The Sandman

47

Reidar squeezes his hand without saying anything. Mikael closes his eyes and lets the images and memories guide his words.

‘There’s a sofa, and a mattress that we pull away from the drain when we need to use the tap,’ he says, gulping hard.

‘The tap,’ Joona repeats.

‘And the door... it’s made of iron, or steel. It’s never open. I’ve never seen it open, there’s no lock on the inside, no handle... and next to the door there’s a hole in the wall, that’s where the bucket of food appears. It’s only a little hole, but if you stick your arm in and reach up, you can feel a metal hatch with your fingertips...’

Reidar is sobbing gently as he listens to Mikael telling them what he remembers of the room.

‘We try to save the food,’ he says. ‘But sometimes it runs out... sometimes it would take so long that we’d just lie there listening for the hatch, and when we did get something we ended up being sick... and sometimes there was no water in the tap, we got thirsty and the drain started to smell...’

‘What sort of food was it?’ Joona asks calmly.

‘Leftovers, mainly... bits of sausage, potato, carrot, onions... macaroni.’

‘The person who gave you the food... he never said anything?’

‘At the start we shouted out the moment the hatch opened, but then it just slammed shut and we went without food... after that we tried talking to whoever opened it, but we never got any answer... We always listened hard... we could hear breathing, shoes on a concrete floor... the same shoes every time...’

Joona checks that the recording is still working. He can’t help thinking about the extreme isolation that the siblings have endured. Most serial killers avoid contact with their victims, not speaking to them so they can continue to regard them as objects. But at some point they always have to visit their victims, they have to see the horror and helplessness in their faces.

‘You heard him moving about,’ Joona says. ‘Did you ever hear anything else from outside?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Think about it,’ Joona says seriously. ‘Birds, dogs barking, cars, trains, voices, aeroplanes, television, laughter, shouting, sirens... anything at all.’

‘Just the smell of sand...’

The sky outside the hospital window is dark now, and hailstones are falling against the glass.

‘What did you do when you were awake?’

‘Nothing... To start with, when we were still fairly little, I managed to pull a loose screw out of the bottom of the sofa... We used it to scratch a hole in the wall. The screw got so hot it almost burned our fingers. We kept going for ages... there was nothing but cement, then, after five centimetres or so, we hit some metal mesh. We kept going through one of the gaps, but a short distance further on we hit more mesh, it was impossible... It’s impossible to escape from the capsule.’

‘Why do you call the room “the capsule”?’

Mikael smiles wearily, in a way that makes him look incredibly lonely.

‘It was Felicia who started that... she imagined we were out in space, that we were on a mission... That was back at the start, before we stopped talking, but I went on thinking of the room as the capsule.’

‘Why did you stop talking?’

‘I don’t know, we just did, there was nothing left to say...’

Reidar raises a trembling hand to his mouth. It looks as though he’s struggling not to cry.

‘You say it’s impossible to escape... yet that’s precisely what you did,’ Joona says.