The Fire Witness

10

Joona spent the previous afternoon in the archive in Östersund. The sweet antiquarian smell of discoloured old paper and heavy bindings filled the room. Sunlight wandered slowly across the tall walls, glinting off the glass of the motionless clock before moving on.

Just before the archive closed, Joona found a girl who was born eighty-four years ago and who was christened Rosa Maja in the parish of Sveg in Härjedalen, in the province of Jämtland. The girl’s parents were Kristina and Evert Bergman. Joona couldn’t find any information about their marriage, but the mother, Kristina Stefanson, was born nineteen years before in the same parish.

It took Joona three hours to locate an eighty-four-year-old woman named Maja Stefanson in a care home in Sveg. It was already seven o’clock in the evening, but Joona still got in his car and drove to Sveg. It was late by the time he arrived, and he wasn’t allowed into the home.

Joona booked into Lilla Hotellet and tried to get some sleep, but woke up at four o’clock, and has been standing at the window ever since, waiting for morning.

He’s almost certain that he’s found Rosa Bergman. She’s adopted her mother’s maiden name, and is using her middle name.

Joona looks at his watch and decides that it’s time to go. He buttons his jacket, leaves the room, goes down to reception, and out into the small town.

The Blue Wings care home is a cluster of yellow-plastered houses around a neat lawn with footpaths and benches to rest on.

Joona opens the door to the main building and goes inside. He forces himself to walk slowly through the neon-lit corridor lined with closed doors leading to offices and the kitchen.

She wasn’t supposed to be able to find me, he thinks once more. She wasn’t supposed to know about me. Something’s gone wrong.

Joona never talks about the reason why he’s ended up alone, but it’s with him every waking moment.

His life burned like magnesium, flared up and died away in an instant, from gleaming white to smouldering ash.

In the dayroom a thin man in his eighties is standing and staring at the bright screen of the television. A TV chef is heating sesame oil in a pan, and talking about various ways of updating traditional crayfish parties.

The old man turns to Joona and screws up his eyes.

‘Anders?’ the man says in an unsteady voice. ‘Is that you, Anders?’

‘My name is Joona,’ he replies in his soft Finnish accent. ‘I’m looking for Maja Stefanson.’

The man stares at him with moist, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Anders, listen, lad. You’ve got to help me get out of here. It’s full of old people.’

The man hits the arm of the sofa with a frail fist, but stops abruptly when a care assistant walks into the room.

‘Good morning,’ Joona says. ‘I’m here to visit Maja Stefanson.’

‘How lovely,’ she says. ‘But I should warn you, Maja’s dementia has got worse. She tries to get out whenever she has a chance.’

‘I understand,’ Joona says.

‘Back in the summer she managed to get all the way to Stockholm.’

The care assistant leads Joona through a freshly-mopped corridor with subdued lighting, and opens one of the doors.

‘Maja?’ she calls out warmly.

11

An old woman is making the bed. When she looks up, Joona recognises her at once. It’s the woman who was following him outside Adolf Fredrik Church, the one who showed him the playing cards. The one who told him she had a message from Rosa Bergman.

Joona’s heart is beating hard.

She’s the only person who knows where his wife and daughter are, and she shouldn’t be aware of his existence.

‘Rosa Bergman?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes,’ she replies, raising one of her hands like a schoolgirl.

‘My name is Joona Linna.’

‘Yes,’ Rosa Bergman smiles, shuffling towards him.

‘You had a message for me,’ he says.

‘Oh my, I don’t remember that,’ Rosa replies, and sits down on the sofa.

He swallows hard and takes a step towards her.

‘You asked me why I was pretending my daughter is dead.’

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she says sternly. ‘That’s not nice at all.’

‘What do you know about my daughter?’ Joona asks, taking another step towards the woman. ‘Have you heard anything?’

She merely smiles distractedly, and Joona lowers his gaze. He tries to think clearly, and notices that his hands are shaking as he goes over to the kitchenette in the corner and pours coffee into two cups.

‘Rosa, this is important to me,’ he says slowly, putting the cups on the table. ‘Very important.’

She blinks a couple of times, then asks in a timid voice: ‘Who are you? Has something happened to Mother?’

‘Rosa, do you remember a little girl called Lumi? Her mother’s name was Summa, and you helped them to …’

Joona falls silent when he sees the lost expression in the woman’s eyes, clouded with cataracts.

‘Why did you try to find me?’ he asks, even though he knows there’s no point.

Rosa Bergman drops her coffee cup on the floor and starts to cry. The care assistant comes in, and soothes her in a practised way.

‘I’ll show you out,’ she says quietly to Joona.

They walk through the corridor.

‘How long has she had dementia?’ Joona asks.

