Stalker

102

Anna Palmer sees Joona in a small, book-lined room. There’s a desk, and a narrow window overlooking the hospital grounds. She’s a tall woman with short, lead-grey hair and visible veins beneath her eyes.

‘I know someone who was in a car accident ten years ago,’ Joona begins. ‘He suffered fairly severe brain damage… This isn’t my area, obviously, but the way it’s been explained to me, he suffers from ongoing epileptic activity in the temporal lobes of both sides of his brain.’

‘That can certainly happen,’ she says, jotting down what he says.

‘His big problem is his memory,’ Joona goes on. ‘Short and long-term… sometimes he remembers every detail of an event, sometimes he forgets that it ever took place… I’m hoping that hypnosis might help him break through the barriers.’

Anna Palmer lowers her notepad and folds her hands on the desk. Joona notices tiny red eczema scabs on her knuckles.

‘I don’t want to disappoint you,’ she says in a weary tone of voice. ‘But a lot of people have unrealistic expectations about what hypnosis can be used for.’

‘It’s very important for this person to remember,’ Joona replies.

‘Clinical hypnosis… is about making suggestions, as a sort of internal self-help… and it’s nothing to do with revealing truths,’ she explains apologetically.

‘But this sort of brain injury doesn’t mean that his memory has been erased. It’s all there, it’s just that the path to it is blocked… I mean, couldn’t hypnosis help him to find a different path?’

‘It would certainly be possible to get to that point, if you were very skilful,’ she concedes, scratching the red marks on her hands. ‘But what do you do when you get there? No one would be able to differentiate between his real memories and his imagination, seeing as his brain can’t tell the difference.’

‘Are you sure? I mean, we think we can tell the difference between memory and imagination, we’re convinced that we can.’

‘Because we store certain information together with an awareness that those are genuine memories – like a sort of code, an introductory note, a prefix.’

‘So shouldn’t that code still be in his brain?’ Joona persists.

‘But extracting that at the same time as his memories…’ she says, shaking her head.

‘Is there anyone who could do that?’

‘No,’ she replies, closing her notepad.

‘Erik Maria Bark claims he can.’

‘Erik is very good at… he’s probably the best person in the world at putting patients into a state of deep hypnosis, but his research isn’t evidence-based,’ she says slowly, and there’s a glint of something in her eyes.

‘Do you believe what the papers have been saying about him?’

‘I have no way of judging that… But he does have a leaning towards the perverse, the psychotic…’

She stops herself.

‘Is this conversation actually about him?’ she asks bluntly.

‘No.’

‘But it’s not about a friend of yours, is it?’

‘It never is… I’m a detective with the National Criminal Investigation Department, and I need to question a witness suffering from organic memory loss.’

The corners of Anna Palmer’s mouth twitch.

‘That would be unethical, seeing as anything said under hypnosis is the opposite of reliable, and has no place in a legal context,’ she says curtly.

‘This is about detective work, not-’

‘I can promise you that no serious practitioner of clinical hypnosis would do this,’ she says, raising her voice and looking him in the eye.