The Fire Witness: A Novel Page 13

Life for her at Strandvägen must have been like a fairy tale. She was kept warm and ate regular meals. She slept in a bed and wore lovely clothes. She would have had toys to play with. The time she spent with Elin and Jack must shine bright in her memory.

  Joona turns on the signal before he moves into the left lane.

  He has studied the list. Before she was sent to Birgittagården, Vicky was at the Ljungbacken orphanage. Before that, she spent two weeks with a family named Arnander-Johansson in Katrineholm.

  In his mind’s eye, he sees The Needle and Frippe forcing Miranda’s hands away from her face. They’d fought her stiff arms, as if the dead girl was resisting. As if she was ashamed to be seen. But her face was calm and as white as a pearl.

  She’d been sitting with the blanket around her body when, according to The Needle, a large rock hit her. She’d been hit six or seven times. Then she was lifted onto the bed and her hands were placed in front of her face.

  The last thing she saw in life was her killer.

  Joona slows down as he reaches an older residential area. He parks by the side of the street, next to a hedge of flowering Öland cinquefoil. He gets out of the car. A woman is walking around the house carrying a bucket of apples. It’s apparent she has trouble moving her hips and her mouth is tense with pain. She’s hefty, with large breasts and thick upper arms.

  “You just missed him,” she says.

  “Typical,” Joona says.

  “He had to go to the warehouse. Something about the invoices.”

  “Who are we talking about?” asks Joona. He’s smiling.

  She puts down the bucket.

  “I thought you were here about the treadmill.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “One thousand. It’s brand-new.” She rubs her hand along the crease of her pants as she looks at him.

  “I’m not here about the treadmill. I’m here from the National Police,” Joona says. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Vicky Bennet. She lived with you about a year ago.”

  The woman’s face turns sad. She nods and points to the door. Joona follows her into a kitchen with a table covered by a crocheted cloth beside a window with floral curtains, which faces onto the backyard. Outside, the lawn is freshly mown. Plum trees and gooseberry bushes form a hedge along the property line, and a small swimming pool is tucked behind a wooden lattice fence.

  “Vicky has run away,” Joona says directly.

  “I read about it in the newspapers,” she says as she puts the bucket in the sink.

  “Do you know where she might be hiding?”

  “No idea.”

  “Did she ever mention friends or boys?”

  “Vicky didn’t really live here long,” the woman says.

  “Why is that?”

  “It didn’t work out.” She fills a carafe with water and pours it into the coffee machine. Then she stops.

  “I guess offering coffee is part of what you do when the police stop by,” she says without any strength in her voice.

  Joona is looking out the window at two blond boys playing karate in the backyard. They’re thin and tanned and wearing swimming shorts that are too large. The play is rough and wild, but the boys are laughing.

  “So you foster children?”

  “Our daughter is nineteen now, so, well, we’ve done this for a few years.”

  “How long do the children usually stay with you?”

  “It varies. They can go back and forth for a while,” she replies. She turns to Joona. “Some of these kids come from really broken homes.”

  “Is it difficult?”

  “No, not really. Of course, there are always conflicts, but you just have to be clear about the limits.”

  One of the boys jumps into the swimming pool and is followed by the second, who somersaults in.

  “Vicky stayed only two weeks,” Joona says looking at the woman. She avoids his gaze.

  “We have the two boys,” she says. “We’ve had them for two years now. They’re brothers. We hoped it would work with Vicky, but we had to stop.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, I mean, nothing really. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We just weren’t up to it.”

  “Did Vicky cause trouble? Was she hard to manage?”

  “No, no,” she says. “It was…” She stops speaking.

  “What were you going to say? What happened?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “You were both experienced foster parents. Why did you decide to give up after only two weeks?”

  “It is what it is.”

  “Something must have happened.”

  “No, really, it was just too much for us.”

  “Something must have happened,” Joona repeats in the same soft tone of voice. “Tell me, please.”

  She reddens and the blush travels all the way down her neck to between her breasts.

  “Someone visited us,” she whispers.

  “Who?”

  She shakes her head. Joona hands her his notebook and a pen. Tears start to run down her cheeks. She looks at him, and then she takes the pen and notebook. She begins to write.

  54

  It takes Joona three hours to drive west to Bengtsfors. By the time he gets there, the tears on his notebook where the woman wrote the address have long since dried. He had to pry it gently from her hand, and when he tried to get her to say something, she just shook her head. Then she hurried from the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom.

  Joona drives slowly along Skrakegatan. Number 35 is the last house on the street. The front yard is overgrown and white plastic furniture is lying in the tall grass. The mailbox by the gate is stuffed with flyers, and black garbage bags have been taped to the inside of the front window.

  Climbing out of his car, Joona walks through the weeds to the front door. A doormat has been printed with the reminder: keys, wallet, cell phone. When he rings the doorbell, a dog barks and after a while, an eye looks through the peephole. He can hear two locks being unlatched and then the door is opened as far as the security chain allows. He can’t see the person in the dark hallway, but he can smell red wine.

  “May I come in?” Joona asks.

