The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

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       25

      Police Constable Mirja Zlatnek has parked her patrol car across the whole width of the road. If any car wanted to get past, it would have to pull off the road and drive with two wheels in the ditch.

      In front of her is a long, straight stretch of road. The police car’s blue lights flash across the wet tarmac and dark branches of the trees, in among the trunks.

      The rain is beating hard on the car roof.

      Mirja sits quietly for a while looking out through the windscreen and trying to think through the situation.

      Visibility is poor because of the rain.

      She had counted on having a very quiet day, seeing as almost all her colleagues in the whole district are busy with the case of the dead girl at the Birgitta Home. Even the National Crime Unit have been brought into the investigation.

      Mirja has been developing a secret fear of the operational side of the job, without ever actually having been in any particularly traumatic situations. Perhaps it’s because of that time she tried to mediate in a domestic drama that ended badly, but that was many years ago now.

      The anxiety has crept up on her. She prefers administrative duties, and crime prevention work.

      She spent the morning sitting at her desk looking at recipes online. Elk fillet wrapped in pastry, potato wedges, and cream sauce with penny bun mushrooms. And puréed artichoke hearts.

      She was in the car heading to Djupängen to look at a stolen trailer when the call came through about the abducted boy.

      Mirja tells herself that she’s going to be able to solve the situation of the kidnapped boy. Because the car containing the woman’s four-year-old son has nowhere else to go.

      This stretch of road is like a long tunnel, a trap.

      The lorry is following it from the other direction.

      Either the car containing the boy crosses the bridge just after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson has blocked the road.

      Or it comes this way, and I’m waiting here, Mirja thinks.

      And ten kilometres behind the car is the lorry.

      Obviously it all depends how fast the car is driving, but within the next twenty minutes there’ll be some sort of confrontation.

      Mirja tells herself that the child almost certainly hasn’t been kidnapped in the real sense of the word. Probably a custody dispute. The woman she spoke to was too upset to give her any coherent information, but from what she did say her car must be somewhere on the road this side of Nilsböle.

      It’ll soon be over, she tells herself.

      It won’t be long before she can go back to her room at the station, get a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich.

      But at the same time there’s something worrying her. The woman spoke about a girl with arms like twigs.

      Mirja didn’t ask her name. There hadn’t been time. She assumed the emergency call centre had taken all the relevant details.

      The fear in her voice had been alarming. She had been breathing fast, and described what she’d been through as incomprehensible, beyond logical explanation.

      The rain is bouncing off the windscreen and bonnet. Mirja reaches for the radio, waits a moment, then calls Lasse Bengtsson.

      ‘What’s happening?’ she asks.

      ‘Torrential rain, but not much else. No cars, not a single damn … Hang on, I can see a truck, a bloody big articulated truck heading down Highway 330.’

      ‘He’s the guy who called,’ Mirja says.

      ‘So where the hell’s the Toyota?’ Lasse says. ‘I’ve been here a quarter of an hour, so it’ll have to reach you in the next five minutes, unless some UFO has—’

      ‘Give me a moment,’ Mirja says quickly and ends the call to her colleague when she sees the distant light from two car headlamps.