The Sandman Read online

  “She’s in control of the situation,” Pollock says, opening his black notebook.

  “Let’s hope so,” Joona mutters.

  “Saga’s brilliant,” Johan Jönson says. “She’s getting him to talk.”

  “But we still don’t know anything about Jurek,” Pollock says, tapping the table with a pen. “Apart from the fact that that’s not his real name.”

  “And that he wants to escape,” Corinne says, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Joona says.

  “But what does he have in mind? What does he want five sleeping pills for? Who’s he planning to give them to?” Corinne asks with a frown.

  “He can’t drug the staff, because they’re not allowed to take anything from him,” Pollock says.

  “Let’s allow Saga to continue doing what she’s doing,” Corinne says after a brief pause.

  “I don’t like it,” Joona says.

  He stands up and goes over to the window. It has started snowing again.

  “Before we move on,” Joona continues, turning to face the room, “I’d like to hear the recording one more time, in particular the bit where Saga says she might not want to leave the hospital.”

  “We’ve only listened to it thirty-five times so far,” Corinne sighs.

  “I know, but I get this feeling that we’re missing something,” he explains, in a voice sharpened with conviction. “To begin with, Jurek sounds the same as usual when he says there are better places than the hospital, but when Saga responds that there are probably worse places, too, she manages to throw him off-balance.”

  “Maybe,” Corinne says, looking down.

  “No ‘maybe’ about it,” Joona insists. “I’ve spent hours talking to Jurek, and I can tell when his voice changes. It becomes reflective, but only for a few moments, when he’s describing the place with the red clay.”

  “And the high-voltage electricity wires and big bulldozers,” Pollock says.

  “I know there’s something there,” Joona says. “Not only does Jurek seem to surprise himself when he starts describing what sounds like a genuine memory, but—”

  “But it doesn’t go anywhere,” Corinne interrupts.

  “I want to listen to the recording again,” Joona says, turning toward Johan.

  123

  Johan leans forward and moves the cursor on the screen across the sequence of sound waves. The speakers crackle and hiss. The rhythmic sound of footsteps on the treadmill becomes audible.

  “We can get out of the hospital together.”

  There’s a knocking, then a rustling noise that gets gradually louder.

  “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t really have anything left outside.”

  “Left? Going back is never an option. But there are better places than this.”

  “And probably some worse.”

  More knocking, then a sigh.

  “What did you say?”

  “I just sighed, because it occurred to me that I can actually remember a worse place.”

  His voice is oddly soft and hesitant as he continues: “The air was filled with the hum of high-voltage electricity wires. The roads were wrecked by big bulldozers. And the tracks were full of water and red clay up to your waist. But at least I could still open my mouth and breathe.”

  “What do you mean?” Saga says.

  Applause and more laughter from the television.

  “That worse places might be preferable to better ones,” Jurek replies, almost inaudibly.

  The sounds of breathing and heavy footsteps merge with the drone of the treadmill.

  “You’re thinking about your childhood?” Saga says.

  “I suppose so,” Jurek whispers.

  They sit in silence as Johan stops the recording and frowns at Joona.

  “We’re not going to get any further with this,” Pollock says.

  “What if Jurek’s saying something that we’re not hearing?” Joona persists, pointing at the screen. “There’s a gap in the recording, isn’t there? Just after Saga says there are worse places outside the hospital.”

  “He sighs,” Pollock says.

  “That’s what it sounds like, but are we sure that’s what he does?” Joona asks.

  Johan scratches his stomach, moves the cursor back, raises the volume, and plays the segment again.

  “I need a cigarette,” Corinne says, picking up her shiny handbag from the floor.

  The speakers hiss, and there’s a loud creaking sound followed by an exhalation.

  “What did I say?” Pollock says.

  “Try playing it slower,” Joona insists.

  Pollock is drumming nervously on the table. The clip plays again at half-speed, and now the sigh sounds like a storm sweeping ashore.

  “He’s sighing,” Corinne says.

  “Yes, but there’s something about the pause, and the tone of his voice afterward,” Joona says.

  “Tell me what I should be looking for,” Johan says, frustrated.

  “I don’t know. I want you to imagine that he’s actually saying something, even if it isn’t audible.” Joona can’t help smiling at his own cryptic answer.

  “I can certainly try.”

  “Isn’t it possible to isolate and amplify 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 treadmill 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. He highlights some of the curves and gets rid of them.

  Each excised curve appears on a smaller screen.

  Corinne and Pollock walk onto the balcony to get some fresh air. They gaze out across the rooftops and the Philadelphia Church.

