Page 150 of The Sleepwalker

‘I open the door and go in.’

Hugo stops talking abruptly, and his eyelids stop fluttering.

‘What is the first thing you see?’

‘A cop with a gun. He’s screaming at me, and there’s blood everywhere.’

Joona realises that although Hugo is in a state of deep hypnosis, he is not yet deep enough to be able to see the massacre in the caravan. The memories are in there somewhere, but he keeps jumping forward to the moment when the two officers found him asleep on the floor.

‘Let’s return to the back of the caravan,’ Erik tells him. ‘Step up onto the breezeblock and stay in that moment, before the blood sprays across the window.’

‘God,’ the teenager whispers.

‘You see a man being killed with an axe, don’t you?’

The teenager nods slowly, and the rings in his nose and lip catch the light.

‘Hugo .?.?. Listen to my voice. Relax your body and keep your breathing calm. You are completely safe here .?.?. You’re going to watch a video clip on your phone now, from the night when the man was murdered in the caravan. Someone has climbed up onto a breezeblock and filmed what happened through the back window .?.?. You start the recording in slow motion, which means you have plenty of time to tell me what you see.’

Hugo takes a deep breath, and when he next speaks, his voice falters.

‘The woman has already chopped off both of his feet .?.?. He’s lying on his back, gasping for air, can’t understand what’s happening. The pool of blood on the floor keeps getting bigger and bigger, running along the edge of a brass strip and soaking into the rug .?.?.’

‘Keep watching the film,’ says Erik.

‘I can see the peeling paint on the window frame and my breath on the glass .?.?. Inside, there’s a broken red vase .?.?. The floor lamp is on its side, and the snakeskin shade is flecked with blood .?.?. The woman is standing over the man with her back to the camera, leaning forward .?.?. She drags the blade slowly across his torso, and the cut starts bleeding. She changes the angle of it, but the man is screaming, and he tries to sit up .?.?. That makes her really angry, it .?.?.’

Hugo is now whispering, speaking so softly that his voice barely carries, and Joona and Erik both have to lean in to hear what he says.

‘She slams the axe into the floor, right by his head,’ Hugo mumbles. ‘He keeps screaming, so she yanks it back, lifts it again and hits him right in the middle of his face .?.?. There’s so much blood, it sprays up onto the window.’

He opens his eyes.

‘There’s so much blood,’ he repeats.

52

Joona is in the car, heading back to Stockholm and the NCU. The light snow swirling through his headlights is a first taste of the low-pressure system currently moving west from northern Russia.

As he drives, Joona thinks about the hypnosis session. About Grind’s wide eyes, the look of fear on Agneta’s face, the hand she pressed to her mouth. He remembers the moment Hugo woke from the hypnosis, the way his eyes glazed over as he repeated his own words:There’s so much blood.

Erik had managed to get him to close his eyes and sink back down into relaxation for a moment or two before lifting him out of the trance properly.

‘You can look around, but just lie still, taking in your surroundings .?.?. And once you’re ready, you can sit up and have a sip of water.’

Joona knows that Erik was extremely pushed for time, that it’s not possible to hold people in their most traumatic moments for too long.

This is uncharted territory, and the doctor has no choice but to feel his way forward, learning more about what works for the specific individual in front of him during every session.

Based on what they know so far, everything points to Hugo having seen the fatal attack during the few seconds when hepeered in through the window of the caravan.

It is as though Erik is methodically panning for the truth.

There are certain details that don’t quite match the hypothetical sequence of events laid out by Erixon and Nils Åhlén, but that could be because there are still fragments of dream muddying the waters. Still, Joona knows that Erik is getting closer to what really happened with every session.

During their first attempt, Hugo reached the campsite and gave them a brief glimpse of the killer.

In the second, he saw the murder itself, but had no memories from his time inside the caravan. For all they know, he might have come face to face with the killer.