Joona watches the patrol spread out around the house at a reasonable distance, weapons drawn. A twig snaps. In the distance he can hear the tapping of a woodpecker echoing through the forest. Joona slowly approaches the house, trying to see something through the pink curtain fabric. He signals to Police Constable Kristina Andersson, a young woman with a pointed chin, to stop on the path. Her cheeks are red, and she nods without taking her eyes off the house. With an air of total calm, she draws her service pistol and moves a few steps to the side.
The house is empty, Joona thinks. Gingerly, he places one foot on the porch steps. They creak under his weight. He watches the curtains for sudden movements as he knocks on the door. Nothing happens. He waits for a while and then stiffens, thinking he’s heard something, and scans the forest, beyond the brush and the tree trunks. He draws his pistol, a heavy Smith & Wesson that he prefers to the standard-issue Sig Sauer, removes the safety catch, and checks the cartridges. Suddenly there is a loud rustling at the edge of the forest and a deer dashes between the trees. Kristina Andersson gives Joona a strained smile when he glances over at her. He points at the window, moves forward cautiously, and looks in through a gap to one side of a curtain.
In the dim interior he can see a cane table with a scratched glass surface and a tan corduroy sofa. On the back of a red wooden chair, two pairs of white pants have been hung up to dry. In the pantry there are several cans of instant macaroni, jars of pesto, canned foods, and a bag of apples. He catches the glint of various pieces of cutlery on the floor in front of the sink and under the kitchen table. He signals to Kristina that he’s going in, then tries the door. The knob turns in his hand; he pushes it open and steps quickly out of the firing line, looking to Kristina for the all-clear. She nods, gesturing for him to enter. He looks inside and steps over the threshold.
From the car, Erik has only a vague sense of what is happening. He sees Joona Linna disappear into the little brown house, followed by another officer. Erik’s eyes are dry and sensitive—a side effect of his codeine capsules. He peers out at the brown house and the policemen, with their careful movements and the dark glimmer of their drawn guns. It is quiet. The trees are bare in the sterile December chill. The light and the colours make Erik think of school trips when he was a child: the smell of rotting tree trunks, the funkiness of mushrooms in the wet earth.
His mother had worked part-time as a school nurse at the high school in Sollentuna and was convinced of the benefits of fresh air. It was Erik’s mother who had wanted him to be called Erik Maria; she had once taken a language course in Vienna and had gone to the Burgtheater to see Strindberg’s The Father with Klaus Maria Brandauer in the lead. She’d been so taken with the performance that she’d carried the actor’s name with her for years. As a kid, Erik always tried to hide his middle name; as a teenager, he saw himself in the Johnny Cash song ‘A Boy Named Sue.’
Some gal would giggle and I’d get red,
And some guy’d laugh and I’d bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.
Erik’s father had worked for the National Insurance Office. But he’d really had only one genuine interest in life. In his spare time, he was a magician and would dress up in a home-made cape and a second-hand formal suit, crowning the outfit with a collapsible top hat, and make Erik and his friends sit on wooden chairs in the garage, where he’d built a little stage with secret trapdoors. Most of his tricks came from the Bernando catalogue: magic wands that would suddenly extend with a clatter, billiard balls that multiplied with the help of a shell, a velvet bag with secret compartments, and the glittering hand guillotine. These days Erik remembers his father with joy and tenderness: the way he would start the tape recorder with his foot, playing Jean Michel Jarre as he made magical movements over a skull floating in the air.
Erik hopes with all his heart that his father never noticed how embarrassed he became as he grew older, rolling his eyes at his friends behind his father’s back.
Erik had always wanted to become a doctor. He had never really wanted to do anything else, hadn’t imagined another kind of life. He remembers sitting there on the sofa in Sollentuna as an eighteen-year-old, staring at his top grades, then letting his gaze roam over his parents’ prototypically middle-class living room, the bookshelves empty of books but adorned with knick-knacks and souvenirs: silver-framed photographs of his parents’ confirmations, wedding, and fiftieth-birthday celebrations, followed by a dozen or more shots of Erik, from a chubby baby in a christening gown to a grinning teenager in stovepipe trousers.
His mother came into the room that day and handed him the application forms for medical school. His mother often said the Swedes were spoiled, taking their welfare society for granted when it was most probably nothing more than a small historical parenthesis. She meant that the system of free health care and dental care, free child care and primary education, free secondary schools and free university education, could simply disappear at any time. But right now there was an opportunity for a perfectly ordinary boy or girl to study to become a doctor, or an architect, or a top economist, at any university in the country without the need for a private fortune, grants, or charity hand-outs. As soon as Erik set foot in the medical school at Karolinska Institute, it was as if he had found his true home.
