Page 87 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

It is the day before Christmas Eve, and the fields and meadows are blanketed beneath a thick layer of shimmering snow.

Joona and Valeria are eating dinner at the table in her kitchen.

After the storm, a solemn calm descended over the country.

People came together to restore and repair their communities, to take care of those who had been injured or bereaved.

The roads were ploughed and cars dug out.

Masts were raised, the power restored and communication made possible once again.

In anticipation of Valeria’s return, Joona busied himself getting ready for the holiday. He bought food, wine, beer and snaps, put up the Christmas decorations, chopped down a tree and wrapped the presents.

Valeria got home late yesterday evening. They took a shower together, made love, and she then slept for thirteen hours straight.

They have just finished the last few preparations ahead of their family arriving for the holidays: Lumi and Laurent, Valeria’s sister, her husband and their three daughters.

Joona went out to buy mussels that morning, and he cooked a simple spaghetti vongole – a contrast to all of the heavy festive food that awaits them over the next few days.

As they eat, Valeria tells him about her trip and how grief found its place in their everyday routines. Her mother had taken a chair to the grave and spent every day sitting there, giving her husband admonitions and advice to take with him to the afterlife.

They clear the table, take out the box of chocolate coins, sit back down and pour a couple of glasses of wine.

Valeria’s amber eyes have a ring of bronze around the edge of her irises. She has lost weight during the trip, but says that it is Joona who seems thinner.

Joona has placed the only decoration he still has from childhood on the window sill. It belonged to his father: a snowy landscape featuring a red cottage with a yellow cellophane window. He has lit a tea light behind the little house, creating a cosy glow in the window.

Valeria sets the two glasses down on the table and holds Joona’s gaze as she asks what he has been up to while she was in Brazil.

‘Just the usual.’

‘You’ve eaten two of the chocolate coins.’

‘I waited to have a third until now.’

They both smile as the chocolate melts in their mouths, and Joona then leans into Valeria and starts telling her about the complex hunt for a serial killer that became world news when it emerged that famous author Bernard Sand was the perpetrator.

Using the material Agneta found in an antiques cabinet, Joona has been able to piece together a fairly detailed timeline of Bernard’s journey from vulnerable young boy to compulsive axe murderer.

As a child, Bernard lived with his parents on a farm outside of Gislaved. His mother and father ran a car and tractor repair service there, and Bernard suffered from the same sleepwalking issues his son Hugo would later exhibit.

‘Is sleepwalking hereditary?’ asks Valeria.

‘Apparently.’

His father came up with a primitive, yet effective system to avoid any accidents. At night, Bernard was tied to a rope that allowed him to go as far as the bathroom, but not out into the yard or over to the stove in the kitchen.

‘Wow,’ Valeria says with a sigh.

After his father abandoned his family for another woman, his mother entered a period of instability that quickly spiralled into schizoaffective disorder.

One day, she picked up an axe, carved an arrow into Bernard’s chest, told him to get back into bed – that it was all his father’s fault – and went outside.

‘The boy was tied to the rope, but he could still see out of the window .?.?.’

Bernard watched as his mother turned the axe around, pressed the sharp edge to her forehead and then ran into a concrete wall, cleaving her head in two.

‘I feel sick,’ Valeria whispers, pressing a hand to her mouth.

With his father gone, Bernard ended up being taken into care and spent time in a number of different homes.

‘That was his original trauma,’ Joona continues.

‘But he seemed OK, did well at school. After he graduated from high school, he was awarded a scholarship and enrolled at Stockholm University. He was only twenty-six when he got his PhD and became a professor, and just three years after that he started writing romance novels and had a huge amount of success.’

‘Was he romantic?’

‘Yes, he was .?.?. which is a key piece of the puzzle,’ Joona replies. ‘He met Claire, and they got married and had a son. Hugo.’

Bernard’s second trauma took place when he discovered that his wife had been cheating on him while Hugo sleepwalked over to a window, climbed out and fell from the roof.

‘She should have heard the alarm. He couldn’t understand how she hadn’t, and he grilled her, but she denied everything.’

