Sundkvist drove fast. First going through two yellow lights and then two red. The few cars waiting for the signal to turn green honked angrily. There was a nationwide alert. They had two dozen Stockholm police officers at their disposal. But they still didn’t know a thing.
“He licks their feet.”
Grens had been silent since Sven started the engine—now he stared straight ahead as he spoke.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve seen children raped, children murdered, even children worked over by sharp metallic objects, but I’ve never seen this. They were thrown onto the concrete floor. They were filthy, bloody, but their feet were clean and the medical examiners determined that there were several layers of saliva on them—he’d spent minutes licking their feet before he killed them.”
Sven increased his speed. The plastic bag slid from one side of the back window to the other, the bottles rattled monotonously.
“Every piece of their clothing was placed on the floor—two centimeters apart. The final pieces were their shoes. One pair of pink patent-leather shoes, one pair of white trainers. The clothes were as dirty as the girls. Dust, dirt, blood. But not the shoes. They shone. Even more layers of saliva. He spent a long time on those.”
Not even E18 was especially busy. Sven stayed in the left lane, passing the few cars on the road at high speed. He didn’t have the energy to talk, to ask any more questions about Lund; he didn’t want to know more, not right now. He almost drove past the exit, slammed on the brakes at the last moment, rammed the car across three lanes and onto the smaller road to Aspsås.
Lennart Oscarsson was waiting in the parking lot for them.
He looked stressed, nervous, a little hunted. The scapegoat. He’d just been stripped naked on television. He also knew exactly how Ewert Grens felt about the decision to let two lone prison guards transport Bernt Lund through the capital in the middle of the night.
“Hello.”
Grens waited a second too long to stretch out his hand, enjoyed letting one of the many idiots who surrounded him suffer for a moment.
“Hello.”
Oscarsson met his hand, dropped it quickly, looked at the driver’s seat.
“Hello. I’m Lennart Oscarsson. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Sven. Sven Sundkvist.”
They all walked toward the large gate of Aspsås prison, which opened as they approached it. The central guard recognized Grens and exchanged a nod with him, but ignored Sven.
“Where are you going?”
Oscarsson stopped, went back to the window, annoyed.
“He’s with me. From the City Police.”
“He hasn’t been cleared.”
“They’re investigating Lund.”
“I have no interest in that. What I am interested in is why he wasn’t cleared.”
Sundkvist interrupted Oscarsson, who was about to start yelling something he would probably regret later.
“Here. My ID. Okay?”
The guard studied the picture of Sven on his ID for a long time, then input his social security number into a database.
“It’s your birthday today.”
“Yep.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Are you going to let me in?”
The guard waved him past, and they walked one by one into the first corridor. Grens laughed out loud.
“With that guy on duty, it’s harder to get in than to get out.”
They walked down the basement corridor. Grens looked around and sighed at walls that looked like every wall in every basement of every Swedish prison. Long murals of varying quality, art therapy projects for inmates done under the supervision of consultants. Always a blue background, always the same overexplicit symbols: prison gates flung open and birds in the sky.
Some dirty doodles signed by Benke Lelle Hinken Zoran Jari Geten, 1987.
Oscarsson was holding his key ring, opening metal door after metal door. They passed a rowdy crowd of prisoners on their way to the gym with two guards in front of them and two behind. Grens sighed again. He’d run into some of them before. Some he’d interrogated, others he’d testified against, and a few of the old ones he’d picked up back when he was still patrolling the streets.
“Howdy, Grens. You taking a walk?”
Stig Lindgren, one of the inhabitants in the Society of Outcasts, who’d never be able to live anywhere except behind these walls—might as well lock him up and throw away the key. Grens was weary of that type.
“Shut your mouth, Lindgren, or I’ll tell your friends why they call you Tinyboy.”
Up a flight of stairs, into Unit A. The sexual offenders’ section. Lennart Oscarsson was a few steps ahead; Sundkvist and Grens walked more slowly, observing their surroundings. It looked like any other unit. Same TV corner, same pool table, kitchen, and cells. The difference was that the crime that landed you here provoked the same hate in the Society of Outcasts as it did anywhere else. For prisoners in this unit, ending up in the wrong part of this building might mean a death sentence.
Oscarsson pointed to a cell door. Number eleven. A blank surface. All the other doors had been decorated by whoever had been living behind them. Posters, newspaper clippings, an occasional photo. But not cell number eleven.
Grens felt like he should have been here already, behind that door, six months ago. In Lund’s cell. He’d been investigating a child pornography ring, his first real glimpse into a new sealed kingdom of pedophiles, which existed among databases and network connections. He’d seen pictures of children, pictures he’d never known existed: naked children, penetrated children, humiliated, tortured children. A child pornography ring that he and his colleagues at the commission initially suspected was located abroad, pedophilia and profit and dark agreements, but soon proved to be far more limited, sophisticated, and challenging.
There had been seven of them.
An exalted company of repeat sex offenders. Some locked up, but most had been recently released.
