Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

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 at 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.”

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.