The Sandman

by Kepler, Lars

  He sees Jurek vanish right after the shot. David is lying completely still in the snow. There’s no way of telling how badly wounded he is.

  To the east the sky has brightened slightly and Reidar can see Saga Bauer in a window on the first floor.

  It had been her who had fired and missed.

  Reidar is breathing far too quickly, his heart is racing and he realises that he’s going into shock as a result of the loss of blood.

  Mikael coughs, puts a hand to his ear and gets unsteadily to his feet.

  ‘Dad …’

  He has no time to say more before Jurek is back. He knocks him down again, then grabs him by one leg and starts to drag him off into the darkness.

  ‘Mikael,’ Reidar screams.

  Jurek drags his son off through the snow. Mikael is flailing with his arms, trying to find something to grab hold of. They disappear towards the rapids, Reidar can only see them as pale shadows now.

  Jurek came here to get Mikael, he thinks in confusion.

  It’s still far too dark for Saga to be able to tell the figures apart from her vantage point in the window.

  Reidar howls as he grabs the handle of the knife and pulls. It’s stuck fast. He pulls again, shifting the angle down slightly to get a better grip, and it cuts into his flesh.

  Warm blood runs over the handle and his fingers.

  He screams and pulls again, and finally the point comes free from the wall behind him. The knife slips out and Reidar falls forward onto the snow. The pain is so bad that he’s sobbing as he crawls forward and tries to get to his feet.

  ‘Mikael!’

  He stumbles over to the burning flare in the snow, picks it up and feels the sparks prick his hand. He almost falls but manages to keep his balance. He looks towards the open water of the rapids, and can just make out Jurek’s figure against the snow. Reidar starts to follow them, but has no energy left. He knows that Jurek is planning to drag Mikael into the forest and vanish with him for good.

  182

  Saga is pointing her pistol out through the window and sees Reidar Frost in the glow of the flare. He’s picked it up, and blood is pouring down his body, he stumbles and looks like he’s going to fall, then he throws the flare.

  Saga wipes the blood from her eyebrows and sees the flare spin through the darkness in a wide arc, and follows it with her eyes, seeing it land in the snow. In its white glow she can clearly make out Jurek Walter. He’s dragging Mikael behind him. They’re more than a hundred metres away.

  They’re a long way off, but Saga rests her arm against the window frame and takes aim.

  Jurek is moving away. The pistol’s sights keep shaking. The black figure keeps moving out of the line of fire.

  Saga tries to hold the gun steady. Taking slow breaths, she squeezes the trigger, past the first notch, and sees Jurek’s head slide away.

  She keeps losing focus and blinks quickly.

  A moment later the angle of fire is better and she squeezes the trigger three times as the sights slip gradually lower.

  The harsh, sharp blasts echo between the manor and stable block.

  Saga manages to see that at least one of the bullets hits Jurek in the neck. Blood is squirting out, hanging like a red haze in front of him in the bright white light.

  She fires off several more shots and sees him let go of Mikael, fall into the shadows and disappear.

  Saga backs away from the window, turns and runs through the hidden doorway.

  She rushes down the stairs. The pistol in her hand clatters against the banisters. She emerges into the kitchen, runs through the rooms, into the large hall and out into the snow. Gasping, she approaches the glowing light with her pistol raised. Further away she sees the black water of the rapids glint like a metallic fracture in the white landscape.

  She carries on through the deep snow and tries to make out anything through the darkness, off towards the forest.

  The light of the flare is weaker now, it will soon go out. Mikael is lying on his side in the snow, gasping for breath. There’s blood spattered at the very edge of the trembling circle of light, but the body isn’t there.

  ‘Jurek,’ she whispers, pushing into the light and spotting his tracks through the snow.

  Saga’s head is aching badly as she picks up the flare and holds it aloft, then carries on moving forward. The glow flickers ahead of her. Shadows and light play across the snow, and suddenly she sees movement from the corner of her eye.