‘It happened quickly with Maja … We started to notice the first signs last summer, so about a year ago … people used to say it was like a second childhood, which is still pretty close to the truth for most sufferers.’

‘If she … if she suddenly has a lucid period,’ Joona says seriously, ‘would you mind contacting me?’

‘That does actually happen occasionally,’ the woman nods.

‘Call me at once,’ he says, handing her his card.

‘Detective Superintendent?’ she says in surprise, and pins the card to the noticeboard behind the desk in the office.

12

When Joona emerges into the fresh air he breathes in deeply, as if he’s been holding his breath. Perhaps Rosa Bergman had had something important to tell him, he thinks. It’s possible that someone asked her to pass on a message. But she succumbed to dementia before she managed to tell him.

He’s never going to know what it was.

Twelve years have passed since he lost Summa and Lumi.

The last traces of them have been erased along with Rosa Bergman’s lost memories.

It’s over now.

Joona sits in his car, wipes the tears from his cheeks, closes his eyes for a while, then turns the key in the ignition to drive back home to Stockholm.

He’s driven thirty kilometres south along the E45 towards Mora when the head of the National Crime Unit, Carlos Eliasson, calls him.

‘We’ve got a murder at a children’s home up in Sundsvall,’ Carlos says in a tense voice. ‘The emergency call centre was alerted just after four this morning.’

‘I’m on leave,’ Joona says, almost inaudibly.

‘You could still have come to the karaoke evening.’

‘Another time,’ Joona says, almost to himself.

The road runs straight through the forest. Far off between the trees a silvery lake is glinting.

‘Joona? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing.’

Someone calls for Carlos in the background.

‘I’ve got a meeting now, but I want … I just spoke to Susanne Öst, and she says the Västernorrland Police aren’t going to make a formal request for help from National Crime.’

‘So why are you calling me?’

‘I said we’d send an observer.’

‘We never send observers, do we?’

‘We do now,’ Carlos says, lowering his voice. ‘I’m afraid this one’s rather sensitive. You remember Janne Svensson, the captain of the national hockey team? The press never stopped talking about how incompetent the police were.’

‘Because they never found …’

‘Don’t start … that was Susanne Öst’s first big case as a prosecutor,’ Carlos goes on. ‘I don’t want to say that the press were right, but the Västernorrland Police could have done with you on that occasion. They were too slow, they went by the book, and time passed … nothing unusual, of course, but sometimes the press picks up on it.’

‘I can’t talk any more,’ Joona says by way of conclusion.

‘You know I wouldn’t ask you if it was just a straightforward murder,’ Carlos says, and takes a deep breath. ‘But there’s going to be a lot of coverage, Joona … this one’s very, very brutal, very bloody … and the girl’s body has been arranged.’

‘How? How has it been arranged?’ Joona asks.

‘Apparently she’s lying on her bed with her hands over her face.’

Joona drives on in silence, his left hand on the wheel. The trees flit past on both sides of the car. He can hear Carlos breathing over the phone. There are other voices in the background. Without saying anything, Joona turns off the E45 towards Los, onto a road that will take him to the coast, and then up to Sundsvall.

‘Please, Joona, just go up there … help them solve the case themselves, preferably before the press gets hold of it.’

‘So now I’m not just an observer?’

‘Yes, you are … just hang around, observe the investigation, make suggestions … As long as you realise that you have no official authority.’

‘Because I’m the subject of an internal investigation?’

‘It’s important that you keep a low profile,’ Carlos says.

13

North of Sundsvall Joona leaves the coast road and turns onto Highway 86, which heads up inland along the valley of Indalsälven.

After two hours of driving he’s approaching the isolated children’s home.

He slows down and turns onto a narrow gravel track. Sunlight filters through the tall pine trees.

A dead girl, Joona thinks.

While everyone was asleep, a girl was murdered and positioned on her bed. The violence was extreme and very aggressive, according to the local police. They have no immediate suspect, it’s too late for roadblocks, but everyone in the local force has been informed, and Superintendent Olle Gunnarsson is leading the preliminary investigation.

It’s just before ten o’clock by the time Joona parks and leaves the car beyond the police’s outer cordon. The ditch is swarming with insects. The forest has opened up into a large clearing. Damp trees are sparkling in the sunlight on the slope down towards the lake, Himmelsjön. By the side of the road is a metal sign saying The Birgitta Home, Specialist Children’s Home.

Joona walks towards the cluster of rust-red buildings, gathered around the central yard like a traditional farm. An ambulance, three police cars, a white Mercedes, and three other cars are parked in front of the buildings.

A dog is barking nonstop as it runs along a line between two trees to which it’s tethered.

