The Fire Witness

115

They leave the building to the happy shrieks of children. The balloons on the apartment door are bumping against each other in the breeze.

They walk out to the sidewalk and into the glare of the setting sun. Tobias stops to look at Joona. He scratches one of his eyebrows and then starts sliding away while peering down the street.

“You were about to tell me where she could be hiding,” Joona says.

“I don’t even remember his name,” Tobias says, shading his eyes with his hand. “He’s the stepfather of a girl I used to know, Mickan. I know she used to sleep on a sofa bed at his place, near Mosebacke Square. Don’t know why I’m going on and on.”

“You know the address?”

Tobias shakes his head and pulls at the heavy suitcase.

“A little white house across from the theater,” he says.

Joona watches him disappear around the corner with his stolen goods. He thinks about driving to Mosebacke Square and knocking on doors, but something is holding him to this place. A rising sense of unease chills him. It’s evening, and it’s been a while since he ate or slept. It’s getting more difficult to hold his headache at bay and to keep thinking. Joona starts to walk toward his car but then stops. He’s just figured out what didn’t fit.

He has to smile to himself.

How could he have missed it? He must be very tired not to realize it until now. Perhaps it was too obvious, like the missing link in a classic detective novel.

Tobias said he’d followed the case in the tabloids, yet he talked to Joona as if Vicky were alive. Journalists throughout the country have been writing and broadcasting since Wednesday that Vicky and Dante drowned in the Indal River. They’ve been howling about the thoughtlessness of the police in aggravating the mother’s suffering by categorizing Vicky’s file as a missing person report.

Tobias knows that Vicky is alive.

This brings to mind an earlier observation.

Joona is sure he has recently seen something without realizing its significance, so instead of following Tobias, he turns around and returns to Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9.

He remembers the pink balloon that fell from the door and rolled weightlessly across the marble floor of the foyer. There were a number of footprints made by children. They’d been playing and running back and forth from the inner courtyard.

Joona thinks that Vicky could be barefoot since she’d lost her shoes in the river. He opens the front door and scrutinizes the floor and sees that his mind did catch something correctly.

One pair of the bare footprints leads directly from the front to the basement door but not back again.