The Fire Witness

  Joona has realized that Flora has been describing a murder that she witnessed as a child, but that she thought she was describing Miranda’s murder. He knows he’s right. He takes out his cell phone and calls Anja. Flora had seen what she’d been through only now, decades later. This is why her memories are so strong and confusing.

  “Anja?” he asks when she picks up the phone. “Are you in front of your computer?”

  “Are you in a better place?” she says, amused.

  “Can you see if anything happened in Delsbo about thirty-five years ago?”

  “Anything special?”

  “A five-year-old girl would be involved.”

  As Anja taps away on her computer, Joona watches Flora walk toward the church. She runs her hand over the façade. Then she goes inside. He follows her to keep her in sight. A hedgehog waddles away between a few gravestones.

  Beyond the tree-lined boulevard, he can see the harvester in the field and the clouds of dust that rise behind it.

  “Yes,” Anja says. “There was an unusual death thirty-five years ago. A five-year-old girl was found dead by Delsbo Church. Nothing more. The police wrote it off as an accident.”

  Joona watches Flora turn around and look at him with a question in her eyes.

  “What was the name of the policeman in charge of the investigation?”

  “Torkel Ekholm.”

  “Can you find an address for him?”

  161

  Twenty minutes later, Joona parks his car on a narrow gravel road. He opens an iron gate, and he and Flora walk through a shady yard up to a wooden house painted red with white trim. The roof is made of asbestos cement tiles. The autumn greenery is filled with buzzing insects. The thunderstorm is still building overhead.

  Joona rings the doorbell. Its chime is deafening.

  They hear a shuffling sound, and then an elderly man opens the door. He’s wearing a vest, suspenders, and slippers.

  “Are you Torkel Ekholm?” asks Joona.

  The man is leaning on a walker. He’s looking at them with old, watery eyes. There’s a hearing aid behind his large, wrinkled right ear.

  “Who wants to know?” he asks. They can hardly hear him.

  “Joona Linna. I’m a detective inspector with the National Police.”

  The old man peers at Joona’s ID and smiles slightly.

  “Ah, the National Police,” he says softly. He gestures for Joona and Flora to come inside. “Let’s have a cup of coffee.”

  They sit down at the kitchen table as Torkel goes to the stove after apologizing to Flora for having no cookies to offer her. He talks quietly and appears to be quite hard of hearing.

  A clock is ticking loudly and over the kitchen bench there’s a moose-hunting rifle, a well-oiled Remington. An embroidery piece with bent corners is hanging crookedly nearby. It reads “Happiness in the home comes from contentment.”

  Torkel Ekholm scratches his chin and looks at Joona.

  Once the water is boiling, he takes out three cups and a tin of instant coffee.

  “When you live alone, you keep things simple,” he says, and shrugs as he hands Flora a teaspoon.

  “I’m here to ask you about an extremely old case,” Joona says. “Thirty-five years ago, a five-year-old girl was found dead at Delsbo Church.”

  “That’s right,” the man says without meeting Joona’s gaze.

  “Was it an accident?” Joona asks.

  “Yes,” the man says.

  “I don’t think it was an accident,” Joona says.

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” the old man says. His mouth trembles and he pushes the sugar bowl toward Joona.

  “Do you remember the case?” asks Joona.

  The spoon clinks against the coffee cup as the old man pours in the coffee powder and stirs. He looks back up at Joona.

  “There are certain cases that I wish I could forget.”

  He gets up and shuffles over to a dark dresser and unlocks the top drawer. He explains that he’s kept his notes from that case all these years.

  “I knew that someday, someone would want these from me,” he says so softly they can hardly hear him.

  162

  Torkel nods toward the papers on the table in front of them.

  “The dead girl was named Ylva. She was the daughter of a farm foreman working on the Rånne estate. When I arrived on the scene, they’d already moved her onto a sheet. They told me she’d fallen from the bell tower …”

  The old policeman leans back against his chair and the wood creaks. A heavy fly buzzes against the windowpane.