They’d created their own virtual showroom. Collections that were channeled through computers and networks on a schedule, as if they were TV programs. Every week, at the same time, Saturday at eight o’clock. They’d been sitting at their computers, waiting for that week’s set of photos with ever-increasing demands—each show had to be more extreme than the last, naked children weren’t enough for them anymore. The children had to touch each other, the children who’d touched each other had to be raped, the children who had been raped had to be raped even more—each photo had to outdo the last. Seven pedophiles, a closed company, custom illustrations of the pedophiles’ own crimes, neatly scanned and sent.
They’d been at it for almost a year before they were discovered.
It was as if they were competing at child pornography.
Bernt Lund had been one of the seven. The only one in prison and, therefore, allowed to send old, previously captured images from the computer in the library, using a mobile hotspot he smuggled in—given his crimes, his right to participate was indisputable. Since their discovery, three of the others had been sentenced to long prison terms. A fourth, Håkan Axelsson, was still being prosecuted. The evidence they had against the other two was weaker. They would probably be able to avoid indictment. Everyone knew, but it didn’t matter—if you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen, and in the meantime, they could make new contacts in the shadow of the investigation, lay the groundwork for a new child pornography ring.
There were many of them out there, and if one left, a new one would step in.
Ewert blamed himself. He should have visited Lund’s cell during the preliminary investigation. They’d been pressed for time, under the pressure of outraged public opinion, so against his better judgment, he’d refrained from personally going to Aspsås. Instead, he sent two younger colleagues to visit Lund in a cell containing a stash of CD-ROMs bearing thousands of images of violated children. If he himself had gone to cell number eleven in the sex offend
ers’ unit, then he might know more right now. If he’d actually been in Lund’s presence back then, maybe he wouldn’t be standing here now, facing so much uncertainty, with no lead on him.
“Here.”
Oscarsson turned the key, opened the door.
“As you can see, a methodical man.”
Sundkvist and Grens entered the cell and stopped abruptly. A very strange room. Outwardly similar to the neighboring cells. A window, a bed, a cupboard, some shelves, a sink, roughly eight square meters. It was the rest. Candlesticks, stones, pieces of wood, pens, bits of string, clothes, binders, batteries, books, notepads. Everything lined up. Along the floor, on the crisply made bed, on the windowsill, on the shelves. Like an exhibition. Two centimeters between each object. Like dominoes in one never-ending line, where if one thing were moved, it would fall over.
Grens searched his jacket pocket. He had a short ruler on the side of his diary. He went over to the bed and laid the pocket diary along the row of stones. Two centimeters. No more, no less. He measured the gap from pen to pen on the windowsill. Two centimeters. On the shelves the books were two centimeters apart, on the floor the pieces of string were two centimeters from the batteries, two centimeters from the notebooks, two centimeters from the cigarette pack.
“Does it always look like this?”
Oscarsson nodded.
“Yes. Always. When he goes to bed at night, he puts every stone on the floor in a new line. Measures the distance. In the morning he does it again, makes the bed, lifts up every stone, puts them onto the cover again, exactly two centimeters apart.”
Sven moved a few pens. Completely ordinary pens. He turned a few of the rocks this way and that. Common rocks, each one more meaningless than the last. The folders, the notebooks. Nothing. The folders were empty shells, the notebooks pristine, not a page had been used. He turned toward Oscarsson.
“I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand?”
“I don’t know. Something. Why would a man lick children’s feet?”
“Why do you think you have to understand?”
“I want to know where he is. Where he’s on his way to. I just want to get hold of the bastard, so I can go home and eat my cake and get drunk.”
“Sorry. You’ll never understand. There is nothing rational about it. Not even he knows why he licks dead feet. I don’t think he has any idea why he puts things in a line two centimeters apart, either.”
Grens held his diary, put his thumb behind the dash that marked two centimeters. He lifted it to face level, and they were all forced to look at his thumb and two centimeters.
“Control. Just that. That’s how it is with all of them. They enjoy rape because they are in control. Power and control. This one is just more extreme. But that’s what the stones in a row are all about. Order. Structure. Control.”
He lowered his diary to the bed, held it behind the line of stones, then quickly pulled it forward, and they all fell down on the floor, one by one.
“We know that. He’s a sadist. We also know that power gives Lund’s type a hard-on. That’s how it works. When he’s in power, when someone else is powerless, when he’s the one deciding whether he’ll hurt them and how much. That’s what gets him off. That’s why he ejaculates in front of bound and bruised nine-year-olds.”
At the windowsill, the pens in a row, he did the same thing as before, used his diary to push them down onto the radiator.
“By the way, the pictures in the computer. How had he organized them?”
Oscarsson looked at the pens on the floor for a long time, pushing them into a pile, disordering them, then at Grens, startled, as if the question were a strange one.
“Organized? What do you mean?”
“How were they sorted? I don’t remember. I remember their faces, eyes, how alone they were. But not the distance between them.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I can find out. If you think it’s important.”
