The Fire Witness (3 page)

A young woman is lying on the bed. A great part of her head seems to be missing. Blood has spattered the walls; it drips from a lampshade.

The door behind Rolf slams shut and he’s so startled that he drops his flashlight. Now there’s nothing but darkness. He turns around and fumbles for the door handle. He can hear the sound of hands on the outside of the door.

“Now she can see you!” shrieks a young voice. “Now she’s looking right at you!”

He presses down on the door handle, but the door is blocked. There is only a glimmer of light through the peephole. He presses down again and throws his shoulder against the door. It flies open and Rolf stumbles into the hallway. The little red-haired girl is standing there, staring at him with her wide eyes.

9

Detective Inspector Joona Linna stands at the window of his hotel room in the town of Sveg, 440 kilometers north of Stockholm. The dawn light is cool and misty blue. The streetlights along Älvgatan have already switched off, but it will be many more hours before he knows whether he’s found Rosa Bergman.

His shirt hangs loose and unbuttoned over black suit pants. His blond hair is, as usual, disheveled. His service pistol lies on the bed, still in its shoulder holster.

The last few months have been unsettled ones for Joona Linna. Last summer, he was accused of alerting an extremist left-wing group to a sweep by Säpo, the security police. The matter is now in the hands of the National Police’s Internal Review Board. While it investigates, Joona has been removed from many duties though not formally barred from the force. But the head of the investigation has made it clear that he intends to forward Joona’s file to the Swedish Prosecution Authority if he finds the slightest cause for an indictment.

It is a serious charge, but this is not the first time Joona has run up against the authorities. It seems to be his nature. He works as a lone wolf, and that can be irritating, especially to a team organization like the National Police. But what they can’t ignore is that in the almost fifteen years Joona’s been on the job, he’s solved more challenging cases than any other Scandinavian police officer. And while he may be independent to a fault, he is also loyal. Despite repeated offers from other organizations, Joona’s allegiance is to the force.

But right now Joona isn’t worrying about the outcome of the investigation. His mind is not on the future, but on the recent past. It’s on the old woman who followed him outside the Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm and delivered a message from Rosa Bergman.

Her thin hands had held up two tarot cards.

“This is you, isn’t it?” she’d asked. “And here is the crown, the bridal crown.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” the old woman had said. “But I have a message for you from Rosa Bergman.”

Joona’s heart had begun to pound, but he’d forced himself to shrug and say nonchalantly that there had to be some kind of mistake “because I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“She wants to know why you pretend your daughter is dead.”

“I’m very sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Joona had forced himself to smile as he answered. His voice had sounded odd in his own ears, foreign and cold, as if it came from underneath a large stone, and he’d been tempted to grab her skinny arms and demand to know what was going on. But he didn’t. He managed to stay calm.

“I have to go,” he had said, and was about to turn away when a migraine had shot through his brain like a knife stabbing his left eye. His vision disintegrated into a shimmering, pulsating halo.

When he was able to see again, a circle of people had gathered around him, a circle that broke only for the paramedics. And the old woman had disappeared.

He’d lied when he’d told her he didn’t know Rosa Bergman.

Of course he knows who Rosa Bergman is. She’s in his thoughts every day. Rosa Bergman is the only person who knows where his wife and daughter are. But she should not know about him. If she knows who he is, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Joona left the hospital a few hours after the migraine attack, and immediately began his search for Rosa Bergman. He requested and was granted a leave of absence. He soon learned that no such person was listed in any of Sweden’s public registers, but there are at least two thousand people with the last name Bergman in Scandinavia.

He began to systematically work his way through register after register. Two weeks ago, he began digging through archived church records. For hundreds of years, the Church of Sweden was responsible for keeping population registers, until 1991, when the responsibility was shifted to the Tax Office, where these records are now kept in digital form.

He started in the south of Sweden at the archives in Lund, where he pored through drawers of index cards, searching for any Rosa Bergman whose birth date might be right. He then traveled to Visby on the island of Gotland, and then to Vadstena, and after that to Gothenburg. Then he headed north to Uppsala and on to the massive archive in Härnösand. He searched through hundreds of thousands of files that recorded birth dates, places of birth, and parentages.

