The Sandman

by Kepler, Lars

  Mikael Kohler-Frost has been dead for seven years, and is buried in Malsta cemetery, in the parish of Norrtälje.

  15

  Detective Inspector Joona Linna is in a small room whose walls and floor are made of bare concrete. He is on his knees while a man in camouflage is aiming a pistol at his head, a black SIG Sauer. The door is being guarded by a man who keeps his Belgian assault rifle trained on Joona the whole time.

  On the floor next to the wall is a bottle of Coca-Cola. The light is coming from a ceiling lamp with a buckled aluminium shade.

  A mobile phone buzzes. Before the man with the pistol answers he yells at Joona to lower his head.

  The other man puts his finger on the trigger and moves a step closer.

  The man with the pistol talks into the mobile phone, then listens, without taking his eyes off Joona. Grit crunches under his boots. He nods, says something else, then listens again.

  After a while the man with the assault rifle sighs and sits down on the chair just inside the door.

  Joona kneels there completely still. He is wearing jogging trousers and a white T-shirt that’s wet with sweat. The sleeves are tight across the muscles of his upper arms. He raises his head slightly. His eyes are as grey as polished granite.

  The man with the pistol is talking excitedly into the phone, then he ends the call and seems to think for a few seconds before taking four quick steps forward and pressing the barrel of the pistol to Joona’s forehead.

  ‘I’m about to overpower you,’ Joona says amiably.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had to wait,’ he explains. ‘Until I got the chance of direct physical contact.’

  ‘I’ve just received orders to execute you.’

  ‘Yes, the situation’s fairly acute, seeing as I have to get the pistol away from my face, and ideally use it within five seconds.’

  ‘How?’ the man by the door asks.

  ‘In order to catch him by surprise, I mustn’t react to any of his movements,’ Joona explains. ‘That’s why I’ve let him walk up, stop and take precisely two breaths. So I wait until he breathes out the second time before I—’

  ‘Why?’ the man with the pistol asks.

  ‘I gain a few hundredths of a second, because it’s practically impossible to do anything without first breathing in.’

  ‘But why the second breath in particular?’

  ‘Because it’s unexpectedly early and right at the middle of the most common countdown in the world: one, two, three …’

  ‘I get it.’ The man smiles, revealing a brown front tooth.

  ‘The first thing that’s going to move is my left hand,’ Joona explains to the surveillance camera up by the ceiling. ‘It’ll move up towards the barrel of the pistol and away from my face in one fluid movement. I need to grasp it, twist upwards and get to my feet, using his body as a shield. In a single movement. My hands need to prioritise the gun, but at the same time I need to observe the man with the assault rifle. Because as soon as I’ve got control of the pistol he’s the primary threat. I use my elbow against his chin and neck as many times as it takes to get control of the pistol, then I fire three shots and spin round and fire another three shots.’

  The men in the room start again. The situation repeats. The man with the pistol gets his orders over the phone, hesitates, then walks up to Joona and pushes the barrel to his forehead. The man breathes out a second time and is just about to breathe in again to say something when Joona grabs the barrel of the pistol with his left hand.

  The whole thing is remarkably surprising and quick, even though it was expected.

  Joona knocks the gun aside, twisting it towards the ceiling in the same movement, and getting to his feet. He jabs his elbow into the man’s neck four times, takes the pistol and shoots the other man in the torso.

  The three blank shots echo off the walls.

  The first opponent is still staggering backwards when Joona spins round and shoots him in the chest.

  He falls against the wall.

  Joona walks over to the door, grabs the assault rifle and extra cartridge, then leaves the room.

  16

  The door hits the concrete wall hard and bounces back. Joona is changing the cartridge as he marches in. The eight people in the next room all take their eyes off the large screen and look at him.

  ‘Six and a half seconds to the first shot,’ one of them says.

  ‘That’s far too slow,’ Joona says.

  ‘But Markus would have let go of the pistol sooner if your elbow had actually hit him,’ a tall man with a shaved head says.

  ‘Yes, you would have won some time there,’ a female officer adds with a smile.

  The scene is already repeating on the screen. Joona’s taut shoulder, the fluid movement forward, his eye lining up with the sights as the trigger is pulled.

  ‘Pretty damn impressive,’ the group commander says, setting his palms down on the table.

  ‘For a cop,’ Joona concludes.

  They laugh, lean back, and the group commander scratches the tip of his nose as he blushes.

  Joona Linna accepts a glass of water. He doesn’t yet know that what he fears most is about to flare up like a firestorm. He doesn’t yet have any idea of the little spark drifting towards the great lagoon of petrol.

  Joona Linna is at Karlsborg Fortress to instruct the Special Operations Group in close combat. Not because he’s a trained instructor, but because he has more practical experience of the techniques they need to learn than just about anyone else in Sweden. When Joona was eighteen he did his military service at Karlsborg as a paratrooper, and was immediately recruited after basic training to a special unit for operations that couldn’t be solved by conventional forces or weaponry.

