Page 55 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

The news is reporting that the huge snowstorm is currently over St Petersburg, and that it will hit the east coast of Sweden with full force in just a few days’ time.

The sky is dark and the air so cold that Bernard turns around and heads home earlier than usual, before he hits ten thousand steps.

It doesn’t matter, he thinks. He is sure he read somewhere that eight thousand is more than enough.

He had been working at his computer in the kitchen for six hours straight – without anything but a cold meatball sandwich to eat – when he pulled on his winter coat and headed out.

Bernard is now almost back at the house. He walks through the gate, down the driveway, opens the front door and turns on the light in the hall. After kicking off his boots, he hangs up his coat and goes through to the kitchen.

He opens the lid of his computer, logs on and reads through the last few paragraphs he wrote before going out.

The pink Post-it note stuck to the top corner of the screen reminds him that he needs to finish his next column for Expressen .

That type of work always seems so meaningless whenever the idea for a new book takes hold of him, all the interviews and public appearances like obstacles in the way of what he really wants to be doing.

Bernard lifts his hands to the keys, but just as he is about to start typing he hears a series of loud bangs above him.

As though someone is rolling a microwave oven across the floor.

He glances down at his phone, because Agneta promised to send him a message when she was on her way back, but he doesn’t have any notifications.

Bernard shudders and gets up. He walks through to the library and pauses at the foot of the stairs. He can hear a sweeping sound from somewhere above, like loose sheets of paper blowing in the breeze.

‘Agneta?’ he shouts as he starts to climb the stairs.

When he reaches the landing, he peers through the glass door at the end of the hallway to Hugo’s old room, where he slept before moving into the guest room.

Bernard turns in the other direction and sees that the narrow door to the stairs leading up to his office in the attic is ajar.

The house is now quiet.

Bernard moves towards the main bedroom, opens the door and goes in. The yellow glow of the lampshade illuminates the bed he shares with Agneta.

She isn’t there.

He has just started to turn back towards the hallway when he hears a rustling sound, like a crane fly hitting a window.

From the corner of one eye, he sees something lunge towards him, and he feels a crack on the side of his head.

As though he has just been hit by a golf ball.

Bernard’s legs give way, and he takes the bedside lamp with him as he crashes to the floor. The bulb flickers and goes out.

Five empty cans tied to the back of the happy couple’s car rattle along the hallway and down the stairs.

He closes his eyes and feels his heart pounding in fear.

The side of his head is throbbing, and he reaches up and touches his temple. It doesn’t seem to be bleeding.

Bernard tries to sit up, but is too dazed to manage it.

What just happened? Someone was rolling a microwave, cracked him over the head and then ran away.

His thoughts are confused, he realises.

Five empty cans on strings hanging around a grey woman’s neck.

A golf ball hits his temple.

Two black dogs race through the room and down the stairs.

Bernard isn’t sure whether he dozed off or passed out when he wakes to the sound of Agneta shouting his name. He may as well stay where he is on the floor, he thinks with a smile. For the drama of it, if nothing else.

‘Bernard?’ she shouts as she climbs the stairs.

‘I’m OK,’ he whispers.

Agneta shrieks and runs over to him when she spots him on the floor, and he attempts a smile and holds up a thumb.

‘Is it your heart?’ she asks.

‘No, I fell .?.?.’

‘Are you sure it’s not your heart? I’m going to call 112,’ she says, rummaging through her bag with shaking hands.

‘Really, I’m OK,’ Bernard mumbles, closing his eyes for a moment.

‘What happened?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he says with a smile. ‘It was just a golf ball .?.?. It hit me right .?.?.’

Agneta finds her phone and dials the number, quickly telling the operator what is happening, that the front door was open, that he is in the bedroom on the first floor.

‘He doesn’t have any injuries that I can see – other than the side of his head, maybe. It’s pretty red, but it isn’t bleeding. He’s conscious, but seems quite confused,’ she says.

‘We’ll send an ambulance,’ the operator tells her.

*?*?*

Agneta watches the ambulance pull away up the driveway, then heads back into the house and locks the door. She goes straight to the library, slumps down on one of the bottom steps, and feels like she wants to cry.

Bernard refused to let her go with him in the ambulance, but he did ask her to bring his laptop to the hospital if they decide to keep him in overnight for observation.

She sighs, gets up and climbs the stairs. When she reaches the landing, she turns right, opens the door to the attic and makes her way up to Bernard’s office.

‘God .?.?.’

The room is complete chaos, like the bridge of a ship after a hurricane. The desk is at an angle, the chair on its back. The banker’s lamp is broken and there are papers and books everywhere, all of the drawers in the desk emptied onto the floor.

The big blue J?rvso cabinet looks like it has been forced open with a crowbar or an axe, and the floor around it is littered with splintered wood and pieces of lock.

Bernard’s original manuscripts have been dumped on the floor and trampled, along with his letters, folders, photographs and contracts.

Agneta tries to spot his laptop amid the mess. She moves a hardback book about the criminal code and criminal law and notices a stack of old letters held together with a brown rubber band. The top envelope was postmarked in Québec two years ago. Agneta picks up the stack and puts it on the desk.

She feels a sudden rush of panic – as though she has just been shot with a bullet made of ice – when she realises that it could have been the serial killer who attacked Bernard.

