The Sandman

It was half past ten in the evening, and he and Summa were lying in bed reading when a noise from the ground floor made Joona’s heart suddenly begin to beat faster. The washing machine hadn’t finished its programme yet and it sounded like a zip rattling against the drum, nevertheless he couldn’t help getting up and checking that all the windows downstairs were in one piece, and that the outside doors were locked.

When he returned, Summa had switched off her lamp and was lying there watching him.

‘What did you do?’ she asked gently.

He forced himself to smile and was about to say something when they heard little footsteps. Joona turned and saw his daughter come into the bedroom. Her hair was sticking up and her pyjama trousers had twisted round her waist.

‘Lumi, you’re supposed to be asleep,’ he sighed.

‘We forgot to say goodnight to the cat,’ she said.

Every evening Joona would read Lumi a story, and before he tucked her in for the night they always had to look out of the window and wave to the grey cat that slept in their neighbours’ kitchen window.

‘Go back to bed now,’ Summa said.

‘I’ll come and see you,’ Joona promised.

Lumi mumbled something and shook her head.

‘Do you want me to carry you?’ he asked, and picked her up.

She clung onto him and he suddenly noticed her heart beating fast.

‘What is it? Did you have a dream?’

‘I only wanted to wave to the cat,’ she whispered. ‘But there was a skeleton out there.’

‘In the window?’

‘No, he was standing on the ground,’ she replied. ‘Right where we found the dead hedgehog … he was looking at me …’

Joona quickly put her in bed with Summa.

‘Stay here,’ he said.

He ran downstairs silently, not bothering to get his pistol from the gun cabinet, not bothering to put shoes on, and just opened the kitchen door and rushed outside into the cold night air.

There was no one there.

He ran behind the house, climbed over the neighbours’ fence and carried on into the next garden. The whole area was quiet and still. He returned to the tree in the garden where he and Lumi had found a dead hedgehog in the summer.

There was no doubt that someone had been standing in the tall grass, just inside their fence. From there you could see very clearly in through Lumi’s window.

Joona went inside, locked the door behind him, fetched his pistol, and searched the whole house before going back to bed. Lumi fell asleep almost instantly between him and Summa, and a little while later his wife was asleep beside him.

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Joona had already tried to talk to Summa about taking off and starting a new life, but she had never encountered Jurek Walter, she didn’t know the extent of what he had done, and she simply didn’t believe that he was behind Rebecka’s, Joshua’s and Reuben’s disappearance.

With fevered concentration, Joona began to confront the inevitable. A chill focus consumed him as he started to examine every detail, every aspect of it, and draw up a plan.

A plan that would save all three of them.

The National Criminal Investigation Department knew almost nothing about Jurek Walter. The disappearance of Samuel Mendel’s family after his arrest provided strong support for the theory that he had an accomplice.

But this accomplice hadn’t left a single shred of evidence.

He was a shadow of a shadow.

His colleagues said it was hopeless, but Joona wouldn’t give up. Naturally he understood it wasn’t going to be easy to find this invisible accomplice. It might take several years, and there was only one of Joona. He couldn’t search and protect Summa and Lumi at the same time, not every second.

If he hired two bodyguards to accompany them everywhere, the family’s savings would be exhausted in six months.

Jurek’s accomplice had waited months before seizing Samuel’s family. Clearly this was a man who was in no hurry, patiently biding his time until he was ready to strike.

Joona tried to find a way they could stay together. They could move, get new jobs and change identities, and live quietly somewhere.

Nothing mattered more than being with Summa and Lumi.

But as a police officer, he knew that protected identities aren’t secure. They just give a breathing space. The further away you got, the more breaths you would manage to take, but in the file of Jurek Walter’s suspected victims was a man who went missing in Bangkok, disappearing without trace from the lift in the Sukhothai Hotel.

There was no escape.

Eventually Joona was forced to accept that there was something that mattered more than him being together with Summa and Lumi.

Their lives mattered more.

If he ran away or disappeared with them, it would be a direct challenge to Jurek to try to track them down.

And Joona knew that once you start looking, sooner or later you are going to find your quarry, no matter how hard they might try to hide.

Jurek Walter mustn’t look, he thought. That’s the only way not to be found.

There was only one solution. Jurek and his shadow had to believe that Summa and Lumi were dead.

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By the time Joona reaches the outskirts of Stockholm the traffic has built up. Snowflakes are swirling about before vanishing on the damp asphalt of the motorway.

He can’t bear to think about how he arranged Summa and Lumi’s deaths in order to give them a different life. Nils Åhlén helped him, but didn’t like it. He understood that they were doing the right thing, assuming the accomplice really did exist. But if Joona was wrong, this would be a mistake of incomprehensible proportions.

Over the years this doubt has settled over the pathologist’s slender figure as a great sorrow.

The railings of the Northern Cemetery flicker past the car and Joona remembers the day Summa and Lumi’s urns were lowered into the ground. The rain was falling on the silk ribbons on their wreaths, and pattering on the black umbrellas.

Both Joona and Samuel carried on looking, but not together; they were no longer in touch with each other. Their different fates had made them strangers to one another. Eleven months after his family disappeared, Samuel gave up searching and returned to duty. He lasted three weeks after abandoning hope. Early in the morning of a glorious March day, Samuel went to his summer house. He walked down to the beautiful beach where his boys used to swim, took out his service pistol, fed a bullet into the chamber and shot himself in the head.

When Joona got the call from his boss telling him that Samuel was dead, he felt a deep, unsettling numbness.