  Joona remains seated and scrutinizes the painstaking work.

  After thirty-five minutes, Johan 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 declares, and stops the playback.

  “Shouldn’t those be lined up as well?” Joona says, pointing to three of the deleted 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.

  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, as it’s repeated at just under normal speed, the dragging sound resembles a shaky exhalation.

  “Isn’t there something there?” Joona asks with renewed concentration.

  “There could be,” Johan says.

  “I can’t hear it,” Corinne says.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound as much like a sigh now,” Johan admits. “But we can’t do any more to it: after this point, the longitudinal sound waves 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 purses his lips together as he surveys the fifteen different curves.

  “You’re really not supposed to do this,” he mutters.

  With surgical precision, he adjusts the timing of the curves and extends some of the peaks to longer plateaux.

  He replays 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 farther apart, then plays it again.

  Sweat has broken out on Pollock’s fo
rehead.

  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 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.

  “There’s a city called Leninsk-Kuznetsky,” she says. “But because he mentioned 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. “Jurek has a childhood memory from Leninsk.”

  Corinne sits down at the table, 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. 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’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. “We now have a location and an approximate age. We know he arrived in Sweden in 1994. We have pictures of him, we’ve documented the scars on his body, and—”

  “We have his DNA and blood type,” Pollock says.

  “So either Jurek’s family was part of the local Kazakhstan population, or they were among the scientists, engineers, and military personnel who were sent there from Russia.”

  “I’ll put everything together,” Pollock says quickly.

  “I’ll try to get hold of the National Security Committee in Kazakhstan,” Corinne says. “Joona? Do you want me to…”

  She stops and gives him a quizzical look. Joona meets her gaze and nods. He picks up his coat from a chair and starts walking toward the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Pollock calls after him.

  “I need to talk to Susanne Hjälm,” Joona mutters.

  125

  When Corinne was talking about the scientists who were sent to the test facility in Kazakhstan, Joona was 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. They walk through the women’s section of Kronoberg Prison together.

  The guard stops outside a thick metal door. Joona looks in through the window. Susanne is sitting motionless, eyes closed. Her lips are moving, as if she is praying under her breath.

  When the guard unlocks the door, she startles and opens her eyes. She begins rocking her upper body when she sees Joona come in. Her broken arm is in a cast, and the other is hugging her stomach.

  “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 next to her on the bunk.

  “Why didn’t you send 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 won’t be able to understand. No one can.”

  “I’m the one who arrested him, but—”

  “Everyone hates me,” she continues, not 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 find me, you should—”

  “Do you remember the address on the letter?” Joona interrupts.

  “I burned it. I thought it would end. I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Did he want it sent to a law firm?”

  Susanne’s body is shaking violently.

  “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 says.

  “When I asked you before, you said the name on the address 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 take it anymore, I—”

  “Are you sure he was speaking Russian?”

  “He said such terrible things….”

  126

  Susanne stands up on the bed. She’s beside herself. She 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 hid your family in your cellar because you were afraid of Jurek.”

  Susanne looks at him, then starts pacing back and forth on the bed.

  “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 thing you did,” 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 eye.

  “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 I gave Jurek the injection in his buttock. As I was putting a bandage on it, I 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 Saint Petersburg—”

  She breaks off and lowers her head.

  “What did he say?”

  “He promised to cut Ellen and Anna open…and let me choose which one would bleed to death,” she says, then smiles to stop herself from 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 and not Kazakh?”

  “He 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 was responding 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 y
ou gave it to Jurek?”

  “I don’t know why. I suppose I was thinking that it was a human right, but he isn’t human.”

  She starts crying and takes a few steps back on the mattress.

  “Try to remember what—”

  “I want my children. I can’t take 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 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 if she’s about to start laughing.

  “Do you?” she says. “You really don’t know anything.”

  She blinks her dry eyes, and her hand is shaking as she raises it to brush her hair from her face.

  “I saw him in the parking lot 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 frame, and collapses in a heap on the floor.

  127

  Corinne puts her phone down on the table and shakes her head, sending a waft of expensive perfume over to Pollock.

  He’s been waiting for her to conclude the call, and has been thinking of asking if she’d like to have dinner with him one evening.

  “Nobody seems to know anything about Jurek,” she says. “I spoke to an Anton Takirov at Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee. He told me that Jurek Walter isn’t a Kazakh citizen faster than I can open my laptop. I was very polite and asked them to conduct a new search, but this Takirov just sounded insulted and said that they did actually have computers in Kazakhstan.”