The Fire Witness: A Novel Page 14

  The river has been high since the snow melted in the Jämtland mountains. The power company has been partially opening the sluice gates as needed to prevent water from spilling over the dam. The heavy rainfall of the past few days has aggravated the threat, and the sluice gates are now wide open. For months, the Indal River resembled a lake, but now its current is strong and evident. The car seat hits the dam, whirls back a short way, and then bumps against it again.

  * * *

  Joona is running along the lane at the edge of the dam. On the far side, a slick concrete wall falls straight down a hundred feet. It’s dizzyingly tall. Water is gushing out of the dam’s gates with chaotic violence and churning over black rocks far below. But on this side of the dam, the shining river is almost at the brim. Two uniformed policemen and a guard from the power plant are standing farther along the lane. One of the policemen is pointing at the water below and the other has a boat hook.

  A great deal of garbage has collected around the car seat. The river has brought empty plastic bottles, branches, spruce logs, and half-dissolved cardboard boxes to the dam. Joona joins the three men and looks at where the officer is pointing. The current is swirling the car seat around and it repeatedly bumps into the wall. Only its gray plastic back is visible. It’s impossible to tell whether a child is still strapped into the front.

  “Turn it over,” Joona says.

  The other policeman nods and leans as far as he can over the rail. He lets the boat hook break the surface of the water and he pulls a spruce log to the side. Then he moves the hook over to the car seat and lets it sink. He lifts it again carefully so that the hook will catch. He draws it up and there’s a splash when the car seat flips over. It’s empty. The unbuckled seat belts trail in the water.

  Studying the car seat, Joona thinks that the child’s body could have slipped through the belts and sunk to the bottom.

  “As I said on the phone,” the policeman says, “it appears to be the right car seat. It’s not noticeably beaten up, but it’s hard to see the details from here.”

  “Tell the technicians to put it in a watertight plastic bag when they get it out of the water.”

  The policeman lets the car seat go and it begins to tumble in the current again.

  “Meet me at the bridge near Indal,” Joona says. He starts walking back to his car. “There’s a beach there for swimming, right?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going swimming,” Joona says, without a trace of a smile. He keeps walking to his car.

  58

  Joona stands at the point where the bridge meets the ground on the river’s north bank. He’s looking down the grassy slope, and at the floating swimming dock that stretches from the sandy edge of the beach out into the river’s current.

  The wind blows open his jacket.

  He walks away from the bridge along the edge of the road and feels the humidity rising from the grass; he can smell the scent of sweet fireweed. He stops, bends down, and picks up a small cube of glass hidden among the plants. He lets it sit in his palm and then looks at the water again.

  “Here’s where they drove off the road,” he says. He points out the direction.

  One policeman walks to the sandy beach and shakes his head.

  “There’s no sign of anything here. Nothing at all,” he calls back.

  “I’m sure I’m right,” Joona says.

  “Well, we’ll never know. There’s been too much rain,” the other policeman says.

  “It didn’t rain underneath the water,” Joona says.

  He strides past the two police officers to the water’s edge. Walking upstream, he catches sight of tire tracks in the shallows. Parallel tracks in the sand head straight out to the deep water.

  “Do you see anything?” yells one of the officers.

  “Yes, I do,” Joona shouts back, and then he walks into the river.

  The cool water swirls around his legs and tugs him gently to one side. It’s hard to see beneath the shimmering surface, but he can make out reeds dancing in the current. One of the policemen follows him into the river, swearing audibly. Now up to his thighs in the river, Joona makes out a dark form about thirty feet farther out.

  “Let me call for a diver,” says the policeman.

  Joona takes off his jacket and hands it to the officer as he keeps going.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to know if they’re dead,” Joona says. He hands his pistol to the officer, who is also thigh deep in the river, and wades farther out. The water is cold here and the current pulls at his pants.

  “Hey! There are logs floating in the river! You can’t go swimming around in there!” yells the other policeman from the shore.

  Joona keeps going. The riverbed is falling away beneath his feet and the water is up to his stomach. He dives in. His ears thud as water fills them. He opens his eyes. Rays of sunlight cut through the water. Mud whirls in the current. He kicks and glides deeper beneath the surface. Suddenly he can see the car. It’s slightly to the side of the wheel tracks. The current has already shifted it toward midstream.

  The red body panels glimmer. The windshield and the two side windows on the right are missing. Water glides through the interior.

  Joona swims closer, trying not to think about what he might find. Still, his brain flashes images of the girl in the driver’s seat, the seat belt diagonally across her body—her arms floating, her mouth open, her hair swirling.

  His heart is beating hard now. This deep below the surface everything is dim and silent. He reaches the rear door on the right side and grabs the empty window frame. The power of the river is drawing him away. There’s a groan of metal and the car shifts. Mud whirls up and he can’t see. He swims a few strokes. The cloud of mud clears and he can see again.

  About three meters above his head is the other world, drenched in sunlight. A waterlogged log is gliding just below the surface—a heavy projectile.

  Joona’s lungs are starting to spasm. The water current is strong down here.

