Lars Kepler - The Sandman

The sound of breathing and heavy footsteps merge with a whining, hissing noise.

‘You’re thinking about your childhood?’ Saga Bauer says.

‘I suppose so,’ Jurek whispers.

They sit in total silence as Johan Jönson stops the recording and looks at Joona with a frown.

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

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

‘He sighs,’ Pollock says.

‘Jurek says he sighs, but are we sure that’s what he does?’ Joona asks.

Johan Jönson 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 exhaled sigh.

‘What did I say?’ Pollock says, smiling broadly.

‘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 afterwards,’ Joona says.

‘Tell me what I should be looking for,’ Johan Jönson says, frustrated.

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

‘I can certainly try.’

‘Isn’t it possible to raise and lower 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 running machine 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. Puffing his cheeks out, he highlights some of the curves and gets rid of them.

Each removed curve appears on a smaller screen instead.

Corinne and Pollock get up. They go outside onto the balcony and freeze for a while as they gaze out across the rooftops and the Philadelphia Church.

Joona remains seated and watches the painstaking work.

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

‘Shouldn’t those be lined up as well?’ Joona says, pointing to three of the removed 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 quickly.

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

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

‘There could be,’ Johan Jönson whispers.

‘I can’t hear it,’ Corinne says.

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a sigh now,’ Johan Jönson admits. ‘But we can’t do any more to it, because at this level the longitudinal soundwaves 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.

Johan Jönson presses his lips together in a way that makes him look like August Strindberg as he surveys the fifteen different curves.

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

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

He tries replaying 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 further apart, then plays it again.

Sweat has broken out on Nathan Pollock’s forehead.

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 Jönson 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, almost shouting.

‘There’s a city called Leninsk-Kuznetsky,’ she says. ‘But because he was just talking about 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 quietly. ‘Jurek has a childhood memory from Leninsk...’

Corinne sits down at the table, her back straight, 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 anything. 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 Walter’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. ‘I mean... now we have a location and an approximate time for his birth. We know he arrived in Sweden in 1994. We’ve got pictures of him, we’ve documented the scars on his body and...’

‘We even have his DNA and blood type,’ Pollock smiles.

‘So either Jurek’s family belonged to the local Kazakhstan population, or they were among the scientists, engineers and military who were sent there from Russia...’

‘I’ll put everything together,’ Pollock says quickly.

‘I’ll try to get hold of the NSC in Kazakhstan,’ Corinne says. ‘Joona? Do you want me to...?’

She falls silent and gives him a quizzical look. Joona stands up slowly, meets her gaze and nods, picks up his coat from a chair and starts walking towards the hall.

‘Where are you going?’ Pollock asks.

‘I need to talk to Susanne Hjälm,’ Joona mutters, and keeps walking.

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