Page 152 of The Sleepwalker

Joona crosses the narrow street between the parked motorcycles and walks over to him.

‘As you might have noticed, I had a real sinking feeling when I realised I might’ve made a big mistake,’ Bondesson says after a moment or two.

‘Everyone makes mistakes.’

‘But I had my doubts even then.’

‘When?’

Bondesson straightens his arm and drops the butt of his cigarette into the storm drain.

‘We turn our backs on the present and travel back three and a half years, tick, tick, tick,’ he continues. ‘It’s high summer, the first week in July, and the station is like a ghost town .?.?. We get a call from Lund, so I jump straight in the car and drive down there, through the bright night .?.?. A woman – and I still remember her name, Lucia Pedersen – has been murdered in her own home, a small timber-framed house in Håstad .?.?. Killed by a single axe blow to the neck.’

‘I remember the case.’

‘Lucia was in the kitchen, opening a delivery from the pharmacy, when she was attacked from behind. The blade hit the right side of her neck, severing the fifth cervical vertebra from the sixth. She dropped like a rock, dead before she even hit the floor.’

Bondesson lights another cigarette and draws the smoke deep into his lungs. He then exhales, picks a fleck of ash from his lower lip and continues.

‘The killer had taken the axe from the chopping block in the woodshed and left it in the sink. There were no prints. They’d cleaned the shaft with some sort of alkaline solution.’

‘You saw a perpetrator who didn’t take the murder weapon to the scene, who knew there was an axe in the shed.’

‘She’d had a number of affairs.’

‘A clear motive.’

‘The prosecutor’s case was built on circumstantial evidence,but it held up in both the district court and the court of appeal,’ Bondesson tells him. ‘Lucia’s husband, Gerald Pedersen, swore he was innocent, but he was sent down for twenty years. And their daughter was handed over to social services and placed in foster care.’

‘I know you’re wondering whether the Widow might have killed Lucia, but what was it that gave you doubts back then?’

‘When he was twelve, Gerald Pedersen and his friends built a pretty powerful pipe bomb, and he lost his right hand .?.?. But the attacker was right-handed.’

‘That sort of thing isn’t usually easy to determine.’

‘No, you’re right .?.?.Theoretically, he could’ve done it, but he would have had to swing the axe in some sort of high backhand .?.?. No one would do that in a thousand years, but sure.’

‘You didn’t have any other suspects?’

Bondesson taps the ash from his cigarette.

‘The killer took the jewellery Lucia was wearing, too. A gold cross on a chain, two diamond earrings and a small silver stud with a freshwater pearl that she wore in her bellybutton. But they hadn’t searched the house, hadn’t touched any of her other jewellery in the bathroom.’

‘So the idea that it was a robbery gone wrong was ruled out?’

‘The prosecutor thought it was an act of jealousy, that it was Gerald’s way of taking back everything he’d given Lucia over the years .?.?. None of it was recovered when we searched the place, so the theory was that he’d tossed them out of the car window as he drove away.’

‘There’s a certain logic to that.’

‘Yeah, but what ultimately did for him was the kid,’ says Bondesson.

‘The kid?’

‘The killer gave the girl her asthma inhaler.’

‘How do we know that?’

‘Lucia had bought her a new one, and the box from the pharmacy was lying in the pool of blood. The ibuprofen, hand cream and tampons were still inside, but the killer had taken out the inhaler, opened it and left it beside the girl in her cot before fleeing the scene.’