The Fire Witness

178

It has taken Joona forty minutes to drive from Sundsvall to Hudiksvall. Now he has just turned west onto Highway 84 to Delsbo. All this time, he couldn’t let go of the thought of the photographs and mementos in Daniel Grim’s shoe box, so completely innocent at first glance. Perhaps the initial phase was always the same for him. A crush, with kisses, gazing, and words filled with longing.

Once the girls moved on, Daniel showed his twisted mind. He went to visit them in secret and then he killed them to ensure their silence. Their deaths surprised no one. Those who took pills were killed with overdoses; those who cut themselves had their wrists slashed.

The owners of the youth homes are profit-driven and probably didn’t want the deaths made public. They certainly wouldn’t have wanted the Ministry of Health to start any kind of investigation.

No one has ever connected those deaths to Daniel Grim.

But something went wrong with Miranda. It didn’t fit his pattern. Perhaps he panicked when Miranda told him she was pregnant. Perhaps she threatened to reveal his secret.

She shouldn’t have done that, because Daniel doesn’t like witnesses.

Joona is still feeling deeply troubled when he calls Torkel Ekholm to tell him that he’ll be there in ten minutes. He wonders if Flora is ready to go home.

“Oh my, I fell asleep,” the old policeman says. “Give me a moment.”

Joona hears Torkel put the phone down and shuffle across the floor. He’s already over the bridge at Badhusholmen when the old man picks the phone back up.

“Flora’s gone,” he says. “She’s taken my rifle.”

“Do you know where she might have gone?”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end. Joona pictures the little house, its kitchen table and embroideries.

“I think she went to the Rånnes’ manor house,” Torkel says.

Joona takes a sharp right onto Highway 743 instead of continuing to Torkel’s house. He hits the gas pedal. He radios the national communications center and requests backup and an ambulance to the Rånnes’ manor house. He’s reaching 110 kilometers an hour when he has to brake to swing between the gates and onto the lane leading to the manor house.

From a distance, the house looks like a great white ice sculpture. It seems darker the closer he gets. Joona stops in front and leaps from the car. He’s headed up the steps into the house when he catches sight of two figures walking around a wall and disappearing behind a huge red barn.

Joona understands what he’s glimpsed: Flora holding a rifle to Daniel’s back. Joona starts to run along the gravel road past the annex and down the slope on the western side of the shed. Flora is walking too close to Daniel, he thinks. Her brother could take the rifle away from her with no trouble at all. He knows she’s not ready to shoot him, that she doesn’t want to shoot him. She just wants the truth to come out.

Joona leaps over the remains of an old fence and slides down the slope. His hand rips through the weeds, but he keeps his balance.

He thinks they are somewhere behind the barn. Its black doors are wide open and shafts of sunlight are falling between its wide boards.

He runs past a rusty gasoline tank and is right at the huge barn when he hears the shot. The sound resonates among the buildings then dies away over the fields.

It’s too far to get around the barn and the wall. There’s not enough time. Perhaps it’s already too late.