by Lars Kepler
The boy is showing clear signs of hypnotic rest. An expression of great relaxation has settled over his cheeks and mouth. Erik has always thought that a patient’s face becomes broader, somehow flatter. Less attractive but more fragile, and without any trace of pretence.
“Now you are deeply relaxed,” says Erik calmly. “Everything is very, very pleasant.”
The boy’s eyes gleam behind the half-closed lids.
“Josef, I want you to try and remember what happened yesterday. It started just like an ordinary Monday, but in the evening someone comes to the house.”
The boy is silent.
“Now you’re going to tell me what’s happening,” says Erik.
The boy responds with the faintest of nods.
“You’re sitting in your room? Is that what you’re doing? Are you listening to music?”
There is no reply. His mouth moves, asking, seeking.
“Your mum was at home when you got back from school,” says Erik.
He nods.
“Do you know why? Is it because Lisa has a temperature?”
The boy nods and moistens his lips.
“What do you do when you get home from school, Josef?”
The boy whispers something.
“I can’t hear,” Erik urges gently. “I want you to speak so I can hear you.”
The boy’s lips move again, and Erik leans forward.
“Like fire, just like fire,” Josef mumbles. “I’m trying to blink. I go into the kitchen, but it isn’t right; there’s a crackling noise between the chairs and a bright red fire is spreading across the floor.”
“Where is the fire coming from?” asks Erik.
“I don’t remember. Something happened before . . .” He falls silent again.
“Go back a little, before the fire in the kitchen,” says Erik.
“There’s someone there,” says the boy. “I can hear someone knocking at the door.”
“The outside door?”
“I don’t know.” The boy’s face suddenly grows tense, he whimpers anxiously, and his lower teeth are exposed in a strange grimace.
“There’s no danger now,” Erik says. “There’s no danger, Josef, you’re safe here, you’re calm, you feel no anxiety. You are simply watching what is happening; you are not there. You can see it all from a safe distance, and it isn’t dangerous at all.”
“The feet are pale blue,” the boy whispers.
“What did you say?”
“Someone’s knocking at the door,” the boy says, slurring his words. “I open it but there’s no one there; I can’t see anyone there. But the knocking keeps coming. Someone’s playing a trick on me.” The patient is breathing more rapidly, his stomach moving jerkily.
“What happens now?” asks Erik.
“I go into the kitchen to get a sandwich.”
“You eat a sandwich?”
“But now the knocking starts again, the noise is coming from Lisa’s room. The door is open a little. I can see that her lamp is on. I carefully push the door open with the knife and look in. She’s on her bed. She has her glasses on, but her eyes are shut and she’s panting. Her face is white. Her arms and legs are totally stiff. Then she throws her head back so her throat is stretched right out, and she starts to kick the bottom of the bed with her feet. She just keeps kicking, faster and faster. I tell her to stop, but she keeps kicking, harder. I yell at her but the knife has already started to stab and Mum rushes in and pulls at me and I spin around and the knife moves forward; it just pours out of me; I need to get more knives, I’m afraid to stop, I have to keep going, it’s impossible to stop. Mum is crawling across the kitchen floor, it’s all red, I have to try the knives on everything, on me, on the furniture, on the walls; I hit and stab and then suddenly I’m really tired and I lie down. I don’t know what’s happening, my body hurts inside and I’m thirsty, but I just can’t move.”
Erik stays with the boy, down there in the bright water, their legs moving gently. He follows the wall of rock with his eyes, farther and farther down, endlessly, the water gradually turning darker, blue fading to blue-grey and then, temptingly, to black.
“You had seen,” asks Erik, hearing his own voice tremble, “you had seen your father earlier?”
“Yes, down at the soccer field,” Josef replies.
He falls silent, looks unsure, stares straight ahead with his sleeping eyes.
Erik sees that the boy’s pulse rate is increasing and realizes that his blood pressure is dropping at the same time.
