Lars Kepler - The Sandman

Presumably Jurek hadn’t foreseen how restrictive the verdict of the Court of Appeal would be.

An unlimited sentence and no contact with the outside world, locked away in the secure unit of the Löwenströmska Hospital.

Jurek Walter bided his time and formulated a plan as the years passed. The brothers had probably each been trying to work out a solution when Susanne Hjälm chose to give Jurek a letter from a lawyer. It’s impossible to know what the encrypted letter said, but the evidence suggests that Jurek’s brother simply gave him a status report about Joona Linna.

Jurek needed to get out, and realised that there was a chance to make a dent in his isolation if he could only smuggle a letter out to the PO box that the brothers sometimes used to communicate to each other.

The twins had learned advanced cryptography from their father, and Jurek managed to make his letter look like a plea for legal help. In actual fact it was an order to release Mikael. Jurek knew the news would reach Joona Linna, and that the police would contact him to try to find out where Felicia was. He didn’t know what form this contact would take, but he was convinced it would give him the opportunity he had been waiting for.

Because no one had attempted to negotiate with him about finding the girl, he realised that one of the unit’s new patients must be a police officer, and when Saga tried to save Bernie Larsson, he knew for certain that it was her.

Jurek had been watching the young doctor, Anders Rönn, as he overstepped his authority and enjoyed the power he wielded in the secure unit.

When Jurek noticed his undisguised fascination for Saga, he knew how his escape could be accomplished. All he had to do was lure the young doctor – with his keys and pass card – into Saga’s cell. There was no way the doctor would be able to resist this sleeping beauty. Jurek spent several nights wetting toilet paper, drying it against his face, and creating a head that would make it look as if he was asleep in his bed.

Saga stops outside the bakery in the cold wind sweeping along Sankt Paulsgatan, unsure whether she feels up to going in right now.

She recalls what Joona had said about Jurek lying to everyone. Jurek listened and pieced together everything he found out, using it to his own advantage, and mixing lies with truth to make his lies stronger.

Saga turns and makes her way across Mariatorget towards Hornsgatan. She walks through the swirling snow as if she is isolated in a tunnel of grief with only the winter light and her memories of herself as a little girl.

She didn’t want to kill her mum, she knows that, it wasn’t intentional.

Saga carries on walking slowly, thinking about her dad. Lars-Erik Bauer. A cardiologist at Sankt Göran Hospital. She hasn’t spoken to him properly since she was thirteen years old. Yet Jurek made her remember how he used to push her on the swing at her grandparents’ when she was little, before Mum got ill...

Suddenly she stops, and feels a shiver run down her neck and through her arms.

A man walks past, pulling a little girl on a sledge as it scrapes along the ground.

Saga thinks that Jurek lied to everyone.

Why does she think he was telling her the truth?

Saga sits down on a snow-covered park bench, takes her phone out of her pocket and calls Nils Åhlén.

‘Nils Åhlén, Forensic Medicine Department.’

‘Hello, Saga Bauer here,’ she says. ‘I’d like—’

‘The body’s been identified now,’ Åhlén interrupts. ‘His name’s Anders Rönn.’

‘That wasn’t what I wanted to ask.’

‘What is it, then?’

A short silence follows as Saga watches the snow blowing off the statue of Thor raising his hammer against the Midgard Serpent, then suddenly she hears herself ask:

‘How many codeine phosphate pills would it take to kill someone?’

‘Child or adult?’ Åhlén asks, without seeming remotely surprised.

‘Adult,’ Saga replies, swallowing hard.

She hears Åhlén breathe through his nose as he taps at his keyboard.

‘It would depend on size and tolerance... but between thirty-five and forty-five pills would probably be a fatal dose.’

‘Forty-five?’ Saga asks, clutching her ear as the tinnitus flares up. ‘But if she was only given thirteen, could that kill her? Could she die from thirteen pills?’

‘No, she couldn’t, she’d fall asleep and wake up with—’

‘So she took the rest herself,’ Saga whispers, standing up unsteadily.

She can feel tears of relief in her eyes. Jurek was a liar; that was all he did, he destroyed people with his lies.

All her life she has hated her father for leaving them. For never coming, for letting her mum die.

She has to find out the truth. There’s no other option.

She gets her phone out again, calls directory inquiries and asks to be put through to Lars-Erik Bauer in Enskede.

Saga walks slowly across the square and the phone rings.

‘This is Pellerina,’ a child’s voice says.

Saga is rendered speechless, and ends the call without saying anything. She stands quite still and looks up at the white sky above St Paul’s Church.

‘Bloody hell,’ she mutters, and dials the number again.

Saga waits in the snow until the child’s voice answers a second time.

‘Hello, Pellerina,’ she says in a steady voice. ‘I’d like to talk to Lars-Erik, please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’ the girl asks, sounding much older than she is.

‘My name’s Saga,’ she whispers.

‘I’ve got a big sister called Saga,’ Pellerina says. ‘But I’ve never met her.’

Saga can’t speak. There’s a lump in her throat. She hears Pellerina pass the phone to someone and say that Saga wants to speak to him.

‘This is Lars-Erik,’ a familiar voice says.

Saga takes a deep breath, and thinks that it’s too late for anything but the truth.

‘Dad, I have to ask... when Mum died... were the two of you married?’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘We’d got divorced two years earlier, when you were five. She never let me see you. I’d got hold of a lawyer who was going to help me to...’

He falls silent and Saga closes her eyes and tries to stop shaking.

‘Mum said you’d abandoned us,’ she says. ‘She said you couldn’t deal with her illness and that you didn’t want me.’

‘Maj was ill, she was mentally ill, bipolar and... I’m so sorry you had such a bad time.’

‘I called you that night,’ she says, in a voice that sounds very lonely.

‘Yes,’ her dad sighs. ‘Your mum used to force you to call... She would call as well, all night long, thirty times, maybe more.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Where are you? Just tell me where you are. I can come and get you...’

‘Thanks, Dad, but... I have to go and see a friend.’

‘How about after that?’ he asks.

‘I’ll call.’

‘Please, Saga, make sure you do,’ he says.

She nods, then walks through the snow to Hornsgatan and hails a taxi.

Saga is waiting at reception in the Karolinska Hospital. Joona Linna is no longer in intensive care, but has been moved to a smaller room. As she walks towards the lifts, she thinks of the look on Joona’s face after Disa’s death.

The only thing he asked of her when she last visited him was to find Jurek Walter’s dead body and let him see it.

She knows she killed Jurek, but she still has to tell Joona that Carlos has sent police divers under the ice for several days without finding the body.

The door to his room on the eighth floor is half-open. Saga stops in the corridor when she hears a woman say she’s going to fetch a thermal blanket. A moment later a smiling nurse comes out, then turns back towards the room again.