Page 123 of The Sleepwalker

A quiet euphoria takes hold of him.

The beat of the music rises, and he hears voices and footsteps in the corridor outside.

Smiling, he pushes his phone back in his pocket. He hears the rushing sound of water in a pipe and tips his head back against the cushion.

Hugo closes his eyes and wakes an instant later when someone’s palm strikes his cheek.

Anxiety surges through his veins, and his heart starts racing.

He is standing in the middle of a room full of monitors and desks, and a burly man with a tattooed face grips his throat with one hand and hits him again with the other.

‘Answer me!’ he shouts. ‘Or I’ll tear your fucking arms off!’

‘Sorry, I—’

‘Who the fuck are you?’

Hugo realises that he must have been sleepwalking. Through a pane of glass, he can see a number of brightly lit booths containing webcams.

‘I’m Hugo. I came here with Olga.’

In one of the booths, a young man with a wet towel over his face is strapped to a tilted table and a broad-shouldered manwearing a latex hood seems to be raping him. The young man’s body is tense, his back arched in a long, drawn-out convulsion.

‘Did she say you should be here?’ the tattooed man asks, his grip tightening on Hugo’s throat.

‘No, I—’

‘This isn’t a goddamn playground,’ the man snarls as he lets go of him.

‘I got lost and—’

‘Get the fuck out of here!’

In the next booth, a slim man with a thick chain around his neck is on his knees. He has an apathetic look on his bloody face, an older man’s penis in his mouth.

In the third booth, a boy is curled up on the floor in his underpants, catatonically shaking his head.

44

It is just after eight in the morning, but the sky outside is stubbornly dark. Bernard is at the computer in his office, still in his navy-blue dressing gown, with a mug of coffee beside the keyboard in front of him.

Against the back wall of the room, he has a seventeenth-century Järvsö cabinet painted in egg tempera to look like a summer sky dotted with white clouds.

In the window, a candle is burning in a bronze chamberstick. The warm yellow flame is reflected in the glass, and beyond it, he can see himself sitting beneath the beams in the cold glare of his computer screen. The unruly grey hair on his head looks like a tuft of frosty grass.

Bernard has just typed up Agneta’s notes from the police press conference and her conversations with Joona. She has done a great job, her observations full of nuance and vivid details.

The day before yesterday, he managed to get hold of Hugo at the lab and he asked how the hypnosis session had been.

‘You don’t get it,’ his son had said. ‘It was like I was right back there in the nightmare. I was fucking traumatised afterwards, had to take some Atarax just to keep it together.’

‘But did you manage to help the police?’ Bernard asked.

‘Don’t think so, it was pretty much all nightmares, but theywere right that I remembered some stuff from the campsite. I saw the caravans and the snow .?.?. and maybe the killer, too. A woman with an axe.’

‘A woman? Was it a woman?’

‘I don’t know, Dad. That could’ve just been part of the dream, too. I’m so confused right now.’