Page 6 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

Hugo wakes with a start, filled with a sense of unease. It is the middle of the night, and he isn’t sure what roused him. For a moment, he lies perfectly still, listening intently. He hears a faint knocking sound through the wall, but it stops suddenly.

He opens his eyes and stares up at his lampshade in the darkness. A white rice paper orb, stretched over rings of thin bamboo.

There have been a number of violent robberies to the south of Stockholm recently.

The police have issued warnings, and there is talk that the perpetrators are a group of career criminals with military backgrounds and equipment.

They let themselves into people’s homes during the night and force them to make large bank transfers, leaving a trail of dead, mutilated and raped family members in their wake.

Social media is rife with rumours that the group’s commander looks like a skeleton. A man who kills his prisoners with a spade before burning their houses to the ground.

The slow knocking sound starts and stops again.

Hugo turns his head and focuses on the closed blind, hovering like a grey rectangle in the darkness. The lights are on in the garden, and the shadows cast by the bare branches of the lilac are like cracks on the smooth fabric.

He closes his weary eyes, relaxes and hears a car pass by on the street. He should check the time, he thinks, see whether Olga has sent any more weird pictures, but he doesn’t have the energy.

All he wants is to go back to sleep, but he hears something that leaves him wide awake. The soft crunch of footsteps on the frosty grass outside.

The shadow of a person darts across the blind.

A moment later, several windows break at the rear of the house.

Hugo hears a series of dull bangs, and the house itself seems to groan. A light sprinkling of dust falls from the lampshade.

The blood in Hugo’s veins runs cold as he gets out of bed as quietly as he can.

His body starts shaking as the front door is forced open and shards of glass, wood and bits of metal crash to the tiled floor.

Through the walls, he hears a muffled voice bark an order, followed by the thudding of boots on the stairs.

Hugo tiptoes over to the window, carefully opens the blind and tries to see if he can make anything out in the dark garden.

He needs to get out, run away and call the police. His hands grope the window frame, but the latch has been removed.

The aggressive shouts of the men reach him through the ceiling, and there is a loud crash as the carafe breaks on the floor.

The smell of smoke drifts through the house.

Hugo tries pulling on the window frame, but it won’t budge, seems to have been screwed shut from the outside.

He hears gunfire, two salvos of three shots, followed by a woman screaming. It must be Agneta, but her voice sounds so panicked that he barely recognises it.

Hugo’s father shouts, ‘Don’t touch her!’ and more gunshots ring out.

In the room above, shattered glass crashes to the floor. Agneta screams again, and Hugo hears her being dragged out of bed and away.

Heart racing, he starts hitting the windowpane with both hands. Despite the darkness, he realises that there is some sort of solid material covering the glass. Beneath a small hatch with horizontal metal slats, there is also – oddly enough – a laminated notice about evacuation in case of fire.

Hugo hears quick footsteps coming down the stairs, someone shouts a command, and door after door is kicked in along the hallway.

Trying not to make a sound, he tiptoes back over to his bed. His hands shake as he plumps up his pillows to make them look like a body beneath the covers.

They will be here any minute now.

He crawls beneath the bed, right up against the wall, and holds his breath as his door is kicked open.

*?*?*

It is light when Hugo wakes beneath the bed, and he feels a rush of anxiety when he remembers where he is.

His body aches as he crawls out and straightens up.

The yellow blanket he was given the night before is rolled up on his bed.

He sits down on the edge of the mattress and stares at his hands.

One of his knuckles is caked in dried blood, the bruises like dark clouds beneath his skin.

Hugo realises he must have been sleepwalking again, but he remembers only fragments of his nightmare.

Shouting and shots from the floor above.

His remand hearing took place yesterday afternoon, and the prosecutor cited the ‘special grounds’ covered by paragraph twenty-three of the Young Offenders (Special Provisions) Act in her argument for keeping him in custody.

When the district court ruled that they agreed with the prosecutor, Hugo turned to look at his father. Bernard’s eyes had welled up, and his chin was trembling with repressed emotion.

Hugo was remanded in custody on suspicion of murder and transferred to Kronoberg Prison.

Because he is not yet eighteen, he cannot be held for any longer than three months before charges are brought against him.

His first night in detention is now over, and he feels a rising sense of panic.

Hugo tucks a lock of hair back behind his ear and takes in his cramped cell. His eyes wander over the wall-mounted bed, the shelf, the chair and dented pine desk.

He doesn’t have a toilet, but can always pee in the sink if necessary.

There are five thick horizontal bars over the window. Behind that, there is a dusty void, then another pane of glass.

The sky is dark above the rooftops.

Hugo is still wearing the soft green sweatpants and T-shirt he was given in custody, and he catches a strong whiff of sweat from himself. The white slippers are on the flecked grey floor.

This is already unbearable.

He missed his meeting with the KULT editorial team yesterday.

Makes no difference, he tells himself. The job wouldn’t have suited him anyway. His life will be way too unstructured before he goes on his big trip.

Hugo was only seven when his parents split up.

Claire had never been happy in Sweden, and she got hooked on synthetic opioids and moved back to Québec.

At first, she wrote to him every week, but as the years passed their correspondence became increasingly infrequent, and she began to forget his birthdays.

After Bernard met Agneta, virtually all contact with Claire stopped, and it has now been two years since he last heard from her.

For all he knows, she could be in rehab, or maybe she just moved.

It wasn’t until Hugo met Olga nine months ago that he began to understand just how much he had missed his mother. He found he could talk to her about Claire, and he was taken aback by how emotional it made him, realising for the first time that the loss of her had shaped his entire life.

It had been Olga’s idea for them to travel to Canada together over the summer, to track down Claire.

‘But you have to be prepared for the possibility that she might still be stuck in the same place she was when she left, and everything that goes along with that,’ Olga had warned him as she lit a cigarette.

‘I’m not expecting some happy-ever-after reunion. I just want to see her, to say hello and look her in the eye .?.?. You know, it makes me feel physically sick when I think about how I’ve almost completely forgotten her.’

Four months ago, he and Olga opened a joint account to save up for their trip. Olga has paid in three times as much as him so far, but he plans to work over the Christmas break, maybe even ask his dad for a loan.

Olga speaks French and has a driving licence, and she has promised to help him in his search.

Hugo likes to imagine his mother living alone in her parents’ dilapidated old house in Le Grand-Village, with nothing but her dog, plants and hens for company. She has been clean for several years, drives a rusty Ford pickup and works part-time with pre-school children in Cap-Rouge.

In this fantasy, he stays with Claire once Olga goes home, spends the summer with her, and before he too flies back to Sweden, he takes his mother out to a nice restaurant with white tablecloths and colourful lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

They get dressed up and spend hours eating. Claire says, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be your mother until now,’ and he gives her his silver dinar.

Hugo has no idea where the coin came from. All he knows is that it was in his hand when he woke in the forest after sleepwalking as a child. Since that day, he has worn it as a kind of amulet on a thin chain, telling himself that it protects him.

The coin is incredibly thin, made from dented silver, and it features an image of a dog or a wolf surrounded by what looks like Arabic text.

When he told Olga about his fantasy, she pinched his cheek as though he were a child and said that he was a silly little cutie pie.

Hugo gets to his feet and runs a hand through his hair. His stomach is aching, and he hopes it might be time for breakfast soon.

Someone walks by in the corridor outside, the wheels of a trolley squeaking.

Through the thick walls, he hears one of the other men shouting.

He realises he must have tried to get out of the cell in his sleep when he sees the blood on the door, on the bars over the hatch and on the little sign telling him what to do in case of fire.