Читать книгу The Sandman - Ларс Кеплер - Страница 37

By the time Joona reaches the outskirts of Stockholm the traffic has built up. Snowflakes are swirling about before vanishing on the damp asphalt of the motorway.

He can’t bear to think about how he arranged Summa and Lumi’s deaths in order to give them a different life. Nils Åhlén helped him, but didn’t like it. He understood that they were doing the right thing, assuming the accomplice really did exist. But if Joona was wrong, this would be a mistake of incomprehensible proportions.

Over the years this doubt has settled over the pathologist’s slender figure as a great sorrow.

The railings of the Northern Cemetery flicker past the car and Joona remembers the day Summa and Lumi’s urns were lowered into the ground. The rain was falling on the silk ribbons on their wreaths, and pattering on the black umbrellas.

Both Joona and Samuel carried on looking, but not together; they were no longer in touch with each other. Their different fates had made them strangers to one another. Eleven months after his family disappeared, Samuel gave up searching and returned to duty. He lasted three weeks after abandoning hope. Early in the morning of a glorious March day, Samuel went to his summer house. He walked down to the beautiful beach where his boys used to swim, took out his service pistol, fed a bullet into the chamber and shot himself in the head.

When Joona got the call from his boss telling him that Samuel was dead, he felt a deep, unsettling numbness.

Two hours later he made his way, shivering, to the old clockmaker’s on Roslagsgatan. It was long past closing time, but the aged clockmaker with the magnifying glass over his left eye was still working amidst a sea of different clocks. Joona tapped on the glass window in the door and was let in.

When he left the clockmaker’s two weeks later he weighed seven kilos less. He was pale, and so weak he had to stop and rest every ten metres. He threw up in the park that would subsequently be renamed in honour of the singer Monica Zetterlund, then stumbled on to Odengatan.

Joona had never thought that he would be losing his family for ever. He had imagined being obliged to abstain from meeting them, seeing them, touching them for a while. He realised that it might take years, possibly several years, but he had always been convinced that he would find Jurek Walter’s accomplice and arrest him. He had assumed that one day he would uncover their crimes, let in the light on their deeds and calmly examine every detail, but after ten years he had progressed no further than he had done in the first ten days. There was nothing that led anywhere. The only concrete proof that the accomplice actually existed was the fact that Jurek’s prophecy for Samuel had been realised.

Officially there was no connection between the disappearance of Samuel’s family and Jurek Walter. It was regarded as an accident. Joona was the only person who still believed that Jurek Walter’s accomplice had taken them.

Joona was convinced that he was right, but had started to accept the impasse. He wasn’t going to find the accomplice, but his family was still alive.

He stopped talking about the case, but because it was impossible to ignore the likelihood that he was being watched, he was pretty much condemned to loneliness.

The years passed, and the fabricated deaths came to seem more and more real.

He truly had lost his wife and daughter.

Joona pulls up behind a taxi outside the main entrance of Södermalm Hospital, gets out and walks through the falling snow towards the revolving glass door.