An older man with a walrus moustache, a pot-belly, and a crumpled linen suit is standing in front of the main building. He’s spotted Joona, but shows no sign of saying hello. Instead he finishes rolling his cigarette and licks the paper. Joona steps over another cordon, and the man tucks the cigarette behind his ear.

‘I’m the National Police observer,’ Joona says.

‘Gunnarsson,’ the man says. ‘Superintendent.’

‘I’m supposed to follow your work here.’

‘Yes, as long as you don’t get in the way,’ the man says, looking at him coolly.

Joona looks up at the main building. The forensics team is already at work. The rooms are illuminated by arc lights, lending all the windows an unnatural glow.

A police officer emerges from the door, his face almost white. He claps one hand to his mouth, stumbles down the steps, then leans against the wall, bends forward, and throws up onto the nettles beside the water butt.

‘You’ll do the same once you’ve been inside,’ Gunnarsson says to Joona with a smile.

‘What do you know so far?’

‘Not a damn thing … We got the call in the middle of the night, from a counsellor at the home … Daniel Grim’s his name. That was at four o’clock. He was at his home on Bruksgatan in Sundsvall, and had just received a call from here … he didn’t know much when he called the emergency call centre, just that the girls were yelling about lots of blood.’

‘So it was the girls themselves who made the call?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes.’

‘But they called the counsellor in Sundsvall rather than the police?’ Joona says.

‘Exactly.’

‘There must have been night staff here?’

‘No.’

‘Shouldn’t there have been?’

‘Presumably,’ Gunnarsson says in a tired voice.

‘Which one of the girls called the counsellor?’ Joona asks.

‘One of the older residents,’ Gunnarsson says, looking in his notebook. ‘A Caroline Forsgren … But as I understand it, she wasn’t the one who found the body. That was … it’s a hell of a mess, several of the girls have looked in the room. It’s bloody nasty, I don’t mind saying. We’ve taken one of them off to hospital. She was hysterical, and the paramedics thought that was the safest thing to do.’

‘Who was first on the scene?’ Joona asks.

‘Two colleagues, Rolf Wikner and Sonja Rask,’ Gunnarsson replies. ‘I got here at around a quarter to six and called the prosecutor … and then she evidently wet herself and contacted Stockholm … so now we’re lumbered with you.’

He smiles at Joona without any warmth.

‘Do you have a suspect?’ Joona asks.

Gunnarsson takes a deep breath and says in a didactic tone: ‘Years of experience have taught me to let an investigation unfold at its own pace … we need to get people out here, start to interview the witnesses, secure the evidence …’

‘Is it OK to go in and take a look?’ Joona asks, looking up at the door.

‘I wouldn’t recommend it … we’ll soon have pictures.’

‘I need to look at the girl before she’s moved,’ Joona says.

‘We’re dealing with an attack with a blunt instrument, very brutal, very aggressive,’ he says. ‘The perpetrator’s a strong guy. After her death the victim was laid out on her bed. No one noticed anything until one of the girls was going to the toilet and trod in the blood that was seeping under the door.’

‘Was it still warm?’

‘Look … these girls are pretty tricky to deal with,’ Gunnarsson explains. ‘They’re frightened, and they’re very angry, they object to everything we say, they don’t listen, they scream at us, and … Earlier on they were determined to get through the cordon to fetch things from their rooms – iPods, Lypsyl, coats, and so on – and when we were going to move them to the other building, two of them escaped into the forest.’

‘Escaped?’

‘We’ve just managed to catch up with them … now we just need to get them to return voluntarily. They’re lying on the ground demanding to be allowed to ride on Rolf’s shoulders.’

14

Joona puts on protective clothing, goes up the steps to the main building and in through the door. Inside the porch the fans of the arc lights are working hard and the air is already warm. Every detail is visible in their strong glare. Dust is moving slowly through the air.

Joona walks carefully along the protective mats that have been laid out across the floor tiles. One picture has fallen to the floor, and the broken glass glints in the strong light. Bloody shoe prints lead off in different directions in the corridor, towards the front door, and back again.

The house has retained its original character from when it was a grand farmhouse. The painted panels have faded over the years, but are still colourful, and the traditional patterns made by itinerant painters curl across the walls and woodwork.

Further along the corridor a forensics officer named Jimi Sjöberg is shining a green lamp at a black chair, having already applied Hungarian red to it.

‘Blood?’ Joona asks.

‘Not on this one,’ Jimi mutters, and moves on with the green lamp.

‘Have you found anything unexpected?’

‘Erixon called from Stockholm and told us not to touch a thing until Joona Linna had given the go-ahead,’ he replies with a smile.

‘I’m grateful.’

‘So we haven’t really got going yet,’ Jimi goes on. ‘We’ve laid out all these damn mats, and photographed and filmed everything, and … well, I took the liberty to get samples of the blood in the corridor so we could send something off to the lab.’

