The Sandman (7 page)

‘A serial killer?’

Thirteen years ago Joona embarked on a preliminary investigation that would change his life entirely. Together with his colleague Samuel Mendel, he began to investigate the case of two people who had been reported missing in Sollentuna.

The first case was a fifty-five-year-old woman who went missing when she was out walking one evening. Her dog had been found in a passageway behind the ICA Kvantum supermarket, dragging its leash behind it. Just two days later the woman’s mother-in-law vanished as
she was walking the short distance between her sheltered housing and the bingo hall.

It turned out that the woman’s brother had gone missing in Bangkok five years before. Interpol and the Foreign Ministry had been called in, but he had never been found.

There are no comprehensive figures for the number of people who go missing around the world each year, but everyone knows the total is a disturbingly large number. In the USA almost one hundred thousand go missing each year, and in Sweden around seven thousand.

Most of them show up, but there’s still an alarming number who remain missing.

Only a very small proportion of the ones who are never found have been kidnapped or murdered.

Joona and Samuel were both relatively new at the National Criminal Investigation Department when they started to look into the case of the two missing women from Sollentuna. Certain aspects were reminiscent of two people who went missing in Örebro four years earlier.

On that occasion it was a forty-year-old man and his son. They had been on their way to a football match in Glanshammar, but never got there. Their car was found abandoned on a small forest road that was nowhere near the football ground.

At first it was just an idea, a random suggestion.

What if there was a direct link between the cases, in spite of the differences in time and location?

In which case, it wasn’t impossible that more missing people could be connected to these four.

The preliminary investigation consisted of the most common sort of police work, the sort that happens at a desk, in front of the computer. Joona and Samuel gathered and organised information about everyone who had gone missing in Sweden and not been traced over the previous ten years.

The idea was to find out if any of those missing people had anything in common beyond the bounds of coincidence.

They laid the various cases on top of each other, as if they were on transparent paper – and slowly something resembling an astronomical map began to appear out of the vague motif of connected points.

The unexpected pattern that emerged was that in many of the cases more than one member of the same family had disappeared.

Joona could remember the silence that had descended upon the room when they stepped back and looked at the result. Forty-five missing people matched that particular criterion. Many of those could probably be dismissed over the following days, but forty-five was still thirty-five more than could reasonably be explained by coincidence.

One wall of Samuel’s office in the National Criminal Investigation Department was covered with a large map of Sweden, dotted with pins to indicate the missing persons.

Obviously they couldn’t assume that all forty-five had been murdered, but for the time being they couldn’t rule any of them out.

Because no known perpetrator could be linked to the times of the disappearances, they started looking for motives and a modus operandi. There were no similarities with cases that had been solved. The murderer they were dealing with this time left no trace of violence, and he hid his victims’ bodies very well.

The choice of victim usually divides serial killers into two groups: organised killers, who always seek out the ideal victim who matches their fantasies as closely as possible. These killers focus on a particular type of person, exclusively seeking out pre-pubertal blond boys, for example.

The other group comprises the disorganised killers – here it is the availability of the victim that counts. The victim primarily fills a role in the murderer’s fantasies, and it doesn’t particularly matter who they really are, or what they look like.

But the serial killer that Joona and Samuel were starting to envisage didn’t seem to fit either of these categories. On the one hand he was disorganised, because the victims were so varied, but on the other hand none of them was especially easy to get hold of.

They were looking for a serial killer who was practically invisible. He didn’t follow a pattern, and left no evidence, no intentional signature.

Days went by without the missing women from Sollentuna being found.

Joona and Samuel had no concrete proof of a serial killer that they could present to their boss. They merely repeated that there couldn’t be any other explanation for all these missing people. Two days later the preliminary investigation was downgraded and the resources for further work reallocated.

But Joona and Samuel couldn’t let it go, and started to devote their free time during the evenings and weekends to the search.

They concentrated on the pattern that suggested that if two people had gone missing from the same family, there was an increased risk of a further family member going missing within the near future.

While they were keeping an eye on the family of the women who had vanished from Sollentuna, two children were reported missing from Tyresö. Mikael and Felicia Kohler-Frost. The children of the well-known author, Reidar Frost.

Joona looks at the petrol gauge as he passes the Statoil filling station and a snow-covered lay-by.

He remembers talking to Reidar Frost and his wife Roseanna Kohler three days after their two children went missing. He didn’t mention his suspicions to them – that they had been murdered by a serial killer whom the police had stopped looking for, a murderer whose existence they had only managed to identify in theory.

Joona just asked his questions, and let the parents cling onto the idea that the children had drowned.

The family lived on Varvsvägen, in a beautiful house facing a sandy beach and the water. There had been several mild weeks and a lot of the snow had thawed. The streets and footpaths were dark and wet. There was barely any ice along the shoreline, and what remained was grey slush.

Joona remembers walking through the house, passing a large kitchen and sitting down at a huge white table next to a window. But Roseanna had closed all the curtains, and although her voice was calm her head was shaking the whole time.

The search for the children was fruitless. There had been countless helicopter searches, divers had been called in, and the water had been dragged for bodies. The surroundings had been searched by chain gangs of both volunteers and specialist dog units.

But no one had seen or heard anything.

Reidar Frost looked like a captured animal.

He just wanted to keep on searching.

Joona had sat opposite the two parents, asking routine questions about whether they had received any threats, if anyone had behaved oddly or differently, if they had felt they were being followed.

‘Everyone thinks they fell in the water,’ the wife had said, her head starting to shake again.

‘You mentioned that they sometimes climb out of the window after their bedtime prayers,’ Joona went on calmly.

