The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер

his name. According to the records, he hadn’t lived anywhere else since he arrived in Sweden from Poland in 1994 and was granted a work permit.

      He had taken a job as a mechanic for a small company, Menge’s Engineering Workshop, where he repaired train gearboxes and renovated diesel engines.

      All the evidence suggested that he lived a lonely, peaceful life.

      Joona and Samuel and the two forensics officers didn’t know what they might find in Jurek Walter’s flat. A torture chamber or trophy cabinet, jars of formaldehyde, freezers containing body parts, shelves bulging with photographic documentation?

      The police had cordoned off the immediate vicinity of the block of flats, and the whole of the second floor.

      They put on protective clothing, opened the door and started to set out boards to walk on, so that they wouldn’t ruin any evidence.

      Jurek Walter lived in a two-room flat measuring thirty-three square metres.

      There was a pile of junk mail below the letterbox. The hall was completely empty. There were no shoes or clothes in the wardrobe beside the front door.

      They moved further in.

      Joona was prepared for someone to be hiding inside, but everything was perfectly still, as if time had abandoned the place.

      The blinds were drawn. The flat smelled of sunshine and dust.

      There was no furniture in the kitchen. The fridge was open and switched off. There was nothing to suggest it had ever been used. The hotplates on the cooker had rusted slightly. Inside the oven the operating instructions were still taped to the side. The only food they found in the cupboards was two tins of sliced pineapple.

      In the bedroom was a narrow bed with no bedclothes, and inside the wardrobe one clean shirt hung from a metal hanger.

      That was all.

      Joona tried to work out what the empty flat signified. It was obvious that Jurek Walter didn’t live there.

      Perhaps he only used it as a postal address.

      There was nothing in the flat to lead them anywhere else. The only fingerprints belonged to Jurek himself.

      He had no criminal record, had never been suspected of any crime, he wasn’t on any registers held by social services. Jurek Walter had no private insurance, had never taken out a loan, his tax was deducted directly from his wages, and he had never claimed any tax credits.

      There were so many different registers. More than three hundred of them, all covered by the Personal Records Act. Jurek Walter was only listed in the ones that no citizen could avoid.

      Otherwise he was invisible.

      He had never been off sick, had never sought help from a doctor or dentist.

      He wasn’t in the firearms register, the vehicle register, there were no school records, no registered political or religious affiliations.

      It was as if he had lived his life with the express intention of being as invisible as possible.

      There was nothing that could lead them any further.

      The few people he had been in contact with at his workplace knew nothing about him. They could only report that he never said much, but he was a very good mechanic.

      When the National Criminal Investigation Department received a response from the Policja, their Polish counterparts, it turned out that Jurek Walter had been dead for many years. Because this Jurek Walter had been found murdered in a public toilet at the central station, Kraków Główny, they were able to supply both photographs and fingerprints.

      Neither pictures nor prints matched the Swedish serial killer.

      Presumably he had stolen the identity of the real Jurek Walter.

      The man they had captured in Lill-Jan’s Forest was looking more and more like a frightening enigma.

      They went on combing the forest for another three months, but after the man and boy in the barrel no more of Jurek Walter’s victims had been found.

      Not until Mikael Kohler-Frost turned up, walking across a bridge, heading for Stockholm.

       25

      A prosecutor took over responsibility for the preliminary investigation, but Joona and Samuel led the interviews, from the custody proceedings to the principal interrogation. Jurek Walter didn’t confess to anything, but he didn’t deny any crimes either. Instead he philosophised about death and the human condition. Because of the relative lack of supporting evidence, it was the circumstances surrounding his arrest, his failure to offer an explanation and the forensic psychiatrist’s evaluation that led to his conviction in Stockholm Courthouse. His lawyer appealed against the conviction and while they were waiting for the case to be heard in the Court of Appeal, more interviews were held in Kronoberg Prison.

      The staff at the prison were used to most things, but Jurek Walter’s presence troubled them. He made them feel uneasy. Wherever he was, conflicts would suddenly flare up; on one occasion two warders started fighting, with one of them ending up in hospital.

      A crisis meeting was held, and new security procedures agreed. Jurek Walter would no longer be allowed to come into contact with other inmates, or use the exercise yard.

      When Samuel called in sick, Joona found himself walking alone down the corridor, past the row of white thermos flasks, one outside each of the green doors. The shiny linoleum floor had long, black marks on it.

      The door to Jurek Walter’s cell was open. The walls were bare and the window barred. The morning light reflected off the worn plastic-covered mattress on the fixed bunk and the stainless-steel basin.

      Further along the corridor a policeman in a dark-blue sweater was talking to a Syrian Orthodox priest.

      ‘They’ve taken him to interview room two,’ the officer called to Joona.

      A guard was waiting outside the interview room, and through the window Joona could see Jurek Walter sitting on a chair, looking down at the floor. In front of him stood his legal representative and two guards.

      ‘I’m here to listen,’ Joona said when he went in.

      There was a short silence, then Jurek Walter exchanged a few words with his lawyer. He spoke in a low voice and didn’t look up as he asked the lawyer to leave.

      ‘You can wait in the corridor,’ Joona told the guards.

      When he was on his own with Jurek Walter in the interview room he moved a chair and put it so close that he could smell the man’s sweat.

      Jurek Walter sat still on his chair, his head drooping forward.

      ‘Your defence lawyer claims that you were in Lill-Jan’s Forest to free the woman,’ Joona said in a neutral voice.

      Jurek went on staring at the floor for another couple of minutes, then, without the slightest movement, said:

      ‘I talk too much.’

      ‘The truth will do,’ Joona said.

      ‘But it really doesn’t matter to me if I’m found guilty of something I didn’t do,’ Walter said.

      ‘You’ll be locked up.’

      Jurek looked up at Joona and said thoughtfully:

      ‘The life went out of me a long time ago. I’m not scared of anything. Not pain … not loneliness or boredom.’

      ‘But I’m looking for the truth,’ Joona said, intentionally naïve.

      ‘You don’t have to look for it. It’s the same with justice, or gods. You make a choice to fit your own requirements.’

      ‘But