The Fire Witness (18 page)

“You wanted to point out something to me,” Joona says.

“Yes, it’s just as well,” Holger says and sighs. He gestures toward the car. “The entire windshield is gone. You saw that yourself when you dove down into the water. It was knocked out when the car collided with the traffic light. Unfortunately, I’ve found a few strands of hair from the boy in the windshield frame.”

“That’s sad to hear,” Joona says. A wave of loneliness washes over him.

“Well, it’s what everyone suspected.”

Joona takes a look at the photograph of the strands of hair on the right side of the jagged windshield frame and at an enlargement showing that the hairs were pulled out by their roots. The only way hair could have been ripped from Dante’s head was if he’d been thrown from the child seat, over the front seat, through the windshield frame, and into the river. Joona imagines the child hurtling through the car and being carried off by the strong current.

Vicky Bennet hadn’t killed the boy, he realizes. She’d kept him with her in the car.

“Is it your opinion that the boy was alive when the car hit the water?” he asks.

“Yes. Probably he was knocked out and drowned, but we’ll have to wait until the bodies appear at the dam to know for sure.”

Holger shows Joona a plastic bag containing a red water pistol. “I have a little boy, too…” He stops speaking and sits down in an office chair.

Joona rests his good hand on Holger’s shoulder.

“We’ll have to tell the mother that we’re going to stop the search and wait and see,” Holger says, and he turns away.

*   *   *

It’s unusually quiet at the small police station. A few men in uniform are standing around talking near the coffee machine. A woman is typing on her computer. The twilight outside is heavy and gray, like an endless dreary day at school.

When the front door opens and Pia Abrahamsson enters, the men stop talking. She is wearing jeans and a tight denim jacket. Her nut-brown hair hanging from beneath her black beret is unwashed. She’s not wearing makeup and her eyes look exhausted, terrified.

Mirja Zlatnek gets up quickly and pulls up a chair.

“I don’t want to sit down,” Pia says weakly.

“We asked you to come here because we fear that…”

Pia steadies herself with a hand on the back of the chair but stays standing.

“What I’m trying to say,” Mirja says, “what I’m trying to say is that…”

“Yes?”

“No one believes that they can still be alive.”

Pia doesn’t react. She doesn’t break into sobs. She just nods slightly and licks her lips.

“Why do you believe that?” she asks, softly and strangely.

“We have found your car,” Mirja says. “She drove it off the road and it landed in the river. The car was at a depth of twelve feet. It was heavily damaged and…”

Mirja’s voice fades away.

“I want to see my son,” Pia says with the same disturbing calm. “Where is his body?”

“It is … We haven’t found it yet, but—this is difficult—the decision was made to stop the search. The divers haven’t found anything.”

“But…”

Pia Abrahamsson’s hand reaches for the silver cross she’s wearing underneath her shirt, but stops over her heart.

“Dante is just four years old,” she says. “He can’t swim.”

“I understand,” Mirja says, looking stricken.

“But he … he does like playing in the water,” Pia whispers.

Her chin begins to tremble. She moves slowly, like an old and broken woman, as she finally sits down.

61

Elin Frank gets out of the gym shower and crosses the polished stone floor to the large mirror over the double washbasins. She dries off with a warm towel. Before the shower, she spent some time in the sauna and her skin is still hot and damp as she pulls on the black kimono Jack gave her the year they separated.

She leaves the bathroom and walks over the white parquet floor past all the pale rooms to her bedroom, where she’s already laid out a copper-colored dress from Karen Millen and golden panties from Dolce & Gabbana. She hangs up the kimono, perfumes herself with La Perla, and waits a moment before putting on her clothes.

When she reaches the large salon, she sees Robert quickly hide the telephone behind his back. Worry sweeps through her, landing like a black stone in her gut.

“What’s going on?”

Robert’s boyish, striped T-shirt has pulled free from his white jeans. His round stomach is visible. He shouldn’t have a little stomach.