  Jurek stands up and moves away through the snow.

  Saga fires before she has time to aim properly. The bullet goes through the top of his arm and he lurches to one side, almost falling, then takes a few steps down the steep slope leading to the rapids.

  Saga follows, with the flare held high. She catches sight of him again, takes aim and hits him in the chest with three shots.

  Jurek falls backwards, over the icy fringe and straight into the black water of the rapids. Saga fires as he’s falling, and hits him in the cheek and ear.

  He gets sucked down into the water and she runs over and manages to shoot him in the foot before he disappears. Saga replaces the cartridge, slides down the steep slope, falls and hits her back on the ground, sliding under the snow, but gets unsteadily to her feet and fires into the black water. She holds the flare up above the swirling rapids. The light penetrates the surface, past the spinning bubbles and all the way to the dark-brown bottom. Something large is tumbling round down there, and suddenly she catches a glimpse of a wrinkled face among the stones and swirling weeds.

  Saga fires again and a cloud of blood billows out in the dark water. She takes aim and goes on firing, releases the cartridge and slides in a fresh one, then shoots again. The flashes from the barrel flicker on the racing water. She walks along the shore, following the current, and goes on shooting until she has no more ammunition and Jurek Walter’s body vanishes beneath the ice where the rapids spread out.

  Panting, Saga stands at the edge of the water as the flare dies away to a shimmering red glow.

  She just stares down at the water as tears run down her face, like a tired child.

  The first rays of sunlight are starting to reach over the treetops, and the warm light of dawn spreads out across the sparkling snowy landscape. There’s a sound of helicopters approaching in the air, and Saga realises that it’s over at last.

  183

  Saga was taken by ambulance to Danderyd Hospital, where she was examined and given a bed. She lay for a while in her room, but left the hospital by taxi before she received any treatment.

  Now she’s limping along a corridor in the Karolinska Hospital, where Reidar and Mikael were taken by air ambulance. Her clothes are dirty and wet, her face is streaked with blood, and all she can hear in her right ear is a loud buzzing sound.

  Reidar and his son are still in emergency room 12. She opens the door and sees the author lying on an operating table.

  Mikael is standing beside him, holding his hand.

  Reidar is telling the male nurse over and over again that he has to see his daughter.

  The moment he sees Saga he falls silent.

  Mikael takes some clean compresses from the trolley and gives them to Saga. He points at her forehead, where blood has once again started to trickle from the blackened wound on her eyebrow.

  The nurse comes over, looks at Saga, then asks her to accompany him to an examination room.

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ Saga says, looking for her ID.

  ‘You need help,’ the nurse tries to say, but Saga interrupts him and asks for them to be taken to Felicia Kohler-Frost’s room in the infectious diseases clinic.

  ‘I have to see her,’ she says gravely.

  The nurse makes a call, gets the go-ahead and wheels Reidar’s bed towards the lift.

  The bed’s wheels squeak faintly on the pale vinyl floor.

  Saga follows, suddenly feeling the urge to cry.

  Reidar is lying with his eyes closed, and Mikael is walking alongside
, holding his father by the hand.

  A young nurse meets them and shows them into an intensive care room with subdued lighting.

  The only sound is the slow wheezing and ticking of the machines monitoring heart rate, breathing, blood oxygenation and ECG.

  In the bed lies an extremely slight woman. Her long black hair is spread out over her shoulders and pillow. Her eyes are closed and her small hands are lying by her sides.

  She’s breathing rapidly, and her face is covered with beads of sweat.

  ‘Felicia,’ Reidar whispers, trying to reach her with his hand.

  Mikael leans his cheek towards his sister and whispers something to her with a smile.

  Saga stands behind them, staring at Felicia, the captive girl who has now been rescued from the darkness.

  epilogue

  Two days later Saga is walking through the park towards the headquarters of the Security Police. There are birds singing in the bushes and snow-covered trees.

