The Fire Witness

‘Anders, listen, lad. You’ve got to help me get out of here. It’s full of old people.’

The man hits the arm of the sofa with a frail fist, but stops abruptly when a care assistant walks into the room.

‘Good morning,’ Joona says. ‘I’m here to visit Maja Stefanson.’

‘How lovely,’ she says. ‘But I should warn you, Maja’s dementia has got worse. She tries to get out whenever she has a chance.’

‘I understand,’ Joona says.

‘Back in the summer she managed to get all the way to Stockholm.’

The care assistant leads Joona through a freshly-mopped corridor with subdued lighting, and opens one of the doors.

‘Maja?’ she calls out warmly.

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An old woman is making the bed. When she looks up, Joona recognises her at once. It’s the woman who was following him outside Adolf Fredrik Church, the one who showed him the playing cards. The one who told him she had a message from Rosa Bergman.

Joona’s heart is beating hard.

She’s the only person who knows where his wife and daughter are, and she shouldn’t be aware of his existence.

‘Rosa Bergman?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes,’ she replies, raising one of her hands like a schoolgirl.

‘My name is Joona Linna.’

‘Yes,’ Rosa Bergman smiles, shuffling towards him.

‘You had a message for me,’ he says.

‘Oh my, I don’t remember that,’ Rosa replies, and sits down on the sofa.

He swallows hard and takes a step towards her.

‘You asked me why I was pretending my daughter is dead.’

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she says sternly. ‘That’s not nice at all.’

‘What do you know about my daughter?’ Joona asks, taking another step towards the woman. ‘Have you heard anything?’

She merely smiles distractedly, and Joona lowers his gaze. He tries to think clearly, and notices that his hands are shaking as he goes over to the kitchenette in the corner and pours coffee into two cups.

‘Rosa, this is important to me,’ he says slowly, putting the cups on the table. ‘Very important.’

She blinks a couple of times, then asks in a timid voice: ‘Who are you? Has something happened to Mother?’

‘Rosa, do you remember a little girl called Lumi? Her mother’s name was Summa, and you helped them to …’

Joona falls silent when he sees the lost expression in the woman’s eyes, clouded with cataracts.

‘Why did you try to find me?’ he asks, even though he knows there’s no point.

Rosa Bergman drops her coffee cup on the floor and starts to cry. The care assistant comes in, and soothes her in a practised way.

‘I’ll show you out,’ she says quietly to Joona.

They walk through the corridor.

‘How long has she had dementia?’ Joona asks.

‘It happened quickly with Maja … We started to notice the first signs last summer, so about a year ago … people used to say it was like a second childhood, which is still pretty close to the truth for most sufferers.’

‘If she … if she suddenly has a lucid period,’ Joona says seriously, ‘would you mind contacting me?’

‘That does actually happen occasionally,’ the woman nods.

‘Call me at once,’ he says, handing her his card.

‘Detective Superintendent?’ she says in surprise, and pins the card to the noticeboard behind the desk in the office.

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When Joona emerges into the fresh air he breathes in deeply, as if he’s been holding his breath. Perhaps Rosa Bergman had had something important to tell him, he thinks. It’s possible that someone asked her to pass on a message. But she succumbed to dementia before she managed to tell him.

He’s never going to know what it was.

Twelve years have passed since he lost Summa and Lumi.

The last traces of them have been erased along with Rosa Bergman’s lost memories.

It’s over now.

Joona sits in his car, wipes the tears from his cheeks, closes his eyes for a while, then turns the key in the ignition to drive back home to Stockholm.

He’s driven thirty kilometres south along the E45 towards Mora when the head of the National Crime Unit, Carlos Eliasson, calls him.

‘We’ve got a murder at a children’s home up in Sundsvall,’ Carlos says in a tense voice. ‘The emergency call centre was alerted just after four this morning.’

‘I’m on leave,’ Joona says, almost inaudibly.

‘You could still have come to the karaoke evening.’

‘Another time,’ Joona says, almost to himself.

The road runs straight through the forest. Far off between the trees a silvery lake is glinting.