  “She doesn’t want to see you.” It’s a boy’s voice, husky and hoarse.

  The dog is panting and Joona can hear the links of a choke collar click.

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “We’re not buying anything!” a woman shouts.

  “I’m from the police,” Joona says.

  Joona hears steps inside the house.

  “Is he by himself?” asks the woman.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Hold on to Zombie.”

  “Mamma? Are you really going to open the door?”

  Joona hears the woman approach.

  “What do you want?” she says.

  “Do you know anything about a girl named Vicky Bennet?”

  Joona hears the dog’s nails scratch against the floor. The woman yells at the boy then closes the door and takes off the security chain. The door opens a crack. Joona pushes it wider and steps inside. The woman is standing with her back to him. She’s wearing flesh-colored leggings and a white T-shirt. Her blond hair hangs over her shoulders. As Joona shuts the door behind him, it’s so dark he has to stop.

  By the time his eyes adjust, the woman is at the far end of the hall. He walks past the kitchen, where a vague gray light shows a box of wine on the table and a pool of wine on the brown linoleum underneath. He goes into the television room, where the woman is already sitting on a denim sofa. Dark purple curtains reach the floor on either side of a window covered in more garbage bags. The door to the veranda lets in a ray of light, which lands on the woman’s hand. Her nails are well cared for and painted red.

  “Go ahead and sit down,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  Joona sits across from her on a
footstool and immediately notices that there’s something wrong with the woman’s face.

  “What do you want to know?” she says.

  “You visited the Arnander-Johansson family,” Joona says.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did you need to go see them?”

  “I had to warn them.”

  “What did you need to warn them about?”

  “Tompa!” the woman yells. “Tompa!”

  A door opens and slow footsteps head toward them. A shadow comes in.

  “Turn on the light.”

  “But, Mamma—”

  “Do as you’re told!”

  The boy hits the light switch and a large globe of rice paper lights up the entire room. The tall, thin boy is standing with his head bowed. His face looks like it had been savaged by a dog and never healed properly. His lower lip is missing so that his teeth are showing. His chin and his right cheek are bright red like fresh beef and a deep red gash goes diagonally from his hairline through one eyebrow.

  When Joona turns toward the woman, he sees that her face is even more ruined. Still, she’s smiling at him. She’s missing her right eye and there are several deep gashes in her face and neck—at least ten. Her eyebrow droops over her remaining eye and her lips have been slashed into sections.

  “Vicky got angry at us,” the woman says. Her smile disappears.

  “What happened?”

  “She cut us with a broken bottle. I never thought a human being could get so angry. I passed out and when I woke up, I could feel the gashes from the broken glass, all the wounds, and the bits of broken glass inside my body. I realized I had no face left.”

  55

  The agreement that Sundsvall township has made with the company that owns Birgittagården is costing it a lot of money, but at least it deals with the difficult situation. To cut back on expenses, the girls have been moved from the Hotel Ibis to the small fishing village of Hårte on the Jungfru coast.

  The school in Hårte closed more than a hundred years ago when a nearby iron mine was abandoned, and the grocery store closed a few decades later when its owners got too old to run it. But the village hangs on and, during the summer, comes alive with visitors to its white sand beaches.

  The six girls are staying in a large old country house with a huge glass-enclosed veranda. It stands at the point where the small road in the village forks like a snake’s tongue. They’ve finished dinner and a few are hanging out in the dining room next to the small kitchen. A guard is sitting where he can watch both the room and the front door as well as see out through the windows to the lawn facing the road.

  Lu Chu and Nina are looking for potato chips in the pantry, but they can only find Frosted Flakes.

  “So what are you going to do when the killer gets here?” asks Lu Chu.

  The guard’s tattooed hand jerks and he smiles stiffly at her.

  “You’re safe here,” he says.

  He’s fifty years old, his head is shaved, and he has a stiff goatee. His large muscles bulge the arms of his dark blue security-company sweater. Lu Chu stares at him while she snacks on the breakfast cereal. Nina finds a packet of smoked ham and a jar of mustard in the fridge. At the other end of the house, sitting around a table on the veranda, Caroline, Indie, Tuula, and Almira are playing cards.

  “I want all your jacks,” Indie says.

  “Go fish.” Almira giggles.

  Indie draws a card and looks at it happily.

  “Ted Bundy was just a butcher,” Tuula says in a low voice.

  “God, how you talk!” Caroline sighs.

  “He went from room to room and clubbed the girls like they were seal pups. Lisa and Margaret and—”

  “Shut up,” Almira says, laughing.

  Tuula smiles too, but Caroline can’t help shivering.

  “What the fuck is that old lady doing here?” Indie says as loud as she can.

  The woman sitting in front of the fireplace looks up and then goes back to her knitting.

  “Come on, aren’t we playing cards?” asks Tuula impatiently.

  “Whose turn is it?”

  “My turn,” says Indie.

  “Cheater!” says Caroline, but she’s smiling.

  “My phone is dead,” Almira says. “I was charging it in my room and now—”

  “Let me look at it,” says Indie.

  Indie opens the back, takes the battery out, and puts it back in again. Nothing happens.