The axe murderer might have seen the interview in Aftonbladet and come over here to silence the witness.

Agneta walks down the stairs as though in a daze, imagining the blonde woman hitting Bernard with the broadside of her axe in anticipation of chopping him to pieces.

Perhaps it was the sound of her Lexus pulling up on the driveway that scared the killer away.

The front door was wide open when she got home, after all.

Had Bernard left it unlocked?

Agneta pauses in the hallway, closes the door behind her and tries to bring her anxious breathing under control.

The killer must have come in through Hugo’s window the night they saw her on the security cameras, she thinks.

And lain in wait inside the house until today.

Agneta tells herself that she needs to calm down, that it can’t be true.

Despite the deep gashes in the frame, the window was intact.

She gazes through the pane of glass in the door to the side of the house they rarely use nowadays, towards Hugo’s old bedroom and games room.

A sudden draught around her feet gives her goosebumps.

There must be a window open somewhere.

The thought of the serial killer getting into the house through the door she spraypainted onto the wall flickers through Agneta’s mind, and she shudders and starts making her way down the stairs to the library, heart racing.

After eight steps, she stops – at the very heart of the house – to listen. It is so quiet that she can hear the weary snapping of the rope against the flagpole outside.

She needs to ask Bernard what he saw, because if it was the killer then she is going to call Joona Linna right away and demand protection.

Agneta glances over her shoulder before she continues down the stairs, crosses the library and goes through to the kitchen.

She is relieved to see that Bernard’s laptop is on the table.

She opens the cupboard beneath the sink and takes out a sponge and a bottle of cleaning spray, then heads out into the hall and pulls on her faded leather jacket and a pair of green wellington boots.

It has started snowing again, and the tyre tracks left by the ambulance are barely visible.

Agneta cuts across the gravel, turns the corner and pauses outside Hugo’s window, peering in at his unmade bed and the piles of clothes on the floor for a moment before continuing along the end of the house and gazing down towards the lake.

The islands and holms have vanished in the haze, and the ice on the surface of the water is blanketed beneath a dusting of white snow.

Agneta rounds the corner again and makes her way over to the spraypainted door on the wall: a tall rectangle complete with a doorstep, hinges, a handle and lock.

She wets the sponge and starts scrubbing at the paint with a rising sense of unease.

By the time she stops twenty minutes later, dropping the bottle and sponge to the ground, her fingers are aching from the cold.

The paint is almost gone, but there is still a faint shadow of a doorway there, as though it were made of smoke.

Agneta hurries back around to the front of the house, opens the door and checks that there are no damp footprints on the floor before going in and locking the door behind her.

She picks up her phone from the chest of drawers and sees that she has a message from Bernard. He will be allowed to come home tomorrow, he writes, followed by three red hearts.

As Agneta makes her way through to the library, she tries calling him, but he doesn’t pick up. She climbs the stairs, thinking about the stack of letters again, and with no real plan, she continues up to the attic.

The intruder has trampled on the cigar box containing Bernard’s old lucky pens.

She picks her way over to the desk, rights the chair, reaches for the stack of letters and sits down. Agneta takes a deep breath and then loosens the elastic band. Flicking through the letters, she realises that they are all from Hugo’s mother, Claire.

Agneta knew, of course, that he got letters from time to time, but she has always made sure to maintain a certain distance from their relationship.

For years, Bernard must have gone into Hugo’s room, retrieved the letters from the floor or the bin, and saved them for him.

She reads them in chronological order, starting with the years after Claire first moved back to Québec, written to a small child.

Some of the later letters have been crumpled, and one has actually been torn to pieces, but Bernard must have taped it back together.

Perhaps Hugo got sick of his mother’s constant excuses and lies about doing better, about starting various treatment programmes and deciding to get clean.

From his perspective, the whole thing is heartbreaking.

Claire writes that she is working as a translator and that she hopes she will have enough money to travel back to Sweden soon.

Agneta dries the tears from her cheeks and feels a lump in her throat as she unfolds the last letter in the stack and reads: ?lskade Hugo, mon fils bien-aimé, I spoke to Dad on the phone and he tells me that you’re doing well at school, that you’re learning to write and that you are incredibly gifted – a wonder boy!

!! I’m sorry to have let you down again by missing ton anniversaire .

It broke my heart, but the truth is that I finally found a place at a great treatment centre in Ontario.

I was in the middle of a detox programme and had no contact with the outside world.

I’m out now, on a methadone programme – methadone maintenance treatment – and I’m feeling good, working at a small garden centre.

The hardest part is that my sponsor says I need to cut off all contact with everyone for a while, until I’m strong enough to come back and try to fix the things I broke.

It’ll be lonely, but I’ve got myself a dog – a Siberian husky, because his eyes remind me of yours.

Bluer than robin eggs. I’ll always love you, and I think of you every day.

Calins et bisous, puss och kram. Your mum, Claire

Agneta folds the sheet of paper, pulls the elastic band back around the stack and gets to her feet. She is thinking about the last letter and the conversation she had with Hugo in the car. He clearly hasn’t read it, because it sounds like his mother is genuinely trying to stay clean.

Agneta feels guilty for having often looked down on Claire and her addiction. She leaves the letters on the desk and turns to the window out onto the water.

A shiver passes down her spine when she sees a light come on in the lake house.