“The photographer from French
Vogue
is ten minutes late,” he says, but he avoids her gaze.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at the newspapers,” Elin says, trying to keep her voice light. “Do you know if the police have found Vicky yet?” For the past two days, she hasn’t dared listen to the news or read the paper. Both nights she’s taken a sleeping pill at ten p.m. and another at three just to get some rest. “Have you heard anything?”

Robert scratches his head.

“Elin, I really don’t want to upset you.”

“I’m not upset, but—”

“No one can connect you to any of this.”

“There’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the situation,” Elin says, trying to appear nonchalant.

“You’re not a part of any of this,” he says stubbornly.

Elin smiles at him coolly. “Do I have to get angry with you?”

Robert shakes his head and tucks his T-shirt in.

“I caught the end of the news as I was driving over,” he says. “Apparently they’ve found the car in the river. I think they were searching with divers.”

Elin quickly turns her face away. Her lips are trembling and her heart is beating so hard she feels it will break.

“It doesn’t sound good,” she says in an empty voice.

“Would you like me to turn on the television?”

“No, that’s not necessary,” she whispers.

“It’ll be sad, of course, if they’ve drowned.”

“Don’t be so blasé,” Elin says.

She has to swallow but her throat hurts.

62

Elin has a vivid memory of the day Vicky arrived. The girl was standing inside the hallway, with a closed face and yellowing bruises on her arms. She’d never even fantasized about having children, but the minute she saw Vicky she realized how much she longed for one. Vicky was the daughter she’d always wanted.

Vicky was her unique self, just as a child should be.

In the beginning, she would run into Elin’s bedroom at night and stare at her before turning away. Perhaps she hoped to find her real mother there; perhaps she regretted that she’d come in at all or couldn’t risk being turned away. Elin still remembers the patter of her small feet running over the parquet floor as she disappeared back to her room.

Sometimes Vicky would sit in Jack’s lap while watching TV, but she never wanted to sit in Elin’s lap. Vicky didn’t trust her, didn’t dare trust her, but Elin noticed that she often glanced at her furtively.

Little Vicky, the silent girl who would play only if she was sure no one was watching her. Little Vicky, who didn’t dare open her Christmas presents because she thought that such beautiful packages couldn’t be hers. Little Vicky, who shrank from every hug.

Elin bought her a little white hamster and a large cage with ladders and tunnels of red plastic. Vicky took care of the hamster during Christmas vacation, but when school started, the hamster vanished. Eventually they found out that she’d let it go in a park on the way to school. When Jack explained to her that it might not survive the cold, Vicky ran to her room and slammed the door maybe ten times. Then she downed a bottle of burgundy during the night and threw up all over the sauna. Later that week, she stole two rings that Elin had inherited from her grandmother and refused to say what she’d done with them. Elin never got the rings back.

Jack was beginning to reach his limit. He started saying that their lives were too complicated to give a child security, especially one who needed as much as this one did. He spent less time at home and stopped engaging with the girl.

Elin realized she was going to lose him.

When the social workers said they wanted to try placing Vicky temporarily back with her real mother, Elin welcomed the news. She felt that both she and Jack needed the break to find their way back to each other. Vicky refused to take the cell phone Elin offered her so they could keep in touch.

The day Vicky left, Elin and Jack had a late dinner at the Operakällaren restaurant, went home and made love, and then slept through the night undisturbed for the first time in months. In the morning Jack said he’d leave if Vicky came back. Elin let him call Vicky’s case manager to explain that they couldn’t cope with the child and were not able to take her back.

She learned later that Vicky and her mother ran away from their placement at an open care facility in Västerås and were later found hiding in a small playhouse at a playground. The mother started leaving Vicky alone at night, and, after she’d been gone for two days, Vicky walked the 110 kilometers back to Stockholm.

Jack was not home the night Vicky rang their doorbell. Elin had no idea what to do. She pressed her body against the wall by the door, listening to the girl ring the bell and call her name over and over. Finally Vicky started to cry. She opened the mail slot and called, “Please? Can I come back? I want to stay with you. Please, Elin, open the door. I’ll be a good girl. Please … please…”

When Jack and Elin had met with Vicky’s case manager after they told her they were dropping out of the program, she’d said, “Do not explain to Vicky why you can’t take her in any longer.”

