Page 52 of The Sleepwalker
‘Right.’
‘So, tell me. I hear you’ve had a few incidents lately?’
‘You could say that.’
Lars gives him a long, searching look.
‘This murder business was rather horrible,’ he says with a dark undertone in his voice.
‘Insane.’
‘How have you been? Are you sleepwalking every night at the moment?’
‘Pretty much, yeah.’
‘And each time is advanced?’ Lars asks, clasping his thin hands on the desk in front of him.
‘I’ve managed to get out – except when I was locked up.’
‘OK, we’ll start with the usual questionnaire,’ says Lars. ‘And tomorrow we can get going with the in-depth interviews and self-assessment.’
The printer starts to whirr, and when it stops, thirty seconds later, Lars gets up, reaches for the sheets of paper and staples them together. The doctor has a dark bruise on his throat, Hugo notices. Almost as though someone has tried to choke him with one hand.
* * *
With Lars Grind’s printed questionnaire in his hand, Hugo strolls through to the spacious dayroom with its knotted pinetables and chairs. A heavyset man with a shaved head is sitting with his back to him, reading a book in the glow of a pink table lamp.
Hugo tiptoes over to him.
The man’s orange fleece is snug over his broad shoulders, and he has a roll of fat at the top of his neck.
Hugo pauses beside him, taking in his shaved head, bushy black beard, thick forearms and short, stubby fingers.
‘Boo!’ he says.
The man’s chair creaks as he slowly turns around and looks up with a frown.
‘Hugo? What the hell are you doing in Uppsala?’
‘No idea, I woke up here.’
The man laughs and gets up to embrace Hugo, but he is so tall that his arms hug the air above the teenager’s head.
‘Where the fuck did he go?’ Bo mumbles, as he always does, before bending down to give him a proper hug.
Bo Balderson is from Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden. He works in the forestry industry and, like Hugo, is both a sleepwalker and one of Lars Grind’s longstanding patients.
He has a white plaster on the bridge of his nose and a bandage around one wrist. On the table beside his coursebook in constitutional law, there is an empty coffee cup.
When they last met at the Sleep Lab, Bo had made the journey south after being handed a suspended sentence for assault. He had left the construction site barracks in his sleep one night and seriously injured the foreman.
Bo’s solicitor lodged an appeal on the grounds of lack of intent, citing a 2016 Prosecution Authority report on somnambulism that determined that a person could commit both violent and sexual acts while sleepwalking.
‘How long have you been here?’ Hugo asks.
‘Almost two weeks.’
‘Is Rakia still around?’