“Yeah. It’s important.”
————
They turned the cell upside down. They touched and sniffed every nook of Bernt Lund’s home for the last four years.
There was no information there. He’d had no plan to escape.
He didn’t know he was on his way to somewhere else.
Fredrik Steffansson opened the car door. He knew he’d been driving too fast through Strängnäs, seventy over Tosterö Bridge, where the speed limit was only thirty, but he’d promised Marie that they’d be there by half past one.
She had to go to nursery school so Daddy could work. A lie today and a lie yesterday. She was there to hold her place, because it was part of his image as a father who worked hard, who wrote and needed to be alone to think important thoughts. He hadn’t thought any big thoughts in months. He hadn’t written a word in weeks. He had a block and no idea how to solve it.
That was why Frans, and the memory of that beating, haunted him at night. It was why he couldn’t make love to the beautiful young woman who’d straddled him naked in his bed this morning, why he couldn’t stop comparing her to a woman he had already lost, Agnes. As if the work, the writing, had kept him from reflecting and he couldn’t anymore—really he’d always done just that, worked and worked and worked to keep from feeling. He had an engine inside him burning and pushing him forward, because if he was moving forward he was moving away from his past.
He parked on the street outside the school entrance. A turning zone, he’d gotten a ticket parking there before, but he didn’t have the energy to keep looking for parking. He helped Marie out of her seat belt, opened the car door. It was even hotter outside. The sun was at its highest, and it was more than eighty-five degrees in the shade. An unusual Swedish summer, warm since May, with just a few cloudy or rainy days.
They walked toward the entrance. Marie was skipping in front of him, both feet right leg left leg both feet together. She was happy—Micaela and David and twenty-five other children, whose names he really should try to remember, were waiting inside.
They passed a park bench just outside the gate where the father of one of the children sat waiting. Fredrik recognized him and nodded slightly, without being able to connect him with one of the little faces jostling around inside.
Micaela was standing by the cloakroom. She kissed him, asked if he was awake, if he’d missed her. Yes, he said. I missed you. Had he? He didn’t know. He missed her soft body at night when he couldn’t sleep, he usually curled up close to her, feeling her warmth, and it made him less afraid. But during the day? Not often. He looked at her. She was young. Too young. Too beautiful. As if he wasn’t enough for her. As if he wasn’t worthy. A couple should be the same age. A couple should be equally beautiful. Did he really believe that? There was doubt deep inside. Like the beating, it was also there, deep inside. He’d wanted to be close to her after the divorce. She’d been standing there when he came and left Marie, day after day, and one day they’d walked together for a little bit, and he’d told her about the pain, about the loss, and she’d listened and they’d gone on more walks, and he’d continued to confide in her, and she’d continued to listen, and one day they’d gone home together to his house and made love all afternoon, while Marie and David played together in the living room on the other side of the closed door.
He helped Marie change her shoes. He unbuckled her red ones, put them on her shelf labeled with a striped elephant. That was her symbol. Other children had red fire trucks or football players or Disney characters, but she’d chosen an elephant and that was that. He put on her indoor shoes, white fabric.
“You shouldn’t go, Daddy.”
She held him tightly by the arm.
“But you wanted to come here, didn’t you? And Micaela is here. And David.”
“Stay. Please, Daddy.”
He lifted her up, held her in his arms.
“But, honey, you know Daddy has to work.”
Her eyes stared into his. She scrunched up her
forehead. She looked at him pleadingly.
He sighed.
“Okay, Okay. I’ll stay then. But just for a little while.”
Marie stood beside him. She kissed her elephant. Ran her finger up its legs, across its back, onto its striped trunk. Fredrik turned to Micaela, making a silent gesture of resignation. It had been like this since she started, almost four years ago now, since Agnes had moved. He hoped each time would be the last, and that the next time he left her, said goodbye, that he could walk away without any guilt.
“And how long are you planning on staying today?”
The only thing they disagreed on. Micaela thought he should just leave, prove once and for all that even if he left right away, he’d be back later that afternoon to pick her up. She felt he had to stand a few tears, a little agony, but then it would pass, and Marie would get used to it. He’d respond by telling her that she’d didn’t have any children of her own, so she couldn’t really understand how it felt.
“A quarter of an hour. At the most.”
Marie heard him.
“Daddy’s gonna stay. Here. With me.”
She held on even tighter to her father’s arm. Only when David came running by, wearing watercolors on his face as war paint, shouting come on, did she let go of Fredrik’s arm and run after. Micaela smiled.
“See. It’s never been that fast. Now she’s forgotten you.”
She took a step forward, stood close to him.
“But not me.”
A light kiss on the cheek, then she left, too. Fredrik stood there, uncertain, watching Micaela, watching Marie. He stepped into the playroom. Marie and David and three other children lay in a pile painting each other’s faces, pretending to be Sioux Indians or something else. Fredrik waved to Marie, and she waved back. He walked away. The Indian warriors followed him as he opened the front door.
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