There was a moment’s silence. A cloud moved across the sun. The flat was cast into shadow.
‘But the boy can’t leave the flat?’ Aron said eventually.
Alex shook his head.
‘No, he can’t.’
He scanned the room. The only way out of it was through the door where Alex was standing. An urgent sense of anxiety found its way through the petrol fumes and gripped him. Why wasn’t Aron sitting in the living room with the boy? There was an unguarded balcony door in there to escape through. Why had he backed himself into a corner?
Aron provided the answer to Alex’s unspoken question.
‘Just as I thought,’ Aron said with a smile. ‘You never had any intention of letting me leave the flat.’
Before Alex could reply, the lighter flared, and in a second the whole kitchen was on fire.
PART III: Signs of Revival
THE END OF SEPTEMBER
Before summer had ever really arrived, autumn came creeping in. Only then did the rain stop. The sky was high and cloudless above the land, but the evenings grew ever cooler, and the nights were drawing in.
Alex Recht came back to work in the third week of September. He stopped in the doorway of his office and smiled. It was good to be back.
In the staff room, they all celebrated his return with coffee and cake. His boss made a short speech. Alex bowed and thanked him, accepted a bouquet and said thank you again.
Alone in his office a while later, he shed the odd tear. It really did feel great to be back.
His hands had healed better than anyone had expected, the doctors said, and they promised he would get full movement back in both of them.
For probably the thousandth time, Alex inspected the scar tissue decorating the backs and palms of his hands. Thin skin in a haphazard pattern of various shades of pink covered his hands and spread up over his wrists.
Alex was staggered not to be able to recall any pain when his hands were on fire. He remembered the whole course of events: Aron Steen’s kitchen turning into a blazing inferno; Aron just sitting there on the kitchen chair, engulfed in flames, the burning child in his arms. Alex saw himself in his mind’s eye, lunging forward into the fire and tearing the child from Aron’s grip. He could hear his own cries echoing in his head:
‘Out of the fucking way. The boy’s on fire!’
And the boy was indeed on fire. He was so much on fire that Alex didn’t have time to register that he was, too. He dragged the boy down onto the hall floor and rolled on him, over and over again, to put out the flames. Then Peder threw a large bath towel over Alex and tried to trap his thrashing arms. The fire crackled and spat, burned and cursed.
The emergency response squad advanced into the kitchen, armed with a hall rug, a bathmat and more towels to protect themselves against the fire. It proved impossible to reach the kitchen table, at which Aron Steen sat like a flaming brand. Not a sound escaped him as the fire took his life. And that, it later emerged, was what most of those involved in the operation saw in their nightmares. The burning man sitting stock still at the kitchen table.
A neighbour who had heard all the disturbance came running up with a fire extinguisher. With that they were able to contain the fire until the fire engine and ambulance got there, but by then one person was dead and a little child was badly burned. The ambulance crew found Alex in the bathroom, trying to soothe his poor hands under cold running water.
Alex found it harder to remember what had happened after that. He knew they had kept him under sedation for several days. He knew it had hurt like hell when he came round. But once he had embarked on the rehabilitation programme, everything had gone better than he could have hoped.
In the time Alex was on sick leave, the papers did nothing but write about the events of the case. Countless newspaper reports detailed the murders of the children and of Nora in Jönköping. There were timelines, and maps with arrows, and red dots, telling the story over and over again.
Alex read them all. Mainly because he had nothing better to do with his time, or so he claimed.
The fates of Nora and Jelena were recounted in many different versions. The press found so-called relatives of the girls, relatives who had never actually had any contact with either of them, but were keen to see themselves in the papers. Former classmates told strange tales of their schooldays, and the articles had quotes from former teachers and even employers who had been located and interviewed.
The police investigation came under scrutiny. Could the police have acted earlier? Could the perpetrator have been identified sooner? A variety of experts were asked to give their opinion. Several of them thought the police had managed to make a mess of what was basically a ‘very simple investigation’, while others made the reasonable point that it had been right for the police to make Lilian Sebastiansson’s father their main suspect in the initial phase. It had been right, even though it had cost the investigation valuable time.
But the body of experts was unanimous in its criticism of the raid on Aron Steen’s flat in Midsommarkransen. Some thought the police should have pulled out as soon as they smelled the petrol and come back with fire blankets and extinguishers. Others thought they should not have engaged in any kind of dialogue with Aron Steen, but tried to put him out of action with a shot through the window, since he was sitting in full view.
None of the pundits whose views were in print had been present at the raid. But Alex had been. He would maintain until the day he died that the raid could not have been done in any other way. If they had made their presence known at the door and then retreated for firefighting equipment, the boy’s life would have been in dire jeopardy. The moment they went into the block of flats, there was only one way for them to go. Forward.
The articles Alex found less infuriating and more interesting were the big features about the murderer. Here, the newspapers had been more thorough in their research and got access to better background material, which made for more satisfactory reading. For Alex, the features showed that the journalists didn’t really know which leg to stand on. It was impossible to relate Aron Steen’s tragic story without an element of understanding and sympathy creeping in. Not forgiveness, they stressed, but understanding.
Aron was really one of those people who never had a chance, Alex thought grimly. Even as a babe in arms he had been horribly mistreated by his mentally unstable grandmother, who went on to spend years belittling him as a person, distorting his perception of right and wrong, and preventing him from developing even the most basic capacity for empathy. He turned up at school in soiled clothes, looking wild and angry, day after day. He stank of his grandmother’s cigarette smoke. The other children teased him, called him grandma’s little girl. He was so skinny and had such long hair that it was hard to tell if he was a boy or a girl, they said. His worst tormentors were inspired by the smell of smoke and his dirty appearance. They called him Cinderella.
The boy was fifteen before social services finally intervened and he was placed in a foster home. His grandmother made no bones about blaming him for his mother’s, her daughter’s, death, and told social services that she couldn’t for the life of her see that he would ever develop into a normally functioning person.
It seemed at first as though Aron Steen’s grandmother was wrong. He completed his school career, went to university and qualified as a psychologist, and left home. But there were warning signs. His nursery school teacher had reported that even at a very young age he took great pleasure in inflicting pain on animals. He found it hard to make friends and maintain relationships. Yet he was outgoing and good at expressing himself verbally. In adult life he was considered good-looking, which helped him socially.