“I want you to sink deeper now,” Erik says softly. “You’re sinking, you’re feeling calmer, better, and— ”
“Not Mum?” asks the boy, in a feeble voice.
Erik risks a guess. “Josef, tell me, did you see your older sister, Evelyn, as well?”
He observes the boy’s face, aware that, if he’s wrong, the conjecture can create a rift in the hypnosis. But he feels he must take the leap, because if the patient’s condition begins to deteriorate again he will have to stop completely.
“What happened when you saw Evelyn?” he asks.
“I should never have gone out there.”
“Was that yesterday?”
“She was hiding in the cottage,” the boy whispers, smiling.
“What cottage?”
“Auntie Sonja’s,” he says.
“Tell me what happens at the cottage.”
“I just stand there. Evelyn isn’t pleased. I know what she’s thinking,” he mumbles. “I’m just a dog to her. I’m not worth anything . . .”
The smile is gone. Tears stream from Josef ’s eyes, and his mouth is trembling.
“Is that what Evelyn says to you?”
“I don’t want to, I don’t have to, I don’t want to,” whimpers Josef.
“What is it you don’t want to do?”
His eyelids begin to twitch spasmodically. “What’s happening, Josef ?”
“She says I have to bite and bite to get my reward.”
“Who? Who do you have to bite?”
“There’s a picture in the cottage, a picture in a frame that looks like a toadstool. It’s Dad, Mum, and Lisa, but— ”
His body suddenly tenses, his legs move quickly and limply, he is rising out of the depths of hypnosis. Carefully, Erik slows his ascent, calming him before raising him a few levels. Meticulously, he closes the door on all memory of the day and all memory of the hypnosis. Nothing must be left open, once he begins the careful process of waking him up.
Josef is lying there smiling when Erik finally moves away from his bedside and leaves the room. He goes over to the coffee machine. A feeling of desolation overwhelms him, a sense that something is irrevocably wrong. He glances up when the door to the boy’s room opens. The detective strolls over to join him.
“I’m impressed,” says Joona quietly, getting out his cell phone.
“Before you make any calls, I just want to stress one thing,” says Erik. “The patient always speaks the truth under hypnosis. But it’s only a matter of what he himself perceives as the truth. His memory is as subjective as ever, and— ”
“I understand that.”
“I’ve hypnotized people suffering from schizophrenia,” Erik goes on, “and they were just as deeply detached from reality under hypnosis as they were in a conscious state.”
“What is it you’re trying to say?”
“Josef talked about his sister.”
“Yes, she wanted him to bite like a dog and so on,” says Joona. He dials a number and puts the phone to his ear.
“There’s no proof his sister told him to do that,” Erik explains.
“But she might have,” says Joona, raising a hand to silence Erik. “Anja, my little treasure.”
A soft voice can be heard at the other end of the phone.
“Can you check on something for me? . . . Yes, exactly. Josef Ek has an aunt called Sonja, and she has a house or a cottage somewhere . . . Yes, that’s— you’re a star.” Joona looks up a
t Erik. “Sorry. You wanted to say something else?”
“Just that it’s by no means certain it was Josef who murdered the family.”
“But is it possible that his wounds are self-inflicted? Could he have cut himself like this in your opinion?”
“Not likely.”
“But is it possible?” Joona persists.
“Theoretically, yes,” Erik replies.
“Then I think our killer’s lying in there,” says Joona.
“I think so too.”
“Is he in any condition to run away from the hospital?”
“No.” Erik smiles weakly in surprise.
Joona heads for the door.
“Are you going to the aunt’s cottage?” asks Erik.
“Yes.”
“I could come with you,” says Erik. “The sister could be injured, or she could be in a state of shock.”
Chapter 18
tuesday, december 8 : early morning
Simone is already awake before the telephone on Erik’s bedside table starts to ring.
Erik mumbles something about balloons and streamers, picks up the phone, and hurries out of the room, closing the door behind him.
