Page 63 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

Agneta watches from the doorway as Bernard’s taxi pulls up outside the house, completing the circle from the moment he left in the back of the ambulance. He gets out, and the car turns around and disappears up the steep driveway.

Bernard walks slowly towards her, cold air clinging to his body as he makes his way inside and locks the door behind him.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

‘Fine. My back and hip are a bit stiff, but I’m OK.’

He groans in pain as she helps him with his coat.

‘Are you hungry? There are some leftovers I could reheat,’ she says.

‘Please.’

Bernard kicks off his shoes, leaving them in the middle of the mat as he moves forward and hugs her.

They stand in the dimly lit hallway for a moment or two, enjoying the heat of each other’s body and their familiar, comforting scent.

‘Maybe you could stop scaring me now?’ Agneta tells him as they break the embrace.

‘Sorry,’ he says, following her through to the kitchen. ‘I actually got a bit of a fright myself. I was thinking: this is it, I’m going to be beaten to death now, have my head lopped off .?.?.’

‘Did you see her? Was it the killer?’ she asks, her voice trembling.

‘I don’t know. I felt a crack on the head and I dropped like a rock.’

‘So someone hit you?’

‘Yes.’

‘With an axe?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We need to call Joona.’

‘I will. I just need to gather my thoughts a bit first.’

‘Sit down. I’ll get the food ready.’

Bernard rests a hand on the counter and looks out at the heavy snow falling in the darkness.

‘Have you checked that all of the doors are locked?’

‘Of course,’ she says.

‘Good,’ he whispers.

Agneta studies the dark bruise on his temple. The blood seems to have seeped beneath his skin, pooling at the bottom of his cheek.

‘Do you want us to do it again?’ she asks when he fails to sit down.

‘I think so.’

They work their way through the rooms on the ground floor, double-checking that all of the windows are closed and the sensors intact. They open cupboards and wardrobes, and Bernard goes down to the basement to fetch a drill.

‘I’m going to fix Hugo’s window. We can get a handyman out some other time,’ he says.

Agneta follows him into the hallway and turns on the crystal wall sconce.

Bernard opens the door to Hugo’s room, walks straight over to the damaged window and starts screwing it shut with a handful of sturdy wood screws.

Agneta continues into the living room and glances over to the windows out onto the lake.

She can hear the whirr of the drill on the other side of the display cabinet.

The disused door behind it dates from a time when parlours and through-rooms were in vogue, but it has been blocked off behind the tall piece of furniture for as long as she can remember.

She peers beneath the sofas around the coffee table, tries the patio doors, checks behind the curtains and then heads back out into the hall.

She is thinking about the last letter from Hugo’s mother, about the methadone programme Claire mentioned and her use of Swedish, French and English.

‘We should get personal alarms,’ Bernard says when he comes out into the library and puts the drill down on the mantelpiece.

‘That might feel reassuring,’ she replies, remembering that she had been so shaken by the break-in and attack that she was convinced she had seen the light come on in the lake house, when it was nothing but the reflection of the lanterns on the neighbour’s jetty in the window.

‘I checked the cameras, by the way, but I couldn’t see her face,’ she says.

‘The police will have to take a look.’

They pop their heads into the utility room and the little room where they keep their weights and exercise bike before heading upstairs.

Agneta can tell that Bernard is in pain, gripping the handrail as they make their way up the steep staircase to his office.

‘Good grief,’ he says when he sees the mess.

‘I told you.’

Bernard steps forward into the room, picking his way between books and sheets of paper. He sighs as he takes in the broken cabinet, the empty cigar box and the cracked glass on a framed diploma.

‘She took everything of value,’ he says after a moment.

‘How much cash did you have?’

‘Next to none.’

‘What about the gold?’

‘Eight hundred grams.’

‘That’s a lot of money .?.?.’ she mumbles.

‘I’ll have to check if the insurance will cover it. They definitely won’t pay up for the DN Culture Section .’

‘She’s taken the jar?’ Agneta asks with feigned indignation.

‘Alas.’

‘Well, that’s just not on. What a pig!’ She smiles.

‘Honestly, I could have done with a nice fat joint this evening.’

Bernard sighs as he bends down and picks up a poetry collection with a personal message from Tomas Transtromer.