Claire continued to deny everything, but she walked straight into the trap Bernard set for her when he pretended to go on another work trip two weeks later.

He fashioned a poncho out of the shower curtain in the basement, grabbed an axe, took his wife by surprise in the bedroom and started dismembering her lover while he was still alive.

She fled down the stairs in terror and was running over the grass towards the gate when Bernard caught up with her. He tackled her to the ground, beheaded her and wrapped her body in the shower curtain before dragging it over to their beach house and burying it beneath the floor.

‘Bernard told Hugo that Claire had abandoned them and moved back to Canada,’ Joona goes on.

He wrote letters from her to Hugo and quickly came up with an alternative narrative about drug addiction to explain why the two could never meet.

Several years later, Bernard happened to cross paths with a patient at the same sleep lab as his son.

He learned that she was cheating on her husband, and that lit some sort of dark fire in his belly, an icy blaze.

Bernard grabbed his axe, drove over to her house by Lake M?laren and hid among the trees until he spotted his opportunity.

When the woman came out of the house and carried a stepladder over to one of the apple trees, he ran over and hit her on the back of the head with the flat side of his blade.

She fell to the ground, losing her blonde wig in the process, and died of intracranial bleeding on the grass beneath the tree.

‘So that was the moment he became a serial killer?’ says Valeria.

‘Yes.’

After the third murder, a new hunger took hold of him, a fire that helped to soothe his trauma but which also needed feeding far more frequently.

Wearing the blonde wig, he resurrected his own mother, but this time he turned his fury on the man who had abandoned her and her child.

‘It wasn’t that Bernard thought he was his mother, but the wig gave him some sort of protection and strength .?.?. almost like a kind of mask.’

Following that murder, it was primarily Bernard’s relationship column in the newspaper that triggered his anger, people asking for advice and telling him about their complex lives, moral dilemmas and longing for change – such as when Nils Nordlund’s jealous wife wrote to him and asked what she should do about her husband cheating on her every time he went to a conference.

‘Bernard watched his victims, planning every step and setting traps for them .?.?. He became increasingly active, increasingly violent .?.?. It was as though the punishment he meted out was never quite harsh enough, because the void inside him .?.?. it refused to be filled. The more he fuelled the fire, the hungrier it became, which is – I think – why he also robbed his victims. He thought they should pay for what they had done, too.’

Joona trails off for a moment, thinking that there are many reasons why a person might repeatedly kill – all more or less explicit – but that the shadow the perpetrator casts is always roughly the same if you put the victims in a row: barren loneliness, a lack of empathy and a dark energy.

‘No one can single-handedly create life, but there are some people who get high on death,’ he says.

Joona and Valeria sit quietly for a while, sipping their wine and gazing out at the snow in the light from the kitchen, the vast darkness beyond.

‘Go on,’ she says.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘I won’t be able to sleep otherwise,’ she replies, flashing him a smile that makes the tip of her chin crease.

Joona gives her a brief overview of the Sleep Lab and Lars Grind’s particular role in the investigation, explaining that for a brief time, he was their key suspect.

But Dr Grind had no idea that Bernard was using his property or his deregistered Opel.

He committed suicide once he realised that his less-than-ethical methods would be exposed.

His secret research had been focused on the interaction between sleepwalkers, and the effect their medication had on their approach to various rules and regulations.

‘The way Bernard managed to avoid drawing any suspicion to himself is remarkable,’ says Joona.

‘No connection was ever drawn between the murders. The first two – Claire and her lover – were seen as separate disappearances, the third as an accident. I haven’t gone into detail about the fourth yet, but it happened in the south of the country, and the wrong man took the blame .

.?. It wasn’t until the murder in the caravan that a wider investigation was actually launched. ’

‘After Hugo ended up in jail?’

‘Exactly.’

Joona tells her that the victim had arranged to meet two prostitutes – women who didn’t know each other – in a caravan at Bred?ng Campsite.

‘You might question his judgement,’ Joona says with a wry smile. ‘He had a beautiful wife and a young son at home, but he arranged to meet both a woman who made a habit of robbing and assaulting johns and an active serial killer.’