Читать книгу: «The Fire Witness», страница 2
4
The dog is barking at her as it runs about, panting and moaning. Elisabet limps away from the house, across the dark driveway. The dog barks again, ragged and anxious. Elisabet knows she won’t be able to get through the forest – the nearest farm is half an hour’s drive away. There’s nowhere to go. She looks around in the darkness, then creeps behind the drying house. She reaches the old brew-house and opens the door with shaking hands, goes inside, and carefully closes the door.
Gasping, she sinks to the floor and tries to find her telephone.
‘Oh God, oh God …’
Elisabet’s hands are shaking so badly that she drops it on the floor. The back comes loose and the battery falls out. She starts to pick up the pieces as she hears footsteps crunching across the gravel.
She holds her breath.
Her pulse is thudding through her body. Her ears are roaring. She tries to look out through the low window.
The dog is barking right outside. Buster has followed her there. He’s scratching at the door and whimpering.
She crawls further into the corner next to the brick fireplace, and tries to breathe quietly, hiding right at the back next to the wood basket, as she pushes the battery back into her mobile.
Elisabet lets out a scream when the door to the brew-house opens. She tries to shuffle along the wall in panic, but there’s nowhere to go.
She sees a pair of boots, then the shadowy figure, and then the terrible face, and the hand holding the dark, heavy hammer.
She nods, listens to the voice, and covers her face.
The shadow hesitates, then rushes across the floor, holds her down on the floor with one foot, and strikes hard. There’s a flash of pain at the front of her head, just above her hairline. Her sight disappears completely. The pain is appalling, but she can still feel the warm blood running over her ears and down her neck like a soft caress.
The next blows hits the same place, her head lurches, and all she can feel is how air is being drawn down into her lungs.
Bewildered, she can’t help thinking that the air is wonderfully sweet, then she loses consciousness.
Elisabet doesn’t feel the rest of the blows and how they make her body flinch. She doesn’t notice the keys to the office and the isolation room being taken from her pocket, and she isn’t aware of being left on the floor, or how the dog slips into the brew-house and starts to lick the blood from her crushed head as life slowly leaves her.
5
Someone’s left a big red apple on the table. It looks really lovely, all shiny. She decides to eat it and then pretend not to know anything about it. Ignore the questions and nagging, just sit there looking grumpy.
She reaches towards it, but when she’s got it in her hand she realises that it’s completely rotten.
Her fingers sink into the cold, wet flesh.
Nina Molander wakes up the moment she snatches her hand back. It’s the middle of the night. She’s lying in bed. The only sound is the dog barking out in the yard. Her new medication often wakes her at night, and she has to get up to pee. Her calves and feet have swollen up, but she needs the pills, otherwise her thoughts turn very dark and she stops caring about anything and just lies there with her eyes shut.
She feels she needs something bright, something to look forward to. Not just death, not just thinking about death.
Nina folds the covers back, sets her feet down on the warm wooden floor, and gets out of bed. She’s fifteen years old, and has straight blonde hair. She’s got a stocky build, with broad hips and big breasts. Her white flannel nightdress is stretched tight across her stomach.
The children’s home is quiet, and the corridor is lit up by the green sign for the emergency exit.
She can hear strange whispering behind one door, and Nina wonders if the other girls are having a party without bothering to ask if she’d like to join in.
I don’t want to anyway, she thinks.
There’s the smell of a burned-out fire in the air. The dog starts barking again. The floor in the corridor is colder. She doesn’t bother trying to be quiet. She feels like slamming the toilet door several times. She couldn’t care less about Almira getting angry and throwing things at her.
The old tiles creak gently. Nina carries on towards the toilets, but stops when she feels something wet under her right foot. A dark puddle is seeping out from under the door to the isolation room where Miranda is sleeping. At first Nina just stands still, unsure of what to do, but then she notices that the key is in the lock.
Very odd.
She reaches out for the shiny handle, opens the door, goes inside and switches the light on.
There’s blood everywhere – dripping, shining, oozing.
Miranda is lying on the bed.
Nina takes a few steps back, doesn’t even notice that’s she’s wet herself. She reaches out to the wall for support as she sees the bloody shoeprints on the floor, and thinks she’s going to faint.
She turns around and rushes out into the corridor, opens the door of the next room, turns the light on and goes over and shakes Caroline’s shoulder.
‘Miranda’s hurt,’ she whispers. ‘I think she’s been hurt.’
