The Fire Witness. Ларс Кеплер

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       34

      Flora pays the man in the grey coat. Water drips onto her face from his umbrella. He gives her the door key and tells her to leave it in the antique shop’s letterbox as usual when she’s finished.

      Flora thanks him and hurries on along the pavement. The seams in her old coat have started to come loose. She’s forty years old, but her girlish face radiates loneliness.

      The first block of Upplandsgatan closest to Odenplan is full of antique and curiosity shops. Their windows are full of chandeliers and glass-fronted cabinets, old tin toys, porcelain dolls, medals, and clocks.

      Beside the mesh-covered door to Carlén Antiques is a narrower door leading to a small basement. Flora tapes a sheet of white paper to the dimpled glass.

      SPIRITUALIST EVENING

      A steep flight of steps leads down to the basement, where the pipes roar whenever someone above flushes a toilet or runs the taps. Flora has rented the room seven times to hold seances. She’s had between four and six participants each time, which only just covers the cost of hiring the room. She’s contacted a number of newspapers to see if they’d like to write about her ability to talk to the dead, but hasn’t had any response. In advance of this evening’s seance, she placed a larger advert in the new-age journal Phenomena.

      Flora only has a few minutes before the participants arrive, but she knows what she has to do. She quickly moves the furniture and arranges twelve chairs in a circle.

      On the table in the middle, she places the doll’s house figures in nineteenth-century costume. A man and a woman with tiny, shiny porcelain faces. The idea is that they should help conjure up a sense of the past. Immediately after the seances, she hides them away again in the fuse-box, because she doesn’t really like them.

      She places twelve tea-lights in a circle around the dolls. She pushes some strontium chloride into the wax in one of the candles with a matchstick, then conceals the hole.

      She hurries over to the dresser to set the alarm on the old clock. She tried that four sessions ago. The clapper is missing, so the only noise is a dry hacking sound from the cupboard. But, before she has time to wind the mechanism, the door opens from the street. The first participants are here. She hears umbrellas being shaken, then footsteps on the stairs.

      Flora happens to see her own reflection in the rectangular mirror on the wall. She stops, takes a deep breath, and runs her hand across the grey dress she bought from the Salvation Army.

      When she smiles, she instantly looks much calmer.

      She lights some incense, then says hello quietly to Dina and Asker Sibelius. They hang up their coats and talk in subdued voices.

      The participants are almost all old people who know they’re approaching death. They’re people who can’t bear what they’ve lost, who can’t accept the idea that death might be absolute.

      The front door opens again and someone comes down the steps. It’s an elderly couple she hasn’t seen before.

      ‘Welcome,’ she says in a low voice.

      Just as she’s about to turn away, she stops and looks at the man as if she’s seen something unusual, then pretends to shake off the feeling, and asks them to take a seat.

      The door opens again and more participants arrive.

      At ten past seven she has to accept that no one else is coming. Nine is still the most so far, but still too few for her to be able to replace the money she’s borrowed from Ewa.

      Flora tries to breathe calmly, but can feel her legs trembling as she returns to the large, windowless room. The participants are already sitting in a circle. They stop talking, and all eyes turn to look at her.