  “They said there was blood on the railing under the roof. They pointed and I looked, and I noticed that something wasn’t right.”

  “Why did you end the preliminary investigation?”

  “There were no witnesses. I had nothing. I questioned everyone but got nowhere. I was told not to disturb the folks at the Rånnes’ manor anymore. They gave the girl’s father leave from work and … it was … I have a picture that Janne took. He worked for Arbetarbladet and we used him as a crime scene photographer.”

  The old policeman shows them a black-and-white photograph. A little girl is lying on a sheet on the lawn. Her hair is spread out. At the side of her head, there’s a pool of blood looking just like the one on Miranda’s bed. The same place.

  The bloodstain looks like a heart.

  The little girl’s face is soft and her cheeks are round. Her mouth is closed, which makes her appear as if she’s asleep.

  Flora stares at the picture with her hand on her hair and her face loses all color.

  “I didn’t see anything,” she moans, and then she begins to weep.

  Joona moves the photograph away. He tries to calm Flora, and after a few moments she gets up and takes the photograph from Torkel. She dries her tears and stares at it, bracing herself against the sink. She doesn’t notice when she knocks an empty beer bottle into the soapy water.

  “We were playing a game called shut-your-eyes,” she says at last.

  “So you were covering your eyes?”

  “Yes, we were supposed to cover our eyes with our hands.”

  “But you looked, didn’t you?” Joona asks. “You saw who hit the little girl with the rock.”

  “No, I had my hands over my eyes.”

  “Who hit her?”

  “What did you see?” asks Torkel.

  “Little Ylva. She was happy … She covered her eyes with her hands, then he hit her.”

  “Who hit her?” Joona asks.

  “My brother.”

  “You don’t have a brother,” Joona says.

  Torkel shakes so much his coffee cup rattles in its saucer.

  “So it was the boy,” he mutters. “Could it have been the boy?”

  “Which boy?” asks Joona.

  Flora’s face is completely white. Tears run freely down her face. The old policeman gets up from his chair with difficulty and rips a paper towel from the roll on the counter. Flora is shaking her head, but Joona sees that her mouth is moving slightly.

  “What did you see?” asks Joona. “Flora?”

  Torkel reaches her and hands her the towel. He says carefully, “Are you little Flora? The silent little sister?”

  163

  The memory comes to Flora as she’s standing in the old policeman’s kitchen with her hand on the sink. She feels her legs start to buckle as she remembers what she’d seen.

  The sun was shining. They were playing on the lawn by the church. She was holding her hands in front of her face. The light was shining right through her spread fingers. The other two children had golden halos around them.

  “Oh God!” she moans. “Oh God!”

  She remembers seeing her brother hit the little girl with a rock.

  The memory is so strong it feels as if the children are there with her in the kitchen.

  She hears the thud and sees Ylva’s head jerk.

  Flora remembers seeing the girl falling down on the grass. Her
mouth opened and closed. Her eyes shook and she mumbled something. He hit her again.

  He was hitting as hard as he could, yelling that they should keep their eyes shut. Ylva stopped moving. He placed her hands over her face.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Are you Flora?” the old policeman asks again.

  She’s still looking between her fingers when her brother gets up. He’s still holding the rock. He tells Flora she should close her eyes. She has to close her eyes to play the game. He is coming closer to her from the side. He lifts the blood-covered rock. She jumps backward as his blow came. The rock cut her chin and hit her shoulder, and she fell to her knees. She picked herself up and ran as fast as she could.

  “Are you little Flora who lived at the Rånne mansion?”

  “I don’t remember much at all,” she answers.

  “Who is her brother?” asks Joona.

  “The forestry magnate Rånne, we called them fine folk,” Torkel said. “They were like nobility. They adopted two children. It was even in the newspapers. Their good deed. A noble deed and a caring deed. After the accident, the girl was sent away. They kept the boy.”