‘Obviously, they’re not supposed to,’ Reidar said.

‘But you know that they sometimes creep out and cycle off to see a friend?’

‘Rikard.’

‘Rikard van Horn, number 7 Björnbärsvägen,’ Joona said.

‘We’ve tried talking to Micke and Felicia about it, but … well, they’re children, and I suppose we didn’t think it was that harmful,’ Reidar replied, gently laying his hand over his wife’s.

‘What do they do at Rikard’s?’

‘They never stay for long, just play a bit of Diablo.’

‘They all do,’ Roseanna whispered, pulling her hand away.

‘But on Saturday they didn’t cycle to Rikard’s, but went to Badholmen instead,’ Joona went on. ‘Do they often go there in the evening?’

‘We don’t think so,’ Roseanna said, getting up restlessly from the table, as if she could no longer keep her internal trembling in check.

Joona nodded.

He knew that the boy, Mikael, had answered the phone just before he and his younger sister had left the house, but the number had been impossible to trace.

It had been unbearable, sitting there opposite the children’s parents. Joona said nothing, but was feeling more and more convinced that the children were victims of the serial killer. He listened, and asked his questions, but he couldn’t tell them what he suspected.

If the two children were victims of this serial killer, and they were correct in thinking that he would soon try to kill one of the parents as well, they had to make a choice.

Joona and Samuel decided to concentrate their efforts on Roseanna Kohler.

She had moved out to live with her sister in Gärdet, in north-east Stockholm.

The sister lived with her four-year-old daughter in a white apartment block at 25 Lanforsvägen, close to Lill-Jan’s Forest.

Joona and Samuel took turns keeping watch on the building at night. For a week, one of them would sit in their car a bit further along the road until it got light.

On the eighth day Joona was leaning back in his seat, watching the building’s inhabitants get ready for night as usual. The lights went off in a pattern that he was starting to recognise.

A woman in a silver-coloured padded jacket went for her usual walk with her golden retriever, then the last windows went dark.

Joona’s car was parked in the shadows on Porjusvägen, between a dirty white pickup and a red Toyota.

In the rear-view mirror he could see snow-covered bushes and a tall fence surrounding an electricity substation.

The residential area in front of him was completely quiet. Through
the windscreen he watched the static glow of the streetlamps, the pavements and unlit windows of the buildings.

He suddenly started to smile to himself when he thought about the dinner he had eaten with his wife and little daughter before he drove out there. Lumi had been in a hurry to finish so she could carry on examining Joona.

‘I’d like to finish eating first,’ he suggested.

But Lumi had adopted her serious expression and talked to her mother over his head, asking if he was brushing his teeth himself yet.

‘He’s very good,’ Summa replied.

She explained with a smile that all of Joona’s teeth had come through, as she carried on eating. Lumi put a piece of kitchen roll under his chin and tried to stick a finger in his mouth, telling him to open wide.

His thoughts of Lumi vanished as a light suddenly went on in the sister’s flat. Joona saw Roseanna standing there in a flannel nightdress, talking on the phone.

The light went out again.

An hour passed, but the area remained deserted.

It was starting to get cold inside the car when Joona caught sight of a figure in the rear-view mirror. Someone hunched over, approaching down the empty street.

Joona slumped down slightly in his seat and followed the figure’s progress in the rear-view mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of its face.

The branches of a rowan tree swayed as he passed.

In the grey lights from the substation Joona saw that it was Samuel.

His colleague was almost half an hour early.

He opened the car door and sat down in the passenger seat, pushed the seat back, stretched out his legs and sighed.

‘OK, so you’re tall and blond, Joona … and it’s really lovely being in the car and everything. But I still think I’d rather spend the night with Rebecka … I want to help the boys with their homework.’

‘You can help me with my homework,’ Joona said.

‘Thanks,’ Samuel laughed.

Joona looked out at the road, at the building with its closed doors, the rusting balconies, the windows that shone blackly.

‘We’ll give it three more days,’ he said.

Samuel pulled out the silver-coloured flask of yoich, as he called his chicken soup.

‘I don’t know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ he said seriously. ‘Nothing about this case makes sense … we’re trying to find a serial killer who may not actually exist.’

‘He exists,’ Joona replied stubbornly.

‘But he doesn’t fit with what we’ve found out, he doesn’t fit with any aspect of the investigation, and—’

‘That’s why … that’s why no one has seen him,’ Joona said. ‘He’s only visible because he casts a shadow over the statistics.’

They sat beside each other in silence. Samuel blew on his soup, and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Joona hummed a tango and let his eyes wander from Roseanna’s bedroom window to the icicles hanging from the guttering, then up at the snow-covered chimneys and vents.

‘There’s someone behind the building,’ Samuel suddenly whispered. ‘I’m sure I saw movement.’

Samuel pointed, but everything was in a state of dreamlike peace.

A moment later Joona saw some snow fall from a bush close to the house. Someone had just brushed past it.

Carefully they opened the car doors and crept out.

The sleepy residential area was quiet. All they could hear were their own footsteps and the electric hum from the substation.

There had been a thaw for a couple of weeks, then it had started to snow again.

They approached the windowless gable-end of the building, walking quietly along the strip of grass, past a wallpaper shop on the ground floor.

The glow from the nearest streetlamp reached out across the smooth snow to the open space behind the houses. They stopped at the corner, hunched over, trying to check the trees as they got denser towards the Royal Tennis Club and Lill-Jan’s Forest.

At first Joona couldn’t see anything in the darkness between the crooked old trees.