The Sandman

139

Veils of snow are blowing across the motorway outside the roadside café. The vehicles thundering past make the windows rattle. The coffee in Joona’s cup is trembling with the vibrations.

Joona looks at the men at the table. Their faces are calm and weary. After taking his phone, passport and wallet, they just seem to be waiting for instructions now. The café smells of buckwheat and fried pork.

Joona looks at his watch and sees that his plane out of Moscow departs in nine minutes.

Felicia’s life is ticking away.

One of the men is trying to solve a sudoku, while the other is reading about horse racing in a broadsheet newspaper.

Joona looks at the woman behind the counter as he goes over his conversation with Nikita Karpin.

The old man had acted as if they had all the time in the world, until they were interrupted. He smiled calmly to himself, wiped the condensation from the jug with his thumb and said that Jurek Walter and his twin brother only stayed in Sweden for a couple of years.

‘Why?’ Joona asked.

‘You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Yes.’

The old man had run his finger over the grey file and once again started talking about the highly trained engineer who had probably been prepared to sell what he knew.

‘But the Swedish Aliens Department was only interested in whether or not Vadim Levanov could work. They didn’t understand anything... they sent a world-class missile engineer to work in a gravel pit.’

‘Maybe he realised you were watching him and had enough sense to keep quiet about what he knew,’ Joona said.

‘It would have been more sensible not to have left Leninsk... He might have got ten years in a labour camp, but...’

‘But he had his children to think of.’

‘Then he should have stayed,’ Nikita said, meeting Joona’s gaze. ‘The boys were extradited from Sweden and Vadim Levanov was unable to trace them. He contacted everyone he could, but it was impossible. There wasn’t a lot he could do. Of course he knew that we’d arrest him if he returned to Russia, and then there was absolutely no way he’d find his boys, so he waited for them instead, that was all he could do... He must have thought that if the boys tried to find him, they’d start by looking in the place where they’d last been together.’

‘And where was that?’ Joona asked, as he noticed a black car approaching the house.

‘Visiting workers’ accommodation, barrack number four,’ Nikita Karpin replied. ‘That was also where he took his own life, much later.’

Before Joona had time to ask the name of the gravel pit where the boys’ father worked, Nikita Karpin had more visitors. A shiny black Chrysler turned in and pulled up in front of the house, and there was no doubt that the conversation was over. Without any apparent urgency, the old man switched all the material on the table concerning Jurek’s father for information about Alexander Pichushkin, the so-called chessboard killer – a serial killer in whose capture Joona had played a small part.

The four men came in, walked calmly over to Joona and Nikita, shook their hands politely, talked for a while in Russian, then two of them led Joona out to the black car while the other two stayed with Nikita.

Joona was put in the back seat. One of the men, who had a thick neck and little black eyes, asked in a not unfriendly voice to see his passport, then asked for his mobile phone. They went through his wallet, called his hotel and the car-hire company. They assured him that they would drive him to the airport, but not just yet.

Now they’re sitting at a table in the café, waiting.

Joona takes another small sip of his cold coffee.

If only he had his phone he could call Anja and ask her to do a search for Jurek Walter’s father. There had to be something about the children, about the place where they lived. He suppresses an urge to overturn the table, run out to the car and drive to the airport. They’ve got his passport, as well as his wallet and mobile.

The man with the thick neck is tapping gently at the table and humming to himself. The other one, who has close-cropped ice-grey hair, has stopped reading and is sitting sending texts from his phone.

There’s a clatter from inside the kitchen.

Suddenly the Russian’s mobile rings, and the grey-haired man gets up and moves away a few steps before answering.

After a while he ends the call and explains that it’s time to go.