The Fire Witness: A Novel Read online

  Pappa, Pappa, help me, Pappa!

  Joona knew that it couldn’t be real. He knew they were already dead. He still couldn’t bear it. He reached into the fire again and grabbed the girl’s hand.

  Then the gas tank exploded. Joona heard the bang just as his eardrums burst. He fell backward and felt the blow as his head hit the ground. His hands were empty. Blood trickled from his ears.

  His heart was screaming and burning.

  Before he lost consciousness, he watched the blazing pine needles come swirling down.

  190

  Joona is staring out the window and doesn’t hear the announcement that the plane has started its descent into Helsinki International Airport.

  Twelve years ago, he’d cut off the finger of the Devil himself, and his punishment had been loneliness. It was a high price, yet he felt that it was still too mild. The Devil was waiting to take more from him. The Devil was waiting for him to imagine that everything was forgotten or forgiven.

  Joona bends over in his seat and waits, trying to slow his breathing. The man sitting next to him looks at him nervously.

  It’s not the migraine, it’s that other thing, the immense darkness behind everything.

  He had stopped the serial killer Jurek Walter. That can’t be written off or forgotten.

  He had no choice, but the price was too high, much too high. It hadn’t been worth it.

  His skin is covered with goose bumps. He pulls at his hair with one hand. He presses his feet against the floor with all his strength.

  He is going to see Summa and Lumi. He is going to do the most unforgivable thing. Only as long as Jurek Walter believes they are dead are they safe.

  Perhaps he’s already leading the serial killer to his family.

  * * *

  Joona has left his cell phone in Stockholm. He’s using a forged passport and is paying for everything in cash. When he gets out of the taxi, he walks two blocks to the door of the apartment.

  He waits for a moment and then goes to a café down the street. He pays ten euros to borrow a phone and calls Saga Bauer.

  “I need help,” he says in a voice thick with emotion.

  “Don’t you know everyone is looking for you? Things have gone completely haywire here.”

  “I need help with one thing.”

  “Yes,” she says without hesitation.

  “When you’ve given me the information I need, erase the search history,” Joona says.

  “All right.”

  Joona swallows hard and looks at the slip of paper Rosa Bergman gave him. Then he asks Saga to search the Finnish health records for a woman named Laura Sandin who lives at Liisankatu 16 in Helsinki.

  “Let me call you back in a minute,” she says.

  “No, I’ll hang on while you search,” he says.

  Those minutes are the longest of his entire life. He stares at the glittering dust on the countertop. He looks at the espresso machine and the marks on the floor where chairs have been pushed in.

  “Joona?” Saga says at last.

  “I’m here,” Joona whispers.

  “Laura Sandin was diagnosed with liver cancer two years ago.”

  “Go on,” Joona says.

  “Well, she had surgery last year, a partial hepatectomy. And she … well…” Saga Bauer is whispering something to herself.

  “What is it?” Joona asks.

  Saga clears her throat and says, “She just had surgery again last week.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Apparently so. She’s still in the hospital.”

  191

  As Joona walks down the hospital corridor, it seems as if everything is sinking. His steps are heavy and the distant murmur of voices and televisions seems to get slower and slower.

  He opens the door to Summa’s room and walks in.

  A thin woman is in the bed, her back to the door.

  A light cotton curtain is drawn across the window. Her thin arms lie on top of the covers. Her hair is sweaty and dull.

  He doesn’t know if she’s sleeping or not. He must see her face. He walks up to her. The room is completely silent.

  * * *

  The woman who had been Summa Linna in another life is extremely tired. Her daughter sat up with her most of the night. Now Lumi is sleeping next door in the room reserved for relatives.

  Summa can see the weak light of dawn filtering through the curtain. She’s thinking that human beings are helplessly alone. She has a few good memories, which she tries to bring to mind when she feels most alone and frightened. When they put her under for the operation, she’d remembered the light, light summer nights of her childhood; the first hours after her daughter was born and her baby fingers wrapped around her own; the wedding that summer day when she wore the bridal crown her mother had woven from birch root.

  Summa swallows, fully aware of the life in her body. She is breathing and her heart is beating. She is so afraid of leaving Lumi all on her own.

  The stitches from her operation burn as she turns over. She closes her eyes, but then opens them again. Joona Linna is standing over her.

  She blinks a few times. Her message has reached him.

  He sits beside her on the bed and she reaches up to touch his face. She runs her hand through his thick blond hair.

  “If I die, you must take care of Lumi,” she says.

  “I promise.”

  “You must see her before you leave again,” Summa says. “You must see her.”

  He strokes her face and whispers she’s the most beautiful woman ever. She smiles at him. Then he leaves the room and Summa no longer feels so afraid.

  * * *

  The room for relatives is simply furnished. There’s a TV suspended from the ceiling and a pine table scarred with cigarette burns alongside a saggy corduroy sofa.

