Lars Kepler - The Sandman

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

When the guard unlocks the door she starts and opens her eyes. She begins rocking her upper body when she sees Joona come in. Her broken arm has been fixed up, and the other is wrapped round her waist, as though she were trying to hug herself.

‘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 beside her on the bunk.

‘Why didn’t you post 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 could never understand, no one could.’

‘It was me who arrested him, but—’

‘Everyone hates me,’ she goes on without 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 if I did, I don’t know what I thought.’

‘Did he want it sent to a law firm?’

Susanne Hjälm’s body is shaking violently, and her sweaty hair hits her forehead and cheeks.

‘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 slurs.

‘When I asked you before, you said the name 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 bear it any more, I can’t bear it...’

‘Are you sure he was talking Russian?’

‘He said such terrible things...’

Susanne stands up on the bed, beside herself, and 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 shut your family away in your cellar because you were frightened of Jurek.’

Susanne looks at him, then starts pacing up and down on the bed again.

‘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 as you,’ 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 eyes, and wipes her mouth.

‘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 gave Jurek the injection in his buttock... As I was putting a plaster on it, I simply 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 St Petersburg.’

She breaks off and lowers her head.

‘What did he say?’

‘He promised to cut Ellen and little Anja open... and let me choose which one would bleed to death,’ she says, then smiles to stop herself 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, not Kazakh?’

‘Jurek Walter 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 replied 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 you gave it to Jurek?’

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

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

‘Try to remember what—’

‘I want my children, I can’t bear 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 Walter 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 though she’s going to start laughing.

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

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

‘I saw him in the car park 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 and collapses in a heap on the floor.

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

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

‘I’m not getting a sausage,’ she says.

‘A sausage,’ he repeats with a wry smile.

‘Isn’t that what you say?’

‘It’s not too common these days, but...’

‘I spoke to an Anton Takirov at Kazakhstan’s security police, the NSC,’ she says. ‘It only took a second. He told me that Jurek Walter isn’t a Kazakh citizen quicker than I can open my laptop. I was very polite and asked them to conduct a new search, but this Takirov just seemed insulted and said that they did actually have computers in Kazakhstan.’

‘Maybe he’s not good at talking to women.’

‘When I tried to tell Mr Takirov that DNA matching can take a bit of time, he interrupted me and explained that they had the most modern system in the world.’

‘So basically they don’t want to help.’

‘In contrast to the federal security service of the Russian Federation. We have a good relationship with them these days. Dmitry Urgov just called me back. They’ve got nothing that matches what I sent them, but he said he’d personally ask the national police to look through the pictures and check their DNA register...’