The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

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       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.