The Sandman

126

Susanne stands up on the bed, beside herself, and turns to face the wall as she sobs, trying to hide her face with her one good hand.

‘Please, sit down,’ Joona says gently.

‘He mustn’t, he mustn’t...’

‘You shut your family away in your cellar because you were frightened of Jurek.’

Susanne looks at him, then starts pacing up and down on the bed again.

‘No one would listen to me, but I know he speaks the truth... I’ve felt his fire on my face...’

‘I would have done the same as you,’ Joona says seriously. ‘If I believed I could protect my family from Jurek that way, I would have done the same thing.’

She stops with a curious look in her eyes, and wipes her mouth.

‘I was supposed to give Jurek an injection of Zypadhera. He’d been given a sedative and was lying on his bed... he couldn’t move. Sven Hoffman opened the door, I went in and gave Jurek the injection in his buttock... As I was putting a plaster on it, I simply explained that I didn’t want anything to do with his letter, I wasn’t going to send it, I didn’t say I’d already burned it, I just said...’

She falls silent and tries to pull herself together before continuing. She holds her hand to her mouth for a while, then lets it fall:

‘Jurek opened his eyes and looked straight at me, and started to speak Russian... I don’t know if he knew I could understand, I’d never told him I once lived in St Petersburg.’

She breaks off and lowers her head.

‘What did he say?’

‘He promised to cut Ellen and little Anja open... and let me choose which one would bleed to death,’ she says, then smiles to stop herself going to pieces. ‘Patients can say the most terrible things, you have to put up with all sorts of threats, but it was different with Jurek.’

‘Are you sure he was speaking Russian, not Kazakh?’

‘Jurek Walter spoke an unusually refined Russian, as if he were a professor at Lomonosov.’

‘You told him you didn’t want anything to do with his letter,’ Joona says. ‘Were there any other letters?’

‘Only the one he replied to.’

‘So he received a letter first?’ Joona asks.

‘It was addressed to me... from a lawyer who was offering to review his rights and options.’

‘And you gave it to Jurek?’

‘I don’t know why, I suppose I was thinking that it was a human right, but he isn’t...’

She starts crying and takes a few steps back on the soft mattress.

‘Try to remember what—’

‘I want my children, I can’t bear it,’ she whimpers, pacing on the bed again. ‘He’s going to hurt them.’

‘You know that Jurek is locked up in the secure...’

‘Only when he wants to be,’ she interrupts, and stumbles. ‘He fools everyone, he can get in and out...’

‘That’s not true, Susanne,’ Joona says gently. ‘Jurek Walter hasn’t left the secure unit once in thirteen years.’

She looks at him, then says through white, cracked lips:

‘You don’t know anything.’

For a moment it looks as though she’s going to start laughing.

‘Do you?’ she says. ‘You really don’t know anything.’

She blinks her dry eyes and her hand is shaking violently as she raises it to brush her hair from her face.

‘I saw him in the car park in front of the hospital,’ she says quietly. ‘He was just standing there, looking at me.’

The bed creaks under her feet and she puts her hand out to steady herself against the wall. Joona tries to calm her down:

‘I appreciate that his threats were—’

‘You’re so stupid,’ she yells. ‘I’ve seen your name written on the glass...’

She takes a step forward, slips off the bed, hits her neck on the edge of the bed and collapses in a heap on the floor.