The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

is sitting in the warm cab high above the ground, shaking. She can’t calm down. She realises that she’s not making any sense, but now she can hear the lorry driver talk to the emergency call centre. He is advised to carry on along Highway 86, then the 330, where he’ll meet an emergency vehicle at Timrå that will take her to Sundsvall Hospital.

      ‘What? What are you talking about?’ Pia asks. ‘This isn’t about me. They have to stop my car, that’s the only thing that matters.’

      The Danish driver gives her a confused look, and she realises that she needs to concentrate to make herself understood. She has to act calmly even though the ground has disappeared beneath her, even though she’s in free-fall.

      ‘My son has been kidnapped,’ she says.

      ‘She says her son’s been kidnapped,’ the driver repeats into his phone.

      ‘The police have to stop the car,’ she goes on. ‘A Toyota … a red Toyota Auris. I can’t remember the licence number, but …’

      The driver asks the emergency operator to wait.

      ‘It’s ahead of us on this road … you have to stop it … my son’s only four, he was sitting in the back when I …’

      He repeats her words to the operator, explains that he’s driving east along Highway 86, about forty kilometres from Timrå.

      ‘They have to hurry …’

      The truck slows down and passes a bent-over traffic light, and drives across a roundabout. The trailer judders as the wheels roll over the kerb, then the truck accelerates past a white brick building, driving parallel to the river.

      The emergency call centre puts the Danish driver through to a female police officer in a patrol car. She introduces herself as Mirja Zlatnek, and says she’s thirty kilometres away, on Highway 330 in Djupängen.

      Pia Abrahamsson takes the phone, swallows hard to stifle the nausea she feels. She hears her own voice, calm but shaky.

      ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘My son’s been kidnapped, and the car is driving along … hang on …’

      She turns to the driver.

      ‘Where are we? What road are we on?’

      ‘Highway 86,’ the driver says.

      ‘How much of a head start did they get?’ the police officer asks.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Pia says. ‘Five minutes, maybe?’

      ‘Have you passed Indal?’

      ‘Indal,’ Pia repeats.

      ‘We’re almost twenty kilometres from there,’ the driver says loudly.

      ‘Then we’ve got them,’ the police officer says. ‘There are no alternative routes …’

      When Pia Abrahamsson hears those words her tears start to flow. She quickly wipes her cheeks and hears the police officer talk to a colleague. They’re going to set up roadblocks on Highway 330 and on the bridge over the river. The second police officer is in Nordansjö, and says he can be in position in less than five minutes.

      ‘That’s good enough,’ the policewoman says quickly.

      The truck drives along the winding road as it follows the river through a sparsely populated part of Medelpad. Even though they can’t see it, they’re following the car with Pia Abrahamsson’s four-year-old son in it: they know it must be ahead of them, because there are no other options. Highway 86 passes through a few isolated communities, but there are no side roads, just forest tracks that don’t connect to other roads, and only lead into the forest, stretching many kilometres through boggy land to logging areas, but no further.

      ‘I can’t bear this,’ Pia whispers.

      The road they’re on splits in two ten kilometres ahead of them. Just past the little town of Indal, one branch of the road crosses the river and carries on almost due south, while the other goes on following the river towards the coast.

      Pia sits with her hands clasped tightly, praying to God. Up ahead, two police cars have set up roadblocks on the two branches of the road. One car is parked at the far end of the bridge, and the other is eight kilometres to the east.

      The truck carrying the Danish truck driver and Pia Abrahamsson is passing through Indal. Through the heavy rain they see the empty bridge over the teeming water, and the blue lights of the lone police car rotating at the far end of the bridge.

       25

      Police Constable Mirja Zlatnek has parked her patrol car across the whole width of the road. If any car wanted to get past, it would have to pull off the road and drive with two wheels in the ditch.

      In front of her is a long, straight stretch of road. The police car’s blue lights flash across the wet tarmac and dark branches of the trees, in among the trunks.

      The rain is beating hard on the car roof.

      Mirja sits quietly for a while looking out through the windscreen and trying to think through the situation.

      Visibility is poor because of the rain.

      She had counted on having a very quiet day, seeing as almost all her colleagues in the whole district are busy with the case of the dead girl at the Birgitta Home. Even the National Crime Unit have been brought into the investigation.

      Mirja has been developing a secret fear of the operational side of the job, without ever actually having been in any particularly traumatic situations. Perhaps it’s because of that time she tried to mediate in a domestic drama that ended badly, but that was many years ago now.

      The anxiety has crept up on her. She prefers administrative duties, and crime prevention work.

      She spent the morning sitting at her desk looking at recipes online. Elk fillet wrapped in pastry, potato wedges, and cream sauce with penny bun mushrooms. And puréed artichoke hearts.

      She was in the car heading to Djupängen to look at a stolen trailer when the call came through about the abducted boy.

      Mirja tells herself that she’s going to be able to solve the situation of the kidnapped boy. Because the car containing the woman’s four-year-old son has nowhere else to go.

      This stretch of road is like a long tunnel, a trap.

      The lorry is following it from the other direction.

      Either the car containing the boy crosses the bridge just after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson has blocked the road.

      Or it comes this way, and I’m waiting here, Mirja thinks.

      And ten kilometres behind the car is the lorry.

      Obviously it all depends how fast the car is driving, but within the next twenty minutes there’ll be some sort of confrontation.

      Mirja tells herself that the child almost certainly hasn’t been kidnapped in the real sense of the word. Probably a custody dispute. The woman she spoke to was too upset to give her any coherent information, but from what she did say her car must be somewhere on the road this side of Nilsböle.

      It’ll soon be over, she tells herself.

      It won’t be long before she can go back to her room at the station, get a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich.

      But at the same time there’s something worrying her. The woman spoke about a girl with arms like twigs.

      Mirja didn’t ask her name. There hadn’t been time. She assumed the emergency call centre had taken all the relevant details.

      The fear in her voice had been alarming. She had been breathing fast, and described what she’d been through as incomprehensible, beyond logical explanation.

      The