Lars Kepler - The Sandman

‘And where was that?’ Joona had asked.

‘Visiting workers’ accommodation, barrack number four. That was also where he took his own life, much later.’

Joona is heading down the motorway towards Stockholm at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. The pieces of the puzzle have been coming thick and fast, and he’s confident that he’ll soon be able to see the overall picture.

Twin brothers forced to leave the country, and a father who commits suicide.

The father was a highly educated engineer, but was doing manual labour in one of Sweden’s many gravel pits.

Joona puts his foot down as he tries to get hold of Carlos again, then Magdalena Ronander.

Before he has time to pull up Nathan Pollock’s number, his phone rings and he answers at once.

‘You should be grateful I’m here,’ Anja says. ‘Every police office in the whole of Stockholm is out at Norra Djurgården...’

‘Have they found Felicia?’

‘They’re busy searching the forest beyond the Albano industrial estate, they’ve got dogs and—’

‘Did you read my text?’ Joona interrupts, his jaw clenched with stress.

‘Yes, and I’ve been trying to work out what happened,’ Anja says. ‘It hasn’t been easy, but I think I’ve managed to track down Vadim Levanov, even if the spelling of his name has been westernised. It looks like he arrived in Sweden in 1960, with no passport, from Finland.’

‘And the children?’

‘I’m afraid there’s no mention of any children in the records.’

‘Could he have smuggled them in?’

‘During the fifties and sixties Sweden absorbed loads of visiting workers, the welfare state was being expanded... but the regulations were still very old-fashioned. Visiting workers were thought incapable of looking after their children and Social Services used to place them with foster families or in children’s homes.’

‘But these boys were extradited,’ Joona says.

‘That wasn’t unusual, especially if there was a suspicion that they were Roma... I’m talking to the National Archives tomorrow... There was no migration authority in those days, so the police, Child Welfare Commission and Aliens Department used to take the decisions, often fairly arbitrarily.’

He turns off at Häggvik to refill the tank.

Anja is breathing hard down the phone. This can’t be allowed to slip away, he thinks. There has to be something here that can lead them forward.

‘Do you know where the father worked?’ he asks.

‘I’ve started investigating all the gravel pits in Sweden, but it may take a while because we’re dealing with such old records,’ she says wearily.

Joona thanks Anja several times, ends the call, and pulls up at a red light as he watches a young man push a pram along the footpath at the side of the road.

Snow is blowing along the carriageway, swirling up into the man’s face and eyes. He squints as he turns the pram round to pull it up over a bank of snow.

Joona suddenly remembers what Mikael said about the Sandman being able to walk on the ceiling, and other muddled things. But he had said three times that the Sandman smells of sand. It may just have been something from the old fairytales, but what if there was a connection to a gravel quarry, a sand pit?

A car horn sounds behind Joona and he starts driving again, but pulls over to the side of the roads shortly afterwards and calls Reidar Frost.

‘What’s going on?’ Reidar asks.

‘I’d like to talk to Mikael – how is he?’

‘He feels bad about not being able to remember more – we’ve had the police here several hours each day.’

‘Every little detail could be important.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ Reidar says hurriedly. ‘We’d do anything, you know that, that’s what I keep saying, we’re here, twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Is he awake?’

‘I can wake him – what did you want to ask?’

‘He’s said that the Sandman smells of sand... is it possible that the capsule is near a gravel pit? At some gravel pits they crush stone, and at others—’

‘I grew up near a gravel pit, on the Stockholm Ridge, and—’

‘You grew up near a gravel pit?’

‘In Antuna,’ Reidar replies, slightly bewildered.

‘Which pit?’

‘Rotebro... there’s a large gravel works north of the Antuna road, past Smedby.’

Joona pulls out onto the opposite carriageway and drives back to the motorway, heading north again. He’s already fairly close to Rotebro, so the gravel pit can’t be far away.

Joona listens to Reidar’s weary, rasping voice whilst hearing simultaneously – like a double-exposure – Mikael’s peculiar fragments of memory: the Sandman smells of sand... his fingertips are made of porcelain and when he takes the sand out of the bag they tinkle against each other... and a moment later you’re asleep...

The traffic thins out as he heads north. Joona is driving faster and faster, thinking that after all these years, three of the pieces of the puzzle are finally fitting together.

Jurek Walter’s father worked in a gravel pit, and killed himself in his home there.

Mikael says the Sandman smells of sand.

And Reidar Frost grew up near an old gravel pit in Rotebro.

What if it’s the same gravel pit? It can’t be a coincidence, the pieces have to fit together. In which case this is where Felicia is, not where all his colleagues are searching, he thinks.

The ridges of snowy slush between the lanes make the car swerve. Dirty water is spraying up at the windscreen.

Joona pulls in ahead of one of the airport buses and carries on down the slip road and past a large car park. He sounds his horn and a man drops his bags of groceries as he leaps out of the way.

Two cars have stopped at a red light, but Joona veers into the other lane and turns sharp left. The tyres slide on the wet road surface. The car lurches across the snow-covered grass and straight through a bank of snow. Compacted snow and ice rattle over and underneath the car. He speeds up again, past Rotebro shopping centre and up the narrow Norrviken road that runs parallel to the high ridge.

The streetlights are swaying in the wind, lighting up the driving snow.

He reaches the top and sees the entrance to the gravel works a little too late, turns sharply and brakes hard in front of two heavy metal barriers. The wheels slide on the snow, Joona wrenches the steering wheel, the car spins and the rear end slams into one of the barriers.

The red glass from the brake-light shatters across the snow.

Joona throws the door open, gets out of the car and runs past the blue barrack containing the office.

Breathing heavily, he carries on down the steep slope towards the vast crater that has been excavated over the years. Floodlights on tall towers illuminate this strange lunar landscape with its static diggers and vast heaps of sifted sand.

Joona thinks that no one can be buried here, it would be impossible to bury any bodies here because everything is constantly being dug up. A gravel quarry is a hole that gets wider and deeper every day.

The heavy snow is falling through the artificial light.

He runs past huge stone-crushers with massive caterpillar tracks.

He’s in the most recent section of the pit. The sand is bare and it’s obvious that work is still going on here every day.

Beyond the machinery there are some blue containers and three caravans.

Joona’s shadow flies past him on the ground as the light from another floodlight hits him from behind a pile of sand.

Half a kilometre away he can see a snow-covered area in front of a steep drop. That must be the older part of the pit.

He makes his way up a steep slope where people have dumped rubbish, old fridges, broken furniture and trash. His feet slip on the snow but he keeps going, sending cascades of stones down behind him, until he shoves a rusty bicycle aside and makes it to the top.