Page 77 of The Sleepwalker
Joona thanks Erik as he drops him off on the street outside his house in Gamla Enskede, then drives back to Stockholm, parks his car in the garage beneath his building, takes the lift to his floor and calls Valeria.
‘Sweetie?’ she answers.
‘It’s good to hear your voice. How are you doing?’
‘I’m OK. Mum spends most of her time staring out of the window, so I’ve been dealing with all the relatives coming over with food and flowers.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Dad was an old man.’
‘I know, but still .?.?. It doesn’t matter how old we are, or whether we know it’s coming, losing a parent is still hard.’
‘It is. I’ve been thinking a lot, crying a bit,’ she says.
‘I miss you.’
‘You haven’t eaten your chocolate coins, have you?’
‘I’ve startedlookingat them.’
‘You could come over here,’ she says. ‘Can’t you do that?’
‘I wish I could.’
‘Come and get your honey,’ she whispers.
They talk for a while, until there is a knock at the door and Valeria says she has to go and see who it is.
Joona is still smiling as he goes through to the kitchen andputs his phone on the counter. He makes himself a simple pasta dish with Italian salami, then sets the little table by the window, sits down and gazes out of the window.
Beneath the dark night sky, the city looks like a bed of glowing embers.
As he eats, his thoughts turn to the investigation and the fact that they have finally made a breakthrough. It was as though one of the many locked doors suddenly clicked and creaked open.
Hugo proved to be incredibly susceptible to hypnosis, entering into a deep trance almost immediately. Erik carved a furrow in the sand, and the boy followed it like he was water.
When they lifted him out of hypnosis at the end of the session, his face was pale and sweaty. He stared straight ahead for a moment or two, then mumbled ‘never again’ over and over.
Erik hadn’t been prepared for the power that was unleashed, and said later that such intense hypnosis was extremely uncommon. Despite years in the field, he had only ever come across a couple of people who had even come close to anything like what Hugo experienced.
During the session, he had repeatedly encouraged Hugo to try to see through his nightmare, and in the end the teenager had managed to give them their first description of the killer.
A blonde woman in a shiny coat had gone into the caravan with an axe hidden behind her back.
Joona lowers his cutlery and thinks about how hard he and his team have been working, how their unorthodox methods have finally produced a description.
‘Not too shabby, Joona,’ he says to himself.
He takes one of the chocolate coins out of the box and pops it into his mouth, closing his eyes for a moment.
When he came round, Hugo had been shaking so much that Lars Grind had had to give him fifty milligrams of Atarax to quickly dull his anxiety.
As the doctors attempted to calm the teenager, Joona went out into the corridor to call Erixon. Among the thousands of biological traces recovered from the caravan, the technicians had found a long blonde hair without a root.
‘And I’m guessing you need answers yesterday,’ Erixon replied.
‘Unless you can do it any quicker.’