‘I found some letters from Claire, by the way,’ Agneta hears herself say, pointing to the desk. ‘I left them over there. One of them had come loose, and I .?.?. I read it. Sorry.’

‘That’s fine. I don’t have any secrets from you.’

‘OK.’

‘Did you read the rest?’

‘No, just that one,’ she lies like a child caught red-handed. ‘It had fallen out of the stack.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, you can read the lot,’ Bernard tells her, putting the poetry collection down on top of a stack of other books on the shelf.

He straightens the shade on the reading lamp, pulls a loose thread from the gold fringing, rolls it into a ball and then looks up and meets Agneta’s eye.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asks.

‘No, it’s just .?.?. You never showed her last letter to Hugo, did you? He told me that Claire does nothing but lie and talk about getting clean, but she never actually gives it a chance. But in that letter .?.?. she sounds like she was really serious.’

‘I should have thrown it away .?.?.’

‘You can’t do that. Hugo would be so happy if—’

‘Hold on a minute.’

‘He has a right to know his mum.’

‘Just hold on a minute, please.’

‘She might be an addict, but she’s still his mum,’ Agneta says, emphasising virtually every word.

Bernard sighs deeply and looks up at her with sad eyes. ‘The problem is that I’m the one who wrote that last letter.’

‘Wait, what?’

‘Claire hadn’t replied to any of his letters in almost two years.

I tried to get hold of her, but she blocked me and changed her number,’ he explains with a pained expression.

‘Hugo used to run home from school every day to check the mailbox. He was crushed, so I wrote that stupid letter, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to give it to him. I just couldn’t.’

‘No.’

‘As a parent, you desperately want to be able to comfort your child. It’s damn near unbearable when they’re upset, but .?.?. I decided – perhaps a little cynically – that silence on her part might actually be the kindest thing. Or the most truthful, at least.’

‘So the part about her joining the methadone programme .?.?. you made that up?’

‘I .?.?. She was always talking about it, but she would back out at the last minute every time.’

‘OK, I get it. I did think it was weird that she’d used the word “anniversaire” to talk about his birthday when they say “fête” in Canada.’

‘Do they? I didn’t know that .?.?. I’ll have to get you to help next time I need to fake a letter,’ he says, attempting a smile.

Agneta sits down heavily on the desk chair and looks up at him.

‘What do you think happened to Claire?’ she asks.

‘Honestly? She couldn’t hack life here in Sweden, with me .

.?. All the demands .?.?. I don’t know. She went back to Canada, to her messy life there, to the drugs and her old friends .

.?. You can see from her letters that she was trying a bit at first, but that she .

.?. She sort of gets more and more bogged down.

It’s so tragic, desperately so .?.?. I don’t know.

I hope .?.?. I hope, of course, that she’s in rehab, that she’s put the past behind her – myself and Hugo included – in order to start over. ’

‘But?’

‘I don’t think she’s overdosed. It doesn’t feel like she’s dead,’ he says, dabbing at his eyes. ‘But I do worry that things might have taken a turn for the worse for her .?.?. that she’s contracted HIV or got mixed up in prostitution, crime .?.?.’

*?*?*

Bernard and Agneta have made their way back downstairs, and are sitting at the kitchen table in the glow of two candles. As they share a bottle of Chateau Tour Baladoz, Bernard eats the leftovers Agneta has reheated for him: tagliatelle with steak, lemon, Parmesan shavings and fresh basil.

‘Well, the window is a bit more secure now, at the very least,’ he says as he chews.

‘I actually went out and scrubbed the .?.?. you know .?.?. the door off the wall yesterday. So no one would be able to get in that way,’ she confesses.

Bernard laughs and splutters. He lowers his fork and wipes his mouth with a napkin.

‘The thought crossed my mind too,’ he says with a grin.

The circles of light from the two candles flicker in sync across the table, like a couple of hula-hoops.

‘Things could have ended very differently, you know,’ Agneta mumbles.

‘It might’ve been the sound of your car that scared her off. Or maybe she realised it was me, rather than Hugo .?.?.’

‘You think it was because of the interview? Because Hugo is a witness?’

‘I don’t know what I think, but I know what I’m afraid of. We can do without a bit of gold, but .?.?.’

