The Fire Witness

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When the fire behind the large barn has been put out, only two blackened bodies are left, entwined in a pile of ashes.

The ambulance drives away with Flora.

Just as it is leaving, the old woman walks out. The lady of the manor stands completely still as if she froze the moment the wall of pain hit her.

Joona starts to drive back to Stockholm. He is listening to the Radio Book Club, but he’s thinking about the weapons Daniel used at Birgittagården.

The hammer and the rock had confused him.

Now it’s clear. Elisabet was not killed because the killer needed her keys. Daniel had his own key to the isolation room. Elisabet must have seen him, and he must have known she had. He followed her and killed her solely because she had witnessed him murder Miranda.

Rain, hard as glass, spatters the windshield. A ray of the setting sun pierces the clouds and steam rises from the asphalt.

Daniel probably went in to Miranda after he thought Elisabet had taken her sleeping pills and gone to bed. Miranda did as he asked because she did not have a choice.

She took off her clothes and sat with the blanket around her to keep her warm.

Something went wrong that night.

Perhaps Miranda told him she was pregnant. Perhaps he found the pregnancy test in her room. Perhaps he felt suffocated. Perhaps he panicked. Joona may never know. But he does know that something made Daniel decide that he had to get rid of a problem, that Miranda was a problem.

Joona can picture him putting on the boots that always stood in the hallway, going outside, and searching the garden for a sharp rock. Then he returns, tells her to shut her eyes and place her hands over her face, and hits her again and again.

She was not supposed to see him. She was supposed to have her hands over her face, just as Ylva had all those years ago.

Nathan Pollock had interpreted the covered face as a sign that the killer wanted to make the girl into an object before he killed her. The reality, Joona thinks, was that Daniel was in love with Miranda and he wanted her to put her hands over her eyes so that she wouldn’t be frightened.

He’d had plenty of time to prepare the deaths of the other girls, but not Miranda’s. He beat her to death without thinking of what would happen next.

At some point in the middle of this-as he hit her with the rock, lifted her onto the bed, and covered her face again-Elisabet burst in on him. Perhaps the sound of his car woke her.

Perhaps he’d already gotten rid of the rock. Perhaps he’d thrown it far into the forest.

Daniel hunted Elisabet down, grabbing a hammer from somewhere, following her into the brewery, and ordering her to cover her face before he hit her.

When Elisabet was dead, he decided to place the blame on the new girl, Vicky Bennet. He knew that she took strong sleeping pills, which meant she’d slept through the events of that evening.

Daniel had to hurry. Any minute someone could wake up. He took Elisabet’s key to the isolation room from her ring of keys, returned to the main building, put the key in the isolation room lock, scooped up Miranda’s blood, went to Vicky’s room, placed the hammer under her pillow, and smeared the blood on her sleeping body. Then he left the grounds.

He’d probably used garbage bags or some newspapers to protect his car while he drove back to his house. He probably burned them along with his clothes in the cast-iron stove.

Afterward, he had to stay nearby to see if anyone was figuring out what had happened. He played the role of helpful director as well as victim.

Joona is nearing Stockholm. The Radio Book Club is almost over. They’d been discussing Gösta Berling’s Saga by Selma Lagerlöf.

Joona turns off the radio and puzzles through the rest of the case.

When Vicky was arrested and Daniel heard that Miranda had told her about the face-covering game, he realized he was vulnerable. His secret would be revealed if Vicky had the chance to tell her story to a competent psychologist, and one would have been assigned to her in jail. That’s why Daniel did everything he could to make sure that Vicky was released-so he could arrange her suicide.

For most of his career, Daniel had worked with troubled girls who had neither parents who cared nor any sense of security. Whether he was acting on a conscious or unconscious level, he sought out those jobs and kept falling in love with little girls who reminded him of his first crush. Daniel used the girls and once they moved away, he made sure that they would never tell anyone about what he’d done.

Joona slows down for a red light and shudders. He thinks of the hours Daniel spent with these girls as their psychotherapist, twisting their minds; of all the reports he wrote detailing their insecurities, their hatred of themselves. He has met a number of killers in his work as a police officer, but Daniel’s careful preparations for these girls’ deaths-preparations he started long before he killed them, and probably shortly after he fell for them-makes him almost the worst killer Joona has ever dealt with. Only one other murderer was worse.