Pen 33

by Anders Roslund

  He stepped off at the Åkeshov metro station and walked slowly through the neighborhood. He’d been singing quietly to himself, it was that kind of evening, the air warm, the day long gone. It was only when Lars Ågestam turned on his own street that he saw it.

  The car was most visible. They’d spray-painted the words. Black letters on red paint. The letters bounced against him, attacked him.

  Pedophile-lover

  Kid-fucker

  Shithole

  Who’s the real psychopath?

  On both doors. On the roof. On the hood. Someone had spray-painted his hatred and then smashed whatever could be broken. The windows were crushed, the headlights kicked in, the mirrors gone.

  ————

  He’d vomited in the sink at the Prosecution Authority, when he’d been told that the father had gone through with his execution.

  He’d understood, even then.

  ————

  It was a small 1940s house with yellow plaster that his whole family had helped to repaint just before summer started.

  Now those words screamed all over its walls, from the kitchen window on the left side, to the front door, to the living room window on the right side.

  The same black spray paint. The same handwriting. One sentence on two lines, from the foundation of the house to the gutter.

  you’re going to die

  cunt bastard

  Marina, his wife, sat in the garden just a few meters from the angular writing. She had her eyes closed and she was rocking back and forth in the porch swing they’d bought at an auction a week ago.

  She coughed as if strained, said nothing as he approached, or when he held her.

  ————

  After three days of trial, what was bound to happen had happened.

  The father who’d killed his daughter’s murderer, risking life imprisonment, was there, everywhere.

  The threat, the faceless citizen, was taking action.

  Lars Ågestam couldn’t stay in the house with words spray-painted all over its walls.

  He woke up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t go back to sleep again. He’d been lying in bed, naked—the blanket was wrapped around Marina—and he’d stared at the ceiling.

  Out there, beyond the kitchen window, his car stood destroyed and spray-painted.

  He was a pedophile-lover. A kid-fucker. A shithole and psychopath.

  Marina’s eyes were still swollen. She couldn’t look at him, had looked to the side instead, away from him. He’d asked her if she was scared, and she had shaken her head, and he’d asked her if she felt violated, and she’d shaken her head, and he’d kept asking her, and she turned her face to the wall. He lay there alone with the psychopath spray paint and the destroyed car and, after a while, he’d started breathing heavily. She noticed it but kept her eyes on the wall, and he’d whispered her name again and again until she’d turned to him. She said she was sorry, they’d held each other in their nakedness, skin against skin, and they’d made love for longer than they usually did, and then they’d lain next to each other a long time before she turned back to the wall again.

  He got out of bed, walked around his house naked. He looked at the clock. Three thirty.

  He went into the kitchen, boiled water and put in instant coffee, made a couple of cheese sandwiches, a glass of yogurt in one hand and orange juice in the other. He read yesterday’s papers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, and was surprised by the amount of text, images, and space being dedicated to what they were calling the Pedophile Trial.

  It wasn’t working. The worry, restlessness, anger lashed at him, and he abandoned his early breakfast after half a cup of coffee, got dressed, and grabbed his briefcase. He went into the bedroom and kissed Marina on the shoulder and explained that he was going to take a walk, think a bit before the city woke up. She said something he couldn’t hear, and he walked out.

  Seven steps along the concrete slabs in the lawn. Then he turned around.

  you’re going to die

  cunt bastard

  The letters seemed even larger in the dawn light, even blacker. The handwriting was childish and ugly—stiff, angular, unpracticed. As if it hadn’t been written for real. As if it would soon wash off, down into messy piles among the flowerbeds of roses.

  He walked past the car. One year old. Fully financed. A wreck, vandalized, looted, like the ones he’d seen in the outskirts of large South American cities.

  It would have to stay there until someone took it away, until the words pierced through.

  He walked into town. Two hours through the western suburbs, briefcase in hand, his jacket over his shoulder, his black shoes chafing a bit. He had time to think. Time to try to understand. What was this all about? He’d wanted to become a prosecutor. He became a prosecutor. He had wanted the big case. He got the big case. That’s where it had ended. He wasn’t ready. He was too young. He wasn’t good enough. A big trial meant attention. With attention came both praise and threats. He knew that, of course. He’d seen it happen to his older colleagues. So why did a few letters on his house and car scare him? Why had he known when they made love in the middle of Marina’s silence that he was on his way somewhere else, that he’d just lost his dreams, become older? He would finish this trial, push for as long a sentence as possible. Then, he didn’t know. He no longer had any clarity. He felt alone.

  He arrived in Kungsholmen and Scheele Street just after six o’clock. The courthouse, so still, an occasional seagull searching for food in two trash bins outside, otherwise empty. He walked up to the large entrance, took a key out of his briefcase, and opened the door. He’d spent many a night and morning here alone in a courtroom. A roving guard used to let him in, until finally the district court made the unusual decision to give a copy of the keys to the young prosecutor who seemed to live in the old stone building.

