Читать книгу The Fire Witness - Ларс Кеплер - Страница 21

Joona puts on protective clothing, goes up the steps to the main building and in through the door. Inside the porch the fans of the arc lights are working hard and the air is already warm. Every detail is visible in their strong glare. Dust is moving slowly through the air.

Joona walks carefully along the protective mats that have been laid out across the floor tiles. One picture has fallen to the floor, and the broken glass glints in the strong light. Bloody shoe prints lead off in different directions in the corridor, towards the front door, and back again.

The house has retained its original character from when it was a grand farmhouse. The painted panels have faded over the years, but are still colourful, and the traditional patterns made by itinerant painters curl across the walls and woodwork.

Further along the corridor a forensics officer named Jimi Sjöberg is shining a green lamp at a black chair, having already applied Hungarian red to it.

‘Blood?’ Joona asks.

‘Not on this one,’ Jimi mutters, and moves on with the green lamp.

‘Have you found anything unexpected?’

‘Erixon called from Stockholm and told us not to touch a thing until Joona Linna had given the go-ahead,’ he replies with a smile.

‘I’m grateful.’

‘So we haven’t really got going yet,’ Jimi goes on. ‘We’ve laid out all these damn mats, and photographed and filmed everything, and … well, I took the liberty to get samples of the blood in the corridor so we could send something off to the lab.’

‘Good.’

‘And Siri lifted the prints in the hall before they got contaminated …’

The other forensics expert, Siri Karlsson, has just dismantled the brass handle from the door to the isolation room. She puts it carefully in a paper bag, then comes over to Joona and Jimi.

‘He’s here to take a look at the crime scene,’ Jimi explains.

‘It’s pretty unpleasant,’ Siri says through her mask. Her eyes look tired and troubled.

‘So I understand,’ Joona says.

‘You can look at pictures instead if you’d rather,’ she says.

‘This is Joona Linna,’ Jimi tells her.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’

‘I’m just an observer,’ Joona says.

She looks down, and when she raises her eyes again there’s a trace of a blush on her cheeks.

‘Everyone’s talking about you,’ she says. ‘I mean … I … I don’t care about the internal investigation. I think it’ll be interesting to work with you.’

‘Same here,’ Joona says.

He stands still and listens to the whirr of the lamps, and tries to focus, so that he’ll be able to absorb the impressions of what he sees without giving in to the instinct to look away.