The Hypnotist

Chapter 89

Erik calls to his son in spite of the fact that he can see the place is deserted; everything is dark and still in the house, with a closed-in smell of dust and old fabric. He moves quickly into the hall, opens the door leading down to the cellar, and is met by a powerful stench, a heavy smell of ash, charred wood, and burnt rubber. He races down the steps, trips, bangs into the wall with his shoulder, and regains his balance. The lights are not working, but enough sunlight comes from a high window to see that there’s been a fire down here. Cinders crunch beneath his feet. Much of the room is black with soot, but some items of furniture appear to be intact. The table with its tiled surface is just slightly sooty, while the scented candles on the tray have melted, blending into a multicoloured pool of solid wax. Erik finds his way to the door leading into the other room. It hangs loosely from its hinges, and the inside of the door is completely blackened.

“Benjamin,” he says, his voice full of fear.

Ash whirls up in his face and he blinks, his eyes smarting. In the middle of the floor are the remains of what looks like a cage, big enough to hold a person.

“Erik,” a voice calls from upstairs.

He stops and listens. The walls creak. Burnt fragments of ceiling tiles drop to the floor. He moves slowly toward the stairs. In the distance he can hear a dog barking.

“Erik!”

It’s Joona’s voice. He’s inside the house. Erik goes up the stairs. Joona looks at him, his expression anxious.

“What happened?”

“There’s been a fire in the cellar,” Erik replies.

“Nothing else?”

Erik gestures vaguely toward the stairs. “The remains of a cage.”

“I brought a dog with me.”

Joona moves quickly along the hall and opens the front door. He waves in the uniformed dog handler, a woman whose dark hair is braided thickly. The black Labrador, its coat groomed to a glossy sheen, walks obediently to heel. The handler nods to Erik, then crouches down in front of the dog and talks to him. The animal moves eagerly through the house, sniffing constantly, breathing quickly, seeking all the time. The dog’s stomach moves as he pants, systematically searching each room. Erik suddenly feels as if he’s going to throw up and leaves the house. Two police officers are chatting beside a police minibus. He goes through the gate, heads towards his car, then stops and takes out the little box with the parrot and the native. He stands there with it in his hands; then he goes over to a sewer grate and tips the contents down between the bars. His forehead covered in a cold sweat, he moistens his lips as if he is about to say something after a long silence, but then he drops the box too and hears the splash as it hits the surface of the water.

When he returns to the garden, Joona is standing outside the house. He meets Erik’s gaze, and shakes his head. Erik goes inside. The dog handler is on her knees, patting the Labrador and scratching the loose skin behind his ears.

“Have you been down to the basement?” asks Erik.

“Of course,” she replies, without looking at him.

“Into the inner room?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps all the ash is preventing the dog from picking up the scent.”

“Rocky can find a corpse underwater, at a depth of two hundred feet,” she says.

“And what about the living?”

“If there was anything here, Rocky would have found it.”

“But you haven’t been outside yet,” says Joona, who has followed Erik inside.

“I didn’t know we were supposed to,” says the dog handler.

“Yes,” Joona answers tersely.

She shrugs her shoulders and gets to her feet.

“Come on then,” she says to the Labrador in a deep, thick voice. “Shall we go outside and have a look? Shall we go and have a look?”

Erik goes with them. The black dog moves rapidly back and forth across the overgrown lawn, sniffing around the rain barrel, where an opaque layer of ice has formed on the surface, searching among the old fruit trees. The sky is dark and cloudy. Erik notices that the neighbour has switched on Christmas lights strung in a tree. The air is bitterly cold. Joona remains close to the handler and the dog, pointing in a particular direction from time to time. Erik follows them around the back of the house. Suddenly he recognizes the mound at the far end of the garden. That’s the place in the picture, he thinks. The photograph Aida sent to Benjamin before he disappeared. Erik is breathing heavily. The dog sniffs around the compost, moves over to the mound and sniffs it, pants, trots all the way around it, sniffs among the low bushes and at the back of the brown fence, comes back, trots around a leaf basket, and goes over to a small herb garden. Wooden labels with seed packets attached to them show what has been planted in the various rows. The black Labrador whines uneasily and then lies down in the middle of the little plot. He flattens himself completely on the wet, freshly dug earth. The dog’s body is shaking with excitement, and the handler’s expression is one of deep sadness as she praises him. Joona turns on his heel, runs back, and stands in front of Erik, refusing to let him go over to the plot. Erik has no idea what he screams, what he tries to do, but Joona moves him away from the spot and out of the garden.

“I have to know,” says Erik, his voice trembling.

Joona nods. “The dog has indicated that there’s a human corpse in the ground.”

Erik feels his entire body give way. He sinks down onto the pavement. When he sees the police officers climb out of the bus carrying spades, he closes his eyes.

Erik Maria Bark sits alone in Joona Linna’s car, looking through the windscreen. Black, sprawling branches against a dark winter sky. His mouth is dry, his head aches, and his face and scalp are itchy. He whispers something to himself, gets out of the car, climbs over the police tape cordoning off the area, and walks around the house through the tall, frosty grass. Joona is watching the uniformed officers with the shovels. They work in dogged silence, their movements almost mechanical. The whole of the small plot has been dug up. It is now only a large rectangular hole. Beside it is a plastic sheet on which muddy scraps of clothing and fragments of bone have been placed. The sound of the shovels continues, metal strikes rock, the digging stops, and the officers straighten up. Erik slowly moves closer, his footsteps heavy and reluctant. Joona turns and smiles with the whole of his tired face.

“What is it?” Erik whispers.

Joona comes to meet him, looks Erik straight in the eye, and says, “It isn’t Benjamin.”

“It isn’t?”

“The body has been here for at least ten years.”

Erik thinks for a moment. “Is it a child?”

Joona’s face darkens. “Five years old, perhaps,” he says.

“So Lydia had a son after all,” says Erik with a shudder.