‘Good.’

‘And Siri lifted the prints in the hall before they got contaminated …’

The other forensics expert, Siri Karlsson, has just dismantled the brass handle from the door to the isolation room. She puts it carefully in a paper bag, then comes over to Joona and Jimi.

‘He’s here to take a look at the crime scene,’ Jimi explains.

‘It’s pretty unpleasant,’ Siri says through her mask. Her eyes look tired and troubled.

‘So I understand,’ Joona says.

‘You can look at pictures instead if you’d rather,’ she says.

‘This is Joona Linna,’ Jimi tells her.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’

‘I’m just an observer,’ Joona says.

She looks down, and when she raises her eyes again there’s a trace of a blush on her cheeks.

‘Everyone’s talking about you,’ she says. ‘I mean … I … I don’t care about the internal investigation. I think it’ll be interesting to work with you.’

‘Same here,’ Joona says.

He stands still and listens to the whirr of the lamps, and tries to focus, so that he’ll be able to absorb the impressions of what he sees without giving in to the instinct to look away.

15

Joona goes over to the alcove and the door that no longer has a handle.

The lock and key are still in place.

He closes his eyes for a moment, then walks into the small room.

Everything is still, and brightly lit.

The warm air is heavy with the smell of blood and urine. He forces himself to inhale it to detect the other smells: damp wood, sweaty sheets, deodorant.

The hot metal of the lamps ticks. He can hear the muffled sound of barking through the walls.

Joona stands perfectly still and forces himself to look at the body on the bed. His eyes linger on every detail, even though he’d like nothing more than to hurry out, leave the building, and walk into the fresh air and shade of the forest.

Blood has run across the floor, and is spattered over the immoveable furniture and the pale biblical motifs on the walls. It’s sprayed across the ceiling and over to the toilet. A thin girl in the early stages of puberty is lying on the bed. She has been laid out on her back, with her hands covering her face. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pants. Her breasts are covered by her elbows, and her feet are crossed at the ankles.

Joona feels his heart beating, feels his own blood coursing through his veins to his brain, as his pulse roars in his temples.

He forces himself to look, register, and think.

The girl’s face is hidden.

As if she’s frightened, as if she doesn’t want to see the perpetrator.

Before the girl was positioned on the bed she was subjected to extreme violence.

Repeated blows with a blunt object to her forehead and scalp.

She’s only a young girl, and must have been horribly frightened.

A few short years ago she was just a child, but a chain of events has led her to this room, to this secure children’s home. Maybe she was just unlucky with her parents and foster parents. Maybe she thought she’d be safe here.

Joona studies every terrible detail until it feels as if he can longer bear it. Then he shuts his eyes for a few moments and thinks about his daughter’s face and the gravestone that isn’t hers, before opening his eyes again and carrying on with the examination.

The evidence suggests that the victim was sitting on the chair at the little table when the attacker struck.

Joona tries to identify the movements that led to this spatter pattern.

Every drop of blood falling through the air naturally assumes a round shape, and has a diameter of five millimetres. If the drop is smaller, that means that the blood has been subjected to external force that’s broken it into smaller drops.

And that’s when spatter pattern analysis comes in.

Joona is now standing on two protective mats in front of the small table, probably exactly where the murderer stood a few hours before. The girl was sitting on the chair on the other side of the table. Joona looks at the spatter pattern, turns around, and sees blood sprayed high up the wall. The implement has been swung backwards several times to gain momentum, and every time it changed direction for another blow, blood sprayed back from it.

Joona has already stayed longer at this crime scene than any other superintendent would have. But he isn’t finished yet. He goes back to the girl on the bed, stands in front of her, sees the stud in her navel, the lip-print on the glass of water, sees that she has had a birthmark removed below her right breast, sees the fine hairs on her shins, and a yellowed bruise on her thigh.

He leans cautiously over her. Her bare skin is emitting very faint heat now. He looks at the hands covering her face, and sees that she didn’t manage to scratch the perpetrator, there’s no skin under her fingernails.

He takes a few steps back, and then looks at her again. Her white skin. The hands over her face. There’s hardly any blood on her body. Only the pillow is bloody.

Apart from that she’s clean.

Joona looks around the room. Behind the door there’s a small shelf with two hooks for clothes beneath it. On the floor beneath the shelf are a pair of trainers with white socks tucked inside them, and a pair of washed-out jeans is hanging from one of the hooks, along with a black college sweater and a denim jacket. There’s a small white bra on the shelf.

Joona doesn’t touch the clothes, but they don’t appear to be bloody.

Presumably she got undressed and hung her clothes up before she was murdered.

So why isn’t her whole body covered with blood? Something must have protected her. But what? There’s nothing else here.