Lars Kepler - The Fire Witness

Flora is fearful as she looks into his gray eyes.

“Forty,” she says in a low voice.

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?”

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.

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?”

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.