Page 151 of The Sleepwalker

If Hugo is willing to undergo a third session, Joona thinks, there is every chance he will be able to give them a firm description at long last.

* * *

Joona parks his car in the garage, takes the lift up to the eighth floor and strides down the corridor.

As he walks, he thinks about the blood in the garage in Stocksund, the spatter on the ceiling from the axe being raised again and again.

Ida’s husband has been informed. He was in Tenerife at the time of the murder, but was planning to catch the first plane home. Their five-year-old son was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and would stay there until his father could collect him.

The latest murder has turned all their previous theories on their head. There is no doubt it was the same killer – the Widow, as she is now known – but the fact is that Ida doesn’t fit the general pattern: she was a young woman rather than a man.

Joona has called a team meeting, asking everyone to return to the station to search for any unsolved or questionable casesinvolving female victims who might, somehow, fit the pattern.

It can no longer be denied that they are dealing with an active serial killer.

Yet again, Joona’s thoughts turn back to the bloody garage. Looking at the scene, he had the sense that while the perpetrator’s aim was to end Ida’s life, some sort of blind rage took over almost immediately. A fury that nothing but sheer exhaustion could numb, when the killer couldn’t physically manage to swing the axe again.

Everyone is already waiting around the table when Joona reaches the investigation room.

He goes straight over to greet Detective Superintendent Bondesson, who has just joined the group. Bondesson is an older man with a thin, wrinkled face, bushy eyebrows and a horseshoe of white hair around his head. He has been a part of the National Murder Squad since it was first set up, and is incredibly experienced, with a firm belief in allowing the slow machinery of an investigation to take its course.

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ Bondesson says, nodding to the photographs, ‘but my trusty brain always feels an urge to interpret crime scenes like this as chaotic, when really they should be read word for word, as a complete story.’

Joona sits down and takes the team through his latest thoughts following the revelation that the killer does not exclusively target men.

‘This time, the victim was a young woman. A mother,’ he says.

They go through the sequence of events in the garage in detail, discussing the images from the scene. Everyone agrees that the latest murder is the most aggressive to date, with the caravan coming a close second.

Anna Andersson is studying a photograph of the main pool of blood, a close-up shot of the grooved tread marks left by a child’s bicycle tyre.

‘Looks like the Widow moved the bike just as the blood was starting to coagulate,’ she says with a frown.

‘Can I see?’ Joona asks.

‘Forward a bit, then back a bit,’ Anna shows him.

‘Strange,’ Bondesson mumbles.

‘Only a couple of centimetres in both directions.’

‘The killer pumped up the tyres,’ says Joona.

‘Of course.’ Anna sighs. ‘Damn it. The other bikes all had flats.’

‘So you’re saying she literally massacred the mother, then stayed behind to pump up the kid’s tyres, just to be nice?’ Rikard Roslund asks.

Bondesson gets up from his chair, mutters that he needs a cancer stick and gives Joona a lingering look.

The group starts to divvy up the tasks for the new preliminary investigation: producing an updated profile and searching the databases for cold cases involving female victims.

‘We still haven’t managed to get hold of Olga Wójcik,’ says Anna.

Joona stands up, grabs his coat from the hanger and leaves the room.

He heads straight for the lifts, and as he waits, he looks up at the notice board, which is full of invitations to Christmas parties, glögg evenings and a seminar about the impact of the government’s decision to ignore the Council on Legislation’s advice and introduce a system of crown witnesses.

He takes the lift down to the ground floor and leaves the building via reception. As expected, Bondesson is waiting for him on the other side of Polhemsgatan. The older detective is wearing a long sheepskin coat, smoking a cigarette on the snowy pavement.