by Kepler, Lars
The kitchen door opens and Sabrina sinks down behind the sofa.
His footsteps come closer.
She glances at the pistol in her right hand. The barrel is resting on the soft rug.
She’s breathing far too fast.
He’s in the living room now, his steps are slower on the wooden floor, and fall silent completely when he crosses the rug.
He’s only three metres away.
Sabrina tries to shuffle sideways so he won’t see her if he carries on through the room towards the bathroom where Pellerina’s hiding.
Her pulse is thudding in her ears, making it hard to hear what he’s doing.
It sounds like he’s walked into the footstool.
Now he’s approaching the sofa, heading straight for her.
She realises she’s about to be discovered. If he takes just another few steps he’ll see her lying on the floor.
So it has to happen now.
She leaps to her feet, holding the pistol with both hands.
But there’s no one there. She sweeps the room with the gun.
He’s gone.
She must have heard wrong.
With trembling hands, she frees the radio from her jacket and starts to walk back to Pellerina.
It takes only a couple of seconds, nevertheless it’s too late when she realises he was crouching down at the other end of the sofa.
He has stood up and is right behind her now.
She spins round with the pistol but her hand is blocked abruptly and the blade of a knife is thrust up into her armpit.
The pistol falls onto the rug, bounces, then slides across the wooden floor.
The pain in her armpit is so intense that Sabrina can’t resist when the man drags her sideways and kicks her legs out from under her.
She falls heavily and lands across the coffee table. The edge hits her like a blow from a baseball bat.
The fruit bowl shatters.
She tumbles onto the floor and tries to cushion her fall with her hand, but can’t avoid hitting the back of her head on the floor.
The oranges from the fruit bowl are rolling across the rug.
She lets out a gasp and tries to get up.
Warm blood is pulsing from her armpit.
It sounds like she’s standing on a beach looking at the sea, but she realises it’s just her own breathing, that she’s heading into circulatory shock.
The man stamps hard on her shoulder and looks at her. His wrinkled face is perfectly calm.
He bends over and moves the heavy silver cross aside so it won’t damage the blade, holds her still, then brings the blade down hard between her breasts, through her breastbone and straight into her heart.
A large wave rolls in and breaks with a hissing sound.
The man stands up.
Sabrina can only see a hazy figure, a thin outline.
He got the knife from the kitchen, didn’t even bother to make sure he was armed when he arrived.
She thinks about the photograph of her grandfather standing under the ladder, then the wave washes over her and everything turns black and cold.
70
As the plane begins its descent over Stockholm, Joona sees that the country is covered with snow, apart from the bigger lakes which are open and black. Fields and patches of forest drift past in leaden colours.
After going through passport control he heads to the left-luggage lockers, taps in the code to one of them and takes out the bag containing his identity papers and the keys to the flat on Rörstrandsgatan. He switches back to his true identity and takes a taxi to the long-stay car park in Lunda industrial estate.
He pays the fee, then gets in the car and unlocks the glove compartment.
His pistol’s still there.
Dusk has already started to fall by the time Joona arrives at the Department of Forensic Medicine. A suspended streetlamp is swaying in the wind, its light swinging back and forth across the almost empty car park.
Joona gets out of the car and buttons his jacket over his shoulder holster as he strides through the main entrance.
Nils Åhlén is pulling off a pair of disposable gloves when Joona walks into the main pathology lab.
‘Are you coming?’ Joona asks.
‘Are you aware of what’s happened, Joona?’ Nils replies, dropping the gloves in the bin.
‘All I know is that Jurek is still alive, you can tell me the rest in the car.’
‘Sit down,’ Nils says in his hoarse voice, and points to a metal chair.
‘I want to get going at once,’ Joona says impatiently, but stops when he sees the look on the professor’s face.
Nils looks at him sadly, then takes a deep breath and starts to tell him about everything that’s happened since Joona went away.
Joona stands and listens as Nils tells him that no one believed Jurek Walter was behind the murders because of the recording from Belarus, showing the man known as the Beaver killing a security guard.
When Nils takes his glasses off and tells him that Valeria was never given any protection at all, Joona slumps heavily onto the chair and covers his face with both hands.
Nils tries to explain how Joona’s theory was dismissed, because all the evidence seemed to disprove it: the footage, the method, and all the witness statements which seemed to point to the Beaver as the sole perpetrator.
It wasn’t until the churchwarden was found buried that Jurek’s name cropped up again. Now they know that it was the churchwarden’s sister who took care of Jurek’s injuries and amputated his arm.
Joona’s face is impassive and his pale grey eyes look glassy as he lowers his hands and meets Nils’s weary gaze.
‘I have to go,’ he says quietly, but doesn’t move.
Nils carries on, telling him about what happened in the greenhouse, then at the school. Joona nods slowly as he hears about the circumstances surrounding Saga’s father’s death.
When Nils tells him that Pellerina is missing and her bodyguard murdered, Joona gets to his feet, leaves the room and hurries for the exit.
Nils catches up with him in the car park and gets in the passenger seat as Joona starts the engine.
