The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