Page 226 of The Sleepwalker
‘Fire.’
‘Oh, I don’t know .?.?. I used to love going to the spring bonfires when I was little,’ she says, aware that fear has made her voice a little shriller than usual. ‘My friends and I cycled from party to party, eating sweets and throwing firecrackers.’
‘For me, my whole childhood – at least until the age of ten or so – is like a different world. Some kind of strange film,’ Bernard says. ‘I can’t quite believe that boy is the same person sittinghere with you now. There are still fragments of him in me, of course – the taste of blood in his mouth, the way he gritted his teeth to stop himself from sobbing in fear, but .?.?.’
Agneta wonders if Bernard is trying to work out whether she saw the picture of him on the pebbly beach.
She feels guilty for having let him pull the wool over her eyes, for not having worked it out sooner. Bernard has never been violent towards her, not once, but he does have a strong sense of justice, and has always stood on the side of children.
‘I think it probably varies from person to person,’ she replies. ‘I feel like I have a pretty strong sense of who I was then .?.?. starting from when I was around five, maybe.’
‘I know, but I never talk about my childhood .?.?. And you never ask.’
‘I have asked, but I’ve always had the sense that you don’t want to talk about it.’
‘What sense would that be, Agneta?’ he asks, a new sharpness to his voice.
‘It’s just something I felt,’ she replies, swallowing hard.
With a rising sense of panic, Agneta realises that Bernard must have noticed the elastic band on the desk.
‘Do you have any idea why I’ve never shared all my happy childhood memories with you?’
‘You mentioned a bus accident.’
‘Yes, a little accident that ended with my mother taking her own life right in front of me,’ he says in a neutral tone.
‘My God .?.?.’
‘With an axe.’ He smiles.
Agneta finds herself thinking about Bernard’s scar, that it has always been hidden beneath his chest hair since she first met him. She knows exactly how it feels beneath her fingertips.
She also knows she asked him about it once, at the start of their relationship, and that he said he was in a bus accident as achild.
But that wasn’t true.
‘Fire is the serial killer’s element,’ Bernard says, more to himself than anything. ‘He burns and spreads like a forest fire unless someone stops him.’
He gets up, refills his wineglass and gazes out into the darkness on the other side of the window before sitting down again.
Agneta knows that she needs to get away from him, no matter the cost, before his rain of red arrows hits her.
‘Shall I go and get some more wood?’ she asks, as naturally as she can.
‘We’ve got enough here.’
‘Not to last until morning,’ she says, suddenly queasy.
‘We’ll see.’
The wind rumbles in the chimney, and the light from the fire flickers over the floor lamp with the grey snakeskin shade.
Bernard dips a finger into his wine and absentmindedly draws a faint line on the table.
‘What do you think about the Widow? Are we really looking for a woman?’ he asks, taking a sip.
‘Almost all serial killers are men,’ she replies, hiding her trembling lips behind her hand until she manages to compose herself.
