Joona Linna Crime Series Books 1 and 2: The Hypnotist, The Nightmare

“Yes.”

She sits motionless on the chair. A thin furrow of anxiety has appeared between her eyebrows. She looks very tired, and her lips are moving slightly, as if she is praying or whispering to herself. “Is he locked up?” she asks suddenly.

“Who?”

She doesn’t look up at him when she replies but speaks tonelessly down at the table. “Josef. Have you locked him up?”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No.”

“I thought perhaps you were carrying the gun because you were afraid of him.”

“I hunt,” she replies, meeting his gaze.

There’s something peculiar about her, something he doesn’t yet understand. It’s not the usual things: guilt, rage, or hatred. It’s more like something reminiscent of an enormous resistance. He can’t get a fix on it. A defence mechanism or a protective barrier unlike anything he has yet encountered.

“Hare?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Is it good, hare?”

“Not particularly.”

“What does it taste like?”

“Sweet.”

Joona thinks about her standing in the cold air outside the cottage. He tries to visualise the chain of events.

Erik Maria Bark had taken her gun. He was holding it over his arm and it was broken open, the brass of the cartridges visible. Evelyn was squinting at him in the sunlight. Tall and slim, with her sandy brown hair in a high, tight ponytail. A silvery padded vest and low-cut jeans, damp running shoes. Pine trees behind her, moss on the ground, low-growing lingonberry and trampled toadstools.

Suddenly Joona discovers a crack in Evelyn’s story. He has already nudged at the thought, but it slipped away. Now the crack is absolutely clear. When he spoke to Evelyn in her aunt’s cottage, she sat completely still on the corduroy couch with her hands clamped between her thighs. On the floor at her feet lay a photograph in a frame that looked like a toadstool. Evelyn’s little sister was in the picture, sitting between her parents with the sun glinting off her big glasses.

The little girl must have been four, perhaps even five years old in the picture. In other words, the photograph can be no more than a year or two old. Evelyn claimed that Josef hadn’t been to the cottage for years, but he accurately described the photo and the frame under hypnosis.

Of course, there could be several copies of the picture in other toadstool frames, thinks Joona. There’s also the possibility that this particular one has been moved around. And Josef could have been in the cottage without Evelyn’s knowledge.

But it could also be a crack in Evelyn’s story.

“Evelyn,” says Joona, “I’m just wondering about something you said a little while ago.”

Jens Svanehjälm gets to his feet. The sudden movement startles Evelyn, and her body jerks. “Would you come with me for a minute, detective?” Outside, he turns to Joona. “I’m letting her go,” he says, in a low voice. “This is bullshit. We don’t have a thing, just an invalid interrogation with her comatose fifteen-year-old brother, who suggests that she—”

Jens stops speaking as soon as he sees the look on Joona’s face.

“You’ve found something, haven’t you?” he says.

“I think so, yes,” Joona replies quietly.

“Is she lying?”

“I don’t know. She might be.”

Jens runs his hand over his chin, considering. “Give her a sandwich and a cup of tea,” he says eventually. “Then you can have one more hour before I decide whether we’re going to arrest her or not.”

“There’s no guarantee this will lead to anything.”

“But you’ll give it a go?”

Four minutes later, Joona places a Styrofoam cup of English breakfast tea and a sandwich on a paper plate in front of Evelyn and sits down on his chair. “I thought you might be hungry,” he says.

“Thanks,” she says, and a more cheerful expression momentarily sweeps across her features. Joona watches her carefully. Her hand shakes as she eats the sandwich and lifts the cup from the table to her lips.

“Evelyn, in your aunt’s cottage there’s a photograph in a frame that looks like a toadstool.”

Evelyn nods. “Aunt Sonja bought it up in Mora; she thought it would look nice in the cottage …” She stops and blows on her tea.

“Did she buy any more like that? For gifts, say?”

“Not that I know of.” She smiles. “I’ve never seen another like it.”

“And has the photograph always been in the cottage?”

“What do you mean?” she asks faintly.

“Well, I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. But Josef talked about this picture, so he must have seen it sometime. I thought perhaps you’d forgotten something.”

“No.”

“Well, that clears that up,” says Joona, getting up.

“Are you going?”

“Yes, I think we’re done here,” says Joona. He looks at her face, filled with anxiety, and acts on a hunch.

“Chances are you’ll be out of here—oh, in an hour or two.”

“Out of here?”

“Well, I don’t think we can hold you for anything.” He smiles.

She wraps her arms around herself. “You never answered my question.”

“Question?”

“Is Josef locked up?”