  Joona grabs the empty window opening and sees that blood is flowing from his hand. He forces his body down and tries to look inside the Toyota.

  The car is empty. There is nobody there—no girl, no child. The windshield is gone. The bodies could have been washed out through the gap and drifted along the bottom of the river. He quickly registers the area around the car. There’s nothing to catch a child’s body. The stones are rounded and the plants are sparse.

  His lungs are screaming for oxygen, but he knows he has just a bit more time. His body has learned to wait. When he was in the navy, he often had to swim twelve kilometers carrying the signal flag. He’s left a submarine with an emergency balloon. He’s swum beneath the ice of the Gulf of Finland. He can go without oxygen for a few more seconds.

  He swims around the car and searches the smooth riverbed. The water pulls him like a strong wind. Shadows from the logs above pass swiftly over the bottom.

  Vicky drove off the road, down the beach, and into the water. The windows were already broken from crashing into the traffic light in Indal. The car would have filled with water immediately but kept going for a few seconds before it settled on the riverbed.

  But where are the bodies?

  He sees something shining among the stones. It’s a pair of glasses that have tumbled away from the car. Joona swims over and grabs them as they are about to whirl farther downstream. Bright spots flash before his eyes. He’s out of time. He kicks, swimming up blindly. He breaks the surface and draws air into his lungs. He doesn’t see the log until just before it hits his shoulder. It hurts so much he howls. His shoulder has been dislocated by the force of the blow. Joona finds himself underwater again. The ringing in his ears sounds like church bells calling him to service. Above him, the sun flares in broken rays.

  59

  The police on shore watch as the log slams into Joona, and within moments they are in the river, swimming out to grab him. They drag him
up onto the beach.

  “I’m sorry,” Joona manages to pant. “I just needed to know…”

  “Where did the log hit you?”

  “There aren’t any bodies in the car,” Joona says. The pain in his shoulder is excruciating.

  “Let’s take a look at your arm,” says an officer.

  “Shit,” another whispers.

  Blood has spread through Joona’s soaked shirt and his arm hangs at a weird angle. It’s dangling loosely from its tendons.

  They take the glasses from his good hand and put them in a plastic bag.

  One of the police officers drives him at top speed the twenty-nine kilometers to Sundsvall hospital. Joona sits quietly, his eyes shut, and holds his arm close to his chest. In spite of the pain, he tells the other officer how the current had shifted the car over the riverbed and the direction of the water flowing through the broken windows.

  “The children weren’t there,” he says, barely audible.

  “Bodies can float pretty far in the current,” the officer replies. “There’s no reason to start a diving search just yet. Either they will be snagged by something and never surface, or they’ll end up at the dam just like the car seat did.”

  At the hospital, two cheerful, chatty nurses who could be mother and daughter get him out of his wet clothes, but when they see his arm, they fall silent. They clean him up and take him to the X-ray unit.

  Twenty minutes later, a doctor comes in to report that nothing is broken, the clavicle is intact, but Joona’s shoulder is dislocated. Joona lies on his stomach, his arm hanging straight down, and the doctor injects twenty milligrams of lidocaine directly into the joint. Then the doctor sinks to the floor. He pulls the arm down while the two nurses press it back into position. Joona bites hard on a towel. Then he hears a crack, and he finds to his relief he can release his breath. And think. The car with Vicky Bennet and Dante had disappeared on a stretch of the road without intersections. And with the press hounding them, the police had searched every possible place a vehicle could be hidden. But what Joona realized when he saw the car seat at the dam was this: If the car had gone off the road and into the river, there was only one spot where it could have happened without being spotted. After Indal, Highway 86 swings to the right and over the bridge. There, Vicky must have missed the turn and headed the car straight down the riverbank and into the water.

  The hard rain would have washed away the tracks on the sandy beach. And given its broken windows, the river would have rushed in to fill the car. In just a few moments, it would have disappeared from sight.

  60

  The air is cool inside the police garage, and Joona is thankful for it as he walks down the stairs, his arm in a dark blue sling.

  A large plastic tent covers the car Vicky Bennet stole. Police used a four-point suspension crane to salvage it from the Indal River, then wrapped it in plastic and transported it here. All the seats have been removed and set aside. Plastic bags containing everything found inside the car have been marked and placed on a long bench. Joona takes a look at the secured evidence. There are fingerprints from Pia, Vicky, and Dante. There are bags of glass splinters, hairs, and fibers, an empty water bottle, a tennis shoe, which most likely belonged to Vicky, and the boy’s tiny pair of glasses.

  The door to the garage office opens and Holger Jalmert comes out holding a folder.

  “You wanted to point out something to me,” Joona says.

  “Yes, it’s just as well,” Holger says and sighs. He gestures toward the car. “The entire windshield is gone. You saw that yourself when you dove down into the water. It was knocked out when the car collided with the traffic light. Unfortunately, I’ve found a few strands of hair from the boy in the windshield frame.”

  “That’s sad to hear,” Joona says. A wave of loneliness washes over him.

