The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер

the prosecutor’s description of my actions will be regarded as proven beyond all reasonable doubt,’ he said, without the slightest hint of a plea in his voice.

      ‘You’re saying that’s wrong?’

      ‘I’m not going to get hung up on technicalities, because there isn’t really any difference between digging a grave and refilling it.’

      When Joona left the interview room that day, he was more convinced than ever that Jurek Walter was an extremely dangerous man, but at the same time he couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that Jurek had been trying to say that he was being punished for someone else’s crimes. Of course he understood that it had been Jurek Walter’s intention to sow a seed of doubt, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that there was actually a flaw in the prosecution’s case.

       26

      The day before the appeal, Joona, Summa and Lumi went to dinner with Samuel and his family. The sun had been shining through the linen curtains when they started eating, but it was now evening. Rebecka lit a candle on the table and blew out the match. The light quivered over her luminous eyes, and her one strange pupil. She had once explained that it was a condition called dyscoria, and that it wasn’t a problem, she could see just as well with that eye as the other.

      The relaxed meal concluded with dark honey cake. Joona borrowed a kippah for the prayer, Birkat Hamazon.

      That was the last time he saw Samuel’s family.

      The boys played quietly for a while with little Lumi before Joshua immersed himself in a video game and Reuben disappeared into his room to practise his clarinet.

      Rebecka went outside for a cigarette, and Summa kept her company with her glass of wine.

      Joona and Samuel cleared the table, and as soon as they were alone started talking about work and the following day’s appeal.

      ‘I’m not going to be there,’ Samuel said seriously. ‘I don’t know, it’s not that I’m frightened, but it feels like my soul gets dirty … that it gets dirtier for every second I spend in his vicinity.’

      ‘I’m sure he’s guilty,’ Joona said.

      ‘But …?’

      ‘I think he’s got an accomplice.’

      Samuel sighed and put the dishes in the sink.

      ‘We’ve stopped a serial killer,’ he said. ‘A lone lunatic who—’

      ‘He wasn’t alone at the grave when we got there,’ Joona interrupted.

      ‘Yes, he was.’ Samuel started to rinse the dishes.

      ‘It’s not unusual for serial killers to work with other people,’ Joona objected.

      ‘No, but there’s nothing that suggests that Jurek Walter belongs to that category,’ Samuel said brightly. ‘We’ve done our job, we’re finished, but now you want to stick a finger in the air and say .’

      ‘I do?’ Joona said with a smile. ‘What does that mean?’

      ‘Perhaps the opposite is the case.’

      ‘You can always say that.’ Joona nodded.

       27

      The sun was shining in through the mottled glass in the windows of the Wrangelska Palace. Jurek Walter’s legal representative explained that his client had been so badly affected by the trial that he couldn’t bear to explain the reason why he was at the crime scene when he was arrested.

      Joona was called as a witness, and described their surveillance work and the arrest. Then the defence lawyer asked if Joona could see any reason at all to suspect that the prosecutor’s account of events was based on a false assumption.

      ‘Could my client have been found guilty of a crime that someone else committed?’

      Joona met the lawyer’s anxious gaze, and in his mind’s eye saw Jurek Walter calmly pushing the woman back into the coffin every time she tried to get out.

      ‘I’m asking you, because you were there,’ the defence lawyer went on. ‘Could Jurek Walter actually have been trying to rescue the woman in the grave?’

      ‘No,’ Joona replied.

      After deliberating for two hours, the Chair of the Court declared that the verdict of Stockholm Courthouse was upheld. Jurek Walter’s face didn’t move a muscle as the more rigorous sentence was announced. He was to be held in a secure psychiatric clinic with extraordinary conditions applied to any eventual parole proceedings.

      Seeing as he was closely connected to numerous ongoing investigations, he was also subject to unusually extensive restrictions.

      When the Chair of the Court had finished, Jurek Walter turned towards Joona. His face was covered with fine wrinkles, and his pale eyes looked straight into Joona’s.

      ‘Now Samuel Mendel’s two sons are going to disappear,’ Jurek said in a measured voice. ‘And Samuel’s wife Rebecka will disappear. But … No, listen to me, Joona Linna. The police will look for them, and when the police give up Samuel will go on looking, but when he eventually realises that he’ll never see his family again, he’ll kill himself.’

      Joona stood up to leave the courtroom.

      ‘And your little daughter,’ Jurek Walter went on, looking down at his fingernails.

      ‘Be careful,’ Joona said.

      ‘Lumi will disappear,’ Jurek whispered. ‘And Summa will disappear. And when you realise that you’re never going to find them … You’re going to hang yourself.’

      He looked up and stared directly into Joona’s eyes. His face was quite calm, as if things had already been settled the way he wanted.

      Ordinarily the convict is taken back to a holding cell until their destination and transportation to the facility have been organised. But the staff at Kronoberg were so keen to be rid of Jurek Walter that they had arranged transport directly from the Wrangelska Palace to the secure criminal psychology unit twenty kilometres north of Stockholm.

      Jurek Walter was to be held in strict isolation in Sweden’s most secure facility for an indeterminate amount of time. Samuel Mendel had regarded Jurek’s threat as empty words from a defeated man, but Joona had been unable to avoid the thought that the threat had been presented as a truth, a fact.

      The investigation was downgraded when no further bodies were found.

      Although it wasn’t dropped altogether, it went cold.

      Joona refused to give up, but there were too few pieces of the puzzle, and what lines of inquiry they had turned out to be dead ends. Even though Jurek Walter had been stopped and convicted, they didn’t really know any more about him than before.

      He was still a mystery.

      One Friday afternoon, two months after the appeal, Joona was sitting with Samuel at Il Caffé close to police headquarters, drinking a double espresso. They were busy with other cases now, but still met up regularly to discuss Jurek Walter. They had been through all the material about him many times, but had found nothing to suggest that he had an accomplice. The whole thing was on the verge of becoming an in-joke, with the two of them weighing up innocent passers-by as possible suspects. And then something terrible happened.