The Sandman

74

The police team consists of thirty-two people in total, civilian staff and officers from the surveillance and detection units of the National Criminal Investigation Department and the National Murder Squad.

In one of the big workrooms on the fifth floor the walls are covered with maps marking the locations of the disappearances and finds in the Jurek Walter case. Colour copies of photographs of the missing people are surrounded by constellations of their families, colleagues and friends.

Old interviews with the relatives of victims are examined again, and new interviews conducted. Medical and forensic reports are checked, and anyone who knew any of the victims is spoken to, no matter how peripheral the relationship.

Joona Linna and his team are standing in the winter light by the window reading the printout of the latest interview with Mikael Kohler-Frost. As they read, a sombre mood settles over the group. There’s nothing in Mikael’s account that can take the investigation forward.

Once the analysts have discounted the expressions of regret and despair from his statements, there’s very little left.

‘Nothing,’ Petter Näslund mutters, rolling the printout up.

‘He says he can feel his sister’s movements, that she tries to find him every time she wakes up in the darkness,’ Benny says with a sorrowful expression on his face. ‘He can feel how much she hopes he might have returned—’

‘I don’t believe any of that,’ Petter interrupts.

‘We have to assume that Mikael is telling the truth, at least in some form or other,’ Joona says.

‘But this business with the Sandman,’ Petter says with a grin. ‘I mean...’

‘The same thing with the Sandman,’ Joona replies.

‘He’s talking about a character in a fairytale,’ Petter says. ‘Are we going to question everyone who sells barometers, or—’

‘As a matter of fact I’ve already compiled lists of manufacturers and dealers,’ Joona replies with a smile.

‘What the hell?’

‘I’m aware that there’s a barometer salesman in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story about the Sandman,’ Joona goes on. ‘And I know Mikael’s mother used to tell them a bedtime story about the Sandman. But none of that precludes the possibility that he might actually exist in real life.’

‘We haven’t got a fucking thing, we might as well admit it,’ Petter says, tossing his rolled-up printout on the desk.

‘Almost nothing,’ Joona gently corrects him.

‘Mikael was sedated when he was moved to the capsule, and sedated when he was removed from it,’ Benny sighs, rubbing a hand over his bald head. ‘It’s impossible even to start identifying a location. In all likelihood, Felicia is in Sweden – but even that isn’t certain.’

Magdalena goes over to the whiteboard and lists what little information they have about the capsule: concrete, electricity, water, Legionella bacteria.

Because Mikael has never seen the accomplice, or heard him speak, they know nothing beyond the fact that it is a man. That’s all. Mikael was sure that the coughs he heard came from a man.

Everything else in the description can be traced back to childhood fantasies about the Sandman.

Joona leaves the room, takes the lift down, walks out of police headquarters and carries on up Fleminggatan, across the Sankt Erik bridge and into Birkastan.

The attic flat of Rörstrandsgatan 19 is where Athena Promacho is based.

When the goddess Pallas Athena is depicted as a beautiful girl with a lance and a shield, she is known as Athena Promacho, the goddess of war.

Athena Promacho is also the name of a secret investigative group that has been put together to analyse the material that Saga Bauer is expected to provide while she is undercover. The group doesn’t exist in any official records, and has no budget from either the National Criminal Investigation Department or the Swedish Security Police.

Athena Promacho consists of Joona Linna from National Crime, Nathan Pollock from the National Murder Squad, Corinne Meilleroux from the Security Police, and forensic officer Johan Jönson.

As soon as Saga is transferred to the secure unit at Löwenströmska Hospital they’ll be there twenty-four hours a day to receive, collate and analyse the surveillance recordings.

Athena Promacho has another three officers attached to it. They’ll be responsible for recording the transmissions from the fibre-optic microphone in a minibus belonging to the local council’s parks department that’s been left in the hospital grounds. All the material will be saved on hard disks, encrypted and sent to Athena Promacho’s computers with a delay of no more than a tenth of a second.