Page 223 of The Sleepwalker
On the back of the photo, someone has written ‘My poor mum’ in black ink.
The next picture is a wedding photograph. It features thesame woman, smiling this time, in a white bridal gown. She is standing beside a tall man with a black moustache in a slim-fitting dress coat.
Agneta gasps when she sees the next picture, adrenaline flooding through her veins.
In it, Bernard is around ten, standing on a pebbly beach beneath a pale sky. He is wearing a pair of swimming trunks and black flippers.
He looks cold, his shoulders hunched.
On his wiry torso, he has an arrow-shaped scar, bumpy and red, stretching from his collarbone to his navel.
The same scar she has felt beneath the hairs on his chest.
She hears footsteps on the stairs up to the attic and starts gathering everything back into a pile with shaking hands, catching a quick glimpse of a number of self-portraits drawn by a child.
A boy in floods of tears, a boy holding a black balloon, a boy with an angry dog – all with the same downward arrow on their bodies.
A boy in a coffin, a boy on a train track, and then nothing but arrows. Hundreds and hundreds of red arrows, filling sheet after sheet of paper.
Agneta closes the folder and puts it back into the hidden compartment. She shuts the lid, hears the latch click, and hurries back over to the desk.
Her heart is racing.
The flame of the candle tilts anxiously in the draught from her movements.
Bernard comes into the office, the smell of woodsmoke clinging to his clothes.
‘I was starting to think you must have dozed off up here,’ he says.
‘No, I .?.?.’
She trails off, panicking as she remembers that all of the victims had incomplete arrows carved into their torsos – just as Bernard had as a child. Like he still has.
‘Hello?’ He smiles.
‘Did you manage to get the fire going?’ she asks, conscious that she has broken out in a cold sweat.
‘Of course.’
‘Great.’
‘You seem jittery.’
‘Do I?’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’
‘Maybe it’s just this apocalyptic storm?’ he says.
‘Mmm, maybe.’
Agneta desperately tries to come up with some sort of rational explanation for what she just saw. Could he be an early victim? Was he part of some sort of weird cult as a child?
But as terrifying and emotionally impossible as it is, there seems to be only one logical conclusion: that Bernard is, in some way, involved in the murders.
She doesn’t even need to think back to know that she can’t give him an alibi for any of them.
