Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

“I can’t just take over a preliminary investigation from the Stockholm police,” says Joona.

“His name is Fredrik Stensund. He seems very nice, but he’s not going to leave his cosy warm office.”

“I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Erik says evenly. “As far as Stensund’s concerned, Benjamin’s just another runaway.”

“I don’t think I can take the case,” Joona says heavily. “There’s nothing I can do about that. But I would like to try and help you. You need to sit down and think about who could have taken Benjamin. It could be someone whose attention you got when you were in the papers. It happens. But it could also be someone you know. If you don’t have a suspect, you have no case, nothing. You need to think, go through your life, over and over again, everyone you know, everyone Simone knows, everyone Benjamin knows. Neighbours, relatives, colleagues, patients, rivals, friends. Is there anyone who threatened you? Who threatened Benjamin? Try to remember. It could be an impulsive action, or it could have been planned for many years. Think very carefully, Erik. Then get back to me.”

Erik opens his mouth to ask Joona once again to take the case, but before he can speak he hears a click on the other end of the line. He sits there in his car watching the traffic racing along on the motorway, his eyes burning.

It is cold and dark in his office at the hospital. Erik kicks off his shoes, catching the smell of damp greenery on his coat as he hangs it up. He is shivering as he boils some water on the hot plate, makes a cup of tea, takes two strong tranquillizers, and sits down at his desk. There are no lights on except the desk lamp. He stares into the deep black darkness of the windowpane, where he can glimpse an outline of himself, framed by the light. Who hates me? he wonders. Who envies me? Who wants to punish me, take everything I have away from me, take my life, take what lives within me? Who wants to crush me?

Erik switches on the main light and begins to pace back and forth. Incapable of gathering his thoughts, he reaches for the phone on his desk and knocks over a plastic cup of water. He watches without interest for a moment as a thin stream slowly heads toward one of his medical journals. Without another thought, he dials Simone’s cell number, leaves a short message about wanting to look at Benjamin’s computer again, and then falls silent, unable to say anything else.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, and tosses the phone back on the desk.

The lift rumbles in the corridor. He hears the doors ping and glide open, then the sound of someone pushing a squeaking hospital trolley to his door.

The pills are beginning to work; he feels the calm rise through his body like warm milk, a memory, a movement inside him, a dip in the pit of his stomach. Like falling from a great height, first through clear cold air, then down into warm oxygen-rich water.

“Come on,” he says to himself. Someone has taken Benjamin; someone has done this to me; there has to be a key to this somewhere in my memory.

“I will find you,” he whispers.

Erik contemplates the sodden pages of his medical journal. In one photograph, the new director of the Karolinska Institute is leaning over a desk. The ink has run, blurring and darkening her face. When Erik peels the magazine from his desktop, the back pages stick to its surface, leaving behind random letters, so he begins to scratch off the bits of paper with his thumbnail. Suddenly he stops and stares at a combination of letters: e v A.

Up from the depths of his memory rolls a slow wave, full of reflections and facets; then comes the clear image of a woman who refuses to give back what she has stolen. Her name is Eva. Her mouth is tense, with flecks of froth on the narrow lips. She is screaming at him in outraged fury. You’re the one who takes! You take and take! What the fuck would you say if I took things from you? How do you think that would feel? She hides her face in her hands and says she hates him; she repeats it over and over again, perhaps a hundred times, before she calms down. Her cheeks are white, her eyes red-rimmed; she looks at him, uncomprehending and exhausted.

He remembers her; he remembers her very well: Eva Blau. Right from the start, he knew he’d made a mistake in accepting her as a patient.

It was many years ago, when he was using hypnosis as a strong, effective element in therapy. Eva Blau. The name comes from the other side of time, before he swore off hypnosis. Before he promised never to use it again.

Why did Eva Blau become his patient? He can no longer remember the source of her pain. He’d met so many people, people with devastating histories, often aggressive, always afraid, compulsive, paranoid, sometimes with self-mutilation and suicide attempts in their background. Many came with only the thinnest of barriers separating them from psychosis or schizophrenia. They had been systematically abused and tortured; they had suffered mock executions; they had lost their children; they had been subjected to incest and rape; they had witnessed terrible things or been forced to participate in them.

What was it she stole? Erik asks himself. I accused her of stealing, but what was it she stole?

He can’t quite pin down the memory. He takes a few steps, stops, and closes his eyes. Something else happened, but what? Did it have anything to do with Benjamin? He remembers explaining to Eva Blau that he wanted to find a different therapy group for her. Why can’t he remember what happened? Had she begun to threaten him?

What comes quite clearly is an early meeting here in his office. Eva Blau had shaved off all her hair and made up only her eyes. She sat down on his sofa, unbuttoned her blouse, and showed him her breasts in a matter-of-fact manner.

“You’ve been to my house,” said Erik.

“You’ve been to my house,” she responded.

“Eva, you told me about your home,” he went on. “Breaking in is another matter altogether.”

“I didn’t break in.”

“You broke a window.”

“The stone broke the window,” she said.

Erik begins to search through the papers he keeps in his office. Somewhere in here, there will be information about Eva Blau. Because whenever his patients act differently from what he expects, Erik keeps his notes handy until he can understand the reasons for these deviations.

It could be an observation or some forgotten object. He rummages through papers, files, scraps of paper, and receipts with notes written on them. Faded photographs in a plastic wallet, an external hard drive, some diaries from the time when he believed in complete openness between doctor and patient, a drawing that a traumatized child made one night. Several cassettes and videotapes from his lectures at Karolinska Institute. A book by Hermann Broch, full of annotations. Erik’s hands stop moving. Around a videotape is a piece of paper held in place by a brown rubber band. On the spine of the tape it simply says Erik Maria Bark, Tape 14 . He removes the piece of paper, angles the lamp, and recognizes his own handwriting: the haunted house.

Ice-cold shivers run up his back and out along his arms, and the hair on the back of his neck stands up. He can suddenly hear the ticking of his watch. His head is pounding and his heart is racing. He sits down, looks at the tape again, picks up the phone with trembling hands, and calls the porters’ office to ask that a videotape player be sent to his office. With feet as heavy as lead he walks over to the window again and peers out at the covering of snow in the inner courtyard. Heavy flakes drift slowly at an angle through the air, landing on the windowpane before losing their colour and melting from the warmth of the glass. He tells himself it’s probably just a coincidence, a strange coincidence, but at the same time he realizes that some of the pieces of the puzzle may fit together.