The Fire Witness

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Flora appears at the top of the stairs. She looks very sad and there are dark rings around her eyes. Her face is bruised.

“There’s no one here,” she says. She bites her lip.

“Are you sure?”

She starts to cry and her voice breaks. “I’m sorry. I was so sure.”

She climbs down the stairs all the while apologizing, but without looking at him. She starts to walk back toward the ruined car.

Joona follows her. “How did you find your way here?” he asks. “Why did you think that the witness would be hiding here?”

“My foster parents’ wedding photo. The bell tower was in the background.”

“What does this have to do with Miranda?”

“The ghost said…” Flora falls silent.

“What is it?” asks Joona.

He thinks back to the drawing she made of Miranda with her hands in front of her face and the dark blood beside her head in the shape of a heart. She drew the picture not to deceive anyone but because she’d actually seen something and no longer remembers the circumstances.

When she was standing outside Carlén Antiques, Flora talked about the ghost as a memory. She tried to say that she remembered what the ghost had said.

A ray of sunlight streams out between the heavy rain clouds.

As a memory, he repeats. He looks at Flora’s pale face.

Yellow leaves are falling from the trees. All of a sudden, the pieces fall into place. Joona realizes how things fit. He feels as if he’s just pulled open the curtains and light is flooding in. He knows he has the key to the case. Flora is the witness hiding in the bell tower.

“You are her,” he whispers. He shudders at his own words.

She is the witness, but it wasn’t Miranda she saw being killed.

Someone else was killed in the same manner.

A different girl, but the same killer.

His instinct is so clear that it is followed by a sharp migraine. It feels as if a bullet is going right through his brain. He tries to find something to hold on to as he hears Flora’s voice through a great darkness. Then as suddenly as it arrived the pain disappears.

“You saw everything,” he says out loud.

“You’re bleeding,” Flora says.

He has a nosebleed. He finds a tissue in his pocket.

“Flora,” he says, “you were the witness hiding in the bell tower.”

“I haven’t seen anything,” she protests.

Joona holds the tissue to his nose. “You’ve just forgotten it.”

“But I wasn’t there. You know that. I have never been to Birgittagården.”

“It was something else you saw.”

“No,” Flora says, shaking her head.

“How old is the ghost?” asks Joona.

“Miranda is about fifteen whenever I’m dreaming, but when she’s real, when it looks like she’s right in the room with me, she’s a little girl.”

“How old?”

“About five.”

“How old are you now, Flora?”

Flora is fearful as she looks into his gray eyes.

“Forty,” she says in a low voice.

Joona has realized that Flora has been describing a murder that she witnessed as a child, but that she thought she was describing Miranda’s murder. He knows he’s right. He takes out his cell phone and calls Anja. Flora had seen what she’d been through only now, decades later. This is why her memories are so strong and confusing.

“Anja?” he asks when she picks up the phone. “Are you in front of your computer?”

“Are you in a better place?” she says, amused.

“Can you see if anything happened in Delsbo about thirty-five years ago?”

“Anything special?”

“A five-year-old girl would be involved.”

As Anja taps away on her computer, Joona watches Flora walk toward the church. She runs her hand over the façade. Then she goes inside. He follows her to keep her in sight. A hedgehog waddles away between a few gravestones.

Beyond the tree-lined boulevard, he can see the harvester in the field and the clouds of dust that rise behind it.

“Yes,” Anja says. “There was an unusual death thirty-five years ago. A five-year-old girl was found dead by Delsbo Church. Nothing more. The police wrote it off as an accident.”

Joona watches Flora turn around and look at him with a question in her eyes.

“What was the name of the policeman in charge of the investigation?”

“Torkel Ekholm.”

“Can you find an address for him?”