  Although a long time has passed since he left the military to study at the Police Academy, he still has dreams about his time as a paratrooper. He’s back on the transport plane, listening to the deafening roar and staring out through the hydraulic hatch. The shadow of the plane moves over the pale water far below like a grey cross. In his dream he runs down the ramp and jumps out into the cold air, hears the whine of the cords, feels his harness jerk as his limbs are thrown forward when the parachute opens. The water approaches at great speed. The black inflatable boat is foaming against the waves far below.

  Joona was trained in the Netherlands for effective close combat with knives, bayonets and pistols. He was taught to exploit changing situations and to use innovative techniques. These goal-orientated techniques were a specialised version of a system of close combat known by its Hebrew name, Krav Maga.

  ‘OK, we’ll take this situation as our starting point, and make it progressively harder as the day goes on,’ Joona says.

  ‘Like hitting two people with one bullet?’ The tall man with the shaved head grins.

  ‘Impossible,’ Joona says.

  ‘We heard that you did it,’ the woman says curiously.

  ‘Oh no.’ Joona smiles, running his hand through his untidy blond hair.

  His phone rings in his inside pocket. He sees on the screen that it’s Nathan Pollock from the National Criminal Investigation Department. Nathan knows where Joona is, and would only call if it was important.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Joona says, then takes the call.

  He drinks from the glass of water, and listens with a smile that slowly fades. Suddenly all the colour drains from his face.

  ‘Is Jurek Walter still locked up?’ he asks.

  His hand is shaking so much that he has to put the glass down on the table.

  17

  Snow is swirling through the air as Joona runs out to his car and gets in. He drives straight across the large exercise yard where he trained as a teenager, takes the corner with the tyres crunching, and leaves the garrison.

  His heart is beating hard and he’s still having trouble believing what Nathan told him. Beads of sweat have appeared on his forehead, and his hands won’t stop shaking.

  He overtakes a convoy o
f articulated lorries on the E20 motorway just before Arboga. He has to hold the wheel with both hands because the drag from the lorries makes his car shake.

  The whole time he can’t stop thinking about the phone call he received in the middle of his training session with the Special Operations Group.

  Nathan Pollock’s voice was quite calm as he explained that Mikael Kohler-Frost was still alive.

  Joona had been convinced that the boy and his younger sister were two of Jurek Walter’s many victims. Now Nathan was telling him that Mikael had been found by the police on a railway bridge in Södertälje, and had been taken to Södermalm Hospital.

  Pollock had said that the Mikael’s condition was serious, but not life-threatening. He hadn’t yet been questioned.

  ‘Is Jurek Walter still locked up?’ was Joona’s first question.

  ‘Yes, he’s still in solitary confinement,’ Pollock had replied.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the boy? How do you know it’s Mikael Kohler-Frost?’ Joona had asked.

  ‘Apparently he’s said his name several times. That’s as much as we know … and he’s the right age,’ Pollock had said. ‘Naturally, we’ve sent a saliva sample to the National Forensics Lab—’

  ‘But you haven’t informed his father?’

  ‘We have to try to get a DNA match before we do that, I mean, we can’t get this wrong …’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  18

  The car sucks up the black, slushy road, and Joona Linna has to force himself not to speed up as his mind conjures up images of what happened so many years before.

  Mikael Kohler-Frost, he thinks.

  Mikael Kohler-Frost has been found alive after all these years.

  The name Frost alone is enough for Joona to relive the whole thing.

  He overtakes a dirty white car and barely notices the child waving a stuffed toy at him through the window. He is immersed in his memories, and is sitting in his colleague Samuel Mendel’s comfortably messy living room.

  Samuel leans over the table, making his curly black hair fall over his forehead as he repeats what Joona has just said.

  ‘A serial killer?’

  Thirteen years ago Joona embarked on a preliminary investigation that would change his life entirely. Together with his colleague Samuel Mendel, he began to investigate the case of two people who had been reported missing in Sollentuna.

  The first case was a fifty-five-year-old woman who went missing when she was out walking one evening. Her dog had been found in a passageway behind the ICA Kvantum supermarket, dragging its leash behind it. Just two days later the woman’s mother-in-law vanished as she was walking the short distance between her sheltered housing and the bingo hall.

  It turned out that the woman’s brother had gone missing in Bangkok five years before. Interpol and the Foreign Ministry had been called in, but he had never been found.

  There are no comprehensive figures for the number of people who go missing around the world each year, but everyone knows the total is a disturbingly large number. In the USA almost one hundred thousand go missing each year, and in Sweden around seven thousand.

  Most of them show up, but there’s still an alarming number who remain missing.

  Only a very small proportion of the ones who are never found have been kidnapped or murdered.

  Joona and Samuel were both relatively new at the National Criminal Investigation Department when they started to look into the case of the two missing women from Sollentuna. Certain aspects were reminiscent of two people who went missing in Örebro four years earlier.

