The Sandman

128

Pollock, Joona and Corinne are leaning over the table, summarising the situation. Not long ago they didn’t have anything. Now, thanks to Saga’s infiltration, they have a location. Jurek Walter let slip something when he whispered ‘Leninsk’. He grew up in Kazakhstan, but because Susanne Hjälm heard him talking educated Russian, it seems highly likely that his family came from Russia.

‘But the security police there didn’t know anything,’ Corinne repeats.

Joona takes out his phone and starts looking for a contact he hasn’t called for years. He can feel himself getting excited as he realises he might finally be on the trail of the mystery of Jurek Walter.

‘What are you doing?’ Corinne asks.

‘I’m going to talk to an old acquaintance.’

‘You’re calling Nikita Karpin!’ Pollock exclaims. ‘Aren’t you?’

Joona moves away, holding the mobile to his ear. The phone rings with a hissing echo, and a fair while later there’s a crackle.

‘Didn’t I thank you for your help with Pichushkin?’ Karpin asks abruptly.

‘Yes, you sent some little bars of soap—’

‘Isn’t that enough?’ he interrupts. ‘You’re the most persistent young man I ever met, so I might have guessed you’d phone and disturb me.’

‘We’re working on a very complex case here, which—’

‘I never talk on the phone,’ Nikita interrupts.

‘What if I organise an encrypted line?’

‘There’s nothing we couldn’t crack in twenty seconds,’ the Russian laughs. ‘But that’s beside the point... I’m out of it now, I can’t help you.’

‘But you must have contacts?’ Joona tries.

‘There’s no one left... and they don’t know anything about Leninsk, and if they did they wouldn’t say so.’

‘You already knew what I was going to ask,’ Joona sighs.

‘Of course. It’s a small country.’

‘Who should I talk to if I need an answer?’

‘Try the dear old FSB in a month or so... I’m sorry,’ Karpin yawns. ‘But I have to take Zean out for his walk, we usually go down the Klyazma, on the ice, as far as the bathing jetties.’

‘I see,’ Joona says.

He ends the call, and smiles at the old man’s exaggerated caution. The former KGB agent doesn’t seem to trust that Russia has changed. Maybe he’s got a point. Maybe the rest of the world has simply been tricked into thinking that things are moving in the right direction.

It wasn’t exactly a formal offer, but coming from Nikita Karpin it was almost a generous invitation.

Nikita’s old Samoyed dog Zean died when Joona was visiting eight years ago. He had been invited to give three lectures on the work that led to Jurek Walter’s capture. At the time the Moscow police were in the middle of the hunt for serial killer Alexander Pichushkin.

Nikita Karpin knows that Joona knows the dog is dead. And he knows that Joona knows where to find him if he goes for a walk on the ice on the Klyazma River.