  “Weird,” she mutters.

  “Fuck that,” says Almira.

  Indie takes the battery out again and exclaims, “The fucking SIM card is missing!”

  “Tuula!” Almira says severely. “Did you take my SIM card?”

  “Don’t know,” Tuula says sullenly.

  “I need that SIM card!”

  The woman puts down her knitting. “What’s going on?”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Caroline replies calmly.

  Tuula whines, “I haven’t taken anything!”

  “My SIM card is missing!” Almira’s voice is loud.

  “It doesn’t mean that Tuula has taken it,” says the woman.

  “Almira says she’s going to hit me!” says Tuula.

  “We don’t tolerate violence of any kind here,” the woman says. Then she picks up her knitting.

  “Tuula,” Almira says in a low voice. “I really need to make phone calls.”

  “Well, too bad for you!” says Tuula, smiling.

  The forest across the bay and the sky above it are dark, but the water is still shimmering like molten lead in the last rays of the sun.

  “The police think that Vicky beat Miranda to death,” Caroline says.

  “They’re so fucking stupid,” Almira mutters.

  “I don’t know Vicky. No one knows Vicky,” Indie says.

  “Well, watch out, then!”

  “What if she’s on the way over here to kill us all?”

  “Shh!” Tuula says. She gets up and looks out into the darkness. She’s tense.

  “Did you hear that?” She turns and looks at Caroline and Almira.

  “No, I don’t hear a thing.” Indie sighs.

  “We’re soon going to be dead, all of us!” whispers Tuula.

  “You’re a sick little bitch, aren’t you?” Caroline says, but she can’t hide a smile. She catches Tuula’s hand and pulls her onto her lap and strokes her hair.

  “Don’t be afraid. Nothing’s going to happen,” she says.

  56

  Caroline wakes up on the sofa. She sits up and looks around the empty room. A few embers are glowing in the fireplace. She realizes that everyone else has gone to bed and just left her sleeping.

  She gets up and looks out the window. She can see the water beyond the fishing huts. Everything is silent and still and the moon, behind a few wisps of clouds, shines over the ocean.

  She opens the door and feels the cool air of the hallway on her face. The shadows are deep and she can barely make out the doors to the girls’ bedrooms. She can hear a bed creak. Caroline walks into the darkness, the floor icy cold beneath her bare feet. She stops when she hears someone softly moaning. The sound is coming from the bathroom. She tiptoes there, her heart pounding. The door is slightly ajar. Someone is inside and Caroline can hear the moan again.

  She peeks through the gap.

  Nina is sitting on the toilet seat with her legs wide apart and her face expressionless. There’s a man kneeling on the floor with his face burrowed between her thighs. She’s opened her pajama top and he’s squeezing her breast as he licks her.

  “You should be done by now,” Nina whispers.

  “Okay,” he says, and gets up quickly.

  As he pulls some toilet paper off the roll and wipes his mouth, Caroline can see that the man is the security guard.

  “So where’s my money?” Nina holds out her hand.

  The guard starts digging around in his pocket.

  “Damn it, I just have eighty,” he says.
<
br />   “You told me you had five hundred.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I only have eighty.”

  Nina sighs and takes the money.

  Caroline hurries away and slides into her own cold little bedroom. She closes the door and turns on the light. She can see herself reflected in the black window and realizes that she’s visible to anyone outside. She stands to one side as she pulls the blind down, so she can’t be seen. For the first time in a long while, she feels afraid of the dark. She leans against the wall, suddenly remembering Tuula’s light blue eyes as she talked about various serial killers. She knows Tuula was frightened and only wanted the others to be scared too when she said that Vicky had followed them to the fishing village.

  Caroline decides to forget about brushing her teeth. Nothing can induce her to go back out into that cold hallway.

  She moves the chair to the door and tries to wedge its back under the handle, but it’s too short. She gets a stack of old magazines from the bookshelf and puts them underneath the rear legs until the back reaches the handle at an angle.

  She thinks she hears someone outside in the hallway and a shiver runs up and down her spine.

  There’s a sudden bang behind her. The window blind has snapped up and is now spinning.

  “Oh God.” She sighs and pulls it back down.

  She stands still in the room and listens. Then she turns off the ceiling light and hurries into bed, pulling the quilt tightly around her. As she waits for the sheets to warm up she stares fixedly at the door.

  She thinks about Vicky Bennet. Vicky, who seemed so shy and withdrawn. Caroline doesn’t think that she really did that awful thing; she just can’t wrap her mind around that. Before she can force her thoughts in another direction, she remembers the sight of Miranda’s crushed skull and the blood dripping from the lamp shade.

  There are footsteps in the hallway. They fall silent for a moment, then start again. Whoever it is stops outside her door. Caroline can hear the faint scrape of the door handle being pushed down. Then it stops. She shuts her eyes and prays to God, who loves little children.

  57

  In the middle of the night, a child’s car seat bumps against the dam by the hydroelectric plant at Bergeforsen, its gray plastic back barely breaking the glassy surface of the water. The car seat has floated here in the current of the Indal River.