Lars Kepler - The Sandman

David moves off through the deep snow. He’s holding the flare in front of him, and its glow reaches all the way to the stables in the distance.

That’s when Saga catches sight of Jurek’s back and the knife in his hand.

She bangs on the window and tries to open the latches. She tugs at them, but they’ve rusted into place and are impossible to move.

With ice-cold fingers Reidar tries to open the combination lock on the stable door. The little numbered dials are stiff. His fingertips are sticking to the frozen metal. Mikael whispers to him to get a move on.

‘Hurry up, Dad, hurry up...’

Jurek is pushing through the snow with the knife in his hand. Reidar blows on his fingers and manages to get the last digit. He undoes the lock, slides the catch back and tries to open the door.

There’s too much snow on the ground.

As he tugs at it, he can hear the horses moving in their stalls. They’re snorting quietly and stamping in the darkness.

‘Come on, Dad,’ Mikael shouts, pulling at him.

Reidar opens the door a bit further, turns round and sees Jurek Walter approaching with his vicious-looking knife.

With a practised gesture, he wipes the knife-blade against his trousers.

It’s too late to run.

Reidar holds his hands up in self-defence, but Jurek grabs his neck and forces him back, against the wall of the stable.

‘Sorry,’ Reidar manages to say. ‘I’m sorry that—’

With immense force Jurek thrusts the knife straight through Reidar’s shoulder and pins him to the wall. Reidar screams with pain and his vision flares. The horses whinny anxiously, their heavy bodies rubbing against the dividing walls of their stalls.

Reidar is stuck. His shoulder is burning with pain. Every second is unbearable. He can feel hot blood running down his arm and hand.

Mikael is trying to squeeze into the stable, but Jurek catches up with him. He grabs hold of the young man’s hair from behind, pulls him out and slaps him so hard across the face that he collapses in the snow.

‘No, no,’ Reidar pants as he sees a bright light approaching from the manor.

It’s David, running towards them with an emergency flare in his hand. It’s crackling with white light.

‘The air ambulance is on its way,’ he yells, but stops when he sees Jurek turn.

Saga tugs at the chest of drawers and manages to pull it a few centimetres away from the wall. Her head is aching and she still feels horribly dizzy. She spits out some blood, then bends over and takes hold of the bottom of the chest with both hands and overturns it with a roar. It topples forward, crashes to the floor and rolls over.

She quickly snatches up her pistol and smashes the window pane with the butt. Glass rains down onto the floor and tinkles off the window ledge outside.

She blinks and sees the bright light shimmering across the snow. It looks like a white jellyfish deep in the ocean. Jurek is heading towards the man with the flare. The man backs away and tries to hit him with the burning flare, but Jurek is too quick, grabs the man’s arm and breaks it.

Saga knocks the last pieces of glass from the bottom of the window.

Jurek is standing over his prey like a lion, moving quickly and efficiently, hitting the man in the neck and kidneys.

Saga holds out her pistol and blinks the blood away from her eyes so she can see.

The man is lying on his back in the snow, his body jerking. The flare beside him is still casting a bright glow.

Jurek slips out of the way just as Saga fires her pistol. He moves away from the light and into the shadows.

The glow from the flare is illuminating a circle of white snow. The man stops moving and is now lying completely still. The red stable is only visible in brief bursts. Otherwise there is nothing but darkness.

Reidar is gasping for breath. He’s pinned to the wall. The pain from the knife is excruciating. It feels as if that one burning point is all that exists. The warm blood is steaming as it runs down his body.

He sees Jurek vanish right after the shot. David is lying completely still in the snow. There’s no way of telling how badly wounded he is.

To the east the sky has brightened slightly and Reidar can see Saga Bauer in a window on the first floor.

It had been her who had fired and missed.

Reidar is breathing far too quickly, his heart is racing and he realises that he’s going into shock as a result of the loss of blood.

Mikael coughs, puts a hand to his ear and gets unsteadily to his feet.

‘Dad...’

He has no time to say more before Jurek is back. He knocks him down again, then grabs him by one leg and starts to drag him off into the darkness.

‘Mikael,’ Reidar screams.

Jurek drags his son off through the snow. Mikael is flailing with his arms, trying to find something to grab hold of. They disappear towards the rapids, Reidar can only see them as pale shadows now.

Jurek came here to get Mikael, he thinks in confusion.

It’s still far too dark for Saga to be able to tell the figures apart from her vantage point in the window.

Reidar howls as he grabs the handle of the knife and pulls. It’s stuck fast. He pulls again, shifting the angle down slightly to get a better grip, and it cuts into his flesh.

Warm blood runs over the handle and his fingers.

He screams and pulls again, and finally the point comes free from the wall behind him. The knife slips out and Reidar falls forward onto the snow. The pain is so bad that he’s sobbing as he crawls forward and tries to get to his feet.

‘Mikael!’

He stumbles over to the burning flare in the snow, picks it up and feels the sparks prick his hand. He almost falls but manages to keep his balance. He looks towards the open water of the rapids, and can just make out Jurek’s figure against the snow. Reidar starts to follow them, but has no energy left. He knows that Jurek is planning to drag Mikael into the forest and vanish with him for good.

Saga is pointing her pistol out through the window and sees Reidar Frost in the glow of the flare. He’s picked it up, and blood is pouring down his body, he stumbles and looks like he’s going to fall, then he throws the flare.

Saga wipes the blood from her eyebrows and sees the flare spin through the darkness in a wide arc, and follows it with her eyes, seeing it land in the snow. In its white glow she can clearly make out Jurek Walter. He’s dragging Mikael behind him. They’re more than a hundred metres away.

They’re a long way off, but Saga rests her arm against the window frame and takes aim.

Jurek is moving away. The pistol’s sights keep shaking. The black figure keeps moving out of the line of fire.

Saga tries to hold the gun steady. Taking slow breaths, she squeezes the trigger, past the first notch, and sees Jurek’s head slide away.

She keeps losing focus and blinks quickly.

A moment later the angle of fire is better and she squeezes the trigger three times as the sights slip gradually lower.

The harsh, sharp blasts echo between the manor and stable block.

Saga manages to see that at least one of the bullets hits Jurek in the neck. Blood is squirting out, hanging like a red haze in front of him in the bright white light.

She fires off several more shots and sees him let go of Mikael, fall into the shadows and disappear.

Saga backs away from the window, turns and runs through the hidden doorway.

She rushes down the stairs. The pistol in her hand clatters against the banisters. She emerges into the kitchen, runs through the rooms, into the large hall and out into the snow. Gasping, she approaches the glowing light with her pistol raised. Further away she sees the black water of the rapids glint like a metallic fracture in the white landscape.