  A fifteen-year-old girl is lying on the sofa, fast asleep. Her eyes are swollen from too much crying. One of her cheeks is creased from the pattern of the cushion. She wakes with a start. Someone has put a blanket over her. Her shoes have been taken off. They are lined up on the floor by the sofa.

  Someone has been here. In her dream, she’d felt someone sit next to her and hold her hand.

  192

  Between Stockholm and Uppsala, on the old highway, is the old Löwenströmska Hospital. Gustaf Adolf Löwenström had it built at the beginning of the nineteenth century in penance for his family’s guilt. His brother had assassinated King Gustav III at a masquerade for the Royal Opera.

  Anders Rönn is thirty-three years old and has just received his license to practice medicine. He’s slender and has a handsome, sensitive face. He has just been hired to work at Löwenströmska and today is his first day on the job.

  The low sunlight of autumn is playing between the leaves of the trees as he enters the building.

  Behind the hospital’s modern main building there’s a structure that, from above, looks like two joined crosses. It’s the psychiatric unit, which includes a secure division for criminals sentenced to psychiatric care.

  A bronze sculpture of a boy playing the flute stands near the building on the forested hillside. There’s a bird sitting on the boy’s shoulder and another on his wide-brimmed hat. On one side of the pathway that leads to the building a park stretches out toward Fysingen Lake. On the other side, there’s a fifteen-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Inside it, there’s a shadow-filled dirt yard with cigarette butts around its single park bench.

  No visitors under the age of fourteen are allowed. Taking photographs or recordings is forbidden.

  Anders Rönn walks up the concrete path, underneath a canopy of flaking tin, and enters the building. He walks quietly across the bone-colored vinyl flooring, scuffed and stained with wheel marks. When he gets to the elevator, he sees that he’s already on the third floor of the building. The rest of it is underground, including the closed psychiatric ward, number 30.

  The elevator doesn’t go all the way down. Two floors down, behind a steel gate, ther
e’s a spiral staircase to the bunkerlike isolation unit. The unit has room for a maximum of three patients. For the past twelve years, there’s only been one: Jurek Walter.

  Anders has been told that Jurek Walter is sentenced to psychiatric care with special parole requirements, and that when he arrived, he was so aggressive that he was physically restrained and tranquilized.

  Nine years ago, he’d been diagnosed: schizophrenia (unspecified) with chaotic thinking. Acute psychotic condition with bizarre, extremely violent features.

  So far, that was the entire diagnosis.

  “I’m going to let you in now,” says a woman with round cheeks and calm eyes.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you know the patient, Jurek Walter?” she asks, but she doesn’t wait for an answer.

  193

  Anders hangs his keys in the cupboard before the woman opens the first door in the gate. He walks inside and waits as the door is shut behind him. Then he goes to the second door. The woman is listening for a signal, and when she hears it, she opens the second door. Anders turns and waves before he heads down the corridor to the staff lunch room.

  A powerful man of about fifty is waiting for him there. His shoulders are slumped and he’s smoking beneath the ventilator grille in the pantry. He nips off the end and throws it into the drain. He stuffs the half cigarette back into the pack, which he puts in the pocket of his lab coat.

  “Hi, Roland Brolin, chief physician,” he says, introducing himself.

  “Anders Rönn.”

  “Why did you end up here, out of all the possible jobs out there?” the chief physician asks.

  “I have young children and wanted to work near home,” Anders Rönn replies.

  “Well, you picked a hell of a day to start.” Roland Brolin smiles.

  He leads the way down the soundproof corridor to the security door, where he takes out his card and swipes it through a lock. He waits for the click from the steel door and then pushes it open with a deep sigh. He lets go of it before Anders has fully cleared it. The door hits him in the shoulder.

  “Is there anything I need to know about the patient?” asks Anders, blinking away the pain.

  Brolin waves his hand and rattles off a list: “He must never be alone with any employee. He is never to leave the premises under any circumstances. He may never meet another patient. He may never receive guests. He may never go to the recreation yard. Not even—”

  “Never?” Anders repeats, doubtfully. “It’s against regulations to keep a patient—”

  “So it is,” Roland says.

  The atmosphere chills between them. Finally Anders asks, “What has he done?”

  “Only nice things,” Roland says.

  “Such as?”

  They pass through a second security door. A woman with pierced cheeks waves at them.

  “Come back alive!” she says.

  “Don’t worry,” Roland says. “Jurek Walter is a quiet older man. He doesn’t fight or even raise his voice. He keeps to himself and we never enter his room. However, today we’ll have to go in, because the night shift observed him hiding a knife underneath his mattress.”

  “How the hell would he have gotten a knife?”

  Roland’s forehead is now sweaty. He wipes his hand over his face and dries it on his coat.

  “Jurek Walter can be extremely manipulative and … well, we’ll be doing an internal investigation. But who knows?”

  194

  The chief physician pulls his card through a third security lock and taps in a code. There’s a beep and the door opens.

  “So why would he want a knife?” asks Anders as he hurries through the door. “If he wanted to kill himself, he’d already have done so by now, right?”

