The Sandman (37 page)

Anders highlights patient room 3, and the image instantly fills the other screen. The lamp in the ceiling of the surveillance control room reflects off the dusty screen. He moves his chair closer. Saga is still sitting there, staring up at him.

He wonders what she wants.

Her pale face is lit up, and the skin on her neck is taut.

She massages the back of her neck with one hand, rises from the bed and takes a couple of steps forward, all the while looking up at the camera.

Anders clicks away from the image, gets up, looks at the guards and the closed door of the rest-room.

He goes over to the security door, runs his card through the reader and walks into the corridor. The nocturnal lighting has a flat grey tone. The three doors are glowing dully, like lead. He walks up to her door and looks in through the reinforced glass. Saga is still standing in the middle of the floor, but turns to look towards the door as he opens the hatch.

The light from the bedside lamp is shining behind her, between her legs.

‘I can’t sleep,’ she says with big, dark eyes.

‘Are you scared of the dark?’ he smiles.

‘I need ten milligrams of Stesolid, that’s what I always used to get at Karsudden.’

He’s thinking that she’s even more beautiful and slender in reality. She moves with a strange awareness, confident in her body, as if she were an elite gymnast or a ballerina. He can see that her tight, thin vest is damp with sweat. The perfect curve of her shoulders, her nipples beneath the fabric.

He tries to recall if he’s read anything about sleeping problems in her notes from Karsudden. Then he remembers that it really doesn’t matter. He’s in charge of decisions about medication.

‘Wait there,’ he says, then goes and gets a tablet.

When he comes back he can feel sweat between his shoulder blades. He shows her the plastic cup, she reaches her hand through the hatch to take it, but he can’t resist teasing her:

‘Can I have a smile?’

‘Give me the tablet,’ she says simply, still holding out her hand.

He holds the plastic cup in the air, out of reach of her outstretched hand.

‘One little smile,’ he says, tickling the palm of her hand.

Saga smiles at the doctor and maintains eye-contact with him until she has the plastic cup. He closes and locks the hatch, but remains outside the door. She retreats into the room, pretends to put the pill in her mouth, gets some water and swallows, tipping her heard back. She’s not looking at him, isn’t sure if he’s still there, but she sits down on the bed for a while and then turns out the light. Under cover of darkness she quickly slips the pill under the inner sole of one of her shoes, then lies back on the bed.

Before she falls asleep she sees Bernie’s face again, the tears filling his eyes as he put the noose round his neck.

His silent cramps, the little thuds as his heels hit the door, follow her into sleep.

Saga sinks steeply into deep sleep, into healing, falling sleep.

At some point the hourglass gets turned over.

Then, like warm air, she drifts up towards wakefulness and suddenly opens her eyes in the dark. She doesn’t know what’s woken her up. In her dream it was Bernie’s helplessly kicking feet.

A distant rattling sound, perhaps, she thinks.

But all she can hear is her own pulse, deep inside her ears.

She blinks and listens.

The reinforced glass in the door gradually appears as a rectangle of frozen seawater.

She closes her eyes and tries to go back to sleep. Her eyes are stinging with tiredness, but she can’t relax. Something is heightening her senses.

The metal walls are clicking, and she opens her eyes again and stares over at the grey window.

Suddenly a black shadow appears against the glass.

She’s instantly wide awake, ice-cold.

A man is looking at her through the reinforced glass. It’s the young doctor. Has he been standing there the whole time?

He can’t see anything in the darkness.

But he’s still standing there, in the middle of the night.

There’s a faint hissing sound.

His head is nodding slightly.

Now she realises that the rattling sound that woke her was the key slipping into the lock.

Air rushes in, the sounds expands, grows lower and fades away.

The heavy door opens and she knows she must lie absolutely still. She ought to be sleeping soundly because of the pill. The nocturnal lighting from the corridor falls like shimmering powder on the young doctor’s head and shoulders.

She’s wondering if he saw that she only pretended to take the pill, that he’s coming to get it from her shoe. But staff aren’t allowed in patients’ rooms alone, she thinks.

Then it dawns on her: the doctor has come in because he thinks she’s taken the pill and is fast asleep.

This is madness, Anders is thinking as he shuts the door behind him. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s gone in to see a patient and is now standing in her darkened room. His heart is pounding so hard in his chest that it actually hurts.

He can just make out her figure in bed.

She’ll be sound asleep for hours yet, practically unconscious.

The door to the rest-room where My is sleeping is closed. There are two guards by the most distant security door. Everyone else is asleep.

He doesn’t actually know what he’s doing in Saga’s room, he can’t think ahead, all he knows is that he has to come in and look at her again, has to come up with an excuse that will let him feel her warm skin beneath his fingers.

It’s impossible to stop thinking of her perspiring breasts and the look of resignation she gave him when she tried to get away and her clothes pulled up.

He repeats to himself that he’s only making sure everything’s OK with a patient who’s just taken a sedative.

If anyone spots him, he can say he detected signs of sleep apnoea, and decided to go in and check, seeing as she’s so heavily medicated.

They’ll say it was an error of judgment not to wake My, but the intrusion itself will be regarded as justified.

He just wants to make sure everything’s OK.

Anders takes a couple of steps into the room, and suddenly finds himself thinking of fishing nets, lobster pots and fyke traps, large openings leading you on towards smaller ones, until eventually there’s no way back.

He swallows hard and tells himself he hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s exceptionally conscientious about his patients’ welfare, that’s all.

He can’t stop thinking about the time he gave her the injection. The memory of her back and buttocks are like a great weight inside him.

He walks slowly over and looks at her in the darkness. He can see she’s lying on her side.

