Page 53 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

Joona is in the car, heading back to Stockholm and the NCU. The light snow swirling through his headlights is a first taste of the low-pressure system currently moving west from northern Russia.

As he drives, Joona thinks about the hypnosis session. About Grind’s wide eyes, the look of fear on Agneta’s face, the hand she pressed to her mouth. He remembers the moment Hugo woke from the hypnosis, the way his eyes glazed over as he repeated his own words: There’s so much blood.

Erik had managed to get him to close his eyes and sink back down into relaxation for a moment or two before lifting him out of the trance properly.

‘You can look around, but just lie still, taking in your surroundings .?.?. And once you’re ready, you can sit up and have a sip of water.’

Joona knows that Erik was extremely pushed for time, that it’s not possible to hold people in their most traumatic moments for too long.

This is uncharted territory, and the doctor has no choice but to feel his way forward, learning more about what works for the specific individual in front of him during every session.

Based on what they know so far, everything points to Hugo having seen the fatal attack during the few seconds when he peered in through the window of the caravan.

It is as though Erik is methodically panning for the truth.

There are certain details that don’t quite match the hypothetical sequence of events laid out by Erixon and Nils ?hlén, but that could be because there are still fragments of dream muddying the waters. Still, Joona knows that Erik is getting closer to what really happened with every session.

During their first attempt, Hugo reached the campsite and gave them a brief glimpse of the killer.

In the second, he saw the murder itself, but had no memories from his time inside the caravan. For all they know, he might have come face to face with the killer.

If Hugo is willing to undergo a third session, Joona thinks, there is every chance he will be able to give them a firm description at long last.

*?*?*

Joona parks his car in the garage, takes the lift up to the eighth floor and strides down the corridor.

As he walks, he thinks about the blood in the garage in Stocksund, the spatter on the ceiling from the axe being raised again and again.

Ida’s husband has been informed. He was in Tenerife at the time of the murder, but was planning to catch the first plane home. Their five-year-old son was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and would stay there until his father could collect him.

The latest murder has turned all their previous theories on their head. There is no doubt it was the same killer – the Widow, as she is now known – but the fact is that Ida doesn’t fit the general pattern: she was a young woman rather than a man.

Joona has called a team meeting, asking everyone to return to the station to search for any unsolved or questionable cases involving female victims who might, somehow, fit the pattern.

It can no longer be denied that they are dealing with an active serial killer.

Yet again, Joona’s thoughts turn back to the bloody garage.

Looking at the scene, he had the sense that while the perpetrator’s aim was to end Ida’s life, some sort of blind rage took over almost immediately.

A fury that nothing but sheer exhaustion could numb, when the killer couldn’t physically manage to swing the axe again.

Everyone is already waiting around the table when Joona reaches the investigation room.

He goes straight over to greet Detective Superintendent Bondesson, who has just joined the group.

Bondesson is an older man with a thin, wrinkled face, bushy eyebrows and a horseshoe of white hair around his head.

He has been a part of the National Murder Squad since it was first set up, and is incredibly experienced, with a firm belief in allowing the slow machinery of an investigation to take its course.

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ Bondesson says, nodding to the photographs, ‘but my trusty brain always feels an urge to interpret crime scenes like this as chaotic, when really they should be read word for word, as a complete story.’

Joona sits down and takes the team through his latest thoughts following the revelation that the killer does not exclusively target men.

‘This time, the victim was a young woman. A mother,’ he says.

They go through the sequence of events in the garage in detail, discussing the images from the scene. Everyone agrees that the latest murder is the most aggressive to date, with the caravan coming a close second.

Anna Andersson is studying a photograph of the main pool of blood, a close-up shot of the grooved tread marks left by a child’s bicycle tyre.

‘Looks like the Widow moved the bike just as the blood was starting to coagulate,’ she says with a frown.

‘Can I see?’ Joona asks.

‘Forward a bit, then back a bit,’ Anna shows him.

‘Strange,’ Bondesson mumbles.

‘Only a couple of centimetres in both directions.’

‘The killer pumped up the tyres,’ says Joona.

‘Of course.’ Anna sighs. ‘Damn it. The other bikes all had flats.’

‘So you’re saying she literally massacred the mother, then stayed behind to pump up the kid’s tyres, just to be nice?’ Rikard Roslund asks.