‘What are you doing in my room?’ Caroline asks, sitting up in bed. ‘What the hell’s the time?’
‘There’s blood on the floor!’ Nina shouts.
‘Just calm down.’
6
Nina is breathing far too fast as she looks into Caroline’s eyes. She has to make her understand, but at the same time is surprised by her own voice, and the fact that she’s dared to shout in the middle of the night.
‘There’s blood everywhere!’
‘Be quiet,’ Caroline hisses, and gets out of bed.
Nina’s cries have woken the others; she can already hear voices from the other rooms.
‘Come and look!’ Nina says, scratching her arms anxiously. ‘Miranda looks funny, you have to come and look at her, you …’
‘Can you just calm down? I’ll come and look, but I’m sure …’
They hear a scream from the corridor. It’s little Tuula. Caroline hurries out. Tuula is staring into the isolation room, her eyes open wide. Indie comes out into the corridor, scratching one armpit.
Caroline pulls Tuula away, but still has time to see the blood on the walls and Miranda’s white body. Her heart is beating fast. She stands in Indie’s way, thinking that none of them need to see any more suicides.
‘There’s been an accident,’ she explains quickly. ‘Can you take everyone to the dining room, Indie?’
‘Has something happened to Miranda?’ Indie asks.
‘Yes, we need to wake Elisabet.’
Lu Chu and Almira come out from the same room. Lu Chu is only wearing a pair of pyjama trousers, and Almira is wrapped in the duvet.
‘Go to the dining room,’ Indie says.
‘Can I wash my face first?’ Lu Chu asks.
‘Take Tuula with you.’
‘What the hell is going on?’ Almira asks.
‘We don’t know,’ Caroline replies curtly.
While Indie tries to get everyone into the dining room, Caroline hurries along the corridor to the staff’s overnight room. She knows Elisabet takes sleeping pills and never hears when any of the girls are running about at night.
Caroline bangs on the door as hard as she can.
‘Elisabet, you have to wake up,’ she cries.
No response. Not a sound.
Caroline carries on, past the registration room to the nurses’ office. The door is open, so she goes in, picks up the phone and calls Daniel, the first person she thinks of.
The line crackles.
Indie and Nina come into the office. Nina’s lips are white, she’s moving weirdly, and her body’s shaking.
‘Wait in the dining room,’ Caroline snaps.
‘What about the blood? Did you see the blood?’ Nina screams, drawing blood as she scratches her right arm.
‘Daniel Grim,’ a tired voice says over the phone.
‘It’s me, Caroline – there’s been an accident here, and Elisabet won’t wake up, I can’t wake her, so I called you, I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’ve got blood on my feet,’ Nina yells. ‘I’ve got blood on my feet …’
‘Calm down,’ Indie shouts, and tries to take Nina out of the room.
‘What’s going on?’ Daniel asks in a voice that’s suddenly very awake, and very focused.
‘Miranda’s in the cell, it’s full of blood,’ Caroline replies, then swallows hard. ‘I don’t know what we …’
‘Is she badly hurt?’ he asks.
‘Yes, I think … well, I …’
‘Caroline,’ Daniel interrupts. ‘I’m going to call an ambulance, then …’
‘But what should I do? What should …’
‘See if Miranda needs help, and try to wake Elisabet,’ Daniel replies.
7
The emergency call centre in Sundsvall is located in a three-storey brick building on Björneborgsgatan, next to Bäckparken. Jasmin doesn’t usually have any trouble with the night-shift, but she’s feeling unusually tired now. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and the worst part of the night has passed. She’s sitting in front of the computer with her headset on, and blows on the mug of black coffee. In the staffroom they’re still laughing and joking. The day before, the tabloids ran a story about one of the police’s emergency operators earning a bit extra on the side, from telephone sex. It turned out that she just had an administrative job with a company that ran sex chat-lines, but the tabloids made it sound like she was dealing with both types of call in the emergency call centre.
Jasmin looks past the screen and out through the window. It hasn’t started to get light yet. An articulated lorry rumbles past. There’s a streetlamp further along the road. Its weak light illuminates a tree, a grey electricity box, and a stretch of empty pavement.
Jasmin puts her coffee cup down and takes an incoming call.
‘SOS 112 … What’s the nature of the emergency?’
‘My name is Daniel Grim, I’m a counsellor at the Birgitta Home. One of the residents has just called me. It sounded extremely serious, you have to get out there.’