When he decided to specialise in psychiatry, he realised that the medical profession was going to suit him even better than he’d imagined. A trainee doctor has to perform eighteen months of general service before he is fully qualified to practise; Erik spent this period working for Médecins sans Frontières. He had wound up at a field hospital in Kismayo, south of Mogadisho, in Somalia. The equipment consisted of material discarded by Swedish hospitals: X-ray machines from the sixties, drugs well past their best-before date, and rusty, stained beds from old wards that had been closed down or rebuilt. In Somalia he encountered severely traumatised people for the first time: young people who would tonelessly relate how they had been forced to carry out horrific crimes; women who had been so severely abused they were no longer-able to speak. Working with them—with children who had become completely apathetic and had lost the desire to play; with women who were unable to look up and meet another’s eyes—Erik discovered that he wanted to devote himself to helping people who were held prisoner by the terrible things that had been done to them, who were still suffering despite the fact that the perpetrators were long gone.
Upon returning home, Erik trained in psychotherapy in Stockholm. But it was not until he specialised in psychotraumatology and disaster psychiatry that he came into contact with the various theories regarding hypnosis. What he found most attractive about hypnosis was its speed, the fact that a psychiatrist could get to the root of trauma straight away. When it came to working with war victims and the victims of natural disasters, speed could prove immensely important.
He pursued his training with the European Society of Clinical Hypnosis and soon became a member of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the European Board of Medical Hypnosis, and the Swedish Society for Clinical Hypnosis; he became awed by the groundbreaking work of Karen Olness, the American paediatrician who turned to hypnosis to alleviate the suffering of those in chronic pain and chronically ill children, and he struck up a correspondence with her that lasted several years.
Next, Erik was with the Red Cross in Uganda. In his five years there, the situations he encountered were acute, overwhelming. There was little time to try out and develop his experience of hypnosis; he used it perhaps fewer than a dozen times, and then only in the most straightforward contexts: to block the perception of pain or to ease phobic fixations. And then, one day in his final year, he came across a young girl who was locked in a room because she wouldn’t stop screaming. The Catholic nuns working as nurses explained that the girl had been found crawling along the road from the shanty town north of Mbale. They thought she was a Bagisu, because she spoke Lugisu. She hadn’t slept one single night and, instead, kept shouting that she was a terrible demon with fire in her eyes. Erik asked to see her. As soon as he did, he realised she was suffering from acute dehydration, but when he tried to get her to drink, she bellowed as if the mere sight of water burned her like flames. She rolled on the floor, screaming. He decided to try hypnosis to calm her down. A nun translated his words into Bukusu, which they suspected the girl could understand, and after a while, once she began to listen, it proved very easy to hypnotise her. In one hour the girl recounted her entire psychic trauma.
A tanker truck from Jinja had run off the road just north of the shanty town on the Mbale-Soroti road. The heavy vehicle had overturned, gouging out a deep ditch along the side of the road and puncturing a hole in the huge tank. Gasoline gushed out onto the ground. The girl had raced home and told her uncle about the gasoline just disappearing into the earth. Her uncle had run to the spot with two empty plastic containers. By the time the girl caught up with him, a dozen or so people were already by the tanker, filling buckets with gasoline from the ditch. The smell was appalling, the sun was shining, and the air was hot. The girl’s uncle waved to her. She took the first container and started hauling it homewards. It was very heavy. She stopped to lift it onto her head, and saw a woman in a blue head scarf standing up to her knees in gasoline by the tanker, filling small glass bottles. Further down the road in the direction of the town, the girl caught sight of a man wearing a yellow camouflage shirt. He was walking along with a cigarette in his mouth, and when he inhaled, the tip of the cigarette glowed red.
Erik vividly remembers how the girl had looked when she was speaking. The tears poured down her cheeks as she told him in a thick, dull voice that she had caught the fire from the cigarette with her eyes and carried it to the woman in the blue head scarf. Because when she turned back and looked at the woman, she caught fire. First the blue head scarf, then her entire body was enveloped in huge flames. The fire was in my eyes, she said. Suddenly it was like a fire storm around the tanker. The girl began to run, hearing nothing but screams behind her.
Later, Erik and the nun talked to the girl at length about what she had revealed under hypnosis. They explained over and over again that it was the vapour from the gasoline, the fumes with the powerful smell, that had begun to burn. The man’s cigarette had set fire to the tanker through the air; it had had nothing to do with her.
A month or so after this event, Erik returned to Stockholm and applied for research funding from the Swedish Medical Research Council in order to immerse himself seriously in the treatment of trauma with hypnosis at the Karolinska Institute. And not long after his return to Sweden he met Simone at a big party at the university. He had noticed her curly, strawberry-blonde hair first of all. Then he had seen her face, the curve of her pale forehead, her fair skin scattered with light brown freckles. She was excited, rosy-cheeked and sparkling, and looked like a bookmark angel, small and slender. He can still remember what she was wearing that evening: a green silk fitted blouse that set off her bright green eyes.
