Joona Linna Crime Series Books 1-3: The Hypnotist, The Nightmare, The Fire Witness. Lars Kepler

       31

       friday, december 11: morning

      Erik runs down the stairs and through the door. He stops outside and feels the sweat cooling on his back. A chill is in the air; not far away, a man sleeps under a thick mound of blankets. After a moment of indecisiveness, he walks slowly up toward Odenplan and sits down on a bench outside the library. He feels sick with fear. How can he be so stupid, pushing Simone away because he feels hurt?

      After a while, Erik gets up and sets off for home, stopping to buy bread at the stone oven bakery and a caffè macchiato for Simone. He hurries back and, not wanting to wait for the lift, jogs up the stairs, but as soon as he unlocks the door he realises the apartment is empty. With effort, Erik pushes aside the feeling of desolation the empty apartment fills him with. No matter what, he intends to prove to Simone that she can trust him. However long it takes, he will convince her once again. He thinks this, then drinks her coffee standing up in the kitchen; no sense letting it go to waste. It upsets his stomach, and he takes a Prilosec.

      It is still only nine o’clock in the morning, and his shift at the hospital doesn’t start for several hours. He takes a book to the bedroom with him and lies on top of the unmade bed in his stockinged feet. But instead of reading, he starts to think about Josef Ek; he wonders if Joona Linna will be able to get anything out of him.

      The apartment is silent, deserted. A gentle calm spreads through his stomach from the medication.

      Nothing that is said under hypnosis can be used as evidence, but Erik knows Josef was telling the truth about having killed his family, even if the actual motive is invisible. He closes his eyes. Evelyn must have known her brother was dangerous from an early age. Over the years she learned to live with his inability to control his impulses, gauging the risk of inciting his violent rage against her desire to live normally and independently. The family as a whole would have dealt with his violence, gradually making hundreds of infinitesimal adjustments and compromises in an effort to live with his hostility and keep it at bay. But nothing discouraged his impulses: not discipline, not punishment, not appeasement. They never really appreciated the seriousness of the situation. His mother and father might have thought that his aggressive behaviour was simply because he was a boy. Possibly they blamed themselves for letting him play brutal video games or watch slasher films.

      Evelyn had escaped as soon as she could, found a job and a place of her own, but she’d sensed the increasing threat and was suddenly so afraid that she hid herself away in her aunt’s cottage, carrying a gun to protect herself.

      Had Josef threatened her?

      Erik tries to imagine Evelyn’s fear in the darkness at night in the cottage, with the loaded gun by her bed. He thinks about what Joona Linna told him after interviewing her. What happened when Josef turned up with a cake? What did he want from her? How did she feel? Was it only then that she became afraid and got the gun? Was it after his visit that she began to live with the fear that he would kill her?

      Erik pictures Evelyn as she appeared on the day he met her at the cottage: a young woman in a silver-coloured down vest, a grey knitted sweater, scruffy jeans, and running shoes. She is walking through the trees, her ponytail swinging; her face is open, childlike. She carries the shotgun lazily, dragging it along the ground, bouncing it gently over the blueberry bushes and moss as the sun filters down through the branches of the pine trees.

      Suddenly Erik realises something crucial. If Evelyn had been afraid, if the gun had been to defend herself against Josef, she would have carried it differently. Erik recalls that her knees were wet, and dark patches of earth clung to her jeans.

      She went out into the forest with the gun to kill herself, he thinks. She knelt on the moss and placed the barrel in her mouth, but she changed her mind; she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

      When he’d spied her on the edge of the trees, she was on her way back to the cottage, on her way back to the alternative from which she had wanted to escape.

      Erik picks up the phone and calls Joona.

      “Erik? I was going to call you, but there’s been so much—”

      “It doesn’t matter,” says Erik. “Listen, I’ve got—”

      “I just want to say how sorry I am about all this business with the media. I promise to track down the leak when things calm down.”

      “It doesn’t matter.”

      “I feel guilty, because I was the one who persuaded you to do it.”

      “I made my own decision. I don’t blame anyone else.”

      “Personally, even though we’re not allowed to say so at the moment, I still think hypnotising Josef was the right thing to do. It could well have saved Evelyn’s life.”

      “That’s what I’m calling about,” says Erik. “A thought occurred to me. Have you got a minute?”

      Erik can hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and then an exhalation as Joona sits. “OK,” he says. “Go on.”

      “When we were out at Värmdö and I spotted Evelyn from the car, I saw her walking among the trees, heading for the cabin, dragging her shotgun in the bushes.”

      “Yes?”

      “Is that the way to carry a gun if you’re afraid someone might surprise you, might be coming to kill you?”

      “No,” replies Joona.

      “I think she’d gone out into the forest to kill herself,” says Erik. “The knees of her jeans were wet. She’d probably been kneeling on the damp moss with the gun pointing at her forehead or her chest, but then she changed her mind and couldn’t go through with it. That’s what I think.”

      Erik stops speaking. He can hear Joona breathing heavily at the other end of the line. A car alarm starts screeching down on the street.

      “Thank you,” says Joona. “I’ll go and have a chat with her.”