‘Can you tell me what’s happened?’ Jasmin asks as she searches for the Birgitta Home on the computer.
‘I don’t know, one of the girls called. I didn’t really understand what she was saying, there was a lot of shouting in the background, and she was crying and saying there was blood all over the room.’
Jasmin gestures to her colleague Ingrid Sandén that they need more operators.
‘And are you at the scene yourself?’ Jasmin says through the headset.
‘No, I’m at home, I was asleep, but one of the girls called …’
‘You’re talking about the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås?’ Jasmin asks calmly.
‘Please, hurry up,’ he says in a shaky voice.
‘We’re sending police and an ambulance to the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås,’ Jasmin repeats, just to be sure.
She transfers the call to Ingrid, who goes on talking to Daniel while Jasmin alerts the police and paramedics.
‘The Birgitta Home is a children’s home, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, a secure children’s home,’ he replies.
‘Shouldn’t there be some staff there?’
‘Yes, my wife Elisabet is on duty, I’m about to call her … I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know anything.’
‘The police are on their way,’ Ingrid says calmly, and from the corner of her eye sees the flashing blue lights of the first emergency vehicle sweep across the deserted street.
8
The narrow turning off Highway 86 leads straight into the dark forest, toward Himmelsjön and the Birgitta Home.
The grit crunches beneath the tyres of the police car. The headlights play across the tall trunks of the pines.
‘You said you’d been out here before?’ Rolf Wikner asks, changing up to fourth gear.
‘Yes … a couple of years ago one of the girls tried to set light to one of the buildings,’ Sonja Rask replies.
‘Why the hell can’t they get hold of the staff?’ Rolf mutters.
‘Probably got their hands full – regardless of what’s happened,’ Sonja says.
‘It would be useful to know a bit more.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees calmly.
The two colleagues sit in silence next to each other, listening to the communications over the police radio. An ambulance is on its way, and another police car has set out from the station.
The road, like so many logging roads, is perfectly straight. The tyres thunder over potholes and dips. Tree trunks flit past as the flashing blue lights make their way far into the forest.
Sonja reports back to the station as they pull up into the yard in front of the dark red buildings of the Birgitta Home.
A girl in a nightdress is standing on the steps of the main building. Her eyes are wide open, but her face is pale and distant.
Rolf and Sonja get out of the car and hurry over to her in the flickering blue light, but the girl doesn’t seem to notice them.
A dog starts to bark anxiously.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ Rolf says in a loud voice. ‘Does anyone need help?’
The girl waves vaguely towards the edge of the forest, wobbles, and tries to take a step, but her legs buckle beneath her. She falls backwards and hits her head.
‘Are you OK?’ Sonja asks, rushing over to her.
The girl lies there on the steps staring up at the sky, breathing fast and shallow. Sonja notes that she’s drawn blood from scratching her arms and neck.
‘I’m going in,’ Rolf says firmly.
Sonja stays with the shocked girl and waits for the ambulance while Rolf goes inside. He sees bloody marks left by boots and bare feet on the wooden floor, heading off in different directions, including long strides through the passageway towards the hall, then back again. Rolf feels adrenaline course through his body. He does his best not to stand on the footprints, but knows that his primary objective is to save lives.
He looks into a common room where all the lights are on, and sees four girls sitting on the two sofas.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ he calls.
‘Maybe a bit,’ a small, red-haired girl in a pink tracksuit smiles.
‘Where is she?’ he asks anxiously.
‘Miranda’s on her bed,’ an older girl with straight dark hair says.
‘In here?’ he says, pointing towards the corridor with the bedrooms.
The older girl just nods in reply, and Rolf follows the bloody footprints past a dining room containing a large wooden table and tiled stove, and into a dark corridor lined with doors leading to the girls’ private rooms. Shoes and bare feet have trodden through the blood. The old floor creaks beneath him. Rolf stops, pulls his torch from his belt, and shines it along the corridor. He quickly looks along the hand-painted maxims and ornate biblical quotations, then aims the beam at the floor.
The blood has seeped out across the floor from under the door in a dark alcove. The key is in the lock. He walks towards it, carefully moves the torch to his other hand, and reaches out towards the handle and touches it as gently as he can.
There’s a click, the door slips open, and the handle pings back up.
‘Hello? Miranda? My name is Rolf, I’m a police officer,’ he says into the darkness as he steps closer. ‘I’m coming in now …’
The only sound is his own breathing.
