The Fire Witness

‘I can’t bear this,’ Pia whispers.

The road they’re on splits in two ten kilometres ahead of them. Just past the little town of Indal, one branch of the road crosses the river and carries on almost due south, while the other goes on following the river towards the coast.

Pia sits with her hands clasped tightly, praying to God. Up ahead, two police cars have set up roadblocks on the two branches of the road. One car is parked at the far end of the bridge, and the other is eight kilometres to the east.

The truck carrying the Danish truck driver and Pia Abrahamsson is passing through Indal. Through the heavy rain they see the empty bridge over the teeming water, and the blue lights of the lone police car rotating at the far end of the bridge.

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Police Constable Mirja Zlatnek has parked her patrol car across the whole width of the road. If any car wanted to get past, it would have to pull off the road and drive with two wheels in the ditch.

In front of her is a long, straight stretch of road. The police car’s blue lights flash across the wet tarmac and dark branches of the trees, in among the trunks.

The rain is beating hard on the car roof.

Mirja sits quietly for a while looking out through the windscreen and trying to think through the situation.

Visibility is poor because of the rain.

She had counted on having a very quiet day, seeing as almost all her colleagues in the whole district are busy with the case of the dead girl at the Birgitta Home. Even the National Crime Unit have been brought into the investigation.

Mirja has been developing a secret fear of the operational side of the job, without ever actually having been in any particularly traumatic situations. Perhaps it’s because of that time she tried to mediate in a domestic drama that ended badly, but that was many years ago now.

The anxiety has crept up on her. She prefers administrative duties, and crime prevention work.

She spent the morning sitting at her desk looking at recipes online. Elk fillet wrapped in pastry, potato wedges, and cream sauce with penny bun mushrooms. And puréed artichoke hearts.

She was in the car heading to Djupängen to look at a stolen trailer when the call came through about the abducted boy.

Mirja tells herself that she’s going to be able to solve the situation of the kidnapped boy. Because the car containing the woman’s four-year-old son has nowhere else to go.

This stretch of road is like a long tunnel, a trap.

The lorry is following it from the other direction.

Either the car containing the boy crosses the bridge just after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson has blocked the road.

Or it comes this way, and I’m waiting here, Mirja thinks.

And ten kilometres behind the car is the lorry.

Obviously it all depends how fast the car is driving, but within the next twenty minutes there’ll be some sort of confrontation.

Mirja tells herself that the child almost certainly hasn’t been kidnapped in the real sense of the word. Probably a custody dispute. The woman she spoke to was too upset to give her any coherent information, but from what she did say her car must be somewhere on the road this side of Nilsböle.

It’ll soon be over, she tells herself.

It won’t be long before she can go back to her room at the station, get a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich.

But at the same time there’s something worrying her. The woman spoke about a girl with arms like twigs.

Mirja didn’t ask her name. There hadn’t been time. She assumed the emergency call centre had taken all the relevant details.

The fear in her voice had been alarming. She had been breathing fast, and described what she’d been through as incomprehensible, beyond logical explanation.

The rain is bouncing off the windscreen and bonnet. Mirja reaches for the radio, waits a moment, then calls Lasse Bengtsson.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks.

‘Torrential rain, but not much else. No cars, not a single damn … Hang on, I can see a truck, a bloody big articulated truck heading down Highway 330.’

‘He’s the guy who called,’ Mirja says.

‘So where the hell’s the Toyota?’ Lasse says. ‘I’ve been here a quarter of an hour, so it’ll have to reach you in the next five minutes, unless some UFO has—’

‘Give me a moment,’ Mirja says quickly and ends the call to her colleague when she sees the distant light from two car headlamps.

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Mirja Zlatnek gets out of her patrol car and hunches in the downpour. She squints at the car approaching through the heavy rain.

With one hand on her holstered pistol she walks towards the car, simultaneously holding her left hand up to make the driver stop.

The water coursing across the road and into the ditches by the side of the carriageway looks as if it’s bubbling.

Mirja sees the car slow down, and she sees her own shadow bounce along the road surrounded by the rotating blue light from behind her. She hears a call on the radio in the patrol car, but stays on the road. The voices on the comms radio are tinny, and there’s a lot of crackling, but the words are still clearly audible.

‘Hell of a lot of blood,’ a younger colleague is saying as he describes the discovery of a second body at the Birgitta Home, a middle-aged woman.

The car comes closer, driving slowly, then pulls over to the edge of the road and stops. Mirja Zlatnek starts to walk towards it. It’s a Mazda pickup with muddy tyres. The driver’s door opens, and a large man in a green hunting jacket and a Helly Hansen sweater gets out. He has neatly combed shoulder-length hair, and a wide face with a large nose and narrow eyes.

‘Are you alone in the car?’ Mirja shouts, wiping the water from her face.

He nods, then looks over at the forest.

‘Stay back,’ she says as he walks closer.

He takes a tiny step back.

Mirja leans forward to look inside the car. Water trickles down the back of her neck.

It’s hard to see anything through the rain and mud on the windscreen. There’s a newspaper spread out on the driver’s seat. He’s been sitting on it while he was driving. She walks around and moves closer, trying to see what’s lying on the narrow back seat. An old blanket and a thermos flask.

The radio in the car crackles again, but she can no longer hear the words.

The shoulders of the man’s hunting jacket are already dark from the rain. There’s a sound of something scraping against metal coming from the vehicle.

When she looks back at the man again she sees he’s come closer. Just a little, one step, perhaps. Unless she’s imagining it. She’s no longer sure. He’s staring at her, looks her up and down, and then frowns.