  He walked up the unwieldy stairs, all the way to the courtroom. He stepped in, sat down in the place he’d occupy in three hours, opened his folders, and took out the documents he’d be using today. Those that didn’t fit he put on the floor in the order that he’d need them.

  He worked for forty-five minutes. Then the door opened.

  “Ågestam.”

  Lars Ågestam heard the hoarse voice. He hated it. He didn’t look up from his papers.

  “Your wife told me you were here. I think I woke her.”

  Ewert Grens didn’t ask if he could come in. His limping steps echoed through the big hall every time he put his right foot down. He passed behind the prosecutor, a cursory glance at the stack of papers as he walked up to the podium and settled into the judge’s seat.

  “I also tend to start early. It’s so quiet then. No idiots nagging for anything.”

  Ågestam continued working, searching through documents, memorizing questions, observations, answers.

  “Can you please stop what you’re doing? I’m talking to you.”

  Ågestam turned toward him. His face like thunder.

  “Why would I do that? I don’t give a shit about you. Just like you don’t give a shit about me, Grens.”

  “That’s why I came.”

  Grens cleared his throat, fingering the wooden gavel that lay before him.

  “I made a bad call.”

  Ågestam stopped in mid-motion, looked at the old man who was searching for the words.

  “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “And I was wrong. I should have taken that threat garbage seriously.”

  It was as quiet in the courtroom as it was outside those big, ugly windows. The early morning of a warm summer day.

  “You should have had police protection. Now you’re getting it. We already have a car outside your home and a car waiting downstairs. He’s coming up soon.”

  Ågestam went to the window. A lone policeman had just opened the door of a car. He closed it, went to the little staircase in front of the entrance.

  He s
ighed, suddenly felt tired, as if the night’s missing sleep was coming to call him back.

  “It’s a little late for that.”

  “This is how it is now.”

  “You said it.”

  Grens held the judge’s gavel, swung it, one bang that bounced around. He’d said what he came to say but still made no move to go. Ågestam waited for him to continue talking, but there was nothing. The lame fucker just sat there, as if waiting for something.

  “Are you done? I’m here to work.”

  The detective superintendent smacked his mouth. An annoying sound.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I bought one of those CD players. I have it in my office. On the shelf next to the tape deck. I can play your disc now.”

  ————

  Grens remained there a long time. In the judge’s chair. He said nothing, and after a while Lars Ågestam started working again. He sought the best arguments to explain to the lay judges, who were under intense media pressure to judge a premeditated murder as just that, regardless of the circumstances. He wrote, crossed out, wrote again. Grens smacked his mouth from time to time, the annoying sound in the distance, as if to show that he was still there. He sat leaning back, his face to the ceiling, almost half asleep.

  It was half past eight when they heard voices outside. Through the thick glass panes, heard people shouting.

  They both went over to the wall with the windows, opened one of them. Gentle air washed over them, and they leaned out in order to see the empty space four floors below.

  It wasn’t empty anymore. They both started counting, estimating that about two hundred people stood down there near the entrance door—a crowd in motion, as if it were electric, a wave, a pulse, as they took a few steps forward and the policemen with plastic shields pushed them back with equal force. They chanted, carrying signs, demonstrating loudly against the judicial process that would continue in thirty minutes. They taunted the society that would choose to prosecute and punish the person who’d been able to protect them when the system couldn’t.

  Grens shook his head.

  “That’s not smart. What do they think they’re going to achieve by screaming? Do they think our police officers would let in idiots making threats?”

  A stone flew through the air and landed next to the police officer standing at the end of the chain of shields. Ågestam winced, thinking of the car and the house and Marina, who might be awake now. There was a police car there. That was surely enough. He met Grens’s gaze and felt compelled to explain out loud.

  “They’re just scared. They’re afraid of pedophiles, so afraid that it turns to hate. So when a wounded father takes the life of one, it’s natural that they’d turn him into a hero. He did what they themselves would like to do, but don’t dare to.”

  Grens snorted.

  “Look, I don’t like scum. I’ve hunted scum my whole life. But there is a difference between scum and scum. They didn’t make him into a hero. He is a hero. He did what we couldn’t. He protected them.”

  The twelve policemen in front of the courthouse were getting reinforcements. Two more vans, with six shield-bearing police officers in each, drove quickly through the crowd.

  They stopped abruptly when two of the demonstrators broke ranks and marched straight toward them. The twelve policemen rushed out of their vehicles, joined the others, making the human wall wider.

  Slowly, those who were attacking calmed down, their cries were muffled, and the state of things shifted from acute to wait-and-see.

  Ågestam closed the window and the sound from outside disappeared completely. He stifled the impulse to shove Grens away. There was something about Grens’s tone of voice, as if he was finding fault with everything all the time. Instead Ågestam continued his argument, the same ground he would cover in this very hall in just a few moments.

  “I don’t know what you mean. Hero? Protecting the citizens?”

  “He made them feel safer.”

  “He’s a murderer. His actions are no different from Lund’s. He took a life. What the people down there think is heroic wouldn’t even be considered mitigating circumstances in a normal trial.”

