Page 10 of The Sleepwalker

‘Forensics will be here soon, and they’ll take you inside and help you find some clothes and gather up everything you might need before we cordon off the house.’

‘Do I need to speak to a lawyer? Hugo is only seventeen. I assume that means I have a right to know why he was arrested.’

‘He’s being held on suspicion of murder,’ the police officer replies.

3

Joona fires two shots in close succession, and the double recoil reverberates through him like an extra heartbeat.

He sees both bullets strike the target’s forehead, sending fragments of cardboard flying through the air.

Joona ducks as he runs, passing a plywood screen. He spots the next target behind an orange net, drops to one knee and pulls the trigger. His shot hits the red circle in the middle of the cardboard figure’s chest.

The ground is damp in the shade behind the rusty shipping container, and spent cartridges shimmer on the gravel.

Joona follows the painted route, rounding two plastic drums full of sand, dragging a heavy dummy to safety behind a police car and hitting the last target square in the forehead.

A cloud of dust hovers in the sunlight as Joona secures his weapon and pushes it into his holster.

For some reason, his thoughts turn to his father, himself a police officer, killed in the line of duty. Joona was only eleven when he died, but the loss was like a prism, bending the light and – in all likelihood – guiding him to become the person he is today.

He has spent his entire adult life trying to make the world a better place, first in the military and later as a police officer. Without a single thought about what the job was doing to him,he forged ahead for years on end.

He doesn’t need to look back to know that he has left a trail of death behind him. A battlefield on which more and more vultures have begun to gather to peck at the bodies.

Joona has often been told that looking back is futile, but it has become increasingly difficult to avoid it when he is alone.

I can’t handle the loneliness anymore, he thinks. Not in my private life, and not at work.

He already misses Valeria, and he longs to see his daughter, Lumi.

In the past, he always insisted that he preferred to work alone, but he has begun to realise that he needs someone by his side.

He wishes Saga Bauer could be that person. They would complement each other perfectly.

Saga feels like a sister. A brilliant but complex woman who needs him, too – though she would never admit that, even to herself.

She is too proud, too stubborn.

Joona is stubborn, too.

When he knows he is right about something, he is incapable of giving in, of backing down. It doesn’t matter what it costs him.

Joona brushes himself off, checks his time for the range and has just started making his way over to the next one when his phone rings.

The call is from Lisette Josephson, the prosecutor, and they talk briefly as he heads back to the parking area.

Five minutes later, Joona drives away from the National Tactical Unit’s training centre in Sörentorp. He tries to come out to the dynamic shooting range as often as he can.

During the call, the prosecutor explained that she had taken the decision to remand a seventeen-year-old male in custody overnight, citing article twenty-four, paragraph two of the Codeof Judicial Procedure because they had been unable to establish his identity.

That morning, they had determined that the teenager’s name is Hugo Sand, and that he is registered at an address in Hägersten. He doesn’t crop up in any police or social services databases, but he is suspected of having carried out a violent axe murder.

The dismembered victim found in the caravan has also been identified as Josef Lindgren, a thirty-one-year-old teacher who lived in Tumba with his wife Jasmin and their young child.

Lisette Josephson asked Joona to assist her in the first interview with Hugo Sand, conducted in the presence of his guardian and solicitor.

Joona Linna is a detective superintendent with the National Crime Unit in Stockholm. He is an expert on serial killers and has solved more complex murder cases than anyone else in Scandinavia. Before he joined the police force, he was a member of the military’s special operations unit, training in unconventional close combat and innovative weapons under Lieutenant Rinus Advocaat in the Netherlands.