It was late in the afternoon yesterday, sitting in the Östersund archive, surrounded by the sweet scent of aged, stained paper and loose-leaf binders, that Joona found the record of a girl born eighty-four years ago. She was baptized Rosa Maja in the parish of Sveg, municipality of Härjedalen, Jämtland Province. Her parents were Kristina and Evert Bergman. He was unable to find any record of their marriage, but the mother had been born nineteen years earlier in the same parish. Her maiden name was Stefansson.

It took Joona three more hours to locate the name of Maja Stefansson, born the same year as Rosa Bergman, whose address was listed as a home for assisted living in Sveg. It was already seven in the evening by then, but Joona decided to drive there immediately. When he arrived, the residents were already in bed so he was denied entry.

Joona checked into the Lilla Hotellet. He went to bed early and woke at four. Since then, he’s been standing at the window, waiting for dawn to break.

10

Sunlight slowly marches around the high walls of the room, dancing briefly in the glass panel of a grandfather clock. Joona’s fairly sure he’s found the right Rosa Bergman. She’s changed her last name to her mother’s maiden name and used her original middle name as her first name. Joona glances at his watch and decides it’s time to go. Buttoning his jacket, he leaves the room, walks through the lobby, and heads out the door into the tiny town of Sveg.

The nursing home is called Blåvingen. It occupies a group of buildings, all of them faced in yellow stucco, surrounding a well-groomed lawn. There are paths and benches for resting.

Joona opens the door to the main entrance and steps inside. Now that he’s this close to meeting her, he’s suddenly apprehensive and has to force himself to walk down the hall, past the closed office doors, under the harsh fluorescent lights.

She was not supposed to find me
, he thinks.
She wasn’t even supposed to know of my existence. Something has gone very wrong.

Joona never talks about what led him to be such a loner. Still, the reasons are with him every waking moment. His life had burned like magnesium, flaring and then out. From bright white to smoking ruin in an instant.

A thin, bent old man watches television in the activity room, staring intently as a chef heats up oil in a sauté pan while describing a new recipe for the traditional crayfish festival. He peers at Joona.

“Anders? Is that you?” he asks.

Gently, Joona replies, “My name is Joona,” his soft Finnish accent coming through. “I’m looking for Maja Stefansson.”

The old man stares at him, with eyes that are damp and red.

“Anders, my boy, please listen to me. You have to get me out of here. There are only old people in this place.” The man slams his bony fist onto the armrest of the sofa but freezes the moment he sees a nurse enter the room.

“Good morning,” Joona says to the nurse. “I’m here to visit Maja Stefansson.”

“How nice,” she replies. “But I must warn you Maja has started to suffer from dementia. She tries to run away at every opportunity.”

“I understand.”

“Last summer she managed to get all the way to Stockholm.”

The nurse leads Joona through a freshly scrubbed but dimly lit hallway and opens a door.

“Maja?” she says. “There’s someone here to see you.”

11

An old woman is making her bed. She looks up and Joona recognizes her at once. It is the woman who approached him outside Adolf Fredrik Church and who showed him the tarot cards.

“Are you Rosa Bergman?” Joona asks.

“Yes,” she says, shyly holding out her hand.

“You had a message for me,” he says softly.

“Oh my goodness … I don’t remember,” she says, and sits down on her sofa.

Joona swallows hard and steps closer.

“You asked me why I’m pretending my daughter is dead.”

“Well, you shouldn’t do that,” she reprimands him. “It’s not a nice thing to do at all.”

“What do you know about my daughter?” Joona asks gently, taking another step. “Have you heard anything at all?”

She smiles absently and Joona has to look away. He tries to think clearly. His hands are shaking. He goes to her tiny kitchenette to steady them and makes two cups of coffee.

“Rosa, this is very important,” he says slowly as he sets the cups down on her coffee table. “It’s extremely important to me.”