Carefully he sits down on the edge of the bed and folds the covers back from her legs and backside. He tries to listen to her breathing, but his own heartbeat is pounding too hard in his ears.

Her body is radiating warmth.

He strokes her thigh softly, a gesture that any doctor might make. His fingers reach her cotton underpants.

His hands are cold, they’re shaking and he’s far too nervous to be sexually excited.

It’s too dark for the camera in the ceiling to be able to register what he’s doing.

He lets his fingers slip cautiously over the underpants and in between her thighs, and feels the heat of her genitals.

Gently he presses a finger into the fabric, running it along the lips of her vagina.

He’d like to stroke her to orgasm, until her whole body is crying out for penetration, even though she’s asleep.

His eyes have got used to the darkness and now he can make out Saga’s smooth thighs and the perfect line of her hips.

He reminds himself that she is fast asleep, he knows that, and he pulls her underpants down without ceremony. She groans in her sleep, but is otherwise completely still.

Her body is shimmering in the darkness.

The blonde pubic hair, sensitive inner thighs, her flat stomach.

She’ll carry on sleeping, no matter what he does.

It makes no difference to her.

She won’t say no, she won’t shoot him a look that’s pleading with him to stop.

A wave of sexual excitement crashes over him, filling him, making him pant for breath. He can feel his penis swelling, straining against his clothes. He adjusts it with one hand.

He can hear his breathing – and the thud and roar of his heartbeat. He has to get inside her. His hands fumble with her knees, trying to part her thighs.

She rolls over, kicking gently in her sleep.

He slows down, leans over her, pushing his hands between her thighs and trying to spread them.

He can’t do it – it feels like she’s putting up resistance.

He rolls her over onto her stomach, but she slips to the floor, sits up and looks at him with wide eyes.

Anders hurries out of the room, telling himself that she wasn’t properly awake, she won’t remember anything, she’ll think she was only dreaming.

Veils of snow are blowing across the motorway outside the roadside café. The vehicles thundering past make the windows rattle. The coffee in Joona’s cup is trembling with the vibrations.

Joona looks at the men at the table. Their faces are calm and weary. After taking his phone, passport and wallet, they just seem to be waiting for instructions now. The café smells of buckwheat and fried pork.

Joona looks at his watch and sees that his plane out of Moscow departs in nine minutes.

Felicia’s life is ticking away.

One of the men is trying to solve a sudoku, while the other is reading about horse racing in a broadsheet newspaper.

Joona looks at the woman behind the counter as he goes over his conversation with Nikita Karpin.

The old man had acted as if they had all the time in the world, until they were interrupted. He smiled calmly to himself, wiped the condensation from the jug with his thumb and said that Jurek Walter and his twin brother only stayed in Sweden for a couple of years.

‘Why?’ Joona asked.

‘You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Yes.’

The old man had run his finger over the grey file and once again
started talking about the highly trained engineer who had probably been prepared to sell what he knew.

‘But the Swedish Aliens Department was only interested in whether or not Vadim Levanov could work. They didn’t understand anything … they sent a world-class missile engineer to work in a gravel pit.’

‘Maybe he realised you were watching him and had enough sense to keep quiet about what he knew,’ Joona said.

‘It would have been more sensible not to have left Leninsk … He might have got ten years in a labour camp, but …’

‘But he had his children to think of.’

‘Then he should have stayed,’ Nikita said, meeting Joona’s gaze. ‘The boys were extradited from Sweden and Vadim Levanov was unable to trace them. He contacted everyone he could, but it was impossible. There wasn’t a lot he could do. Of course he knew that we’d arrest him if he returned to Russia, and then there was absolutely no way he’d find his boys, so he waited for them instead, that was all he could do … He must have thought that if the boys tried to find him, they’d start by looking in the place where they’d last been together.’

‘And where was that?’ Joona asked, as he noticed a black car approaching the house.

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

Before Joona had time to ask the name of the gravel pit where the boys’ father worked, Nikita Karpin had more visitors. A shiny black Chrysler turned in and pulled up in front of the house, and there was no doubt that the conversation was over. Without any apparent urgency, the old man switched all the material on the table concerning Jurek’s father for information about Alexander Pichushkin, the so-called chessboard killer – a serial killer in whose capture Joona had played a small part.

The four men came in, walked calmly over to Joona and Nikita, shook their hands politely, talked for a while in Russian, then two of them led Joona out to the black car while the other two stayed with Nikita.

Joona was put in the back seat. One of the men, who had a thick neck and little black eyes, asked in a not unfriendly voice to see his passport, then asked for his mobile phone. They went through
his wallet, called his hotel and the car-hire company. They assured him that they would drive him to the airport, but not just yet.

Now they’re sitting at a table in the café, waiting.

Joona takes another small sip of his cold coffee.

If only he had his phone he could call Anja and ask her to do a search for Jurek Walter’s father. There had to be something about the children, about the place where they lived. He suppresses an urge to overturn the table, run out to the car and drive to the airport. They’ve got his passport, as well as his wallet and mobile.

The man with the thick neck is tapping gently at the table and humming to himself. The other one, who has close-cropped ice-grey hair, has stopped reading and is sitting sending texts from his phone.

There’s a clatter from inside the kitchen.

Suddenly the Russian’s mobile rings, and the grey-haired man gets up and moves away a few steps before answering.

After a while he ends the call and explains that it’s time to go.

Mikael is sitting in his room watching television with Berzelius. Reidar is heading downstairs, looking out through the row of windows at the snow lying on the fields outside like a grey glow. The sun never came up today, and it’s been dark since morning.

Birchwood is burning in the open fireplace and the post has been laid out on the table in the library. Beethoven’s late piano sonatas are streaming from the speakers.