Page 88 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

At eleven that evening, after Agneta had fallen asleep, Bernard drove out to the silo in Grillby, picked up an axe and Lars Grind’s old car, and drove to the campsite. He then walked home to get changed.

Wearing a padded coat and a blonde wig, he returned to the campsite, entered the caravan and knocked the man to the floor with the broadside of his axe. Rage took hold of him, and he then chopped off one of the man’s legs, beheaded him and began the rest of the dismemberment process.

What he didn’t know was that the female robber was also at the campsite, and that she turned around and left when she heard the victim’s screams. Nor that his son had followed him while sleepwalking, and had witnessed the entire murder.

Once he had finished dismembering his victim, Bernard walked over to Grind’s car, shoved his bloody clothes into a couple of rubbish bags and drove back to the silo.

He cleaned the car, burned the bags in an oil drum, left his trophies in his underground room, washed himself with chlorine and then got dressed and drove home in his own car.

‘Following the second murder – that we knew about, anyway – I asked Saga what she thought.’

‘How is she doing?’

‘Much better. My boss has agreed to let her join the team with a view to eventually bringing her back into operative service.’

‘That’s great news.’

‘I’ve told him I want her as my partner.’

‘And what does he say to that?’

‘That it sounds like a nightmare.’

‘OK.’ Valeria laughs.

‘But he didn’t say no.’

Joona explains that he had described the first two murders to Saga, and that her immediate reaction was that they sounded like medieval punishments.

‘Aggravated capital punishment, as it was known. When death wasn’t considered harsh enough.’

‘Always so smart,’ Valeria says.

‘She was right, and that led me to the real question .?.?.’

‘Of what they were being punished for.’

‘Bravo. That was the question we needed to answer in order to understand the killer,’ says Joona. ‘The punishment is obvious, but as for the crime .?.?. that was only visible in the murderer’s head.’

‘Buying sex, infidelity .?.?.’

‘Right, a kind of selfish lust – and one that impacts upon a child who is already suffering for whatever reason.’

‘But didn’t he think his death sentences were a bit over the top?’

‘He identified with the children, and he punished the victims for all of the pain he had experienced. Everything that made him into the person he was.’

Joona takes a sip of wine and turns towards the little yellow window in the Christmas decoration as he tells Valeria about Pontus Bandling.

His sister had written to Bernard’s column in an attempt to explain her dilemma.

She was convinced that her brother was cheating on his wife with a woman called Kimberly, and that it had all started a few years after his daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The sister felt a powerful sense of loyalty towards her brother, but she also couldn’t accept his behaviour and therefore wanted Bernard’s advice.

‘But what she hadn’t realised was that Kimberly didn’t exist, that she was just part of a game between husband and wife.’

‘Oh God.’

Joona moves on to the book Bernard and Agneta were writing together.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It felt like they were really trying to help me stop the killer.’

‘Isn’t that strange?’

‘To Bernard, it was probably just a way of trying to gain access to the investigation, of staying one step ahead of us,’ Joona replies. ‘But in the end, it proved to be his downfall.’

‘How so?’

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Hugo had been sleepwalking, that he’d had his eyes open .

.?. but that he didn’t remember anything other than fragments of his nightmare.

At the same time .?.?. the axe, the blood, the caravan – those weren’t insignificant things, they should have been fresh in his episodic memory, even if he didn’t know how to access them. ’

Joona describes how Erik used the hypnosis sessions to gradually wash away the nightmare, enabling reality to emerge.

In his dreams, Hugo was being chased by a skeleton man while he followed his mother to the campsite.

‘But even in the first session, he gave us a glimpse of the murderer.’

During the second session, Hugo had described what he saw through the window at the rear of the caravan, but the violence he recounted didn’t fit with the forensic evidence.

In a state of extreme anxiety, Hugo had talked about seeing the killer amputate both of the man’s feet before killing him with a blow to the face.

‘It wasn’t until the third session that Erik finally got him to talk about the murder in the caravan.’

Driving through the snow in his car, it had dawned on Joona that Hugo had actually witnessed two murders, one in his own home.

In the second session, Hugo had been looking through a different kind of window. He had mentioned a parquet floor, a brass edging strip and a lamp with a snakeskin shade.

As a child, during a bout of sleepwalking, he had seen his father kill his mother’s lover while wearing a shower curtain featuring a pattern of skulls and bones. He followed his mother through the house, out into the garden, then lost her in the darkness.

That subconscious trauma had then found its way into his nightmares about the skeleton man, programming him to always follow his mother in his sleep.

In his nightmare on the night of the murder in the caravan, Hugo had been following his mother in an attempt to save her from the skeleton man, but in reality he was following his father in a blonde wig.

‘For Hugo that night, Bernard was both his mother and the skeleton man.’

‘I understand.’

Joona swirls his wine and wraps up by telling Valeria about Bernard’s habit of carving the arrow from his childhood trauma onto his victims’ bodies. Occasionally, he only managed a single line before another impulse took hold of him and he turned his attention back to the dismemberment.

‘But what do you think those arrows symbolised for him?’

‘They were a part of him. He carried them with him, physically, on his body, and they appeared on hundreds of his childhood drawings. I think they probably meant something like “this is the moment your fate is sealed”.’

‘And the arrow is always pointing downwards? Towards the earth, the underground. Towards Hades?’

‘Away from heaven,’ Joona mumbles.