Rosa blinks a few times. It is clear she’s grown suddenly frightened. “Who are you? Has something happened to Mother?”

“Rosa, do you remember a little girl named Lumi? Her mother’s name is Summa and you helped them to…”

Joona falls silent as he sees her wandering, lost gaze.

“Why did you come to Stockholm to find me?” he asks, although he knows his question won’t be answered.

Rosa Bergman begins to cry. A nurse comes in and comforts her in a practiced manner.

She says quietly to Joona, “Come with me. I’ll show you out.”

They walk along the wide hall, designed for wheelchairs.

“How long has she been suffering from dementia?” Joona asks.

“Things went quickly for Maja. We started to see the first signs last summer, so, for about a year. In the old days, they used to call it a second childhood, which is not so far from the truth.”

“If she … if she’s able to think clearly at all…” Joona says seriously.

“It’s unlikely,” the nurse says, but you never know. “I can call you.”

“My card,” Joona says, and hands it to her.

She looks impressed. “Detective Inspector?” She tacks it to the bulletin board behind her desk.

12

Joona steps into the fresh air and takes a deep breath.
Perhaps Rosa Bergman did have something important to tell me
, he thinks.
Maybe someone sent her, but she began to suffer from dementia before she could do anything about it.

Perhaps he’ll never know what the message was.

It has been twelve years since he lost Summa and Lumi, and the last trace of them has disappeared with Rosa Bergman’s memory.

Joona climbs into his car and wipes the tears from his cheeks. He closes his eyes for a moment, then starts the drive back to Stockholm. He’s barely gone thirty kilometers along the E45 when he gets a call from Carlos Eliasson, chief of the National Police.

“There’s been a murder in Sundsvall. A girl,” Carlos says. “The call came in just after four this morning.”

“I’m on leave,” Joona says. His voice is barely audible. He’s driving through a forest that offers glimpses of a distant silvery lake between the trees.

“Joona? What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

In the background, someone yells for Carlos.

“There’s a damned board meeting I’ve got to go to, but I would like … You see, I just talked with Prosecutor Susanne Öst and she thinks that the police in Västernorrland do not intend to request our help in the case.”

“So why call me?”

“I told them we would send an observer anyway.”

“Since when do we send observers?”

“As of now,” says Carlos. He lowers his voice. “Things are kind of touchy around here these days. Remember the mess with the captain of the hockey league, Janne Svensson? The press had a field day with the police department’s incompetence.”

“Because they didn’t find—”

“Let’s not discuss it. That was Susanne Öst’s first big prosecution. I don’t want to say the press had it right, but the Västernorrland police could certainly have used you that time. They were just too slow and kept going by the book. Time ran out. Not unusual, perhaps, but it can lead to media unpleasantness.”

“I can’t talk anymore,” Joona says, trying to cut short the conversation.

“You know I wouldn’t trouble you if this was just an average murder case,” Carlos says. Joona can hear him breathing deeply over the phone. “The press is going to be all over this one, Joona. It’s extremely violent, extremely bloody. And there’s one especially nasty thing: the girl’s body has been arranged.”

“Meaning what?”

“She’s lying in bed with her hands over her face.”

Joona says nothing. His left hand is on the wheel. The trees flash past as he drives, and Joona can hear a babble of voices in the background. Carlos waits patiently, and Joona turns off the E45 and onto the E14, leading east to Sundsvall, on the coast.

“Just go there, Joona,” Carlos says. “Be nice and let them solve the case themselves, preferably before the press gets to town.”

“So now I’m more than just an observer?”

“No, no. That’s what you are, but stick around and keep an eye on the investigation. Make a few suggestions. Just keep in mind that you have no authority in the case.”

“Because I’m under internal investigation?”

“It’s important you keep a low profile.”

13

North of Sundsvall, Joona leaves the coast and turns onto Highway 86, which heads inland toward Indalsälven. After two hours, he’s close to where the home for troubled girls should be. He slows down and eventually turns onto a gravel road. Rays of sunshine stream past the dark trunks of the tall pines.