  Her hair has started to grow out again. She has twelve neat stitches on her temple, and five across her left eyebrow.

  Yesterday her boss, Verner Zandén, called and told her to report to his office at eight o’clock this morning to receive the Security Police Medal of Honour.

  The ceremony strikes her as being rather odd. Three men died out at Råcksta Manor, and Jurek Walter’s body was washed away, deep under the ice covering the lake.

  Before she was discharged she managed to visit Joona in hospital. He had a distant look in his eyes as he patiently answered her questions about why Jurek and his brother had done what they did.

  Joona’s body was shaking as if he were still frozen as he slowly told her what was behind it all.

  Vadim Levanov fled from Leninsk with his two sons Igor and Roman after the disastrous accident in 1960, when an intercontinental missile exploded on the launch pad. He eventually reached Sweden, was granted a work permit and given a job at the big quarry in Rotebro, with accommodation in the guest labourers’ barracks. His children lived with him in secret; he would school them during the evenings and keep them hidden during the day, all the while hoping that he would be granted Swedish citizenship and the chance of a new life for him and his sons.

  Joona had asked for a glass of water and when Saga leaned forward to help him drink she could feel him shaking as if he were freezing, even though his body was radiating heat.

  Saga recalls Reidar’s account of how he met the twins by Edssjön, and started playing with them. The twins took Reidar back to the quarry where they played in the great mounds of sifted sand. One evening Reidar got caught by one of the foremen. He was so scared of reprisals that he blamed everything on the older boys, and pointed out where they lived.

  The twins were taken into the custody of the Child Welfare Commission, and because they weren’t listed on any Swedish registers the case was passed to the Aliens Department.

  Joona asked a nurse for a warm blanket and explained to Saga that Jurek’s brother had pneumonia and was being treated in hospital when Jurek was extradited to Kazakhstan. But because Jurek didn’t have any family there he ended up in a children’s home in Pavlodar.

  From the age of thirteen he worked on the barges trafficking the Irtysh River, and during the troubles that followed Stalin’s death he was forcibly recruited by a Chechen militia group. They took the fifteen-year-old Jurek to a suburb of Grozny and turned him into a soldier.

  ‘The brothers were sent to different countries,’ Joona said in a low voice.

  ‘But that’s crazy,’ Saga whispered.

  Sweden had little experience of migrants in those days, and had no effective way of dealing with them. Mistakes were made, and Jurek’s twin brother was sent to Russia as soon as he was well enough. He ended up at Children’s Home 67 in the Kusminki district of south-east Moscow, and was written off as retarded because of the after-effects of his illness. When Jurek, after many years as a soldier, left Chechnya and managed to track down his brother, he had been transferred to a mental hospital, the Serbski Institute, and was a complete wreck.

  Saga is so absorbed in her thoughts about the twin brothers that she doesn’t notice Corinne Meilleroux walking towards the security doors at the same time as her. They come close to colliding. Corinne’s hair is tied up and she’s wearing a black trench-coat and high-heeled boots. For once Saga is conscious of the way she’s dressed. Maybe she should have chosen something different from her usual jeans and thick parka.

  ‘Very impressive,’ Corinne smiles, and gives her a hug.

  Saga and Corinne get out of the lift and walk side by side down the corridor leading to their boss’s large office. Nathan Pollock, Carlos Eliasson and Verner Zandén are already waiting for them. On the table is a bottle of Taittinger and five champagne glasses.

  The door closes and Saga shakes hands with the three men.

  ‘Let’s start with a minute’s silence in memory of our colleague Samuel Mendel and his family, and all the other victims,’ Carlos says.

  Saga lowers her head and has trouble maintaining a steady gaze. In front of her she can see the first pictures of the police operation in the industrial estate where the old brickworks used to be. Towards morning it had become clear to everyone that no victims were going to be found alive. In the muddy snow the forensics officers had started placing numbered signs by the fourteen different graves. Samuel Mendel’s two sons had been found tied together in a shaft covered by a sheet of corrugated metal. Rebecka’s remains were found buried ten metres away in a drum fitted with a plastic air-tube.