  “Well, it’s what everyone suspected.”

  Joona takes a look at the photograph of the strands of hair on the right side of the jagged windshield frame and at an enlargement showing that the hairs were pulled out by their roots. The only way hair could have been ripped from Dante’s head was if he’d been thrown from the child seat, over the front seat, through the windshield frame, and into the river. Joona imagines the child hurtling through the car and being carried off by the strong current.

  Vicky Bennet hadn’t killed the boy, he realizes. She’d kept him with her in the car.

  “Is it your opinion that the boy was alive when the car hit the water?” he asks.

  “Yes. Probably he was knocked out and drowned, but we’ll have to wait until the bodies appear at the dam to know for sure.”

  Holger shows Joona a plastic bag containing a red water pistol. “I have a little boy, too…” He stops speaking and sits down in an office chair.

  Joona rests his good hand on Holger’s shoulder.

  “We’ll have to tell the mother that we’re going to stop the search and wait and see,” Holger says, and he turns away.

  * * *

  It’s unusually quiet at the small police station. A few men in uniform are standing around talking near the coffee machine. A woman is typing on her computer. The twilight outside is heavy and gray, like an endless dreary day at school.

  When the front door opens and Pia Abrahamsson enters, the men stop talking. She is wearing jeans and a tight denim jacket. Her nut-brown hair hanging from beneath her black beret is unwashed. She’s not wearing makeup and her eyes look exhausted, terrified.

  Mirja Zlatnek gets up quickly and pulls up a chair.

  “I don’t want to sit down,” Pia says weakly.

  “We asked you to come here because we fear that…”

  Pia steadies herself with a hand on the back of the chair but stays standing.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Mirja says, “what I’m trying to say is that…”

  “Yes?”

  “No one believes that they can still be alive.”

  Pia doesn’t react. She doesn’t break into sobs. She just nods slightly and licks her lips.

  “Why do you believe that?” she asks, softly and strangely.

  “We have found your car,” Mirja says. “She drove it off the road and it landed in the river. The car was at a depth of twelve feet. It was heavily damaged and…”

  Mirja’s voice fades away.

  “I want to see my son,” Pia says with the same disturbing calm. “Where is his body?”

  “It is … We haven’t found it yet, but—this is difficult—the decision was made to stop the search. The divers haven’t found anything.”

  “But…”

  Pia Abrahamsson’s hand reaches for the silver cross she’s wearing underneath her shirt, but stops over her heart.

  “Dante is just four years old,” she says. “He can’t swim.”

  “I understand,” Mirja says, looking stricken.

  “But he … he does like playing in the water,” Pia whispers.

  Her chin begins to tremble. She moves slowly, like an old and broken woman, as she finally sits down.

  61

  Elin Frank gets out of the gym shower and crosses the polished stone floor to the large mirror over the double washbasins. She dries off with a warm towel. Before the shower, she spent some time in the sauna and her skin is still hot and damp as she pulls on the black kimono Jack gave her the year they separated.

  She leaves the bathroom and walks over the white parquet floor past all the pale rooms to her bedroom, where she’s already laid out a copper-colored dress from Karen Millen and golden panties from Dolce & Gabbana. She hangs up the kimono, perfumes herself with La Perla, and waits a moment before putting on her clothes.

  When she reaches the large salon, she sees Robert quickly hide the telephone behind his back. Worry sweeps through her, landing like a black stone in her gut.

  “What’s going on?”

  Robert’s boyish, striped T-shirt has pulled free from his white jeans. His round stomach is visible. He shouldn’t have a little stomach. />
  “The photographer from French Vogue is ten minutes late,” he says, but he avoids her gaze.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at the newspapers,” Elin says, trying to keep her voice light. “Do you know if the police have found Vicky yet?” For the past two days, she hasn’t dared listen to the news or read the paper. Both nights she’s taken a sleeping pill at ten p.m. and another at three just to get some rest. “Have you heard anything?”

  Robert scratches his head.

  “Elin, I really don’t want to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset, but—”

  “No one can connect you to any of this.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the situation,” Elin says, trying to appear nonchalant.

  “You’re not a part of any of this,” he says stubbornly.

  Elin smiles at him coolly. “Do I have to get angry with you?”

  Robert shakes his head and tucks his T-shirt in.

  “I caught the end of the news as I was driving over,” he says. “Apparently they’ve found the car in the river. I think they were searching with divers.”

  Elin quickly turns her face away. Her lips are trembling and her heart is beating so hard she feels it will break.

  “It doesn’t sound good,” she says in an empty voice.

  “Would you like me to turn on the television?”

  “No, that’s not necessary,” she whispers.

  “It’ll be sad, of course, if they’ve drowned.”

  “Don’t be so blasé,” Elin says.

  She has to swallow but her throat hurts.

  62

  Elin has a vivid memory of the day Vicky arrived. The girl was standing inside the hallway, with a closed face and yellowing bruises on her arms. She’d never even fantasized about having children, but the minute she saw Vicky she realized how much she longed for one. Vicky was the daughter she’d always wanted.