He carefully pushes the door open and sweeps the beam of the torch around the room. The sight that greets him is so brutal that he stumbles and has to reach out for the doorframe.
Instinctively he looks away, but his eyes have already seen what he didn’t want to see. His ears register the rushing of his pulse as well as the drips hitting the puddle on the floor.
A young woman is lying on the bed, but large parts of her head seem to be missing. Blood is spattered up the walls, and is still dripping from the dark lampshade.
The door suddenly closes behind Rolf, and he’s so startled that he drops the torch on the floor. The room goes completely black. He turns and fumbles in the darkness, and hears a girl’s small hands hammering on the other side of the door.
‘Now she can see you!’ a high-pitched voice screams. ‘Now she’s looking!’
Rolf finds the handle and tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. The little peephole glints at him in the darkness. With his hands shaking, he pushes the handle down and shoves with his shoulder.
The door flies open, and Rolf staggers into the corridor. He breathes in deeply. The little red-haired girl is standing a short distance away looking at him with big eyes.
9
Detective Superintendent Joona Linna is standing at the window in his hotel room in Sveg, four hundred and fifty kilometres north of Stockholm. The dawn light is cold, steamily blue. There are no lights lit along Älvgatan. It will be many hours yet before he finds out if he’s found Rosa Bergman.
His light grey shirt is unbuttoned and hanging outside his black suit trousers. His blond hair is unkempt, as usual, and his pistol is lying on the bed in its shoulder holster.
Despite numerous approaches from various specialist groups, Joona has remained as an operative superintendent with the National Crime Unit. His habit of going his own way annoys a lot of people, but in less than fifteen years he has solved more complex cases in Scandinavia than any other police officer.
During the summer a complaint was filed against Joona with the Internal Investigations Committee, claiming that he had alerted an extreme left-wing group about a forthcoming raid by the Security Police. Since then, Joona has been relieved of certain duties without actually being formally suspended.
The head of Internal Investigations has made it very clear that he will contact the senior prosecutor at the National Police Cases Authority if he believes there are any grounds at all for prosecution.
The allegations are serious, but right now Joona hasn’t got time to worry about any potential suspension or reprimand.
His thoughts are focused on the old woman who had followed him outside Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm, and who gave him a message from Rosa Bergman. With thin hands she passed him two tattered cards from an old ‘cuckoo’ card game.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ the woman said uncertainly. ‘And here’s the crown, the bridal crown.’
‘What do you want?’ Joona asked.
‘I don’t want anything,’ the old woman said. ‘But I’ve got a message from Rosa Bergman.’
His heart began to thud. But he forced himself to shrug and explain kindly that there must be some mistake: ‘Because I don’t know anyone called …’
‘She’s wondering why you’re pretending that your daughter’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Joona replied with a smile.
He was smiling, but his voice sounded like a stranger’s, distant and cold, as if it were coming from under a large rock. The woman’s words swirled through him and he felt like grabbing her by her thin arms and demanding to know what she was talking about, but instead he remained calm.
‘I have to go,’ he explained, and was about to turn away when a migraine shot through his brain like the blade of a knife through his left eye. His field of vision shrank to a jagged, flickering halo.
When he regained fragments of his sight, he saw that people were standing in a circle around him. They moved aside to make way for the paramedics.
The old woman had vanished.
Joona had denied knowing Rosa Bergman, had said there must be some misunderstanding. But he had been lying.
Because he knows very well who Rosa Bergman is.
He thinks about her every day. He thinks about her, but she shouldn’t know anything about him. Because if Rosa Bergman knows who he is, then something could have gone very badly wrong.
Joona left the hospital a few hours later and immediately set about trying to find Rosa Bergman.
He had no choice but to conduct the search alone, and requested a period of leave.
According to official records there was no one called Rosa Bergman living in Sweden, but there are more than two thousand people with the surname Bergman in Scandinavia.
Joona systematically checked through database after database. Two weeks ago the only option remaining to him was to start to search the physical archives of the Swedish Population Register. For centuries the maintenance of the register was the responsibility of the Church, but in 1991 the register was digitised and transferred to the Tax Office.
Joona started to work his way through the registers, beginning in the south of the country. He sat down in the National Archive in Lund with a paper cup of coffee in front of him, searching in the card files for a Rosa Bergman born at the right time and place. Then he travelled to Visby, Vadstena, and Gothenburg.
He went to Uppsala, and the vast archive in Härnösand. He searched through thousands of pages of births, locations, and family connections.