The voice she hears through the door sounds sympathetic, almost tender. After a while, Erik creeps back into the bedroom and she asks who called.
“Police . . . a detective . . . I didn’t catch his name,” he says, and explains that he has to go to Karolinska University Hospital.
She looks at the alarm clock and closes her eyes.
“Sleep now, Sixan,” he whispers, and leaves the room.
Her nightgown has twisted itself awkwardly around her. Unwinding and yanking it into place, she turns onto her side and lies still, listening to Erik’s movements.
He dresses quickly, then goes rummaging for something in the wardrobe. Next, she hears a metallic ping when he tosses the shoehorn back into the drawer. After a little while she hears the faint sound of the street door closing.
She tries for a long time to get back to sleep, but without success. She doesn’t think it sounded as if Erik was talking to a police officer. He sounded too relaxed. Maybe, she tells herself, he was just tired.
She gets up to pee, has a yoghurt drink, and goes back to bed. Then she starts to think about what happened ten years ago, and all chance of sleep is gone. She lies there for half an hour, and then, unable to resist her suspicions, switches on the bedside light, picks up the phone, and thumbs through the display to find the last incoming call. She stares at the number for a moment, knowing she ought to turn off the light and go back to sleep, but finally she calls the number anyway. It rings three times, there is a click, and she hears a woman laughing a short distance away from the phone.
“Stop it, Erik,” says the woman happily, and then the voice is very close. “Daniella Richards. Hello?”
Simone says nothing. The woman waits a bit, then says aloha in a wearily sarcastic voice before ending the call. Simone remains sitting there, telephone in hand. She tries to understand why Erik said it was a police officer, a male police officer, who rang. She wants to find a reasonable explanation, but she can’t stop her thoughts from finding their way back to that time ten years ago when she suddenly realized that Erik was deceiving her.
It just happened to have been the same day Erik informed her that he was finished with hypnosis forever.
Simone remembers that she hadn’t been at her newly opened gallery that day, a rare occasion; maybe Benjamin wasn’t in school, maybe she’d taken the day off, but at any rate she was sitting at the kitchen table in the terrace house in Järfälla going through the mail when she caught sight of a pale blue envelope addressed to Erik. The sender’s name on the back simply said: Maja.
There are times when you know with every fibre of your being that something is wrong.
Simone had been married to Erik for eight years when, fingers trembling, she opened the envelope from Maja. Ten colour photographs fell out onto the kitchen table. The pictures had not been taken by a professional photographer. Blurred close-ups: a woman’s breast, a mouth and a naked throat, pale green underwear, black hair in tight curls. Erik was in one of the pictures. He looked surprised and happy.
Maja was a pretty, very young woman with dark, strong eyebrows and a large, serious mouth. In the only photo that showed her completely, she was lying on a narrow bed dressed in just her underwear, strands of black hair falling over her broad white breasts. She looked happy, too, a faint blush high on her cheeks.
It is difficult to recall the feeling of being deceived. For a long time everything was just a sense of sorrow, a strange, empty craving in her stomach, a desire to avoid painful thoughts. And yet she remembers that the first thing she felt was surprise, a gaping, stupid surprise at being so comprehensively taken in by someone she had trusted completely. And then came the embarrassment, followed by a despairing sense of inadequacy, burning rage, and loneliness.
Simone lies in bed as these thoughts go round and round in her head, spinning off in various painful directions. She remembers the way Erik looked into her eyes and promised he hadn’t had an affair with Maja— that he didn’t even know anyone named Maja. She had asked him three times, and each time he had sworn he didn’t know a Maja. Then she had pulled out the photos and thrown them at him, one by one.
Slowly the sky grows light above the city. She falls asleep a few minutes before Erik returns. He tries to be quiet, but when he sits on the bed she wakes up. Erik says he’s going for a shower. Looking up at him, she can tell he’s taken a lot of pills again. Heart pounding, she asks him the name of the policeman who called during the night. When he doesn’t answer, she realizes that he’s passed out in the middle of the conversation. Simone tells him she called the number, and did a policeman answer? No, it was some giggling woman called Daniella. But Erik just can’t keep awake; it’s infuriating. Then she yells at him, demands to know, accuses him of having destroyed everything, just when she had begun to trust him again.
