway, heading north again. He’s already fairly close to Rotebro, so the gravel pit can’t be far away.

  Joona listens to Reidar’s weary, rasping voice whilst hearing simultaneously – like a double-exposure – Mikael’s peculiar fragments of memory: the Sandman smells of sand … his fingertips are made of porcelain and when he takes the sand out of the bag they tinkle against each other … and a moment later you’re asleep …

  150

  The traffic thins out as he heads north. Joona is driving faster and faster, thinking that after all these years, three of the pieces of the puzzle are finally fitting together.

  Jurek Walter’s father worked in a gravel pit, and killed himself in his home there.

  Mikael says the Sandman smells of sand.

  And Reidar Frost grew up near an old gravel pit in Rotebro.

  What if it’s the same gravel pit? It can’t be a coincidence, the pieces have to fit together. In which case this is where Felicia is, not where all his colleagues are searching, he thinks.

  The ridges of snowy slush between the lanes make the car swerve. Dirty water is spraying up at the windscreen.

  Joona pulls in ahead of one of the airport buses and carries on down the slip road and past a large car park. He sounds his horn and a man drops his bags of groceries as he leaps out of the way.

  Two cars have stopped at a red light, but Joona veers into the other lane and turns sharp left. The tyres slide on the wet road surface. The car lurches across the snow-covered grass and straight through a bank of snow. Compacted snow and ice rattle over and underneath the car. He speeds up again, past Rotebro shopping centre and up the narrow Norrviken road that runs parallel to the high ridge.

  The streetlights are swaying in the wind, lighting up the driving snow.

  He reaches the top and sees the entrance to the gravel works a little too late, turns sharply and brakes hard in front of two heavy metal barriers. The wheels slide on the snow, Joona wrenches the steering wheel, the car spins and the rear end slams into one of the barriers.

  The red glass from the brake-light shatters across the snow.

  Joona throws the door open, gets out of the car and runs past the blue barrack containing the office.

  Breathing heavily, he carries on down the steep slope towards the vast crater that has been excavated over the years. Floodlights on tall towers illuminate this strange lunar landscape with its static diggers and vast heaps of sifted sand.

  Joona thinks that no one can be buried here, it would be impossible to bury any bodies here because everything is constantly being dug up. A gravel quarry is a hole that gets wider and deeper every day.

  The heavy snow is falling through the artificial light.

  He runs past huge stone-crushers with massive caterpillar tracks.

  He’s in the most recent section of the pit. The sand is bare and it’s obvious that work is still going on here every day.

  Beyond the machinery there are some blue containers and three caravans.

  Joona’s shadow flies past him on the ground as the light from another floodlight hits him from behind a pile of sand.

  Half a kilometre away he can see a snow-covered area in front of a steep drop. That must be the older part of the pit.

  He makes his way up a steep slope where people have dumped rubbish, old fridges, broken furniture and trash. His feet slip on the snow but he keeps going, sending cascades of stones down behind him, until he shoves a rusty bicycle aside and makes it to the top.

  He’s now at the original level of the ridge, more than forty metres above the current ground level, and has a good view of the pitted landscape. Cold air tears at his lungs as he gazes out across the illuminated pit with its machines, makeshift roads and piles of sand.

  He starts to run along the narrow strip of snow-covered meadow grass between the steep drop and the Älvsunda road.

  There’s a crumpled car-wreck by the side of the road in front of the wire-mesh fence with its warning signs and notices from the security company. Joona stops and peers into the falling snow. At the far corner of the very oldest section of the gravel pit is an area of tarmac, on top of which is a row of single-storey buildings, as long and narrow as military barracks.

  151

  Joona steps over some rusty barbed wire and heads towards the old buildings with their broken windows and graffiti tags sprayed on the brick walls.

  It’s dark up here and Joona gets his torch out. He aims the beam at the ground, carries on, then shines the light between the low buildings.

  There’s no door on the first building. Snow has blown in over the first few metres of blackened wooden floor. The beam of the torch sweeps quickly across old beer cans, dirty sheets, condoms and latex gloves.