  On that occasion it was a forty-year-old man and his son. They had been on their way to a football match in Glanshammar, but never got there. Their car was found abandoned on a small forest road that was nowhere near the football ground.

  At first it was just an idea, a random suggestion.

  What if there was a direct link between the cases, in spite of the differences in time and location?

  In which case, it wasn’t impossible that more missing people could be connected to these four.

  The preliminary investigation consisted of the most common sort of police work, the sort that happens at a desk, in front of the computer. Joona and Samuel gathered and organised information about everyone who had gone missing in Sweden and not been traced over the previous ten years.

  The idea was to find out if any of those missing people had anything in common beyond the bounds of coincidence.

  They laid the various cases on top of each other, as if they were on transparent paper – and slowly something resembling an astronomical map began to appear out of the vague motif of connected points.

  The unexpected pattern that emerged was that in many of the cases more than one member of the same family had disappeared.

  Joona could remember the silence that had descended upon the room when they stepped back and looked at the result. Forty-five missing people matched that particular criterion. Many of those could probably be dismissed over the following days, but forty-five was still thirty-five more than could reasonably be explained by coincidence.

  19

  One wall of Samuel’s office in the National Criminal Investigation Department was covered with a large map of Sweden, dotted with pins to indicate the missing persons.

  Obviously they couldn’t assume that all forty-five had been murdered, but for the time being they couldn’t rule any of them out.

  Because no known perpetrator could be linked to the times of the disappearances, they started looking for motives and a modus operandi. There were no similarities with cases that had been solved. The murderer they were dealing with this time left no trace of violence, and he hid his victims’ bodies very well.

  The choice of victim usually divides serial killers into two groups: organised killers, who always seek out the ideal victim who matches their fantasies as closely as possible. These killers focus on a particular type of person, exclusively seeking out pre-pubertal blond boys, for example.

  The other group comprises the disorganised killers – here it is the availability of the victim that counts. The victim primarily fills a role in the murderer’s fantasies, and it doesn’t particularly matter who they really are, or what they look like.

  But the serial killer that Joona and Samuel were starting to envisage didn’t seem to fit either of these categories. On the one hand he was disorganised, because the victims were so varied, but on the other hand none of them was especially easy to get hold of.

  They were looking for a serial killer who was practically invisible. He didn’t follow a pattern, and left no evidence, no intentional signature.

  Days went by without the missing women from Sollentuna being found.

  Joona and Samuel had no concrete proof of a serial killer that they could present to their boss. They merely repeated that there couldn’t be any other explanation for all these missing people. Two days later the preliminary investigation was downgraded and the resources for further work reallocated.

  But Joona and Samuel couldn’t let it go, and started to devote their free time during the evenings and weekends to the search.

  They concentrated on the pattern that suggested that if two people had gone missing from the same family, there was an increased risk of a further family member going missing within the near future.

  While they were keeping an eye on the family of the women who had vanished from Sollentuna, two children were reported missing from Tyresö. Mikael and Felicia Kohler-Frost. The children of the well-known author, Reidar Frost.

  20

  Joona looks at the petrol gauge as he passes the Statoil filling station and a snow-covered lay-by.

  He remembers talking to Reidar Frost and his wife Roseanna Kohler three days after their two children went missing. He didn’t mention his suspicions to them – that they had been murdered by a serial killer whom the police had stopped looking for, a murderer whose existe
nce they had only managed to identify in theory.

  Joona just asked his questions, and let the parents cling onto the idea that the children had drowned.

  The family lived on Varvsvägen, in a beautiful house facing a sandy beach and the water. There had been several mild weeks and a lot of the snow had thawed. The streets and footpaths were dark and wet. There was barely any ice along the shoreline, and what remained was grey slush.

  Joona remembers walking through the house, passing a large kitchen and sitting down at a huge white table next to a window. But Roseanna had closed all the curtains, and although her voice was calm her head was shaking the whole time.

  The search for the children was fruitless. There had been countless helicopter searches, divers had been called in, and the water had been dragged for bodies. The surroundings had been searched by chain gangs of both volunteers and specialist dog units.

  But no one had seen or heard anything.

  Reidar Frost looked like a captured animal.

  He just wanted to keep on searching.

  Joona had sat opposite the two parents, asking routine questions about whether they had received any threats, if anyone had behaved oddly or differently, if they had felt they were being followed.

  ‘Everyone thinks they fell in the water,’ the wife had said, her head starting to shake again.

  ‘You mentioned that they sometimes climb out of the window after their bedtime prayers,’ Joona went on calmly.

  ‘Obviously, they’re not supposed to,’ Reidar said.

  ‘But you know that they sometimes creep out and cycle off to see a friend?’

  ‘Rikard.’

  ‘Rikard van Horn, number 7 Björnbärsvägen,’ Joona said.

  ‘We’ve tried talking to Micke and Felicia about it, but … well, they’re children, and I suppose we didn’t think it was that harmful,’ Reidar replied, gently laying his hand over his wife’s.