The Fire Witness

57

In the middle of the night, a child’s car seat bumps against the dam by the hydroelectric plant at Bergeforsen, its gray plastic back barely breaking the glassy surface of the water. The car seat has floated here in the current of the Indal River.

The river has been high since the snow melted in the Jämtland mountains. The power company has been partially opening the sluice gates as needed to prevent water from spilling over the dam. The heavy rainfall of the past few days has aggravated the threat, and the sluice gates are now wide open. For months, the Indal River resembled a lake, but now its current is strong and evident. The car seat hits the dam, whirls back a short way, and then bumps against it again.

Joona is running along the lane at the edge of the dam. On the far side, a slick concrete wall falls straight down a hundred feet. It’s dizzyingly tall. Water is gushing out of the dam’s gates with chaotic violence and churning over black rocks far below. But on this side of the dam, the shining river is almost at the brim. Two uniformed policemen and a guard from the power plant are standing farther along the lane. One of the policemen is pointing at the water below and the other has a boat hook.

A great deal of garbage has collected around the car seat. The river has brought empty plastic bottles, branches, spruce logs, and half-dissolved cardboard boxes to the dam. Joona joins the three men and looks at where the officer is pointing. The current is swirling the car seat around and it repeatedly bumps into the wall. Only its gray plastic back is visible. It’s impossible to tell whether a child is still strapped into the front.

“Turn it over,” Joona says.

The other policeman nods and leans as far as he can over the rail. He lets the boat hook break the surface of the water and he pulls a spruce log to the side. Then he moves the hook over to the car seat and lets it sink. He lifts it again carefully so that the hook will catch. He draws it up and there’s a splash when the car seat flips over. It’s empty. The unbuckled seat belts trail in the water.

Studying the car seat, Joona thinks that the child’s body could have slipped through the belts and sunk to the bottom.

“As I said on the phone,” the policeman says, “it appears to be the right car seat. It’s not noticeably beaten up, but it’s hard to see the details from here.”

“Tell the technicians to put it in a watertight plastic bag when they get it out of the water.”

The policeman lets the car seat go and it begins to tumble in the current again.

“Meet me at the bridge near Indal,” Joona says. He starts walking back to his car. “There’s a beach there for swimming, right?”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going swimming,” Joona says, without a trace of a smile. He keeps walking to his car.