The Sandman

151

Joona steps over some rusty barbed wire and heads towards the old buildings with their broken windows and graffiti tags sprayed on the brick walls.

It’s dark up here and Joona gets his torch out. He aims the beam at the ground, carries on, then shines the light between the low buildings.

There’s no door on the first building. Snow has blown in over the first few metres of blackened wooden floor. The beam of the torch sweeps quickly across old beer cans, dirty sheets, condoms and latex gloves.

He carries on through the deep snow, going from door to door and peering through broken or missing windows. The guest workers’ old housing has been abandoned for many years. Nothing but dirt and dereliction. In some places the roofs have caved in, and whole sections of wall are missing.

He slows down when he sees that the windows in the last but one building are intact. An old supermarket trolley is lying on its side by the wall.

On one side of the building the ground drops away steeply towards the bottom of the quarry.

Joona switches the torch off as he makes his way to the wall, where he stops and listens before turning the torch on again.

All he can hear is the wind sweeping across the rooftops.

In the darkness a short distance away he can make out the last building in the row. It seems to be little more than a snow-covered ruin.

He goes over to the window and shines the torch through the dirty glass. The beam moves slowly across a filthy hotplate connected to a car battery, a narrow bed with some rough blankets, a radio with a shiny aerial, some tanks of water and a dozen tins of food.

When he reaches the door he can make out an almost vanished number 4 at the top left corner.

This could be the number four of the visiting workers’ accommodation that Nikita Karpin mentioned.

Joona carefully pushes the handle down and the door slides open. He slips inside, shutting the door behind him. It smells of damp old fabric. There’s a bible on a rickety shelf. There’s only one room, with one window and door.

Joona realises that he is now quite visible from the outside.

The wooden floor creaks under his weight.

He shines the torch along the walls, and sees piles of water-damaged books. In one corner the light flashes back at him.

He moves closer and sees that there are hundreds of tiny glass bottles lined up on the floor.

Dark glass bottles, with rubber membranes.

Sevoflurane, a highly effective sedative.

Joona pulls out his phone and calls the emergency control room, and asks for police backup and an ambulance to be sent to his location.

Then everything is silent again, and all he can hear is his own breathing and the floor creaking.

Suddenly from the corner of his eye he sees movement outside the window, draws his Colt Combat and releases the safety catch in an instant.

There’s nothing there, just some loose snow blowing off the roof.

He lowers the pistol again.

On the wall by the bed is a yellowed newspaper cutting about the first man in space, the ‘Space Russian’ as Expressen’s headline-writer describes him.

This must be where the father killed himself.

Joona is just thinking that he ought to search the other buildings when he catches sight of an outline on the filthy rag-rug where something underneath is protruding. He pulls the rug aside and exposes a large hatch in the wooden floor.

Carefully he lies down and puts his ear to the hatch, but he can’t hear anything.

He looks towards the window, then shoves the rug aside and opens the heavy wooden hatch.

A dusty smell of sand rises from the darkness.

He leans forward and shines the torch into the opening, and sees a steep flight of concrete steps.