Lars Kepler - The Sandman

‘You have to trust me,’ he says curtly.

‘It sounds like you’re planning on dumping me in the first house we come to.’

‘No.’

‘Sounds like it,’ she persists, sounding hurt. ‘I think I’ll stay here until I get discharged.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you sure they’re going to let you out?’

‘Yes,’ she replies honestly.

‘Because you’re a good little girl who helped your sick mum when she—’

‘I wasn’t good,’ Saga interrupts, pulling her arm away. ‘Do you think I wanted to be there? I was only a child, I was just doing what I had to.’

He leans back on the sofa and nods.

‘Compulsion is interesting.’

‘I wasn’t forced into it,’ she protests.

He smiles at her. ‘You just said you were.’

‘Not like that... I mean, I managed to do it,’ she explains. ‘She was only in pain in the evenings, and at night.’

Saga falls silent, thinking about one morning after a particularly difficult night, when her mother was making breakfast for her. She was frying eggs, making sandwiches, pouring milk. Then they went outside in their nightdresses. The grass in the garden was damp with dew, and they took the cushions with them down to the hammock.

‘You gave her codeine,’ Jurek says, in a strange tone of voice.

‘It helped.’

‘But they’re not very strong – how many did she have to take that last evening?’

‘A lot... she was in such terrible pain...’

Saga rubs her hand across her forehead and realises to her surprise that she’s perspiring heavily. She doesn’t want to talk about this, she hasn’t thought about it for years.

‘More than ten, I suppose?’ Jurek asks lightly.

‘She used to take two, but that evening she needed far more... I spilled them on the rug, but... I don’t know, I must have given her twelve, maybe thirteen pills.’

Saga feels the muscles in her face tighten. She’s scared she’s going to start crying if she stays, so she gets up quickly to go to her room.

‘Your mum didn’t die of cancer,’ Jurek says.

She stops and turns towards him.

‘That’s enough,’ she says sternly.

‘She didn’t have a brain tumour,’ he says quietly.

‘OK... I was with my mum when she died, you know nothing about her, you can’t—’

‘The headaches,’ Jurek interrupts. ‘The headaches don’t subside the following morning if you have a tumour.’

‘That’s how it was for her,’ she says firmly.

‘The pain is caused by the pressure on brain tissue and blood vessels as the tumour grows. That doesn’t pass, it just gets worse.’

She looks into Jurek’s eyes and feels a shiver run down her back.

‘I...’

Her voice is no more than a whisper. She feels like shouting and screaming, but she’s suddenly powerless.

If she’s honest, she’s always known that there was something odd about her memories. She remembers yelling at her father when she was a teenager, saying he lied about everything, that he was the biggest liar she’d ever met.

He had told her that her mother hadn’t had cancer.

She’s always thought he was lying to her in an effort to excuse his betrayal of her mum.

Now she’s standing here, no longer sure where the idea of her mother’s brain tumour came from. She can’t remember her mum ever saying she had cancer, and they never went to any hospital.

But why did Mum cry every evening if she wasn’t sick? It doesn’t make sense. Why did she make me call Dad all the time and tell him he had to come home? Why did Mum take codeine if she wasn’t in pain? Why did she let her own daughter give her all those pills?

Jurek’s face is a sombre, rigid mask. Saga turns away and starts walking towards the door. She wants to run away, she doesn’t want to hear what he’s about to say.

‘You killed your own mother,’ he says calmly.

Saga stops abruptly. Her breathing has become shallow but she forces herself not to show her feelings. She has to remind herself who’s in charge of this situation. He may believe that he’s deceiving her, but in actual fact she’s the one deceiving him.

Saga adopts a neutral expression, then turns slowly to face him.

‘Codeine,’ Jurek says, smiling joylessly. ‘Codeine phosphate only comes in the form of twenty-five-milligram tablets... I know precisely how many it takes to kill a human being.’

‘Mum told me to give her the pills,’ she explains hollowly.

‘But I think you knew she’d die,’ he says. ‘I’m sure your mum thought you knew... She thought you wanted her to die.’

‘Fuck you,’ she whispers.

‘Maybe you deserve to be locked up here for ever.’

‘No.’

He looks at her with terrifying gravity in his eyes, with metallic precision.

‘Maybe it will be enough if you get one more sleeping pill,’ he says. ‘Because yesterday Bernie said he had some Stesolid wrapped in a piece of paper, in a crack under his sink... Unless he only said it to buy time.’

Her heart speeds up. Bernie hid sleeping pills in his room? What’s she going to do now? She has to stop this. She can’t let Jurek get hold of the sleeping pills. What if there are enough for him to carry out his escape plan?

‘Are you going into his room?’ she asks.

‘The door’s open.’

‘It would be better if I did it,’ she says quickly.

‘Why?’

Jurek is giving her a look that seems almost amused, while she tries desperately to come up with a reasonable answer.

‘If they catch me,’ she says, ‘they’ll just think I’m addicted and—’

‘Then we won’t get any more pills,’ he retorts.

‘I think I can get more from the doctor anyway,’ she says.

Jurek considers this, then nods.

‘He looks at you as if he were the one who was captive.’

She opens the door to Bernie’s room and goes inside.

In the light from the dayroom she can see that his room is an exact copy of hers. When the door closes behind her, everything goes dark. She walks over to the wall, feeling her way round, picking up the smell of stale urine from the toilet, then she reaches the sink, the edges of which are wet, as if it’s recently been cleaned.

The doors to the dayroom will be closing in a few minutes.

She tells herself not to think about her mother, just concentrate on the job at hand. Her chin starts to tremble, but she manages to pull herself together, stifling the tears even though her throat feels as if it’s going to burst. She kneels down and runs her fingers across the cool underside of the sink. She reaches the wall and feels along the silicone seal, but can’t find anything. A drop of water falls on her neck. She blinks in the darkness, reaches further down, touches the floor. Another drip falls between her shoulder blades. She suddenly notices that the basin is sloping slightly. That’s why the water on top is dripping onto her instead of draining back into the bowl.

She pushes the basin up with her shoulder and feels along the underside where it joins the wall. Her fingers find a crack. There it is. A tiny package, tucked inside. Sweat is running from her armpits. She pushes the basin up further. It creaks as she tries to grab hold of the package. Carefully she manages to pull it out. Jurek was right. Pills. Tightly wrapped in toilet paper. She’s breathing hard as she crawls out, tucks the package in her trousers and stands up.

As she feels her way to the door to the dayroom she thinks about having to tell Jurek she didn’t find anything, that Bernie must have been lying about the pills. She reaches the wall, quickly moves along it until she finds the door and emerges into the dayroom.