The Sandman (43 page)

The doctor is weeping like an overtired child.

Saga manages to shift position slightly and pulls her left arm so hard that her vision starts to go black before her arm suddenly comes loose.

She tugs the underpants from her mouth, gasps for breath and coughs again.

‘We can’t escape now – there weren’t any sleeping pills in Bernie’s room,’ Saga says quickly to Jurek.

The hand she’s just pulled free hurts like hell. She can’t tell how badly wounded it is. Her fingers are burning like fire.

Jurek starts to go through the doctor’s clothes, finds the keys to the cell door and slips them in his pocket.

‘Do you want to watch while I cut his head off?’ he asks, glancing quickly at Saga.

‘Don’t do it, please … there’s no need, is there?’

‘There’s never any need to do anything,’ Jurek says, grabbing the doctor by the neck.

‘Wait.’

‘OK, I’ll wait … for two minutes, for your sake, little police officer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The one mistake you made was when you only broke one of Bernie’s fingers,’ Jurek says, taking the doctor’s pass card.

‘I was thinking of killing him slowly,’ she tries, even though she knows there’s no point.

Jurek slaps the doctor again.

‘All I need is the two codes,’ he says.

‘Codes,’ the doctor mumbles. ‘I can’t remember, I …’

Saga tries to loosen the other straps, but the fingers of her left hand are so badly injured that it’s impossible.

‘How could you tell?’ Saga asks.

‘I got a letter.’

‘No,’ the doctor whimpers.

‘Saying that Mikael Kohler-Frost had escaped and been found alive … so I assumed the police were going to send someone.’

Jurek finds the doctor’s phone, drops it on the floor and crushes it beneath his foot.

‘But why—’

‘I haven’t got time,’ he interrupts. ‘I need to go and destroy Joona Linna.’

Saga watches as Jurek Walter leads the doctor out of the cell. She hears their footsteps in the corridor, then the sound of the pass card being pulled through the reader, the code being tapped in, followed by the whirr of the lock.

Joona rings his own doorbell and smiles to himself as he hears footsteps on the floor. The lock rattles and the door swings open. He walks into the dimly lit hall and takes his shoes off.

‘You look completely wiped out,’ Disa says.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Do you want something to eat? There’s some left … I can warm it up …’

Joona shakes his head and gives her a hug. He’s thinking that he’s too tired to talk now, but later he’ll ask her to cancel her trip to Brazil. There’s no need for her to go now.

She helps him get his clothes off and a load of sand falls on the floor.

‘Have you been playing in a sandpit?’ she laughs.

‘Only for a little while,’ he replies.

He goes into the bathroom and gets in the shower. His body feels sore as the hot water courses over him. He leans against the tiles as his muscles slowly start to relax.

The hand that was holding the gun as he pulled the trigger and shot an unarmed man is burning.

If I can get used to the thought of what I’m guilty of having done, I can be happy again, he thinks.

Even though Joona knows the Sandman is dead, even though he
saw the bullets go straight through his body, even though he saw him tumble into the quarry like a corpse into a mass grave, he still went down after it. He slid down the steep slope, trying to stop himself going too fast, and made his way to the body. Keeping his pistol aimed at the back of the man’s head, he felt his neck with the other hand. The Sandman was dead. His eyes hadn’t deceived him. The three bullets had all passed straight through his heart.

The thought that he no longer has to fear Jurek’s accomplice is so warm and comforting that he can’t help letting out a groan.

Joona dries himself and brushes his teeth, then suddenly stops and listens. It sounds like Disa’s talking on the phone.

When he walks into the bedroom he sees that Disa’s getting dressed.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks, lying down on the fresh sheets.

‘My boss called,’ she says with a weary smile. ‘Apparently they’re filling in a pit out at Loudden. The ground is being cleared, but it sounds as if they’ve found a backgammon set. I’ve got to get out there and stop them at once, because if it really is—’

‘Don’t go,’ Joona begs, feeling his eyes prick with tiredness.

Disa hums to herself as she takes a folded sweater from the top drawer of the chest.

‘Have you started using my drawers?’ he mutters, closing his eyes.

Disa walks back and forth in the room. He hears her brushing her hair, then lifting her coat off the hanger.

He rolls onto his side and feels memory and dreams start to join up, like snowflakes.

The Sandman’s body tumbles down the steep slope and stops when it hits an old cooker.

Samuel Mendel scratches his head and says: ‘There’s nothing at all to suggest that Jurek Walter has an accomplice. But you have to stick a finger in the air and say
.’

Saga makes a fresh attempt to loosen the strap round her right wrist, but fails and slumps back again, out of breath.

Jurek Walter is escaping, she thinks.

Panic is bubbling in her chest.

She has to warn Joona.

Saga twists her body to the right, but has to give up.

In the distance she can hear a noise.

She holds her breath and listens.

There’s a squeaking sound, then several heavy thuds, before everything is silent once more.

It dawns on Saga that Jurek never needed the pills, all he wanted was for her to entice the doctor into her room. Jurek had seen through Anders Rönn’s intentions, and realised he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to go into her room if she asked for sleeping pills.

That had been the plan all along.

That was why he had taken her punishment, because the fact that she was dangerous had to be concealed.

She was a siren, just as he had said on the first day.

Jurek needed to lure the doctor into her room without a guard or a carer keeping an eye on proceedings.

Her fingers are so badly damaged that she whimpers with pain as
she stretches to the side and picks at the catch of the strap across her shoulders.

Now she can move her shoulder and raise her head.

