Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

Anja walks into Joona Linna’s office and silently hands him a manila folder and a glass of mulled wine. He looks up at her round, pink face. For once she looks completely serious.

“They’ve identified the child,” she explains.

“Thanks.”

There are two things he loathes, he thinks, looking at the folder. One is having to give up on a case, walking away from unidentified bodies, unsolved rapes, robberies, cases of abuse and murder. And the other thing he loathes, although in a completely different way, is when these unsolved cases are finally solved, because when the old questions are answered, it is seldom in the way one would wish.

He begins to read. The body of the child found in Lydia Everson’s garden was that of a boy. He was five years old when he was killed. The cause of death is thought to be a fractured skull caused by a blunt object. In addition, a number of healed and partially healed injuries have been found, indicating repeated abuse of a serious nature. Beatings, the forensic pathologist has suggested. Abuse so serious that it caused broken bones and cracks in the skeleton. The back and the arms, especially, seem to have been the focus of violence using heavy objects. In addition, several symptoms of malnutrition on the skeleton suggest that the child was starving.

Joona looks out the window for a little while. He can’t get used to this, and he has told himself that the day he does get used to it, he’ll give up his job as a detective. He runs a hand through his thick hair, swallows hard, and returns to his reading.

The child has been identified. His name was Johan Samuelsson, and he had been reported missing thirteen years ago. According to her statement the mother, Isabella, had been in the garden with her son when the phone rang inside the house. She had not taken the boy with her when she went to answer, and at some point during the twenty or thirty seconds it took her to pick up the receiver, establish that there was no one there, and hang up again, the child had disappeared.

Johan was two years old at the time.

He was five years old when he was killed.

His remains then lay in Lydia Everson’s garden for ten years.

The smell of the mulled wine is suddenly nauseating. Joona gets up and pushes his office window open. He looks down at the inner courtyard, the sprawling branches of the trees over by the custody area, the shining wet asphalt.

Lydia had the child with her for three years, he thinks. Three years of keeping a secret. Three years of abuse, starvation, and fear.

“Are you all right, Joona?” asks Anja, popping her head around the door.

“I’m going to go and speak to the parents,” he says.

“I’m sure someone else can do that.”

“No. This is my case,” says Joona. “I’ll go.”

“I understand.”

“Could you find some addresses for me in the meantime?”

“No problem.”

“I’d like to know every place Lydia Everson has lived for the past thirteen years.” His heart is heavy as he pulls on his fur hat and overcoat and sets off to tell Isabella and Joakim Samuelsson that their son has been found dead.

Anja calls him as he’s driving out of the city.

“That was quick,” he says, trying to sound cheerful but failing.

“This is my job after all, darling,” chirrups Anja.

He hears her take a deep breath and he thinks of the two pictures of Johan in the folder. In one he’s dressed in a policeman’s uniform, laughing out loud, his hair standing on end. And in the other: a collection of bones laid out on a metal table, neatly labelled with numbers.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he mutters to himself.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, Anja, it was another driver.”

“All right, all right. But I don’t want to hear that kind of language.”

“No, I know,” he says wearily, incapable of joining in the banter.

Anja finally seems to realize that he isn’t in the mood for jokes and says neutrally, “The house where Johan Samuelsson’s remains were found is Lydia Everson’s mother’s place. She grew up there, and that’s always been her only address.”

“Any family? Parents? Brothers and sisters?”

“Wait, I’m just checking it now… It doesn’t look like it. There’s no record of her father, and her mother’s dead. It doesn’t even look as if Lydia was in her care for very long.”

“Brothers and sisters?” Joona asks again.

“No,” says Anja, leafing through papers. “Sorry, yes,” she calls out. “She had a little brother, but he seems to have died at an early age.”

“How old was Lydia at the time?”

“She was ten.”

“So she’s always lived in that house?”

“No, that’s not exactly what I said. She has lived elsewhere- on several occasions, in fact.”

“Where?” Joona asks patiently.

“Ulleråker, Ulleråker, Ulleråker Psychiatric Clinic.”

“Three stays.”

“That’s what it says.”

“There are pieces missing,” Joona remarks quietly to himself.

“What are you saying?”

“There are too many pieces missing,” he answers. “I can’t make sense of it, and now I have to try to explain to two parents why Lydia took their child.”

Joona has turned onto the little street where Johan Samuelsson’s parents still live. He spots their place at once, an eighteenth-century house painted Falun red, with a saddle roof. A shabby playhouse stands in the garden. Beyond the Samuelssons’ hilly plot it is just possible to glimpse the black, heavy water of the Baltic Sea.

“I have to go, Anja.”

He pulls his car into a raked gravel drive neatly edged with cobblestones and runs his hands over his face before getting out. He walks up to the door and rings the bell, waits, rings again. Eventually he hears someone shouting inside.

“Coming!”

The lock rattles and a teenage girl pushes open the door. Her eyes are heavily made up with kohl, and she has dyed her hair purple.

“Hey,” she says.

“My name is Joona Linna,” he says. “I’m from the National CID. Are your parents at home?”

The girl nods and turns to shout to them. But a middle-aged woman is already standing in the hallway, staring at Joona. “Amanda,” she says in a frightened voice, “ask him… ask him what he wants.”

Joona shakes his head. “I’d prefer not to say on the doorstep what I came to say,” he says. “May I come in?”

“Yes,” whispers the mother.

Joona steps inside and closes the door. He looks at the girl, whose lower lip has begun to tremble. Then he looks at Isabella Samuelsson. Her hands are pressed to her breast, and her face is deathly pale.

Joona takes a deep breath and explains quietly. “I’m so very, very sorry. We’ve found Johan’s remains.”

The mother presses her clenched fist to her mouth, making a faint whimpering sound. She leans on the wall but slips and sinks to the floor.

“Dad!” yells Amanda. “Dad!”

A man comes running down the stairs. When he sees his wife weeping on the floor, he slows down. It’s as if every vestige of colour disappears from his face. He looks at his wife, his daughter, then Joona. “It’s Johan,” is all he says.

“We’ve found his remains,” says Joona, his voice subdued.

They sit in the living room. The girl puts her arm around her mother, who is weeping inconsolably. The father still seems strangely calm. Joona has seen it before, these men- and sometimes women, though this is less common- who show very little reaction, who continue to talk and ask questions, whose voices take on a peculiarly vacant tone as they ask about the details. Joona knows this is not indifference but a battle, a desperate attempt to put off the moment when the pain comes.