  He carries on through the deep snow, going from door to door and peering through broken or missing windows. The guest workers’ old housing has been abandoned for many years. Nothing but dirt and dereliction. In some places the roofs have caved in, and whole sections of wall are missing.

  He slows down when he sees that the windows in the last but one building are intact. An old supermarket trolley is lying on its side by the wall.

  On one side of the building the ground drops away steeply towards the bottom of the quarry.

  Joona switches the torch off as he makes his way to the wall, where he stops and listens before turning the torch on again.

  All he can hear is the wind sweeping across the rooftops.

  In the darkness a short distance away he can make out the last building in the row. It seems to be little more than a snow-covered ruin.

  He goes over to the window and shines the torch through the dirty glass. The beam moves slowly across a filthy hotplate connected to a car battery, a narrow bed with some rough blankets, a radio with a shiny aerial, some tanks of water and a dozen tins of food.

  When he reaches the door he can make out an almost vanished number 4 at the top left corner.

  This could be the number four of the visiting workers’ accommodation that Nikita Karpin mentioned.

  Joona carefully pushes the handle down and the door slides open. He slips inside, shutting the door behind him. It smells of damp old fabric. There’s a bible on a rickety shelf. There’s only one room, with one window and door.

  Joona realises that he is now quite visible from the outside.

  The wooden floor creaks under his weight.

  He shines the torch along the walls, and sees piles of water-damaged books. In one corner the light flashes back at him.

  He moves closer and sees that there are hundreds of tiny glass bottles lined up on the floor.

  Dark glass bottles, with rubber membranes.

  Sevoflurane, a highly effective sedative.

  Joona pulls out his phone and calls the emergency control room, and asks for police backup and an ambulance to be sent to his location.

  Then everything is silent again, and all he can hear is his own breathing and the floor creaking.

  Suddenly from the corner of his eye he sees movement outside the window, draws his Colt Combat and releases the safety catch in an instant.

  There’s nothing there, just some loose snow blowing off the roof.

  He lowers the pistol again.

  On the wall by the bed is a yellowed newspaper cutting about the first man in space, the ‘Space Russian’ as Expressen’s headline-writer describes him.

  This must be where the father killed himself.

  Joona is just thinking that he ought to search the other buildings when he catches sight of an outline on the filthy rag-rug where something underneath is protruding. He pulls the rug aside and exposes a large hatch in the wooden floor.

  Carefully he lies down and puts his ear to the hatch, but he can’t hear anything.


  He looks towards the window, then shoves the rug aside and opens the heavy wooden hatch.

  A dusty smell of sand rises from the darkness.

  He leans forward and shines the torch into the opening, and sees a steep flight of concrete steps.

  152

  The sand on the steps crunches under Joona’s shoes as he heads down into the darkness. After nineteen stairs he finds himself in a large concrete room. The torch beam flickers across the walls and ceiling. There’s a stool almost in the middle of the floor, and on one wall is a sheet of polystyrene with a few drawing pins and an empty plastic sleeve.

  Joona realises that he must be in one of the many shelters built in Sweden during the Cold War.

  There’s an eerie silence down here.

  The room tapers slightly, and tucked beneath the staircase is a heavy door.

  This has to be the place.

  Joona puts the safety catch back on his pistol and slips it into the holster again to leave his hands free. The steel door has large bolts that slide into place when a wheel at the centre of the door is turned.

  He turns the wheel anticlockwise and there’s a metallic rumble as the heavy bolts slide from their housings.

  The door is hard to open, the metal fifteen centimetres thick.

  He shines the torch into the shelter, and sees a dirty mattress on the floor, a sofa and a tap sticking out of the wall.

  There’s no one here.

  The room stinks of old urine.

  He points the torch at the sofa again and approaches cautiously. He stops and listens, then moves closer.

  She might be hiding.

  Suddenly he has the feeling that he’s being followed. He could end up trapped in the same room as her. He turns and at that instant sees that the heavy door is closing. The immense hinges are creaking. He reacts instantly, throwing himself backwards and jamming the torch in the gap. There’s a crunch as it gets squeezed and the glass shatters.

  Joona shoves the door open with his shoulder, draws his pistol again and emerges into the dark room.