Page 29 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)
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 started looking at 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 and puts 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.’
‘I’ll try, but you know how things are.’
The National Forensic Centre processes around thirteen thousand DNA samples a year, and simply doesn’t have the resources for a quick turnaround. Thanks to Joona, Erixon has already used up a lifetime’s quota of priority cases.
Joona’s thoughts turn to the two premeditated murders and the niggling sense that, once again, he is chasing a serial killer.
Serial killers are rare, no doubt about it, but there are also far more of them than are ever brought to justice.
Sweden is a small country with a functional social security net, and of the twenty-five thousand or so people reported missing every year, the majority are eventually found safe and well.
Statistically speaking, however, around three thousand of them turn up dead. And thirty are never found.
Many are not victims of any crime, but there is definitely scope for some to have fallen prey to unknown serial killers.
On top of that, there are all the unreported cases, missed leads and opportunities no one is willing or able to talk about.
Across the world, the majority of all serial killers operate under the cover of armed conflict. They are soldiers, willing to do whatever is asked of them in battle, but their psychological driving force is pathological.
Many serial killers fall under the umbrella of organised crime networks, while other faceless perpetrators stalk the corridors of neonatal wards or palliative care facilities like angels of death. Some are protected by religious organisations.
And those serial killers whose victims come from the most marginalised groups of society – street children, the homeless, drug addicts, sex workers and refugees – tend not to be caught.
It is only when the victims belong to a certain social class, when the circumstances cannot be explained away, that the perpetrator attracts attention – and is labelled a serial killer.
With the bittersweet taste of chocolate still lingering in his mouth, Joona wonders whether he isn’t some kind of serial killer too.
On the basis of certain criteria, the answer would be yes, but not the most important of all: the drive.
He has a trail of dead bodies behind him, and he can almost always hear the sound behind his back: the rustling of feathers and the pecking and cawing of crows.
But that isn’t his goal; it’s the price he pays.
He has to believe that.
Joona has often thought that regardless of a serial killer’s choice of victim, the setting in which they are active and their individual justifications for killing, they are all actually incredibly alike.
No one can singlehandedly create life, but a serial killer fills the emptiness inside themselves with others’ deaths.
Their motives may vary – some believe they are punishing sinners or cleansing society, some that they are sparing their victims from suffering; others still reduce murder to a pragmatic consequence in order to satisfy their need for money or sex – but all lack empathy for their victims.
Joona would guess that the person they are currently trying to stop sees their own driving force as economical, killing the best way to do away with any witnesses, but in actual fact it is the other way around.
The murder itself is always the focus.
The economical explanation is, in essence, a fictitious motive dreamed up to prevent the killer from becoming incomprehensible to themselves, to keep the looming madness at bay.