Page 156 of The Sleepwalker

Agneta shrieks and runs over to him when she spots him on the floor, and he attempts a smile and holds up a thumb.

‘Is it your heart?’ she asks.

‘No, I fell .?.?.’

‘Are you sure it’s not your heart? I’m going to call 112,’ she says, rummaging through her bag with shaking hands.

‘Really, I’m OK,’ Bernard mumbles, closing his eyes for a moment.

‘What happened?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he says with a smile. ‘It was just a golf ball .?.?. It hit me right .?.?.’

Agneta finds her phone and dials the number, quickly telling the operator what is happening, that the front door was open, that he is in the bedroom on the first floor.

‘He doesn’t have any injuries that I can see – other than the side of his head, maybe. It’s pretty red, but it isn’t bleeding. He’s conscious, but seems quite confused,’ she says.

‘We’ll send an ambulance,’ the operator tells her.

* * *

Agneta watches the ambulance pull away up the driveway, then heads back into the house and locks the door. She goes straight to the library, slumps down on one of the bottom steps, and feels like she wants to cry.

Bernard refused to let her go with him in the ambulance, but he did ask her to bring his laptop to the hospital if they decide to keep him in overnight for observation.

She sighs, gets up and climbs the stairs. When she reaches the landing, she turns right, opens the door to the attic and makes her way up to Bernard’s office.

‘God .?.?.’

The room is complete chaos, like the bridge of a ship after a hurricane. The desk is at an angle, the chair on its back. The banker’s lamp is broken and there are papers and books everywhere, all of the drawers in the desk emptied onto the floor.

The big blue Järvsö cabinet looks like it has been forced open with a crowbar or an axe, and the floor around it is littered with splintered wood and pieces of lock.

Bernard’s original manuscripts have been dumped on the floor and trampled, along with his letters, folders, photographs and contracts.

Agneta tries to spot his laptop amid the mess. She moves a hardback book about the criminal code and criminal law and notices a stack of old letters held together with a brown rubber band. The top envelope was postmarked in Québec two years ago. Agneta picks up the stack and puts it on the desk.

She feels a sudden rush of panic – as though she has just been shot with a bullet made of ice – when she realises that it could have been the serial killer who attacked Bernard.

The axe murderer might have seen the interview inAftonbladetand come over here to silence the witness.

Agneta walks down the stairs as though in a daze, imagining the blonde woman hitting Bernard with the broadside of her axe in anticipation of chopping him to pieces.

Perhaps it was the sound of her Lexus pulling up on the driveway that scared the killer away.

The front door was wide open when she got home, after all.

Had Bernard left it unlocked?

Agneta pauses in the hallway, closes the door behind her and tries to bring her anxious breathing under control.

The killer must have come in through Hugo’s window the night they saw her on the security cameras, she thinks.

And lain in wait inside the house until today.

Agneta tells herself that she needs to calm down, that it can’t be true.

Despite the deep gashes in the frame, the window was intact.