Erik blinks hard, leans closer to the windscreen, and tries to see between the trees, but he can only sense movement inside the brown cabin. Most likely, Evelyn is not there. The curtains shift; the front door swings open; Joona Linna steps out on the porch, and three policemen come round the house and join him. They point to the road and the other cottages. One unfolds a map, and they gather around him to consult it. Then Joona seems to want to show them something inside the house. They all go in, the last one closing the door quietly.
Suddenly Erik spots someone standing in the trees where the ground slopes down towards the bog. It’s a slender woman with a double-barrelled shotgun, which she drags along the ground, letting it bounce gently against the blueberry bushes and moss.
The police have not spotted her, and she has had no opportunity to see them. Erik keys in the number of Joona’s mobile phone, which begins to ring in the car. It’s lying next to him on the driver’s seat.
Without any urgency, the woman wanders between the trees, shotgun in hand. Erik realises a dangerous situation could arise if the woman and the police take each other by surprise. Despite his promise to Joona, he has no choice. He gets out of the car. “Hi, there,” he calls.
The woman stops and turns to look at him.
“Chilly today,” he says quietly.
“What?”
“It’s cold in the shade,” he says, a little louder this time.
“Yes,” she replies.
“Are you new here?” he asks, walking towards her.
“No, I borrow the house from my aunt.”
“Is Sonja your aunt?”
“Yes,” she says, with a smile.
Erik goes up to her. “What are you hunting?”
“Hare,” she replies.
“Can I have a look at your gun?”
Obligingly, she breaks it and hands it over. The tip of her nose is red. Dry pine needles are caught in her sandy-coloured hair.
“Evelyn,” he says calmly, “there are some police officers here who would like to talk to you.”
She looks anxious and takes a step backwards.
“If you have time,” he says, with a smile.
She gives a faint nod and Erik shouts in the direction of the house. Joona emerges with an irritated look on his face, ready to order Erik back to the car. When he sees the woman he stiffens.
“This is Evelyn,” says Erik, handing him the shotgun.
“Hello.”
The colour suddenly drains from her face, and she looks as if she’s going to faint.
“I need to talk to you,” Joona explains, in a serious voice.
“No,” she whispers.
“Come inside.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to go inside?”
Evelyn turns to Erik. “Do I have to?” she asks, trembling.
“No,” he replies. “You decide.”
“Please come in,” says Joona.
She shakes her head but begins to head for the house anyway.
“I’ll wait outside,” says Erik.
He walks a little way up the drive. The gravel is covered in pine needles and brown cones. He hears Evelyn scream through the walls of the house. Just one scream. It sounds lonely and despairing, an expression of incomprehensible loss. He recognises that scream well from his time in Uganda.
Evelyn is sitting on the sofa with both hands clamped between her thighs, her face ashen. On the floor by her feet is a photograph in a frame that looks like a toadstool. It’s a mother and father—her mother and father—sitting in something that looks like a hammock, with her little sister between them. Her parents squint into the bright sunlight, while the little girl’s glasses shine as if they were white.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” says Joona.
Her chin quivers.
“Do you think you might be able to help us understand what’s happened?” he asks. The wooden chair creaks under his weight. He waits for a while, then continues. “Where were you on Monday, 7th December?”
She shakes her head.
“Yesterday,” he clarifies.
“I was here,” she says faintly.
“In the cottage?”
She meets his gaze. “Yes.”
“You didn’t go out all day?”
“No.”
“You just sat here?”
She makes a gesture toward the bed and the textbooks on political science.
“You were studying?”
“Yes.”
“So you didn’t leave the house yesterday?”
“No.”
“Is there anyone who can confirm that?”
“What?”
“Was anyone here with you?” asks Joona.
“No.”
“Have you any idea who could have done this to your family?”
She shakes her head.
“Has anyone threatened you?” She doesn’t seem to hear him. “Evelyn?”
“What? What did you say?” Her fingers are still tightly clamped between her legs.
“Has anyone threatened your family? Do you have any enemies?”
“No.”
“Did you know that your father was heavily in debt?”
She shakes her head.
“He was,” says Joona. “He owed money to criminals.”
“Right.”
“Could it be one of them who—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t understand anything,” she says, raising her voice.
“What is it we don’t understand?”
“You don’t understand anything.”
“Tell us what—”
“I can’t!” she screams.
She is so distraught that she begins to cry, straight out, without covering her face. Kristina Andersson goes over and hugs her, and after a while she grows calmer. She sits there motionless, the policewoman’s arms around her, as occasional sobs shudder through her body.
“There, there,” Kristina whispers reassuringly. She holds the girl close and strokes her head—and then suddenly screams and pushes Evelyn away, straight onto the floor. “Goddammit, she bit me … she fucking bit me!”
Kristina looks in amazement at her fingers, covered in blood seeping from a wound in the middle of her throat.
On the floor, Evelyn hides a bewildered smile behind her hand. Then her eyes roll back in her head and she slumps into unconsciousness.