The winter evening is dismal and alien, as if someone had ripped reality apart and replaced it with a lonely, abandoned world.
They drive along dark, wet streets, past parks with climbing-frames left empty in the cold.
During the short drive to Police Headquarters Nils Åhlén tells Joona what little Saga has said about her encounters with Jurek Walter.
‘She doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to write any reports,’ Nils explains heavily. ‘It seems like she’s blaming herself for everything that’s happened.’
A couple of years ago Jurek exploited her to escape from a secure psychiatric unit. Saga, however, had managed to secure information from him that led to the death of his twin brother.
Wet snow starts to fall on the water as they drive along Klarastrandsleden. The headlights stretch out into oily smears.
Now Jurek has returned from the dead and, following his usual practice, has taken the people closest to Saga. But at the same time he’s deviated from his normal pattern, Joona thinks as he listens to Nils.
He tricked her into killing her own father.
That’s indescribably cruel.
But Jurek Walter isn’t a sadist.
At first Joona wonders if Jurek is behaving differently because he’s fascinated by Saga’s beauty and darkness.
Maybe it hurt more than usual when she started to deceive him? Was that why he was taking such brutal revenge?
‘No,’ Joona whispers.
This goes much further than that. Jurek has set this entire drama in motion to unbalance her.
No one can defend themselves against Jurek, not him, and no one else either.
They cross Sankt Eriksbron and approach Kronoberg Park, and the old Jewish cemetery where Samuel Mendel and his family are buried.
Snow is blowing towards them along
the road. He eases his foot off the accelerator, but it feels as if they’re still moving forward at speed.
Joona parks outside Police Headquarters and he and Nils walk in through the large glass-covered entrance.
They take the lift up and walk past Joona’s old room, knock on the door of the conference room and walk in.
Saga Bauer barely reacts when she sees him. She looks up briefly, then carries on writing a list of names on a whiteboard.
‘Saga, I’m so sorry, I’ve just heard—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says, cutting him off.
Nathan gets up from his computer and shakes hands with Nils and Joona. His face looks ravaged, and he almost seems on the brink of tears. He tries to say something, but stops and covers his mouth with his hand.
Joona turns back towards Saga and sees that she’s written the names of everyone who has been found buried, in the order they were reported missing.
‘Where do you think that’s going to lead?’ he asks.
‘Nowhere,’ she whispers.
‘There are plenty of us working on this now,’ Nathan says. ‘The chiefs are with us, along with the National Murder Unit, Forensics, plenty of detectives, things are heating up …’
‘While we’re rummaging through the bins,’ Saga says without looking at them.
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Joona says. ‘But we’re all here now, the four individuals who know more about Jurek Walter than anyone else in the world.’
Saga pus her pen down and looks at him with bloodshot eyes. Her lips are cracked, and one cheek and her throat are covered with yellow bruises.
‘It’s too late,’ she says hollowly. ‘You came back too late.’
‘Not if we can save your sister and Valeria,’ he replies.
71
Nathan’s ordered food, and they eat while they work. Nils Åhlén is talking on the phone to a colleague in Odense as he spears pieces of lettuce with a plastic fork.
Joona has dragged the desk lamp over, and it’s shining down on the contents of his boxes: water-damaged notes, fuzzy pictures, printouts from the population registry, smudged pencil-written letters in Cyrillic script.
Slushy rain falls against the windows and runs down onto the dirty sills.
Saga doesn’t touch the food, but drinks a little mineral water as she sends a formal request to the police in St Petersburg for access to their reports.
Joona clears the table, puts Saga’s salad in the fridge, then carries on looking through every detail of the new investigation.
He makes his way along the wall of photographs from the new crime scenes and stops in front of the pictures from the nature reserve in Belarus.
‘Jurek leaves nothing to chance, even though it can sometimes look that way,’ Joona says. ‘But he’s still human, and he makes mistakes … Some of those mistakes are traps, but others are doors … I know he’s here in the details, he thinks in set ways.’
Nathan busies himself adding new details to the database. After a while he wonders out loud if it’s time to make a noise in the media, pleading with Jurek not to harm Pellerina.
They all know it would be pointless, but no one can be bothered to argue with him.
Saga goes over to one of the windows and looks out.
‘We haven’t got time to be sad, that can wait,’ Joona says.
‘OK,’ she sighs.
‘I understand that this is terrible, but we need you,’ he goes on.
‘What could I possibly do?’
‘You’ve spoken to him three times, maybe—’
‘It won’t lead anywhere,’ she exclaims. ‘We won’t find a damn thing, I thought I had a chance, but I didn’t, he was way ahead of me.’
‘It can sometimes feel like that.’
‘He makes you believe lies, he makes you lose your footing,’ she goes on, rubbing one eyebrow hard. ‘I like to think I’m reasonably smart, but I made every mistake I could possibly have made.’
‘He makes mistakes too,’ Joona says. ‘It’s possible to read him—’
‘No, it isn’t.’
Nathan gets up from his chair, loosens his tie, and undoes the top button of his shirt.
