The Sandman. Ларс Кеплер

      ‘I know, I agree, but … I have to do this. I’m going after him, and now is when it’s all happening.’

      Disa can feel a sob rising in her throat. She fights it back down and turns her face away. Once she had been Summa’s friend. That was how they met. And when his life fell apart, she was there.

      He moved in and stayed with her for a while when things were at their very worst for him.

      At night he would sleep on her sofa, and she would hear him moving about, and knew that he knew she was lying awake in the next room. That he was looking at the door to her bedroom and thinking about her lying in there, more and more confused and hurt by how distant he was being, how cold. Until one night he got up, got dressed and left her flat.

      ‘I’m staying,’ Disa whispers, wiping the tears from her face.

      ‘You have to go.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because I love you,’ he says. ‘You must know that …’

      ‘Do you really think I’d go now?’ she asks with a broad smile.

       40

      Jurek Walter is visible on one of the nine squares of the huge monitor. Like a caged beast he is pacing the dayroom, walking round the sofa, then turning left and going past the television. He goes round the running machine, turns left again and goes back into his room.

      Anders Rönn watches him from above on another of the screens, as well as on the other monitor.

      Jurek washes his face, then sits down on the plastic chair without drying himself. He stares at the door to the corridor as the water drips onto his shirt and dries.

      My is sitting in the operator’s chair. She checks the time, waits another thirty seconds, looks at Jurek, makes a note of the zone on the computer, and locks the door to the dayroom.

      ‘He’s getting faggots this evening … he likes that,’ she says.

      ‘He does?’

      Anders Rönn already thinks that the routines surrounding this one patient are so repetitive and static that it would be hard to tell the days apart if it weren’t for the daily meeting up on Ward 30. The other doctors talk about their patients and care plans. No one even expects him to repeat that the situation in the secure unit is unchanged.

      ‘Have you ever tried talking to the patient?’ Anders asks.

      ‘With Jurek? We’re not allowed to,’ she replies, and scratches her tattooed arm. ‘It’s because … well, he says things you can’t forget.’

      Anders hasn’t spoken to Jurek Walter since that first day. He just makes sure that the patient gets his regular injection of neuroleptic drugs.