Lars Kepler - The Fire Witness

She hears the thud and sees Ylva’s head jerk.

Flora remembers seeing the girl falling down on the grass. Her mouth opened and closed. Her eyes shook and she mumbled something. He hit her again.

He was hitting as hard as he could, yelling that they should keep their eyes shut. Ylva stopped moving. He placed her hands over her face.

“But I didn’t—”

“Are you Flora?” the old policeman asks again.

She’s still looking between her fingers when her brother gets up. He’s still holding the rock. He tells Flora she should close her eyes. She has to close her eyes to play the game. He is coming closer to her from the side. He lifts the blood-covered rock. She jumps backward as his blow came. The rock cut her chin and hit her shoulder, and she fell to her knees. She picked herself up and ran as fast as she could.

“Are you little Flora who lived at the Rånne mansion?”

“I don’t remember much at all,” she answers.

“Who is her brother?” asks Joona.

“The forestry magnate Rånne, we called them fine folk,” Torkel said. “They were like nobility. They adopted two children. It was even in the newspapers. Their good deed. A noble deed and a caring deed. After the accident, the girl was sent away. They kept the boy.”

“Daniel,” Flora says. “His name is Daniel.”

Joona’s chair scrapes the floor as he gets up from the table. He leaves the house without saying a word. He runs through the garden with the cell phone to his ear and leaves a message as he gets into his car.

“Anja, you have to help me, it’s urgent. See if Daniel Grim has any connection to a family named Rånne in Delsbo.”

Joona has just turned on the car’s radio to alert police at the national communications center when Anja calls him back.

“Yes, those are his parents.”

“Find out everything you can about him,” Joona says.

“What’s this about?”

“Girls,” Joona replies.

He ends the call and before he radios the police, he calls Elin Frank.

Elin is driving carefully down the steep gravel road toward Åre to pick up Vicky’s nurse from the bus station. Her window is rolled down and fresh, cool air has flooded the Jeep. The mountains here are close together like giant Viking burial mounds, rounded and overgrown.

She remembers Vicky taking her hand and squeezing it. Everything is going to be better from now on.

The narrow road is passing beneath a cliff when she hears her cell phone buzz in her purse. She drives slowly until she finds a place to stop. She has a bad feeling as she takes out the phone. It’s still ringing in her hand and she can see it’s Joona Linna calling. She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say, but she answers anyway.

“Hello?”

“Where’s Vicky?”

“She’s here with me,” she says. “I have a house in Duved which—”

“I mean, can you see her right now?”

“No, I—”

“Get Vicky at once, get in your car, and drive to Stockholm right now. Just you and Vicky. Don’t stop to bring anything with you—”

“I’m already in the car!” Elin shrieks. She feels alarmed. “Vicky is with Daniel at the house.”

“That’s not good,” Joona says in a tone that fills Elin with dread.

“What’s happened?”

“Listen to me. Daniel was the one who killed Miranda and Elisabet.”

“That can’t be true,” she whispers. “He’s keeping an eye on Vicky while I pick up the nurse from the bus station.”

“Then she may no longer be alive, and you are in danger,” Joona says. “Get away from there right now. That is my advice as a police officer.”

Elin stares at the sky. In the last few minutes, low clouds have gathered. They push over the mountaintops, threatening rain.

“I can’t leave her,” Elin hears herself say.

“The police are on the way, but it could take a while.”

“I’m turning around right now.”

“I understand,” Joona says. “Be very careful. Daniel Grim is an extremely dangerous man and you’ll be on your own until the police get there.”

Elin’s mind is blank. She turns the Jeep around and speeds up the steep road, the gravel clattering against the underside of the vehicle.

Vicky is sitting on the white leather armchair, downloading apps onto her cell phone. Daniel comes into her room and sits down on the bed. He’s quiet for a moment as he looks out at the gray, ancient top of Mount Åreskuta and the dark clouds gathering around it.

“Did it feel wrong yesterday?” Daniel says. “I mean, just sitting and waiting in the car when we got your stuff.”

“No. I knew nobody wanted to see me,” she says, still busy with her phone.

“When I went inside the house, I saw Almira and Lu Chu playing the shut-your-eyes game,” Daniel says. “Miranda taught you that game, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Vicky says.

“Do you know where Miranda learned it?” Daniel asks.

Vicky nods as she reaches for the cell-phone charger.

“I use the game in therapy sometimes,” Daniel says. “It’s a game to practice trust.”

“Miranda popped some chocolate in my mouth,” Vicky says. She smiles. “Once, she drew a heart on my stomach.”

Vicky stops talking. She’s remembering her meeting with Tuula. Tuula had told her things when she met her by the lilac bushes.

“Have you told anyone about the game?” Daniel asks.

“No,” she says.

“I was just wondering.”

Vicky looks back down at her phone. She thinks about Tuula, standing in the darkness with a baseball bat in her hand. She was saying that the murderer only kills whores. Only whores need to be afraid. Typical Tuula, trying to scare her with her crazy stories. Vicky had tried to smile, but Tuula said that she’d found a pregnancy test in Miranda’s purse when she took her necklace. Yesterday, the only thing Vicky had thought about that was Miranda must have been sleeping with some guy she’d met through the All Day Living program.

Now she realizes that it has to be Daniel.

Vicky had the feeling that something was wrong when Miranda was trying to explain the game. It struck her that Miranda was only pretending that the game was fun. She was giggling and giving her chocolate, but the real reason she was doing it seemed to be to find out what Vicky knew about the game.

She remembers how unconcerned Miranda tried to look when she asked if Daniel had ever come into her room and played with her.

“Miranda didn’t say anything,” Vicky says. “She didn’t tell me anything about what you guys did in therapy.”

Vicky blushes as she realizes how everything fits together. Daniel had killed Miranda and Elisabet. The killings had nothing to do with Miranda being a whore. Daniel killed Miranda because she was pregnant.

Perhaps Miranda had told Elisabet everything.

Vicky tries to breathe calmly. She doesn’t know what she is supposed to say. She pulls at the frayed edge of her cast.

“It was—”

Daniel leans forward and takes her cell phone out of her hand.

“The therapy... It was about trusting one another,” Vicky says. She feels sure that Daniel has seen through her, that he’s aware she knows he killed Miranda and Elisabet with the hammer and tried to pin the murders on her.

“Yes, it’s an important step in therapy,” Daniel says. He’s watching her closely.

“I know,” she whispers.

“We can play the game now. You and me. Just for fun,” he says.

Vicky nods and realizes with panic that he’s already decided to kill her. He helped her avoid jail so that he could find out what she knew. He wanted to be absolutely sure that he was safe.

“Shut your eyes,” he says with a smile.