‘Joona wants us to try to work out how Jurek thinks,’ he says. ‘Everyone has their own rules, their own system … he had loads of people buried in the same place, Lill-Jans Forest. I mean, why there, of all places? How was he able to remember where all the coffins and barrels were?’
Saga sweeps a heap of reports off one of the tables.
‘This is stupid,’ she says in a trembling voice. ‘We aren’t the ones making the rules here, why are we even pretending that we are? We’ve lost, and we’re going to have to do whatever he says.’
‘So what’s he saying?’ Joona asks. ‘You haven’t told us what he—’
‘Stop!’ she interrupts. ‘All I need to know is what you’ve done with Igor’s body, that’s what he wants … I don’t give a damn about anything else, I just want to get Pellerina back, she’s terrified of the dark, she’s—’
‘Saga,’ Joona says. ‘This isn’t about Igor’s body, that’s all part of the lies, the manipulation.’
‘No, it’s important to him,’ she sobs.
‘It isn’t important, he isn’t sentimental or religious, he doesn’t care about someone’s remains.’
Joona is thinking that Jurek exaggerated his interest in his brother’s body because he already knew that Joona had taken it.
That was the only reason he said he was prepared to swap Saga’s father for his brother.
The idea was that if Saga started to look for the body, she would realise that it was Joona who had taken it. She’d have to contact him to get her dad back, and thereby reveal where he was hiding.
It was a smart and cruel ploy.
It was a brutal plan, and it would probably have succeeded if Saga had had any idea where he was.
She was merely a means to an end, again.
Joona looks at Saga’s anguished face and thinks: I’m the one Jurek’s obsessed with, and he needed an accomplice who he could share that obsession with. That’s why my number was in the German paedophile’s phone, that’s why the grave-robber took Summa’s skull. But Jurek chose the Beaver – and there are no limits to what he’s prepared to do.
‘I’ve talked to Jurek,’ Saga goes on in a tense voice. ‘He wants Igor to have a proper grave, and I need to be able to tell him where the body is if he calls again.’
‘He won’t call – he was lying to you if he said that.’
‘Great, then all we have to go on are lies,’ she says quietly, brushing away her tears and sitting down again.
‘They won’t all be lies – that’s why you have to tell us every detail of your conversations.’
‘There’s no point. I’ve got a bloody good memory, but Jurek is in a completely different league. He has total recall of everything I’ve ever said to him, from the moment we first met in the secure unit. It’s crazy – every gesture, every intonation … We don’t stand a chance, we’re still no nearer to catching him.’
‘The first time you met him he mentioned Leninsk, and that was enough, we stopped him,’ Joona points out.
‘That was sheer luck.’
‘No, you did that, you got him to talk, he wanted to get inside you, and he happened to give you something he hadn’t planned to.’
‘That’s what I thought at the time,’ she says quietly. ‘But he tricked me, the whole thing turned out to be one trap after another.’
‘Have you written down your conversations?’
‘I didn’t want to,’ she whispers.
‘But you can remember them?’
‘Stop it,’ she mutters, and bites her trembling lip.
‘I know you can remember everything if you try.’
‘That’s enough,’ she says, louder, and little red dots start to appear on her forehead.
‘Tell us where he lives,’ Joona says in a sharp voice.
<
br /> ‘Who?’
‘Jurek.’
‘If I knew that, I’d—’
‘But what do you think?’ he interrupts. ‘You’ve talked to him, you should be—’
‘I don’t know!’ Saga yells.
‘Maybe you do,’ Joona persists.
‘Stop it!’
‘Tell us what you think when—’
‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to …’ she sobs.
‘Saga, I’m going to ask you some questions, and you need to try to answer them.’
‘I can’t deal with any more of this shit right now.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘Be gentle with her,’ Nathan says.
‘Shut up,’ Joona says, and goes and stands in front of Saga. ‘You talked to Jurek, and I want to know where he’s hiding.’
‘The rest of us will leave,’ Nils Åhlén says.
‘You’re staying,’ Joona snaps.
Saga is staring at him wide-eyed. Her breathing is laboured, as if she’s been for a long run and is exhausted.
‘I can’t bear to think about him, don’t you get it?’ she says. ‘He humiliated me, I can’t stand myself—’
‘Try to think about him anyway,’ Joona insists.
Saga takes a deep breath and looks down at the floor.
‘OK, it doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘I got the impression he was living in a house, because he reacted when I said that, but that was probably just another trap.’
‘What exactly did you say?’
She raises her head and looks at him with her tired blue eyes.
‘I said I thought he had a house, and that it probably wasn’t all that isolated, seeing as he thought it was too risky to let the Beaver live there.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He used what I’d said, turned it back on me and got me to believe he was hiding in the gravel pit. It seemed logical. Because there’s something about him and the places he’s lived.’
‘Yes, there is,’ Joona says.
Joona goes over to look at the various maps, then bends down and picks up a folder containing registry printouts, rental contracts, and tax demands from one of the boxes.
‘Maybe because he fled from Leninsk, was thrown out of Sweden, ended up in the wrong country and had to make his way back here?’ Nathan says quietly.