“Why not?” Elin had asked.

“Because,” the case manager had said, “the child will blame herself. She’ll assume it’s her fault.”

So Elin had stood silently in the hallway and after what seemed like an eternity, she’d heard Vicky’s footsteps fade away.

63

Elin is looking in the huge bathroom mirror and watching her eyes sparkle in the indirect light. She’s taken two Valium and has had a glass of Alsatian Riesling. Out on her large terrace, Nassim DuBois, the young photographer from French
Vogue
, is setting up. The interview was done last week, when Elin was in Provence for a charity auction. She auctioned off not only her collection of contemporary French art, but also her Jean Nouvel–designed house in Nice. She’s donating the proceeds to a guaranteed fund for microloans to women in North Africa.

She moves away from the mirror and picks up the phone to call Jack. Even though Jack’s lawyer has told her that any contact regarding Vicky Bennet should go through his office, she wants to tell Jack that the car Vicky stole has been found in the Indal River. She won’t care if he seems tired or irritated. She’s no longer in love with him, but at times she feels the need to hear his voice. Before he can answer, she changes her mind and ends the call.

She steadies herself, resting her hand against the wall as she leaves the bathroom. She walks through the living room, to the glass doors leading to the terrace.

She steps languidly outside. Nassim whistles.

“You look absolutely wonderful,” he says with a smile.

She knows she looks good in her copper-colored dress with its thin shoulder straps, and her necklace of hammered white gold. Her gold earrings—a gold so deep it’s almost bronze—cast reflections over her bare skin.

Nassim wants her to stand with her back to the terrace wall and drape herself in a flowing white Ralph Lauren shawl. She lets it billow in a beautiful curve behind her body.

The photographer moves a silver reflecting screen so that her face is filled with light and photographs her from a distance with a telephoto lens. Then he comes closer. He sinks down on his knees. He’s wearing tight-fitting jeans. He takes a series of shots with an old-fashioned Polaroid.

She notices the sweat breaking out on his forehead, but he never stops praising her. Still, she knows his concentration is elsewhere: on composition and light.

“You’re dangerous, you’re sexy,” he mumbles.

“You really think so?” she answers with a smile.

He gets to his feet, nods, and then breaks into a wide, self-conscious smile. “Though more sexy than dangerous.”

“You’re sweet,” she says.

Elin is not wearing a bra and she feels her nipples harden in the cool breeze. She’s hoping he’s noticing and realizes she’s tipsy.

Now he’s lying down beneath her with an old Hasselblad camera and he’s asking her to lean forward and pucker her mouth as if she wants to be kissed. “
Une petite pomme
,” he says.

They smile at each other and Elin feels happy all of a sudden, almost giddy from the flirtation. His thin, tight T-shirt has come untucked and she can see how firm his body is.

She pouts a little and he keeps taking her photograph, keeps mumbling that she’s the best, she’s just like a top model, then finally he lowers his camera and looks at her.

“I can keep going all night,” he says. “But I can see that you’re freezing.”

Elin nods. “Let’s go inside and have a glass of whiskey.”

64

The salon feels warm when they get inside; Elin’s housekeeper has lit a fire in the tile stove. They sit side by side on the couch with their malt whiskeys and talk about the importance of microloans to women in the third world. The Valium and alcohol still have a spell over Elin. She feels relaxed, becalmed.

Nassim is saying that the journalist from
Vogue
is very happy with the interview. Then he tells Elin that his mother is from Morocco.

“What you’ve done is incredible,” he says with a smile. “If my grandmother had been able to have a microloan, perhaps my mother’s life would not have been so hard.”

“I do what I can, but…”

She falls silent and looks into his serious eyes.

“No one is perfect,” he says and slides closer.

“Once I let a little girl down. A girl I never should have abandoned. A girl who…”

He touches her comfortingly on the cheek and whispers something in French. She smiles at him, tipsy and tingling. “If you weren’t so young, I might fall in love with you,” she says in Swedish.