  “Maybe he likes knives,” Roland replies.

  “Do you think he plans to escape?”

  “He hasn’t tried it once during all these years.”

  They have reached another locked gate.

  “Wait a minute,” Roland says. He holds out a small box with yellow earplugs.

  “You just said he doesn’t scream.”

  Roland looks extremely tired as if he hasn’t slept in weeks. He looks at his new colleague for a while and sighs heavily before he starts to explain.

  “Jurek Walter will talk to you, very calmly, very pleasantly,” he says. His tone is serious. “Later this evening, when you’re driving home, you’ll find yourself driving into the lane of oncoming traffic and crash into a truck, or you’ll go past a hardware store and buy an ax before you pick up your children from day care.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?” asks Anders with a smile.

  “Not really, but I want you to be careful,” Roland says. “I’ve had to enter his room once before, sometime last year, because he had a pair of scissors in there.”

  “He’s an old man, right?”

  “Don’t worry. We’re going to make it through this all right.”

  Roland’s voice dies away and his expression is vague and hard to read. Then he says, “Before you walk through these doors, make sure you look as bored as possible. Your days are boring, boring, boring. You act like you’re doing nothing that you haven’t done a thousand times before.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Roland’s face is tense. His gaze is hard and nervous.

  “We’re going to act as if we’re giving him his usual dose of Risperdal.”

  “But?”

  “But instead we’re giving him an overdose of Eutrexa,” the chief physician says.

  “Intentionally give an overdose?”

  “I did it the last time, so, yes, all right. At first he was extremely aggressive. It lasted a short time. Then the muscle relaxant worked. First the face and tongue—he wasn’t able to speak properly. Then he fell on the floor and lay on his side. He was breathing. Then there were a number of cramps, like epilepsy. It took a while. After that, he was tired and dazed, almost out of it, unable to move. When that happens this time, we’ll run in and grab the knife.”

  “Why not just use a barbiturate?”

  “That would be better,” Roland nods. “But it’s best to keep to the kinds of drugs he’s already getting.”

  They walk through the final grid gate into the ward devoted to Jurek Walter. Ahead is a metal door painted white, with a small bulletproof glass window, a boom, and a slot.

  Roland Brolin gestures to Anders to wait. He is moving cautiously.

  Perhaps he is afraid of being surprised.

  He keeps his distance from the glass and moves sideways. Then his face relaxes and he waves to Anders to join him. They stand in front of the window and look into a large room without windows.

  195

  A man in blue jeans and a denim shirt is sitting on a plastic chair. He’s leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Then his blue eyes look up at the door and Roland Brolin takes a step back.

  Jurek Walter is clean-shaven and his gray hair has been combed with a straight part. His face is unnaturally white and deeply furrowed with wrinkles. It’s a net of pain.

  Roland walks back to the grid gate and unlocks a cupboard. He takes out three small glass vials with wide necks and aluminum caps. He adds two milliliters of water to each bottle, turns them upside down, and then swirls them carefully so that the powder dissolves in the liquid. Then he draws the liquid into a needle.

  They walk up to the bulletproof glass on the door. Jurek Walter is now sitting on his bed. Roland puts his earplugs into his ears and then opens the slot in the door.

  “Jurek Walter,” he says in a relaxed voice. “It’s time…”

  Anders watches the man get up from the bed and walk to the door while unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Stop and take off your shirt,” Roland says, although the man is already doing so.

  Jurek Walter walks slowly toward them.

  Roland shuts the slot and fastens it with movements that are just a bit too fast, too nervous. Jurek stops and slips out of his shirt. He has thr
ee round scars on his chest. His skin hangs limply from his arms.

  Roland opens the slot again and Jurek walks the last few steps.

  “Hold out your arm,” Roland says. A slight hiccup betrays his fear.

  Jurek puts his arm through the slot but does not look at Roland at all. He’s staring intently at Anders.

  Roland jabs the needle into an upper-arm muscle and injects the liquid quickly. Jurek’s hand jerks in surprise, but he does not withdraw his arm until he has received permission.

  Roland shuts the slot and locks it as swiftly as he can. Jurek Walter stumbles back toward his bed. He sits down. His movements are jerky. Roland drops the needle and they watch it roll across the concrete floor.

  When they look back through the glass, it’s misty. Jurek Walter has breathed on it. He’s written a single word backward in the haze: JOONA.

  “What’s that say?” asks Anders, his voice weak.

  “He’s written ‘Joona.’”

  “Joona? What the hell does that mean?”

  Before the haze dissipates, they look in. Jurek Walter is sitting on his bed as if he’d never moved.

  also by lars kepler

  The Hypnotist

  The Nightmare

  a note about the author

  Lars Kepler is the pseudonym for a literary couple who live and write in Sweden. Their novels, including The Fire Witness, The Nightmare, and The Hypnotist, have been number-one bestsellers in more than a dozen countries, including France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Denmark.

  Sarah Crichton Books

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2011 by Lars Kepler

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Laura A. Wideburg