Lars Kepler - The Sandman

Bernie is dangling in the air, with his feet only just off the floor, trying to pull himself up with the lead, but he isn’t strong enough.

Saga goes into her room, walks over to the door and its reinforced glass window. She kicks at it as hard as she can, but all she can hear is a muffled thud from the metal. She pulls back, turns and kicks again, backs up and kicks, then kicks again. The solid door vibrates slightly, but the heavy sound of her kicks carries into the concrete walls. She goes on kicking, until finally she hears agitated voices in the corridor, followed by rapid footsteps and the whirr of the electric lock.

The lights in the ceiling go out. Saga is lying on her side in bed, with her eyes open.

God, what should I have done? She’s burning up with anguish.

Her feet, ankles and knees ache from the kicks.

She doesn’t know if she could have saved Bernie by intervening. Maybe she could have, maybe Jurek wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

But there was no doubt that she would have exposed herself to danger and ruined any chance of saving Felicia.

So she went into her room and kicked at the door. Which had been desperate and pathetic, she thinks.

She kicked on the door as hard as she could, hoping that the guards would wonder where the noise was coming from and finally glance at their monitors.

But nothing happened. They didn’t hear her. She should have kicked harder.

It felt like an eternity before any voices and footsteps approached.

She’s lying on her bed and trying to tell herself that the staff got there in time, that Bernie is now in intensive care, that his condition is stable.

The outcome depends on how tightly the noose squeezed the arteries in his neck.

She’s thinking that Jurek might have tied a bad noose, even though she knows that wasn’t the case.

Since Saga returned to her room all she’s done is lie on her bed, feeling frozen. Dinner was dished out by the girl with the piercings, but she’s only eaten the peas and two mouthfuls of potato from the fish gratin.

Saga lies in the darkness thinking about Bernie’s face as he shook his head with a look of total helplessness in his eyes. Jurek moved like a shadow. He conducted the execution dispassionately, simply doing what he had to, kicking the chair away and then walking to his room without hurrying.

Saga switches on the lamp by her bed, then sits up and puts her feet on the floor. She turns her face towards the CCTV camera in the ceiling, towards its black eye, and waits.

As usual, Joona was right, she thinks as she stares at the camera’s round lens. He thought there was a chance that Jurek would approach her.

He had actually started talking to her in such a personal way that even Joona ought to be surprised.

Saga thinks of how she broke the rule about not talking about her parents, her family. She just hopes that the officers listening don’t think she lost control of the situation. She persuades herself it was an attempt to deepen the conversation,. She was perfectly aware of what she was doing when she told serial killer Jurek Walter about one of the most difficult periods of her life.

She’s never forgotten what Jurek Walter has done, but she hasn’t felt threatened by him. That’s probably benefitted the infiltration, she thinks. She’s been more scared of Bernie. Up until the moment when Jurek hanged him with the lead.

Saga massages her neck with her hand, and goes on staring at the eye of the camera. She must have been sitting like that for over an hour now.

Anders Rönn has logged in and is sitting in his room trying to summarise the day’s events in the unit journal.

Why is everything happening now?

The same day every month the staff go through the medicine store and other perishable goods.

It takes no longer than forty minutes.

He, My and Leif were outside the medicine store when they suddenly heard the noise.

Deep rumbling, echoing within the walls. My dropped the inventory list on the floor and ran to the surveillance control room. Anders followed her. My reached the large monitor and cried out when she saw the image from patient room 2. Bernie was hanging lifeless against the door to the dayroom. Urine was dripping from his toes, forming a puddle beneath him.

Anders’s skin is still crawling. As a result of the suicide in the ward he was summoned to a crisis meeting of the hospital committee. The hospital manager came straight from a children’s party, annoyed to have been called away in the middle of a game. The manager had looked at him and said that perhaps it had been a mistake to allow an inexperienced doctor to assume the role of senior consultant. His round face with its deeply dimpled chin quivered.

Anders gulps and blushes when he recalls how he stood up and apologised, stammering and trying to explain that, according to his medical notes, Bernie Larsson had been extremely depressed, and that he had found the transfer difficult.

‘Are you still here?’

He starts and looks up to see My standing in the doorway, smiling wearily at him.

‘The hospital management want the report first thing tomorrow morning, so you’re probably going to have to put up with me for a few more hours.’

‘Tough shit,’ she says with a yawn.

‘You can go and lie down in the rest-room if you like,’ he says.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘I mean it. After all, I have to be here anyway.’

‘Are you sure? That’s really sweet of you.’

He smiles at her.

‘Get a couple of hours’ sleep. I’ll wake you when I’m ready to leave.’

Anders hears her walk down the corridor, past the changing room and into the rest-room.

The glow from the computer screen fills Anders’s little office. He clicks to open the calendar, then adds some newly arranged meetings with relatives and care workers.

His fingers pause above the keyboard as he thinks about the new patient again. He feels caught in that moment, the seconds when he was in her room, pulling down her trousers and underwear, and saw her white skin turn red after the two injections. He touched her as a doctor, but he looked between her thighs at her genitals, her blonde hair and closed vagina.

Anders makes a note about a rearranged meeting, then clicks to open up past assessments, unable to concentrate properly.

He reads through the report for Social Services, then gets up and goes out to the surveillance control room.

As he sits down in front of the large screen to look at the nine squares, he immediately notices that Saga Bauer is awake. Her bedside light is switched on. She is sitting quite still and staring at him, directly into the camera.

Feeling a peculiar weight inside him, Anders looks at the other cameras. Patient rooms 1 and 2 are dark. The airlock and dayroom are quiet. The camera outside the room in which My is resting shows nothing but a closed door. The security company’s staff are beyond the first security door.

Anders highlights patient room 3, and the image instantly fills the other screen. The lamp in the ceiling of the surveillance control room reflects off the dusty screen. He moves his chair closer. Saga is still sitting there, staring up at him.

He wonders what she wants.

Her pale face is lit up, and the skin on her neck is taut.

She massages the back of her neck with one hand, rises from the bed and takes a couple of steps forward, all the while looking up at the camera.

Anders clicks away from the image, gets up, looks at the guards and the closed door of the rest-room.

He goes over to the security door, runs his card through the reader and walks into the corridor. The nocturnal lighting has a flat grey tone. The three doors are glowing dully, like lead. He walks up to her door and looks in through the reinforced glass. Saga is still standing in the middle of the floor, but turns to look towards the door as he opens the hatch.