She’s sitting up in bed now, staring at him. He doesn’t seem to understand her agitation. She says the words that, no matter how many times she has thought them, seem no less painful, sad, or distant from her hopes.
“It might be best if we separate.”
That seems to get his attention momentarily. But Simone is already gathering her pillow and the duvet. Entering the guest room, she lies on the sofa and cries for a long time, then blows her nose. Now it’s really morning. She hasn’t the strength to deal with her family right now. She goes to the bathroom, washes up, then creeps back to the bedroom. Erik is out like a light, so she collects an outfit and dresses in the guest room. She hastily puts on her makeup and leaves the apartment to have breakfast somewhere before she goes to the gallery.
She reads in a café in Kungsträdgården for a long time before she can manage to get down the sandwich she ordered with her coffee. She puts her newspaper down for a moment and looks through the café’s big window, which overlooks a large stage. A dozen or so men are preparing for some kind of event. Pink tents have been erected. A barrier is placed around a small ramp. Suddenly something happens. The men stumble backwards, yelling at one another. There is a crackling noise and a rocket shoots up into the air. Simone leans forward to follow its flight. It rises into the bright morning sky, then bursts in a transparent blue glow, and the explosion reverberates between the buildings.
Chapter 19
tuesday, december 8 : morning
Simone sits in the office of the gallery, taking in the large self-portrait of the artist Sim Shulman posing in a black ninja costume, a sword raised high above his head, when the phone in her bag begins to buzz.
“Simone Bark,” she answers, forcing the sadness out of her voice.
“Hello, it’s Siv Sturesson from Edsberg School,” says an older woman.
“Oh,” says Simone hesitantly. “Yes?”
“I’m just calling to see how Benjamin is.”
“I’m sorry, I do
n’t understand.”
“He’s not in school today,” says the woman, “and he hasn’t called in sick. We always get in touch with the parents in cases like this.”
“Right,” says Simone. “I’ll call home and check. Both Benjamin and his father were still there this morning when I left. I’ll get back to you.”
She rings off and immediately calls the apartment. It isn’t like Benjamin to oversleep or flout the rules.
Nobody picks up at home. Erik is supposed to have the morning off. A fresh fear sinks its claws into her, before it occurs to her that Erik is probably lying there snoring with his mouth open, knocked out by his beloved pills, while Benjamin is listening to loud music. She tries Benjamin’s phone; no reply. She leaves a short message, then tries Erik’s mobile, but of course it’s switched off.
She calls out to her assistant at the art gallery. “Yiva, I have to go home. I’ll be back soon.”
Her assistant peers out of the office, a thick file in her hand, and calls out, with a smile, “ Kiss-kiss!”
But Simone is too stressed to return their running joke. Throwing her coat around her shoulders, she picks up her bag and almost runs to the underground station.
There is a particular silence outside the door of an empty house. As soon as Simone puts her key in the lock, she knows no one is in.
The skates lie forgotten on the floor, but Benjamin’s backpack, shoes, and jacket are gone, as are Erik’s overcoat and scarf. The Puma bag containing Benjamin’s medication is in his room. She hopes this means Erik has given Benjamin his injection.
Simone glances around the room, thinking it is a bit sad that he has taken down his Harry Potter poster and put almost all his toys in a box in the cupboard. He was suddenly in a hurry to grow up when he met Aida.
It occurs to Simone that perhaps Benjamin is with her now.
Benjamin is only fourteen, Aida is seventeen; he claims they’re just friends, but it’s obvious that she’s his girlfriend. Has he even told her he has a blood disorder? Does she know that the slightest blow could cost him his life if he hasn’t taken his medication properly?