  “Daniel,” Flora says. “His name is Daniel.”

  Joona’s chair scrapes the floor as he gets up from the table. He leaves the house without saying a word. He runs through the garden with the cell phone to his ear and leaves a message as he gets into his car.

  “Anja, you have to help me, it’s urgent. See if Daniel Grim has any connection to a family named Rånne in Delsbo.”

  Joona has just turned on the car’s radio to alert police at the national communications center when Anja calls him back.

  “Yes, those are his parents.”

  “Find out everything you can about him,” Joona says.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Girls,” Joona replies.

  He ends the call and before he radios the police, he calls Elin Frank.

  164

  Elin is driving carefully down the steep gravel road toward Åre to pick up Vicky’s nurse from the bus station. Her window is rolled down and fresh, cool air has flooded the Jeep. The mountains here are close together like giant Viking burial mounds, rounded and overgrown.

  She remembers Vicky taking her hand and squeezing it. Everything is going to be better from now on.

  The narrow road is passing beneath a cliff when she hears her cell phone buzz in her purse. She drives slowly until she finds a place to stop. She has a bad feeling as she takes out the phone. It’s still ringing in her hand and she can see it’s Joona Linna calling. She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say, but she answers anyway.

  “Hello?”

  “Where’s Vicky?”

  “She’s here with me,” she says. “I have a house in Duved which—”

  “I mean, can you see her right now?”

  “No, I—”

  “Get Vicky at once, get in your car, and drive to Stockholm right now. Just you and Vicky. Don’t stop to bring anything with you—”

  “I’m already in the car!” Elin shrieks. She feels alarmed. “Vicky is with Daniel at the house.”

  “That’s not good,” Joona says in a tone that fills Elin with dread.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Listen to me. Daniel was the one who killed Miranda and Elisabet.”

  “That can’t be true,” she whispers. “He’s keeping an eye on Vicky while I pick up the nurse from the bus station.”

  “Then she may no longer be alive, and you are in danger,” Joona says. “Get away from there right now. That is my advice as a police officer.”

  Elin stares at the sky. In the last few minutes, low clouds have gathered. They push over the mountaintops, threatening rain.

  “I can’t leave her,” Elin hears herself say.

  “The police are on the way, but it could take a while.”

  “I’m turning around right now.”

  “I understand,” Joona says. “Be very careful. Daniel Grim is an extremely dangerous man and you’ll be on your own until the police get there.”

  Elin’s mind is blank. She turns the Jeep around and speeds up the steep road, the gravel clattering against the underside of the vehicle.

  165

  Vicky is sitting on the white leather armchair, downloading apps onto her cell phone. Daniel comes into her room and sits down on the bed. He’s quiet for a moment as he looks out at the gray, ancient top of Mount Åreskuta and the dark clouds gathering around it.

  “Did it feel wrong yesterday?” Daniel says. “I mean, just sitting and waiting in the car when we got your stuff.”

  “No. I knew nobody wanted to see me,” she says, still busy with her phone.

  “When I went inside the house, I saw Almira and Lu Chu playing the shut-your-eyes game,” Daniel says. “Miranda taught you that game, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Vicky says.

  “Do you know where Miranda learned it?” Daniel asks.

  Vicky nods as she reaches for the cell-phone charger.

  “I use the game in therapy sometimes,” Daniel says. “It’s a game to practice trust.”

  “Miranda popped some chocolate in my mouth,” Vicky says. She smiles. “Once, she drew a heart on my stomach.”

  Vicky stops talking. She’s remembering her meeting with Tuula. Tuula had told her things when she met her by the lilac bushes.

  “Have you told anyone about the game?” Daniel asks.

  “No,” she says.

  “I was just wondering.”