  “You at least have to agree that we couldn’t protect them. But he did.”

  There were people down there, outside the closed window. The kind you would describe as ordinary people. They’d made up their minds. The father had done the right thing. And what Ågestam was doing now, prosecuting him, was wrong.

  “That doesn’t give Fredrik Steffansson or any other grieving father the right to decide life and death. You don’t know me, Grens. You don’t know if deep down inside I think he did the right thing, that he was right to blow the head off a pedophile and a serial killer. You have no clue. And I’m not going to help you, because anything but a long prison sentence would be wrong. He has to pay. We can’t give the people out there any other message.”

  Ågestam left the window and walked toward the pile of papers on the floor. He gathered together the documents, put them in the right order in two binders.

  Ewert Grens lingered, one last glance out the window as the crowd began to disperse. He walked over to the witness bench at the back of the hall and sat down in the same place he’d sat during the first three days of the trial.

  The door opened. An usher came in, and after him came the long line of media representatives and spectators who had managed to pass through the heightened security checks.

  The trial of Fredrik Steffansson had entered its fifth and final day.

  Bengt Söderlund woke up early. Two weeks left of his vacation. He had to make the most of his days. He’d only slept a few hours every night for the last week. Only when he was in motion, when he was doing something, could he stop thinking about Elisabeth and the kid, who had gone to God knows where. He’d called obsessively that first day, to her parents and friends and former colleagues, but no one had seen her. He didn’t tell them why he’d called. No way in hell anyone was going to laugh at his expense.

  They were supposed to meet at half past nine. Just a few minutes left. He looked out of the living room window. They were already there: Ove and Helena. Ola Gunnarsson and Klas Rilke. He snapped his fingers, Baxter came running from the kitchen, and they went out together.

  His toolshed was big and stood right next to Flasher-Göran’s boundary—he would see them go in and wonder what they were doing there.

  They greeted each other, took each other by the hand as they’d done since they were little. He didn’t know why, that’s what you did in Tallbacka.

  Bengt owned two sawhorses. He lifted one, set it beside the other, and placed a long broad plank on top. Ove and Klas Rilke each carried a large plastic sack with empty bottles in their arms. Forty of them. Half of them wine bottles and the other half soda bottles. All glass. They both helped to place them side by side on the long sawhorse table. Meanwhile, Ola Gunnarsson opened the lid of the large oil drum behind the mower in one corner of the shed. It was filled to the brim with gasoline. He lowered an oilcan underneath the surface, large bubbles rose as it filled. He lifted it up. Gas ran down its sides. Helena waited until he was finished, then she went over to the first wine bottle and put a plastic funnel on top of it. Ola Gunnarsson poured the gas through it and into the bottle, filled it halfway, then moved the oilcan and funnel to the next bottle, filled it to half. They continued like that through all forty bottles, using almost twenty liters of gasoline. Bengt, meanwhile, had unfurled the dirty sheets he’d brought with him from the laundry basket and laid them on top of a pile of firewood. He pulled a knife through the fabric, cutting it into equal-size pieces, thirty centimeters by thirty centimeters. He then rolled them up and put a piece of cloth into each bottle and left a small piece of fabric sticking out of the mouth, like the head of a pin. Then they moved the bottles into a box on the ground, each bottle tightly packed so as to stand steady. In a smaller box next
to it lay ten cigarette lighters, two for each of them, in case one broke.

  It didn’t take very long. The morning wasn’t even over yet.

  Fredrik sat in the middle of the courtroom with his eyes closed, wanting to see what was around him, but

  LARS ÅGESTAM (LÅ): Steffansson committed murder without a trace of compassion or concern for Bernt Lund’s life. I see no mitigating circumstances regarding Steffansson’s action and, therefore, urge that he be convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life in prison.

  didn’t have the energy. It was the fifth and final day. He wanted to go back to his cell and

  KRISTINA BJÖRNSSON (KB): Fredrik Steffansson found himself outside that nursery school. His act is considered self-defense, because if he had not shot Bernt Lund, then this pedophile and serial killer would have murdered two more five-year-old girls—whom we have been able to identify.

  piss in the sink, it was nothing more than that.

  The whole room was full, all these people around him. It made him feel so damn lonely.

  Like the Christmas he spent after Agnes left him, a few weeks before he’d met Micaela. It was Christmas Eve and he had tried his best to push that knowledge away but couldn’t quite manage to, so at five in the evening, when the darkness seemed densest, he’d gone to one of the few pubs in Stockholm that was open. He would never forget the people there, the communal loneliness. It had become unbearable when the show Karl-Bertil Jonsson’s Christmas started on the TV at the end of the bar, became the center of their attention for half an hour. It was as if the story, which had played every year at this time for decades, was about them, Christmastime for the down-and-out. They’d all laughed and the evening felt warm for a moment and then it was over. Another beer and a cigarette, and they all returned home to a stuffy-smelling apartment that needed to be cleaned.

  He looked around. He was sitting now as he had then, surrounded by strangers in a system he didn’t understand, cheated out of his own future. The prosecutor