The Fire Witness - Ларс Кеплер

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Jensen walks over to them.

      ‘We haven’t seen anything,’ he tells the police officer. ‘You must have set up the roadblock too late.’

      ‘Too late? I drove up this road to get here …’

      ‘So where the hell is the car?’ he asks.

      Mirja Zlatnek runs back to her car and calls her colleague.

      ‘Lasse?’ she says urgently.

      ‘I’ve been trying to get you,’ he says. ‘You weren’t answering.’

      ‘No, I was—’

      ‘Has everything gone OK?’ he asks.

      ‘Where the hell’s the car?’ she asks, almost shouting. ‘The truck’s here, but there’s no sign of the car.’

      ‘There aren’t any other roads,’ he says.

      ‘We need to put an alert out and block the 86 in the other direction.’

      ‘I’ll get onto that at once,’ he says, and ends the call.

      Pia Abrahamsson has come over to the police car. The rain has soaked her clothes. Police Constable Mirja Zlatnek is sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open.

      ‘You told me you were going to get him,’ Pia says.

      ‘Yes, I—’

      ‘You told me, I believed you when you said that.’

      ‘I know, I don’t understand this,’ Mirja says. ‘It doesn’t make sense, you can’t drive fast on these roads, there’s no way the car could have got to the bridge before Lasse got there.’

      ‘It has to be somewhere,’ Pia says in a hard voice, pulling her priest’s collar from her shirt.

      ‘Hang on,’ Mirja Zlatnek suddenly says.

      She calls the command centre.

      ‘This is patrol car 321,’ she says quickly. ‘We need another roadblock, at once … Before Aspen … There’s a small road there, if you know the way, you can get from Kävsta up to Myckelsjö … Yes, exactly … Who? Good, he’ll be there in eight, ten minutes …’

      Mirja gets out of the car and looks along the straight road, as if she still expects the Toyota to appear.

      ‘My boy – he’s gone?’ Pia asks her.

      ‘There’s nowhere they could have gone,’ Mirja says, doing her best to sound patient. ‘I understand that you’re worried, but we’ll get them – they must have turned off and stopped somewhere, but there’s nowhere they can go …’

      She falls silent and wipes the rain from her forehead, takes a deep breath, and goes on: ‘We’ll closing off the last roads, and we’re calling in a helicopter …’

      Pia undoes the top button of her shirt and leans one hand on the bonnet of the police car. She’s breathing far too heavily, and tries to calm down, her chest is pounding. She knows she ought to be making demands, but she can’t think clearly, can only feel a desperate fear and confusion.

       28

      Although the rain is still pouring from the sky, only a few drops manage to reach the ground between the trees in the forest.

      A large white command vehicle is parked in the rain at the centre of the yard between the Birgitta Home’s buildings. The bus contains a coordination centre, and a group of men and women are seated around a table covered with maps and computers.

      Their discussion of the ongoing murder investigation is interrupted as they listen to the radio communication about a boy who’s been abducted. Roadblocks have been set up on Highway 330, and at the bridge at Indal, as well as at Kävsta and further north on Highway 86. At first their colleagues sound confident of stopping the vehicle, but then everything goes quiet. No communication for ten minutes, until the radio suddenly crackles again and an officer reports breathlessly: ‘It’s gone, the car’s gone … it should be here, but it hasn’t turned up … We shut off every damn road there is, but it’s still vanished … I don’t know what to do,’ Mirja says wearily. ‘The mother’s sitting in my car, I’ll try and talk to her …’

      The police officers have sat in silence as they listen to the exchanges. Now they gather around the map on the table, as Bosse Norling points out Highway 86 with his finger.

      ‘If they blocked the road here and here, the car can’t just disappear,’ he says. ‘Obviously it could have driven into a garage in Bäck or Bjällsta … or up one of the logging trails, but it’s still bloody weird.’

      ‘And they won’t get anywhere,’ Sonja Rask says.

      ‘Am I the only one thinking that Vicky Bennet might have taken the car?’ Bosse asks tentatively.

      The pattering on the roof has grown quieter, but rain is still running down the bus’s windows.

      Sonja sits down at the computer and uses the police intranet to check the databases of people with a criminal record, people who’ve been suspected of committing a crime, and ongoing custody disputes.

      ‘In nine times out of ten,’ Gunnarsson says, leaning back and peeling a banana, ‘problems like this sort themselves out of their own accord … I think she had her bloke in the car, they had an argument, and in the end he’d had enough and dumped her at the side of the road before taking off with the kid.’

      ‘She’s not married,’ Sonja says.

      ‘According to the statistics,’ Gunnarsson goes on in the same lecturing tone, ‘the majority of children in Sweden are now born out of wedlock.’

      ‘Here it is,’ Sonya says, interrupting. ‘Pia Abrahamsson sought sole custody of her son Dante, and the father has tried to lodge an appeal …’

      ‘So we’re dropping any suggestion of a connection to Vicky Bennet?’ Bosse asks.

      ‘Try to get hold of the father first,’ Joona says.

      ‘I’ll get onto that,’ Sonja says, and goes to the back of the bus.

      ‘Was there anything outside Vicky Bennet’s window?’ Joona asks.

      ‘Nothing on the ground, but we found prints and some coagulated remains on the windowsill and the outside of the building,’ one of the forensics officers says.

      ‘How about the edge of the forest?’

      ‘We didn’t get that far before it started to rain.’

      ‘But presumably Vicky Bennet ran straight into the forest,’ Joona says thoughtfully.

      He looks at Bosse Norling, who is doing things the old-fashioned way by leaning over the map with a compass, putting the point on the Birgitta Home, and drawing a circle.

      ‘It wasn’t her who took the car,’ Gunnarsson says. ‘Christ, it doesn’t take three hours to walk through the forest to Highway 86 and then follow it to …’

      ‘But it isn’t easy to get your bearings at night … so she could very well have walked something like this,’ Bosse says.

      He points to a possible route to the east of an area of bog, then heading north.

      ‘Then the timing would fit,’ Joona says.

      ‘Dante’s father is in Tenerife at the moment,’ Sonja calls from the back of the bus.

      Olle Gunnarsson swears under his breath, then goes over to the radio and calls Police Constable Mirja Zlatnek.

      ‘Gunnarsson here,’ he says. ‘Have you taken a witness statement from the mother?’

      ‘Yes,

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