Lars Kepler - The Fire Witness

Afterward, he had to stay nearby to see if anyone was figuring out what had happened. He played the role of helpful director as well as victim.

Joona is nearing Stockholm. The Radio Book Club is almost over. They’d been discussing Gösta Berling’s Saga by Selma Lagerlöf.

Joona turns off the radio and puzzles through the rest of the case.

When Vicky was arrested and Daniel heard that Miranda had told her about the face-covering game, he realized he was vulnerable. His secret would be revealed if Vicky had the chance to tell her story to a competent psychologist, and one would have been assigned to her in jail. That’s why Daniel did everything he could to make sure that Vicky was released — so he could arrange her suicide.

For most of his career, Daniel had worked with troubled girls who had neither parents who cared nor any sense of security. Whether he was acting on a conscious or unconscious level, he sought out those jobs and kept falling in love with little girls who reminded him of his first crush. Daniel used the girls and once they moved away, he made sure that they would never tell anyone about what he’d done.

Joona slows down for a red light and shudders. He thinks of the hours Daniel spent with these girls as their psychotherapist, twisting their minds; of all the reports he wrote detailing their insecurities, their hatred of themselves. He has met a number of killers in his work as a police officer, but Daniel’s careful preparations for these girls’ deaths — preparations he started long before he killed them, and probably shortly after he fell for them — makes him almost the worst killer Joona has ever dealt with. Only one other murderer was worse.

There is a light fog in the air as Joona parks his car and walks across Karlaplan to Disa’s apartment.

“Joona?” Disa says as she opens the door. “I almost thought that you weren’t coming. I have the TV on and they’re talking about what happened at Delsbo.”

Joona nods.

“So, you caught the killer,” Disa says with a slight smile.

“Or however you want to put it,” Joona says, thinking of the father’s fiery embrace.

“What happened to that poor woman who was always calling you? They said she’d been shot.”

“Flora Hansen,” Joona says.

He bumps his head on the light in the hallway. Light flashes back and forth over the walls. Joona is barely aware of it. He’s thinking now about the young girls whose photographs were in Daniel Grim’s shoe box.

“You’re tired,” Disa says, pulling him by the hand.

“Flora was shot in the leg by her brother and...”

She doesn’t notice that he’s stopped in the middle of a sentence. He’s tried to clean up at a gas station on the way back, but his clothes are still covered in Flora’s blood.

“Go take a bath. I’ll pick up some food at the corner shop,” Disa says.

“Thanks.” Joona smiles.

In the living room, the news is showing a photo of Elin. They stop to look at it. A young journalist is reporting that Elin Frank has undergone an operation during the night and that her doctors are very optimistic. The picture switches to footage of Elin’s assistant, Robert Bianchi. He looks exhausted, but he smiles tentatively and tears leak from his eyes as he tells the reporters that Elin is going to live.

“What happened?” Disa asks.

“She fought this killer all on her own. She saved the girl’s life, the one—”

“My God,” Disa whispers.

“Yes, well, Elin Frank, she’s... she’s actually quite exceptional,” Joona says as he rubs Disa’s narrow shoulders.

Joona is sitting at Disa’s kitchen table wrapped in a bathrobe. They’re eating chicken vindaloo and lamb tikka masala.

“Good...”

“Mamma’s Homemade Finnish recipes, and I won’t reveal what they are!” Disa is laughing.

She tears a naan in half and hands one piece to Joona. He’s looking at her with smiling eyes. He drains his wineglass, and then picks up his story about the case.

He’s started at the beginning and told Disa about Flora and Daniel, the siblings who were placed in an orphanage at a young age.

“Were they really siblings?” she asks as she refills their wineglasses.

“Yes, and it was a big deal when the rich couple, the Rånnes, adopted them.”

“I can see that.”

They were small children who played with the foreman’s daughter on the grounds of the estate, in the fields, and around the churchyard and its bell tower. Daniel had a crush on Ylva, who was still a little girl herself. Joona tells her what Flora, wide-eyed, had said about Daniel kissing Ylva when they were playing the close-your-eyes game.

“The little girl laughed and said she was now with child,” Joona says. “Daniel was six years old and he panicked for some reason.”

“So what did he do?” whispers Disa.

“He ordered both girls to close their eyes and then he picked up a heavy rock and hit Ylva so hard in the head that she died.”

Disa stops eating and listens intently as Joona describes how Flora fled and told her father what happened.

“But her father loved Daniel and defended him,” Joona says. “He demanded that Flora take back her accusation. He threatened her by telling her that all liars end up in a lake of fire.”

“So she took it all back?”

“She said she lied, and because she’d lied so terribly, they banished her from their home forever.”

“So Flora took back what she’d said. She lied about lying,” Disa says thoughtfully.

“Yes,” Joona says, and he reaches across the table for her hand.

He is thinking about Flora and how, even as a little girl, she managed to bury her memories of what happened at Delsbo so deeply she also soon forgot all about her earlier life, her adoptive parents, her own brother.

He realizes Flora had little choice but to create a whole life based on lies. She lied for others to make them happy. Her memories began to return only after she heard about the girl with her hands over her face who’d been murdered at Birgittagården. It cracked open the vault of her memories, and the past started to catch up to her.

“How could she forget such things?” Disa asks, gesturing to Joona to help himself to more.

“I called Britt-Marie on the way here,” Joona says.

“The Needle’s wife?”

“Exactly. She told me how they have a number of theories concerning repressed memories after traumatic events. It’s a form of PTSD. Apparently the huge amounts of adrenaline and stress hormones released at the time of the trauma affect long-term memory. Seriously traumatic events are stored deep within the brain and are hidden. They are not dealt with on an emotional level. However, the right stimulus can trigger the memory to surface in physical responses and pictures. Flora was first just shaken up by what she’d heard on the radio and didn’t know why. She thought she might earn some money by leaving a tip with the police. But when the real memories began to appear, she thought they were ghosts.”

“Perhaps they were ghosts,” Disa says.

“Well, perhaps. In any case, she started to tell the truth and she became the witness who solved the case.”

Joona stands up and blows out the candles on the table. Disa joins him and snuggles beneath his robe. They stand holding each other for a long time. He breathes in her scent and feels the pulse of her heart.

“I’m so afraid something could happen to you. This is why our relationship has been so rocky. I get afraid and I withdraw,” he says.

“What could ever happen to me?” she asks, smiling.

“You can disappear off the face of the earth.”

“Joona, I’m not going to disappear.”