Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

Joona grins. “We’ll see,” he says diplomatically.

“All right,” says Erixon, wiping the sweat from his cheeks. “There was hair belonging to Josef Ek in the drain, and there was blood from his father between the tiles on the floor.”

“What did I tell you?” Joona beams.

In the lift down to the foyer, Joona calls Jens Svanehjälm again.

“I’m glad you called,” says Jens. “I’m getting a lot of shit about this hypnosis business. They’re saying we ought to scrap the preliminary investigation into Josef, that it’s just going to cost money and- ”

“Hold on.”

“But I’ve decided to- ”

“Jens?”

“What?” he replies irritably.

“We’ve got forensic evidence,” he says seriously. “We can link Josef Ek to the first crime scene and to his father’s blood.”

Chief Prosecutor Jens Svanehjälm breathes heavily on the other end of the phone. “Joona, you know you’ve called at the last possible minute.”

“But I’m in time.”

“Yes.”

They are just about to hang up when Joona says, “What did I tell you?”

“What?”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

There is silence at the other end of the line. Then Jens says, slowly and deliberately, “Yes, Joona, you were right.”

They end the conversation, and the smile fades from the detective’s face. He walks along the glass wall facing the courtyard and checks the time once again. In half an hour he wants to be at the Nordic Museum.

Joona walks up the staircase in the museum and down the long, empty corridors, passing hundreds of illuminated display cases without even glancing at them. He does not see the tools, the treasures, or the fine examples of handicrafts; he does not notice the exhibitions, the folk costumes, or the large photographs.

The guard has already drawn up a chair next to the faintly illuminated display case. Without saying a word, Joona sits down as usual and contemplates the Sami bridal headdress, sewn by descendents of indigenous people from the Scandinavian peninsula. Fragile and delicate, it widens out into a perfect circle. The pieces of lace are reminiscent of the cup of a flower, or a pair of hands brought together with the fingers stretching upward. Slowly Joona moves his head, so that the light gradually moves. The headdress is woven from roots, tied by hand. The material was dug from the ground, but it shines like gold.

The present is gone, but the memory lingers mercilessly.

He is driving a car, the rain has stopped, but the puddles of water glow like fire in the sunset. Everything is so wonderfully beautiful, and then gone forever.

This time, Joona sits in front of the display case for an hour before he gets to his feet, nods to the guard, and slowly leaves the museum. The slush on the ground is dirty, and he can smell diesel from a boat beneath the bridge, Djurgårdsbron. He is ambling toward Strandvägen when his cell phone rings. It’s Nils Åhlén, the Chief Medical Officer.

“I’m glad I got hold of you,” The Needle says when Joona answers.

“Have you finished the postmortem?”

“More or less.”

Joona sees a young father on the pavement, tipping a buggy up over and over again to make his child laugh. A woman is standing motionless at a window, gazing out into the street; when he catches her eye, she immediately takes a step backwards into her apartment.

“Did you find anything unexpected?” asks Joona. “Well, I don’t know…”

“But?”

“Joona, these bodies were subjected to a great deal of violence. Particularly the little girl.”

“I realize that,” says Joona.

“Many of the wounds were inflicted purely for pleasure. It’s appalling.”

“Yes,” says Joona, thinking about how things looked when he arrived at the scenes of the crimes: the shocked police officers, the feeling of chaos in the air, the bodies inside. He remembers Lillemor Blom’s ashen cheeks as she stood outside smoking, her hands shaking. He recalls how the blood had splashed on the windowpanes, run down the inside of the patio doors at the back of the house.

“And then there’s this business with the rather surgical cut to the stomach,” says The Needle.

“Have you come to any conclusion about that?”

The Needle sighs. “Well, it’s just as we thought. The cut was inflicted some two hours after death. Someone turned her body over and used a sharp knife to cut open the old C-section scar.” He leafs through his papers. “However, our perpetrator doesn’t know much about section caesarea . Katja Ek had an emergency C-section scar running down from the navel in a vertical line.”

“And?”

The Needle puffs loudly. “Well, the thing is, the cut in the womb is always horizontal, even if the cut in the stomach is vertical.”

“But Josef didn’t know that,” says Joona.

“No,” replies The Needle. “He simply opened the stomach without realizing that a C-section always involves two incisions, one through the stomach and one through the womb.”

“Is there anything else I ought to know straight away?”

“Maybe the fact that he attacked the bodies for an unusually long time; he just kept on and on. They were long dead by the time he was done with them. He must have been getting more and more tired. That kind of violence would take a lot out of you. But he couldn’t get enough; his rage showed no sign of subsiding.”

Silence falls between them. Joona continues along Strandvägen. He starts to think about his most recent interview with Evelyn again.

“Anyway, I just wanted to confirm this business with the C-section,” says The Needle, after a while. “The fact that the cut was made some two hours after death.”

“Thanks, Nils,” says Joona.

“You’ll have my full report in the morning.”

Joona tries to remember what Evelyn had said about her mother’s C-section while slumped on the floor against the wall in the interview room, talking about Josef ’s pathological jealousy of his little sister.

“There’s something wrong inside Josef ’s head,” she had whispered. “There always has been. I remember when he was born, Mum was really sick. I don’t know what it was, but they had to do an emergency C-section.” Evelyn shook her head and sucked in her lips before continuing. “Do you know what an emergency C-section is?”

“More or less,” Joona replied.

“Sometimes… sometimes there can be complications when you give birth that way.” Evelyn looked at him shyly.

“You mean the baby can be starved for oxygen, that kind of thing?” Joona asked.

She shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I mean, not with the baby. The mother can have psychological problems. I read about it. A woman who’s gone through a difficult labour and is then suddenly anaesthetized for a C-section sometimes has problems later.”

“Post-natal depression?”

“Not exactly,” said Evelyn, her voice thick and heavy. “My mother developed a psychosis after she gave birth to Josef. They didn’t realize on the maternity ward; they just let her take him home. I was only eight, but I noticed right away. Everything was wrong. She didn’t pay any attention to him at all, she didn’t touch him, she just lay in bed and cried and cried and cried. I was the one who took care of him.”

Evelyn looked at Joona and whispered the rest.

“Mum would say he wasn’t hers. She’d say her real child was dead. In the end, she had to be hospitalized.”

Evelyn smiled wryly when she mentioned the vast psychiatric unit.

“Mum came home after about a year. She pretended everything was back to normal, but in reality she continued to deny his existence.”