We all walked into his trap, she thinks. We thought we were deceiving him, but he had as good as put in an order for me. He knew someone would be sent, and today he found out for certain that I was his Trojan horse.

She lies still for a few seconds, catching her breath and feeling the endorphins in her body. She gathers her strength, then cranes her head to the side, trying to grab the strap round her right wrist with her mouth.

She slumps back, panting, thinking that she has to alert the staff and get them to call the police.

Saga takes a deep breath and tries again. Straining hard to hold her position, she manages to sink her teeth into the thick strap, loosen the catch and release another centimetre or so of the strap. She falls back, feeling nauseous, then twists and pulls her hand and succeeds in freeing it.

It doesn’t take long for her to remove the remaining straps. She puts her legs together and slips onto the floor. Her inner thighs are aching and her muscles shake as she pulls on her trousers.

She runs out into the corridor barefoot. One of the doctor’s shoes is wedged in the doorway, preventing the security door from closing.

Cautiously she opens the door, listens, then hurries on. The secure unit is ghostly quiet and abandoned. She can hear the sound of her feet sticking to the vinyl flooring as she creeps into the room to her right and over to the operator’s desk. The screens are dark, and the lights on the alarm unit are all switched off. The electricity supply to the whole secure unit has been cut.

But somewhere there has to be a phone or a functioning alarm. Saga carries on, past a number of closed doors, until she reaches the staff kitchen. The cutlery drawers are open, and there’s a toppled chair on the floor.

In the sink there’s a vegetable knife and some browning apple peel. Saga quickly snatches up the little knife, checks that the blade is sharp, and moves on.

She can hear a strange buzzing sound.

She stops and listens, then continues forward.

Her right hand is squeezing the knife too hard.

There ought to be security staff and carers here, but she daren’t call out. She’s scared of Jurek hearing her.

The buzzing is coming from the corridor. It sounds like a fly caught on a piece of fly-paper. She creeps past the inspection room, feeling more and more apprehensive.

She blinks at the darkness and stops again.

The buzzing is closer now.

She takes a few cautious steps forward. The door to the staffroom is open. There’s a light on. She reaches out her hand and opens the door wider.

For a moment there’s total silence, then she hears the hissing, buzzing sound again.

She moves closer and sees the end of the bed. Someone’s lying on it, their toes twitching. Two feet in white socks.

‘Hello?’ she says tentatively.

Saga convinces herself that the carer is lying there listening to music and has missed everything that’s been going on before she steps further into the room.

The bed is completely drenched in blood.

The girl with pierced cheeks is lying on her back, her body is quivering, her eyes are staring up at the ceiling but she may well have lost consciousness.

Her face is twitching, and from her pursed lips a mixture of blood and air is bubbling out with a hissing sound.

‘God …’

The girl has a dozen knife-wounds to her chest, deep cuts into her lungs and heart. There’s nothing Saga can do, she needs to get help as soon as she possibly can.

Blood is dripping onto the floor, beside the remnants of the girl’s crushed phone.

‘I’ll get help,’ Saga says.

The girl’s lips hiss as a bubble of blood inflates.

Saga leaves the room with a horribly empty feeling inside.

‘Dear God in heaven, dear God in heaven …’

She runs along the corridor, oddly numb with shock as she approaches the security airlock. The guard is sitting on the other side of the far door. The toughened glass makes him look indistinct and grey.

Hiding the little vegetable knife in her hand so as not to frighten him, Saga slows down and tries to control her breathing as she walks up to the glass and knocks on it.

‘We need help in here!’

She knocks louder, but he doesn’t react, so she moves to the side, towards the door, and sees that it’s open.

All the doors are open, she thinks as she walks through.

Saga is about to say something when she sees that the guard is dead. His throat has been cut so brutally that it’s sliced right through to the vertebrae. His head looks almost as if it’s hanging limply from a broom-handle. The blood has run down his body and gathered in a pool around his chair.

‘OK,’ she says to herself, and she runs across the wet floor with the knife in her hand, then up the steps and through the open gate.

She tugs at the door leading to secure forensic psychiatric Ward 30. It’s locked, it’s the middle of the night. She bangs on it a few times, then carries on along the corridor.

‘Hello,’ she calls out. ‘Is there anyone here?’

The doctor’s other shoe is lying on the floor in the harsh glare of the fluorescent ceiling light.

Saga runs on, and sees movement up ahead, through several panes of glass at different angles. It’s a man, standing and smoking. He flicks the cigarette away, then disappears off to the left. Saga runs as fast as she can, towards the glassed-in exit and the passageway leading to the main hospital building. She turns the corner and suddenly notices that the floor beneath her feet is wet.

The light is blinding her, and at first it looks like the floor is black, then the smell of blood becomes so tangible that it’s all she can do not to throw up.

There’s a large puddle, and footsteps lead away from it towards the entrance.

In an almost dreamlike state she carries on, and sees the young doctor’s head. It’s lying discarded on the floor, beside the rubbish bin against the wall to her right.

Jurek aimed and missed, she thinks, as she starts breathing far too quickly.

She keeps moving forward, out over the dry floor, while her thoughts drift hollowly, unable to make sense of things.

It’s impossible to understand that this is happening.

Why has he taken the time to do this?

Because he didn’t just want to get out, she tells herself. He wanted revenge.

Suddenly she hears heavy steps from the passage leading to the main building. Two guards are running towards her, with bulletproof vests, guns and black clothing.

‘We need doctors to the secure unit,’ Saga calls.