Lars Kepler - The Fire Witness

“Keep moving,” Flora mutters, when Daniel slows down.

They are walking on the gravel road, heading toward the field.

She is starting to remember even more fragments of her two years on this estate, but also a single vivid memory from before then, of standing at the door to the orphanage with Daniel.

There must have been a time before that when she was with her real mother.

“Are you going to shoot me?” Daniel asks.

“I could,” she says. “But I’m taking you to the police.”

Sunshine breaks through the heavy rain clouds and blinds her for a moment. She wants to wipe her damp hands, but she doesn’t dare risk taking them off the rifle.

They keep walking along the gravel road, which makes a wide semicircle past the enormous, empty barn. They pass by stinging nettles and milkweed and sacks of LECA balls stacked on pallets beside the wall. A crow caws in the distance.

It is a long way around to reach the field.

The sun is hidden behind the barn until they reach its other side.

“Flora,” Daniel mumbles to himself in amazement.

Flora’s arms are beginning to shake from the weight of the rifle.

On the other side of the large field is the road to Delsbo. It looks like a pencil streak between the yellow pastures.

Flora pushes Daniel between the shoulder blades with the barrel of the rifle. They walk across the dried mud in front of the barn.

Flora quickly wipes her hand on her pants and returns her finger to the trigger.

Daniel stops and waits to feel the pressure of the gun before he starts moving again. They walk past a concrete foundation with rings of rusted iron. Weeds are growing along its broken edge.

Daniel has started to limp and is walking more slowly.

“Keep going,” Flora says.

Daniel lets his hand run along the weeds. A butterfly takes off and glides into the air.

“I think we can stop here,” he says, slowing down again. “This is the old slaughtering spot, when we used to have cattle. Do you remember the slaughterhouse and how they killed the animals?”

“I’m going to shoot if you don’t get moving,” Flora says, adjusting her finger on the trigger.

Daniel catches a marguerite daisy and pulls it from its stalk. He turns as if he wants to give it to Flora.

She steps back and thinks she has to shoot now. She has no time. Daniel has grabbed the barrel and pulled the rifle toward himself.

Flora is so surprised that she can’t dodge him. He slams the rifle butt into her chest. She falls on her back. She gasps for breath, coughs, and scrambles back up.

Now they’re standing and staring at each other. Daniel is looking at her. His eyes are dreamy.

“You shouldn’t have peeked,” he says.

She doesn’t know what to say to him. She realizes that she might die on this spot.

Daniel raises the rifle and meets her eyes. He places the muzzle directly on her right leg and pulls the trigger.

The bullet goes straight through Flora’s muscle. She doesn’t feel any pain, just a kind of cramp.

The recoil makes Daniel step back. He watches Flora drop to the ground, her leg no longer holding her weight.

She tries to break her fall, but her hip and chin hit the ground hard. She lies there a moment. She can smell hay and gunpowder. Small insects are crawling over the weeds beside her.

“Time to cover your face,” he says as he takes aim.

Flora is lying on her side and blood is bubbling from her leg. She turns her head to look at the barn. Things go black before her eyes for a moment. She wants to throw up. The fields and the red barn are whirling around as if she’s riding a carousel.

She’s having trouble breathing. She coughs so she can take a deep breath.

Daniel is standing above her, the sun behind him. He pushes her shoulder with the rifle so she rolls onto her back. She’s starting to feel pain in her leg and lets out a moan. He is saying something she can’t understand.

She tries to lift her head and her gaze slides over the ground, the weeds, and the concrete foundation with its rings of iron.

Daniel aims the rifle at her forehead and then moves the muzzle along her nose to her mouth.

She can feel the warm metal on her lips and chin. She is breathing too quickly. Blood pulses from her leg. She looks up into the sky and then down to the barn. She blinks and tries to make out what she’s seeing. A man is running inside the large barn, behind the sparse boards, right through the rays of light.

She wants to call out, but she has no voice.

The rifle’s mouth is wandering toward her eye. She shuts it and feels the pressure against her eyeball and does not hear the shot.

It has taken Joona forty minutes to drive from Sundsvall to Hudiksvall. Now he has just turned west onto Highway 84 to Delsbo. All this time, he couldn’t let go of the thought of the photographs and mementos in Daniel Grim’s shoe box, so completely innocent at first glance. Perhaps the initial phase was always the same for him. A crush, with kisses, gazing, and words filled with longing.

Once the girls moved on, Daniel showed his twisted mind. He went to visit them in secret and then he killed them to ensure their silence. Their deaths surprised no one. Those who took pills were killed with overdoses; those who cut themselves had their wrists slashed.

The owners of the youth homes are profit-driven and probably didn’t want the deaths made public. They certainly wouldn’t have wanted the Ministry of Health to start any kind of investigation.

No one has ever connected those deaths to Daniel Grim.

But something went wrong with Miranda. It didn’t fit his pattern. Perhaps he panicked when Miranda told him she was pregnant. Perhaps she threatened to reveal his secret.

She shouldn’t have done that, because Daniel doesn’t like witnesses.

Joona is still feeling deeply troubled when he calls Torkel Ekholm to tell him that he’ll be there in ten minutes. He wonders if Flora is ready to go home.

“Oh my, I fell asleep,” the old policeman says. “Give me a moment.”

Joona hears Torkel put the phone down and shuffle across the floor. He’s already over the bridge at Badhusholmen when the old man picks the phone back up.

“Flora’s gone,” he says. “She’s taken my rifle.”

“Do you know where she might have gone?”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end. Joona pictures the little house, its kitchen table and embroideries.

“I think she went to the Rånnes’ manor house,” Torkel says.

Joona takes a sharp right onto Highway 743 instead of continuing to Torkel’s house. He hits the gas pedal. He radios the national communications center and requests backup and an ambulance to the Rånnes’ manor house. He’s reaching 110 kilometers an hour when he has to brake to swing between the gates and onto the lane leading to the manor house.

From a distance, the house looks like a great white ice sculpture. It seems darker the closer he gets. Joona stops in front and leaps from the car. He’s headed up the steps into the house when he catches sight of two figures walking around a wall and disappearing behind a huge red barn.

Joona understands what he’s glimpsed: Flora holding a rifle to Daniel’s back. Joona starts to run along the gravel road past the annex and down the slope on the western side of the shed. Flora is walking too close to Daniel, he thinks. Her brother could take the rifle away from her with no trouble at all. He knows she’s not ready to shoot him, that she doesn’t want to shoot him. She just wants the truth to come out.

Joona leaps over the remains of an old fence and slides down the slope. His hand rips through the weeds, but he keeps his balance.