Page 247 of The Sleepwalker

‘But didn’t he think his death sentences were a bit over the top?’

‘He identified with the children, and he punished the victims for all of the painhehad experienced. Everything that made him into the person he was.’

Joona takes a sip of wine and turns towards the little yellow window in the Christmas decoration as he tells Valeria about Pontus Bandling. His sister had written to Bernard’s column in an attempt to explain her dilemma. She was convinced that her brother was cheating on his wife with a woman called Kimberly, and that it had all started a few years after his daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The sister felt a powerful sense of loyalty towards her brother, but she also couldn’t accept his behaviour and therefore wanted Bernard’s advice.

‘But what she hadn’t realised was that Kimberly didn’t exist, that she was just part of a game between husband and wife.’

‘Oh God.’

Joona moves on to the book Bernard and Agneta were writing together.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It felt like they were really trying to help me stop the killer.’

‘Isn’t that strange?’

‘To Bernard, it was probably just a way of trying to gain access to the investigation, of staying one step ahead of us,’ Joona replies. ‘But in the end, it proved to be his downfall.’

‘How so?’

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Hugo had been sleepwalking, that he’d had his eyes open .?.?. but that he didn’t remember anything other than fragments of his nightmare. At the same time .?.?. the axe, the blood, the caravan – those weren’t insignificant things, they should have been fresh in his episodic memory, even if he didn’t know how to access them.’

Joona describes how Erik used the hypnosis sessions to gradually wash away the nightmare, enabling reality to emerge.

In his dreams, Hugo was being chased by a skeleton man while he followed his mother to the campsite.

‘But even in the first session, he gave us a glimpse of the murderer.’

During the second session, Hugo had described what he saw through the window at the rear of the caravan, but the violence he recounted didn’t fit with the forensic evidence. In a state of extreme anxiety, Hugo had talked about seeing the killer amputate both of the man’s feet before killing him with a blow to the face.

‘It wasn’t until the third session that Erik finally got him to talk about the murder in the caravan.’

Driving through the snow in his car, it had dawned on Joona that Hugo had actually witnessed two murders, one in his own home.

In the second session, Hugo had been looking through a different kind of window. He had mentioned a parquet floor, a brass edging strip and a lamp with a snakeskin shade.

As a child, during a bout of sleepwalking, he had seen his father kill his mother’s lover while wearing a shower curtain featuring a pattern of skulls and bones. He followed his mother through the house, out into the garden, then lost her in the darkness.

That subconscious trauma had then found its way into his nightmares about the skeleton man, programming him toalways follow his mother in his sleep.

In his nightmare on the night of the murder in the caravan, Hugo had been following his mother in an attempt to save her from the skeleton man, but in reality he was following his father in a blonde wig.

‘For Hugo that night, Bernard was both his motherandthe skeleton man.’

‘I understand.’

Joona swirls his wine and wraps up by telling Valeria about Bernard’s habit of carving the arrow from his childhood trauma onto his victims’ bodies. Occasionally, he only managed a single line before another impulse took hold of him and he turned his attention back to the dismemberment.

‘But what do you think those arrows symbolised for him?’

‘They were a part of him. He carried them with him, physically, on his body, and they appeared on hundreds of his childhood drawings. I think they probably meant something like “this is the moment your fate is sealed”.’

‘And the arrow is always pointing downwards? Towards the earth, the underground. Towards Hades?’

‘Away from heaven,’ Joona mumbles.

Epilogue

In June, Hugo and Agneta travelled together to Canada for Claire’s funeral in the small hamlet of Le Grand-Village. Her skeletal remains had been found wrapped in a shower curtain beneath the floor of the lake house, buried in the sand.