The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

Flora goes on. ‘There are so many here, they keep interrupting him.’

      ‘Stig,’ the woman whispers.

      ‘He says he’s sorry … he wants you to forgive him.’

      Through the hand she’s holding, Flora can feel the old woman shaking.

      ‘I’ve forgiven you,’ the old woman whispers.

       36

      After the seance is over Flora takes a very measured farewell. She knows that people usually want to be alone with their fantasies and memories.

      She goes around the room slowly, blowing out the candles and rearranging the chairs. She can still feel a lingering satisfaction in her body from everything having gone so well.

      She’s left a box in the hall for the participants to leave their money in. She counts it and confirms that it isn’t enough to pay back what she borrowed from Ewa’s envelope. Next week she’s got another spiritualist evening, and that’s her last chance to earn the money back without being found out.

      Despite the fact that she advertised in Phenomena, there still weren’t enough participants. She’s started waking up at night, staring dry-eyed into the darkness wondering what on earth she’s going to do. Ewa usually pays the bills at the start of each month, and that’s when she’s going to realise that some of the money’s missing.

      The rain has stopped by the time she emerges into the street. The sky is black. Streetlamps and neon signs shimmer in the wet tarmac. Flora locks the door and drops the key through the letterbox of Carlén Antiques.

      Just as she is removing the paper sign and putting it in her bag, she notices that there’s someone standing in the next doorway. It’s the young man from the seance. He takes a step towards her and smiles apologetically.

      ‘Hi, I was wondering … can I offer you a glass of wine somewhere?’

      ‘I can’t,’ she says with instinctive shyness.

      ‘You’re really great,’ he says.

      Flora doesn’t know what to say, she can feel her face getting redder and redder the longer he looks at her.

      ‘It’s just that I’m going to Paris,’ she lies.

      ‘No time for me to ask a few questions?’

      Now she realises that he must be a journalist from one of the newspapers she’s been trying to contact.

      ‘I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning,’ she says.

      ‘Give me half an hour – can you manage that?’

      As they hurry across the street to the nearest bistro, the young man tells her that his name is Julian Borg, and that he writes for the magazine Close.

      A few minutes later Flora is sitting opposite him at a table covered by a white paper cloth. She takes a careful sip of the red wine. Sweet and sour blend in her mouth, and warmth spreads through her body. Julian Borg picks at a Caesar salad as he looks at her curiously.

      ‘How did this start?’ he asks. ‘Have you always seen spirits?’

      ‘When I was little I thought everyone could, it didn’t seem at all odd to me,’ she says, blushing because the lies come so easily.

      ‘What did you see?’

      ‘People I didn’t know seemed to live with us … I just thought they were lonely people … and sometimes a child would come into my room and I’d try to play with her …’

      ‘Did you tell your parents?’

      ‘I learned very early to keep quiet,’ Flora says, taking another sip of the wine. ‘It’s only fairly recently that I’ve realised that a lot of people actually need the spirits, even if they can’t see them … and the spirits need people. I’ve finally found my purpose … I stand in the middle and help them to connect.’

      She looks into Julian Borg’s warm eyes for a few moments.

      In fact it all started when Flora lost her job as an auxiliary nurse. She saw less and less of her old workmates, and in just one year she had lost touch with all her friends. When Flora’s unemployment benefit ran out, she had to move back in with Ewa and Hans-Gunnar.

      The job centre helped her get onto a course to become a nail technician, where she got to know one of the other participants, Jadranka from Slovakia. Jadranka went through low patches, but when she was feeling better she used to earn extra money by taking calls on a webpage called the Tarot Hotline.

      They started to socialise, and Jadranka took Flora to a big seance held by the Society of Truth Seekers. Afterwards they talked about how it could be done much better, and just a few months later they found the basement room on Upplandsgatan. After two seances, Jadranka’s depression got worse, and she was admitted to a clinic south of Stockholm. But Flora carried on holding the seances on her own.

      She borrowed books from the library about healing, past lives, angels, auras, and astral bodies. She read about the Fox sisters, about the cabinet of mirrors, and Uri Geller, but the person she learned most from was the sceptic James Randi’s attempts to uncover deceptions and tricks.

      Flora has never seen any spirits or ghosts, but she’s realised that she’s good at saying the things people are desperate to hear.

      ‘You use the word spirits rather than ghosts,’ Julian says, putting his knife and fork together on the plate.

      ‘They’re the same thing,’ she replies. ‘But ghosts sound unpleasant and negative.’

      Julian smiles, and there’s a disarming honesty in his eyes when he says: ‘I have to confess … I have a lot of trouble believing in spirits, but …’

      ‘You just need to be open-minded,’ Flora explains. ‘Conan Doyle, for instance, he was a spiritualist … you know, the guy who wrote all those books about Sherlock Holmes …’

      ‘Have you ever helped the police?’

      ‘No, that …’

      Flora blushes hard and doesn’t know what to say, and looks at her watch.

      ‘Sorry, you need to go,’ he says, and takes hold of her hands across the table. ‘I just want to say that I can tell you want to help people, and I think that’s a good thing.’

      His touch makes Flora’s heart beat faster. She daren’t meet his gaze again until he lets go, and they go their separate ways.

       37

      The red buildings that make up the Birgitta Home look idyllic in daylight. Joona is standing beside a huge silver birch talking to prosecutor Susanne Öst. Raindrops sparkle in the air as they fall from the branches.

      ‘The police are still knocking on doors in Indal,’ the prosecutor says. ‘Someone drove into a traffic light, and there’s a load of broken glass on the ground, but apart from that … nothing.’

      ‘I need to talk to the girls again,’ Joona says, thinking about the violence that played out inside the misted windows of the main building.

      ‘I thought this business with Dennis would give us something,’ Susanne says.

      Joona thinks about the isolation room, and is seized by an unsettling suspicion. He tries to picture the sequence of brutal events, but can only make out shadows between the furniture. People’s figures are transparent, like dusty glass, fluid, almost impossible to see.

      He takes a deep breath, and suddenly the room where Miranda is lying with her hands over her face