  Vicky looks back down at her phone. She thinks about Tuula, standing in the darkness with a baseball bat in her hand. She was saying that the murderer only kills whores. Only whores need to be afraid. Typical Tuula, trying to scare her with her crazy stories. Vicky had tried to smile, but Tuula said that she’d found a pregnancy test in Miranda’s purse when she took her necklace. Yesterday, the only thing Vicky had thought about that was Miranda must have been sleeping with some guy she’d met through the All Day Living program.

  Now she realizes that it has to be Daniel.

  Vicky had the feeling that something was wrong when Miranda was trying to explain the game. It struck her that Miranda was only pretending that the game was fun. She was giggling and giving her chocolate, but the real reason she was doing it seemed to be to find out what Vicky knew about the game.

  She remembers how unconcerned Miranda tried to look when she asked if Daniel had ever come into her room and played with her.

  “Miranda didn’t say anything,” Vicky says. “She didn’t tell me anything about what you guys did in therapy.”

  Vicky blushes as she realizes how everything fits together. Daniel had killed Miranda and Elisabet. The killings had nothing to do with Miranda being a whore. Daniel killed Miranda because she was pregnant.

  Perhaps Miranda had told Elisabet everything.

  Vicky tries to breathe calmly. She doesn’t know what she is supposed to say. She pulls at the frayed edge of her cast.

  “It was—”

  Daniel leans forward and takes her cell phone out of her hand.

  “The therapy … It was about trusting one another,” Vicky says. She feels sure that Daniel has seen through her, that he’s aware she knows he killed Miranda and Elisabet with the hammer and tried to pin the murders on her.

  “Yes, it’s an important step in therapy,” Daniel says. He’s watching her closely.

  “I know,” she whispers.

  “We can play the game now. You and me. Just for fun,” he says.

  Vicky nods and realizes with panic that he’s already decided to kill her. He helped her avoid jail so that he could find out what she knew. He wanted to be absolutely sure that he was safe.

  “Shut your eyes,” he says with a smile.

  “Right now?”

  “It’s a fun game.”

  “But I—”

  “Just do it,” he orders.

  She shuts her eyes and puts her hands in front of
her face. Her heart is pounding. He’s doing something. It feels as if he’s pulling the sheet off her bed beneath her.

  “I have to pee,” she says.

  “You’ll have a chance soon,” he says.

  She sits with her hands over her face and flinches when she hears the scrape of the chair being moved. But she keeps her hands over her face.

  166

  Elin is driving recklessly fast up the steep hill. Last spring the runoff corrugated the road, and the key ring is rattling violently in the spare-change cup by the gearshift. Tree branches slap the sides of her Jeep and the gravel beats against its underside. She brakes during a steep curve and almost skids. The tires slide over the gravel, but she shifts into neutral, comes around, and hits the gas again.

  Elin is driving too quickly when she reaches the turnoff to her house. She slows down just a little, but she swings wide and scrapes the side of the Jeep against one of the gateposts, knocking off a side mirror. She hits the gas and it seems like she’s about to launch into the air as she reaches the top. The case of mineral water in the back falls over with a crash.

  She brakes hard at the house and leaps from the car, leaving the engine running. She runs straight inside. The metal shutters are closed. It’s dark and she stumbles over boots in the hall as she hurries into the large living room.

  “Vicky!” she yells.

  Elin turns on the lights and runs up the stairs. She slips and bangs her knee, jumps back up, and rushes toward Vicky’s room. She pushes down the handle. It’s locked. Elin bangs on the door and can hear the hysteria in her voice as she screams, “Open up!”

  She can’t hear anything inside. She looks through the keyhole. A chair has been overturned and shadows are jerking across the walls.

  “Vicky?”

  She moves back and then kicks the door. There’s a thud, but nothing happens. She kicks again. Then she runs to the room next door, but there’s no key in the lock. She runs to the next room, and there’s a key to that bedroom still in the keyhole. She grabs it and runs back, knocking over a glass sculpture, which thuds to the floor. Her hands are shaking, but she manages to get the key into the lock and throw the door open.