Agneta tilts her glass and studies the blood-red orb of light in the dark wine for a moment before she drinks.

‘It’s a good job Hugo is at the clinic, then,’ she says.

‘Which reminds me: we haven’t talked about the latest hypnosis session yet,’ he says as he picks up his fork again.

‘I was there for the whole thing.’

‘How was he afterwards?’

‘Pretty good, I’d say. A little anxious at first, but I think the whole thing felt OK.’

‘Did they give him anything to calm his nerves again?’

‘No, there was no need.’

‘Good. So what happened?’

‘It was crazy .?.?. and incredibly interesting, too.’ Agneta smiles and turns her glass.

‘Anything we can use?’

‘I wrote it all down as soon as I came out.’

‘That’s great. We really need it,’ he says, topping up their glasses. ‘I’m getting excited now. Tell me everything.’

‘OK.’ She laughs.

‘You were there, with Hugo, Lars, the hypnotist and the detective.’

‘Joona Linna. He’s very attractive, you know .?.?. objectively speaking.’

‘Ha ha. What about the hypnotist? Is he as creepy as you’d expect?’

‘I’m going to sound insane now, but he was actually really charming.’

‘And handsome?’ Bernard suggests, pushing his plate away.

‘No comment,’ she replies with a smile.

A gust of wind blows a flurry of snowflakes against the kitchen window with a soft crackling sound.

‘Go on,’ he says, hiding his shaking hand beneath the table.

‘I don’t really understand how hypnosis works – we’ll have to look into that – but the whole process took much longer than I was expecting,’ she begins.

‘At first, I felt like laughing at how serious it all was. The ceremonial aspect of it. He started by counting down, but it all got very suggestive after a while.’

‘And that’s when you found yourself getting hypnotised too?’ he teases.

‘I know.’ Agneta laughs again. ‘It almost felt that way.’

‘Sorry, go on,’ says Bernard, producing a mechanical pencil from his chest pocket. ‘He was counting down .?.?.’

‘He started counting down from one hundred, and he kept telling Hugo to focus on his voice. Somehow, he managed to take Hugo back to that night, when he was sleepwalking at the campsite, over to the caravan where he saw the woman with the blonde hair.’

As Agneta takes him through the sequence of events at the back of the caravan, Bernard asks a few follow-up questions and takes notes directly on the table.

‘Even though he was under hypnosis, it was like Hugo kept turning away from whatever he saw through the window,’ she tells him. ‘Erik Maria Bark tried a few times to guide him back over there, but as soon as he realised it wasn’t going to work he changed tack .?.?.’

‘OK,’ Bernard mumbles as he scribbles, circling and underlining certain words.

‘This part was really interesting, so we’ll have to make sure it’s included in the book,’ she says.

‘Rather than trying to force Hugo to turn back to the window, he told him to watch a video of the murder on his phone instead, and it actually worked. I wrote everything down. You can read it once I’ve typed it up. ’

Agneta takes a sip of wine, and Bernard leans back in his chair and studies her with a smile.

‘Did he manage to give the detective any sort of description?’

‘No, but I don’t think it’ll be long.’

‘We’re getting closer, aren’t we?’

‘One more session. That’s my guess.’

Bernard picks up his glass, gets to his feet and moves around the table to toast with her.

‘I really do believe in this. We’re helping the police stop a killer, and we’ll be done with the book before the court case is even over. This is going to be great.’

‘I hope so,’ Agneta replies, getting up.

‘You’re incredible,’ Bernard tells her, putting down his glass.

‘Pff. I’m an OK journalist, and I’ve got a good memory. I can put things in context, and I’ve got good deductive skills.’

‘You’ve got a good everything. Good mind, good heart, good body. Incredible thighs .?.?.’

They kiss, light-heartedly at first, then more passionately. Agneta wraps her arms around his neck, and Bernard pulls her close.

‘What’s happening here?’ she jokes.

Bernard’s warm hands caress the base of her spine, moving down to her bottom and thighs. He lifts her up – says, ‘Ow, my back’ – and sits her down on the edge of the table.

Agneta laughs and hikes up her skirt. He tugs her knickers down and leaves them hanging around her ankles as he unbuttons his trousers. She leans back on her elbows and parts her legs, kicking her knickers away and sighing as he enters her.