  The voices drown in Saga’s tinnitus and she shuts her eyes and tries to understand.

  The traumatised twins made their way to Poland, where Roman killed a man, took his passport and became Jurek Walter. Together they caught a ferry from Swinoujscie to Ystad, and then travelled up through Sweden.

  Now middle-aged, the brothers returned to the place where they had been separated from their father, to barrack number four in the guest workers’ accommodation at a quarry in Rotebro.

  Their father had spent decades trying to trace the boys, but couldn’t travel to Russia himself because he’d be sent to the gulag. He had written hundreds of letters in an effort to find his children, and waited for them to come back, but just one year before the brothers arrived in Sweden the old man gave up and hanged himself in his cellar.

  Before Saga left the hospital, Joona had closed his eyes and tried to sit himself up as he explained that finding out about his father’s suicide had wrecked what little was left of Jurek’s soul.

  ‘He started to draw up his circle of blood and revenge,’ Joona said, almost soundlessly.

  Everyone who had contributed to the break-up of his family would experience the same fate. Jurek would take their children from them, their grandchildren and wives, sisters and brothers. The guilty parties would be left as alone as their father in the quarry, they would have to wait year after year, and only when they had killed themselves would those of their relatives that survived be allowed to return.

  That was why the twins didn’t kill their victims – it wasn’t the people who were buried who were being punished, but those left behind. During the wait for the suicides, the victims were placed in coffins or drums with air-tubes. Most of them died after just a few days, but some lived for years.

  The bodies that were found in Lill-Jan’s Forest and in the vicinity of the Albano industrial estate cast a cruel light on Jurek Walter’s terrible revenge. He was following an entirely logical plan, which was why his actions and the choice of victims didn’t seem to fit the pattern followed by other serial killers.

  It was going to take a while for the police to fill in all the details, but it was already apparent who the victims were. Apart from Reidar Frost, who revealed the boys to the foreman in the quarry, they included those responsible at the Child Welfare Commission, and the case-officers at the Aliens Department.

  Saga thinks about Jeremy Magnusson, who was a young man when he dealt
with the twins’ case at the Aliens Department. Jurek took his wife, son and grandson, then finally his daughter Agneta. When Jeremy eventually hanged himself in his hunting cabin, Jurek went to the grave where Agneta was still being kept alive to let her out.

  Saga repeats to herself that Jurek actually had disinterred her, just as he’d told Joona. He had opened the coffin, sat by the graveside and watched her blind fumbling. In this terrible circle, she was a version of him, a child doomed to return to nothing.

  Joona explained that Jurek’s brother was so psychologically damaged that he lived among their father’s old possessions in the abandoned barracks. He did everything that Jurek told him to do, learned to handle sedatives and helped him to seize people and watch over the graves. The shelter that their father had built in anticipation of a nuclear war acted as a sort of holding cell before the victims could be placed in graves.

  Saga is torn from her thoughts by her boss tapping a glass and asking for silence. With great solemnity he fetches a blue box from the safe, snaps it open and takes out the gold medal.

  A wreathed star on a blue-and-yellow ribbon.

  Saga’s feels her heart clench unexpectedly when she hears Verner say that she has demonstrated remarkable courage, bravery and intelligence.

  The atmosphere in the room is one of gentle solemnity.

  Carlos’s eyes are moist, and Nathan smiles at her with a sombre look in his eyes.

  Saga takes a step forward and Verner attaches the medal to her chest.

  Corinne claps her hands and gives her a big smile. Carlos opens the champagne, firing the cork at the ceiling.

  Saga drinks a toast with them, and receives their congratulations. Every so often her hearing is interrupted by a howl of tinnitus.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Pollock asks.

  ‘I’m on sick leave, but … I don’t know.’