The Fire Witness

78

Joona parks his car outside the Statoil gas station in Dingersjö, 360 kilometers north of Stockholm. It’s a sunny day and the breeze is brisk. Ragged advertising flags are flapping in the wind.

Joona and Disa had been having lunch at Villa Källhagen when Joona received a call from a nervous Sonja Rask, the policewoman.

Now Joona is walking into the shop. A hollow-eyed man with a Statoil cap is placing paperback books in a rack. Joona looks at the menu over the counter and then at the hot dogs rotating on the grill.

“What would you like?” asks the man.

“Makkarakeitto,” Joona answers in Finnish.

“Suomalainen makkarakeitto,” Ari Määtilainen says with a smile. “My grandmother used to make sausage soup when I was a boy.”

“With rye bread on the side?” asks Joona.

“Yes indeed. But here there’s only Swedish food,” he says, gesturing to the hot dogs and hamburgers.

“Well, I’m not really here to eat. I’m from the police,” Joona says.

“I realized that. I talked to one of your colleagues the night I saw them,” Ari says and points at the monitor for the security cameras.

“What did you see that made you call?”

“A girl and a little boy at the back of the building.”

“You saw them on the screen?”

“Right.”

“Clearly?”

“Well, I’m used to keeping an eye open.”

“Did the police come here that night?”

“This guy Gunnarsson stopped by the next morning and didn’t think there was much to the video. He told me I could erase it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“What do you think?”

“I imagine you’ve kept a copy on an external hard drive.”

Ari Määtilainen smiles and shows Joona to the minuscule office beside the storage area. A sofa bed is open and some empty cans of Red Bull are lying on the floor. A carton of milk is standing in the frosty window. On a school desk, there’s a laptop computer connected to an external hard drive. Ari Määtilainen sits down on a plastic chair and quickly goes through the files.

“I’d heard on the radio that everyone was looking for a girl and a little boy, and this is what I saw in the middle of the night,” he says as he opens a file.

Joona leans forward to get a better look. There are four small squares showing the inside and outside of the gas station. A counter in the corner of each square ticks away the time. The gray pictures don’t move. Ari is sitting behind the counter. Every once in a while, he turns the page of a newspaper and eats an onion ring.

“This long-haul truck was there for three hours,” Ari tells Joona. He points at one of the pictures. “Now it’s about to move.”

They see a dark shadow in the driver’s seat.

“Can you enlarge the picture?” asks Joona.

“Just a moment.”

A grove of trees is suddenly lit up by the headlights of the truck. Sensors outside detect motion and banks of lights go on.

Ari points at the second exterior picture and changes it to full screen.

“You can see them here,” he whispers.

The long-haul truck is starting to roll forward. Ari points at the back of the gas station with the garbage bins and the recycling boxes. There are many shadows and it’s still. Then there’s movement next to the black glass of the entrance to the car wash. A small figure appears-a thin being pressed against the wall.

The picture is grainy and flickers. It’s hard to make out the face or other details. However, it’s obviously a girl. And now there’s something else.

“Can you make the picture clearer?” asks Joona.

“Just wait,” Ari whispers.

The long-haul truck is turning toward the exit ramp. Light floods the door beside the figures and the glass turns blinding white for a second. Then the entire back of the gas station building is bathed in light.

Joona can see that it definitely is a thin girl standing there with a child. They’re looking at the long-haul truck. Then they turn black again.

Ari points at the screen as both figures run along the dark gray wall and disappear from the picture.

“You saw them?” Ari asks.

“Can you show it to me again?”

Ari moves the cursor back to where the two figures are briefly lit up. He plays the video extremely slowly.

It appears that the long-haul truck is barely moving. In jerks, the light goes from the grove of trees, over the back wall of the station, and starts to fill the windows with white light.

The smaller child is looking down and its face is in shadow. The thin girl is barefoot and it looks like she is carrying plastic bags in both hands. The headlights reach them and the girl starts to lift her hand.

Joona sees that she’s not carrying plastic bags. Her wrists are wrapped in bandages that have partially come undone and are hanging loosely and swaying in the light. Vicky Bennet and Dante Abrahamsson did not drown in the river.

The digital clock says 2:14 a.m.

Somehow, the two children managed to get out of the car and cross the river. They reached the other shore and traveled seventy-two kilometers farther south.

Hair hangs in tangled strands over the girl’s face. Her dark eyes shine and then the two figures move out of the frame.

They’re alive, Joona thinks. They’re both still alive.