The Sandman

150

The traffic thins out as he heads north. Joona is driving faster and faster, thinking that after all these years, three of the pieces of the puzzle are finally fitting together.

Jurek Walter’s father worked in a gravel pit, and killed himself in his home there.

Mikael says the Sandman smells of sand.

And Reidar Frost grew up near an old gravel pit in Rotebro.

What if it’s the same gravel pit? It can’t be a coincidence, the pieces have to fit together. In which case this is where Felicia is, not where all his colleagues are searching, he thinks.

The ridges of snowy slush between the lanes make the car swerve. Dirty water is spraying up at the windscreen.

Joona pulls in ahead of one of the airport buses and carries on down the slip road and past a large car park. He sounds his horn and a man drops his bags of groceries as he leaps out of the way.

Two cars have stopped at a red light, but Joona veers into the other lane and turns sharp left. The tyres slide on the wet road surface. The car lurches across the snow-covered grass and straight through a bank of snow. Compacted snow and ice rattle over and underneath the car. He speeds up again, past Rotebro shopping centre and up the narrow Norrviken road that runs parallel to the high ridge.

The streetlights are swaying in the wind, lighting up the driving snow.

He reaches the top and sees the entrance to the gravel works a little too late, turns sharply and brakes hard in front of two heavy metal barriers. The wheels slide on the snow, Joona wrenches the steering wheel, the car spins and the rear end slams into one of the barriers.

The red glass from the brake-light shatters across the snow.

Joona throws the door open, gets out of the car and runs past the blue barrack containing the office.

Breathing heavily, he carries on down the steep slope towards the vast crater that has been excavated over the years. Floodlights on tall towers illuminate this strange lunar landscape with its static diggers and vast heaps of sifted sand.

Joona thinks that no one can be buried here, it would be impossible to bury any bodies here because everything is constantly being dug up. A gravel quarry is a hole that gets wider and deeper every day.

The heavy snow is falling through the artificial light.

He runs past huge stone-crushers with massive caterpillar tracks.

He’s in the most recent section of the pit. The sand is bare and it’s obvious that work is still going on here every day.

Beyond the machinery there are some blue containers and three caravans.

Joona’s shadow flies past him on the ground as the light from another floodlight hits him from behind a pile of sand.

Half a kilometre away he can see a snow-covered area in front of a steep drop. That must be the older part of the pit.

He makes his way up a steep slope where people have dumped rubbish, old fridges, broken furniture and trash. His feet slip on the snow but he keeps going, sending cascades of stones down behind him, until he shoves a rusty bicycle aside and makes it to the top.

He’s now at the original level of the ridge, more than forty metres above the current ground level, and has a good view of the pitted landscape. Cold air tears at his lungs as he gazes out across the illuminated pit with its machines, makeshift roads and piles of sand.

He starts to run along the narrow strip of snow-covered meadow grass between the steep drop and the Älvsunda road.

There’s a crumpled car-wreck by the side of the road in front of the wire-mesh fence with its warning signs and notices from the security company. Joona stops and peers into the falling snow. At the far corner of the very oldest section of the gravel pit is an area of tarmac, on top of which is a row of single-storey buildings, as long and narrow as military barracks.