The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

got their hands full – regardless of what’s happened,’ Sonja says.

      ‘It would be useful to know a bit more.’

      ‘Yes,’ she agrees calmly.

      The two colleagues sit in silence next to each other, listening to the communications over the police radio. An ambulance is on its way, and another police car has set out from the station.

      The road, like so many logging roads, is perfectly straight. The tyres thunder over potholes and dips. Tree trunks flit past as the flashing blue lights make their way far into the forest.

      Sonja reports back to the station as they pull up into the yard in front of the dark red buildings of the Birgitta Home.

      A girl in a nightdress is standing on the steps of the main building. Her eyes are wide open, but her face is pale and distant.

      Rolf and Sonja get out of the car and hurry over to her in the flickering blue light, but the girl doesn’t seem to notice them.

      A dog starts to bark anxiously.

      ‘Is anyone hurt?’ Rolf says in a loud voice. ‘Does anyone need help?’

      The girl waves vaguely towards the edge of the forest, wobbles, and tries to take a step, but her legs buckle beneath her. She falls backwards and hits her head.

      ‘Are you OK?’ Sonja asks, rushing over to her.

      The girl lies there on the steps staring up at the sky, breathing fast and shallow. Sonja notes that she’s drawn blood from scratching her arms and neck.

      ‘I’m going in,’ Rolf says firmly.

      Sonja stays with the shocked girl and waits for the ambulance while Rolf goes inside. He sees bloody marks left by boots and bare feet on the wooden floor, heading off in different directions, including long strides through the passageway towards the hall, then back again. Rolf feels adrenaline course through his body. He does his best not to stand on the footprints, but knows that his primary objective is to save lives.

      He looks into a common room where all the lights are on, and sees four girls sitting on the two sofas.

      ‘Is anyone hurt?’ he calls.

      ‘Maybe a bit,’ a small, red-haired girl in a pink tracksuit smiles.

      ‘Where is she?’ he asks anxiously.

      ‘Miranda’s on her bed,’ an older girl with straight dark hair says.

      ‘In here?’ he says, pointing towards the corridor with the bedrooms.

      The older girl just nods in reply, and Rolf follows the bloody footprints past a dining room containing a large wooden table and tiled stove, and into a dark corridor lined with doors leading to the girls’ private rooms. Shoes and bare feet have trodden through the blood. The old floor creaks beneath him. Rolf stops, pulls his torch from his belt, and shines it along the corridor. He quickly looks along the hand-painted maxims and ornate biblical quotations, then aims the beam at the floor.

      The blood has seeped out across the floor from under the door in a dark alcove. The key is in the lock. He walks towards it, carefully moves the torch to his other hand, and reaches out towards the handle and touches it as gently as he can.

      There’s a click, the door slips open, and the handle pings back up.

      ‘Hello? Miranda? My name is Rolf, I’m a police officer,’ he says into the darkness as he steps closer. ‘I’m coming in now …’

      The only sound is his own breathing.

      He carefully pushes the door open and sweeps the beam of the torch around the room. The sight that greets him is so brutal that he stumbles and has to reach out for the doorframe.

      Instinctively he looks away, but his eyes have already seen what he didn’t want to see. His ears register the rushing of his pulse as well as the drips hitting the puddle on the floor.

      A young woman is lying on the bed, but large parts of her head seem to be missing. Blood is spattered up the walls, and is still dripping from the dark lampshade.

      The door suddenly closes behind Rolf, and he’s so startled that he drops the torch on the floor. The room goes completely black. He turns and fumbles in the darkness, and hears a girl’s small hands hammering on the other side of the door.

      ‘Now she can see you!’ a high-pitched voice screams. ‘Now she’s looking!’

      Rolf finds the handle and tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. The little peephole glints at him in the darkness. With his hands shaking, he pushes the handle down and shoves with his shoulder.

      The door flies open, and Rolf staggers into the corridor. He breathes in deeply. The little red-haired girl is standing a short distance away looking at him with big eyes.

       9

      Detective Superintendent Joona Linna is standing at the window in his hotel room in Sveg, four hundred and fifty kilometres north of Stockholm. The dawn light is cold, steamily blue. There are no lights lit along Älvgatan. It will be many hours yet before he finds out if he’s found Rosa Bergman.

      His light grey shirt is unbuttoned and hanging outside his black suit trousers. His blond hair is unkempt, as usual, and his pistol is lying on the bed in its shoulder holster.

      Despite numerous approaches from various specialist groups, Joona has remained as an operative superintendent with the National Crime Unit. His habit of going his own way annoys a lot of people, but in less than fifteen years he has solved more complex cases in Scandinavia than any other police officer.

      During the summer a complaint was filed against Joona with the Internal Investigations Committee, claiming that he had alerted an extreme left-wing group about a forthcoming raid by the Security Police. Since then, Joona has been relieved of certain duties without actually being formally suspended.

      The head of Internal Investigations has made it very clear that he will contact the senior prosecutor at the National Police Cases Authority if he believes there are any grounds at all for prosecution.

      The allegations are serious, but right now Joona hasn’t got time to worry about any potential suspension or reprimand.

      His thoughts are focused on the old woman who had followed him outside Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm, and who gave him a message from Rosa Bergman. With thin hands she passed him two tattered cards from an old ‘cuckoo’ card game.

      ‘This is you, isn’t it?’ the woman said uncertainly. ‘And here’s the crown, the bridal crown.’

      ‘What do you want?’ Joona asked.

      ‘I don’t want anything,’ the old woman said. ‘But I’ve got a message from Rosa Bergman.’

      His heart began to thud. But he forced himself to shrug and explain kindly that there must be some mistake: ‘Because I don’t know anyone called …’

      ‘She’s wondering why you’re pretending that your daughter’s dead.’

      ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Joona replied with a smile.

      He was smiling, but his voice sounded like a stranger’s, distant and cold, as if it were coming from under a large rock. The woman’s words swirled through him and he felt like grabbing her by her thin arms and demanding to know what she was talking about, but instead he remained calm.

      ‘I have to go,’ he explained, and was about to turn away when a migraine shot through his brain like the blade of a knife through his left eye. His field of vision shrank to a jagged, flickering halo.

      When he regained fragments of his sight, he saw that people were standing in a circle around him. They moved aside to make way for