Page 27 of The Sleepwalker

He can hear the woman’s heavy footsteps behind him and knows he needs to keep going, but all his strength has deserted him. The waves from her movements wash bloody water up onto the ice in front of him, and he just has time to start a prayer before she reaches him.

10

The photograph shows a man frozen solid in a lake. He is on his knees with the water up to his waist, and his severed head is lying on the ice in front of him.

There is little doubt that this latest murder was carried out by the same perpetrator, turning the prosecutor’s theory completely on its head.

Seventeen-year-old Hugo Sand will be released without charge.

Joona enlarges the image and studies the wound on the man’s throat.

A single stroke.

The axe had a wider blade this time, and was swung horizontally.

The bright lighting in the office is reflected in the dark sections of the images on the screen, in the blood that has flowed down the victim’s back.

Early that morning, Joona sat down to read the printouts from Hugo’s phone.

The teenager has three close friends and occasionally exchanges brief messages with his father, but it is the texts to and from his girlfriend, Olga Wójcik, that are most interesting.

On a couple of occasions, the pair touch upon their plans to take a trip to Canada next summer, and it is clear that they havebeen trying to save enough money for the flights.

In one message, Hugo writes that he feels low and exhausted after school, and Olga replies that she will give him medicine and take care of him.

The reference to medicine may well just be part of some private game, but Joona instinctively associated her words with the traces of benzodiazepine found in Hugo’s blood and had just decided to bring her in for questioning when the call came in from Edsviken Tennis Club.

A group of children from a preschool class had found the body, and one of their teachers had called 112 as they ushered them away from the jetty and the shore.

Joona immediately got in touch with Kronoberg Remand Prison to make sure Hugo hadn’t escaped, and learned that he had fallen out of bed during the night and was currently in the medical wing.

The crime scene had been cordoned off into an inner and outer perimeter by the time Joona arrived. He spoke to Erixon and his team of forensic technicians, and didn’t leave until he had a clear understanding of what had happened there.

Sitting at his desk now, he remembers the divers in their dry suits, gathering chunks of ice in the hope of securing biological matter or fibres, taking samples and examining the lake bed. They photographed those parts of the victim that were beneath the surface of the water and then transferred him onto dry land. Once that was done, they turned their attention to his severed head and removed large sections of the thin ice, preserving them in various cool bags.

Joona leans in to his computer screen and studies the close-up shots of the victim’s broken windscreen. It has bowed inwards in a fine web of cracks, and the driver’s seat is covered in tiny chunks of glass beneath the oval-shaped hole left by the axe.

There is a knock at the door, and Magda Brons, the secretaryto the head of the National Crime Unit, comes into the room, jewellery jingling. She tells him that the doors of the large meeting room are now open.

‘He’d like you to come right away.’

‘OK,’ says Joona.

The new head of the NCU is a man by the name of Noah Hellman. He is just thirty-eight, and has never worked as a police officer in any real sense. Instead, he has a doctorate in political science and spent several years as the Security Service’s representative on the Police Authority’s national management committee. The other bosses like him, and he is already popular with the rest of the department, a skilled media communicator with his own professional Instagram account.

Joona makes his way down the corridor, past the curtained windows and over to the open door. In addition to a number of bar stools and a drinks trolley, Noah has had a pool table installed in the meeting room, and he is busy chalking his cue when Joona comes in. He looks up and gives him a boyish smile.

‘My man,’ he says.

‘Magda said you wanted to see me?’

Noah is wearing a pair of red trainers, jeans and a pale-blue overshirt. He is clean-shaven, but his dirty blond hair is getting in his eyes.

‘The murder at the tennis club .?.?. What similarities are there with the previous one?’ he asks.

‘The victim is male, around the same age, and he was killed with an axe .?.?. His wallet and phone are both missing, too,’ Joona replies.

‘Was the first man robbed?’