Bondesson gets up from his chair, mutters that he needs a cancer stick and gives Joona a lingering look.

The group starts to divvy up the tasks for the new preliminary investigation: producing an updated profile and searching the databases for cold cases involving female victims.

‘We still haven’t managed to get hold of Olga Wójcik,’ says Anna.

Joona stands up, grabs his coat from the hanger and leaves the room.

He heads straight for the lifts, and as he waits, he looks up at the notice board, which is full of invitations to Christmas parties, glogg evenings and a seminar about the impact of the government’s decision to ignore the Council on Legislation’s advice and introduce a system of crown witnesses.

He takes the lift down to the ground floor and leaves the building via reception. As expected, Bondesson is waiting for him on the other side of Polhemsgatan. The older detective is wearing a long sheepskin coat, smoking a cigarette on the snowy pavement.

Joona crosses the narrow street between the parked motorcycles and walks over to him.

‘As you might have noticed, I had a real sinking feeling when I realised I might’ve made a big mistake,’ Bondesson says after a moment or two.

‘Everyone makes mistakes.’

‘But I had my doubts even then.’

‘When?’

Bondesson straightens his arm and drops the butt of his cigarette into the storm drain.

‘We turn our backs on the present and travel back three and a half years, tick, tick, tick,’ he continues.

‘It’s high summer, the first week in July, and the station is like a ghost town .

.?. We get a call from Lund, so I jump straight in the car and drive down there, through the bright night .

.?. A woman – and I still remember her name, Lucia Pedersen – has been murdered in her own home, a small timber-framed house in H?stad .

.?. Killed by a single axe blow to the neck. ’

‘I remember the case.’

‘Lucia was in the kitchen, opening a delivery from the pharmacy, when she was attacked from behind. The blade hit the right side of her neck, severing the fifth cervical vertebra from the sixth. She dropped like a rock, dead before she even hit the floor.’

Bondesson lights another cigarette and draws the smoke deep into his lungs. He then exhales, picks a fleck of ash from his lower lip and continues.

‘The killer had taken the axe from the chopping block in the woodshed and left it in the sink. There were no prints. They’d cleaned the shaft with some sort of alkaline solution.’

‘You saw a perpetrator who didn’t take the murder weapon to the scene, who knew there was an axe in the shed.’

‘She’d had a number of affairs.’

‘A clear motive.’

‘The prosecutor’s case was built on circumstantial evidence, but it held up in both the district court and the court of appeal,’ Bondesson tells him.

‘Lucia’s husband, Gerald Pedersen, swore he was innocent, but he was sent down for twenty years.

And their daughter was handed over to social services and placed in foster care. ’

‘I know you’re wondering whether the Widow might have killed Lucia, but what was it that gave you doubts back then?’

‘When he was twelve, Gerald Pedersen and his friends built a pretty powerful pipe bomb, and he lost his right hand .?.?. But the attacker was right-handed.’

‘That sort of thing isn’t usually easy to determine.’

‘No, you’re right .?.?. Theoretically , he could’ve done it, but he would have had to swing the axe in some sort of high backhand .?.?. No one would do that in a thousand years, but sure.’

‘You didn’t have any other suspects?’

Bondesson taps the ash from his cigarette.

‘The killer took the jewellery Lucia was wearing, too. A gold cross on a chain, two diamond earrings and a small silver stud with a freshwater pearl that she wore in her bellybutton. But they hadn’t searched the house, hadn’t touched any of her other jewellery in the bathroom.’

‘So the idea that it was a robbery gone wrong was ruled out?’

‘The prosecutor thought it was an act of jealousy, that it was Gerald’s way of taking back everything he’d given Lucia over the years .?.?. None of it was recovered when we searched the place, so the theory was that he’d tossed them out of the car window as he drove away.’

‘There’s a certain logic to that.’

‘Yeah, but what ultimately did for him was the kid,’ says Bondesson.

‘The kid?’

‘The killer gave the girl her asthma inhaler.’

‘How do we know that?’

‘Lucia had bought her a new one, and the box from the pharmacy was lying in the pool of blood. The ibuprofen, hand cream and tampons were still inside, but the killer had taken out the inhaler, opened it and left it beside the girl in her cot before fleeing the scene.’

‘OK.’

‘Which is something only a father would do,’ he concludes with a troubled smile.

‘Where is Gerald Pedersen now?’

‘They transferred him to Hall.’