by Arne Dahl
He cast one final glance into the burnt-out cell. He shouldn’t have done so.
The crime scene technician was just coaxing a rough, burnt lump loose from the cell wall with a kind of large spatula. He weighed it in his hand, turning it round. For a moment, it ended up staring at Viggo Norlander.
The lump was staring. In the shapeless piece of unidentifiable material, a human eye was wedged. Completely unspoilt. As though it could still see.
He imagined that it was staring at him accusingly.
‘False eye,’ said the technician, grinning.
5
IT WAS TIME for a coffee break.
It was just after lunch, and for the third time that Thursday, it was time for a coffee break. They would manage to fit at least three more in before it was time to go home. To celebrate Midsummer.
Probably by having a coffee break, Gunnar Nyberg thought, staring down into his untouched mug of black coffee.
One of his ascetic’s coffee breaks, as Ludvig Johnsson called them.
Johnsson himself wolfed down at least four Danish pastries a day; he was thin as a rake.
‘It’s your metabolism,’ Sara Svenhagen had explained a week or two earlier, on Saturday 12 June to be precise, just after half two in the afternoon. The paedophile hunters, as the group was unofficially called, were having a coffee break in the Strandcafé on Norrmälarstrand.
‘You ruined your metabolism when you were Mr Sweden,’ she had continued didactically. ‘The anabolic steroids knocked the whole thing out of kilter. Ludvig’s the exact opposite, he’s got the build of a marathon runner. He probably ran his way out of his sorrow. Sixty kilometres a week.’
‘Sorrow?’ Nyberg had asked, glancing with sorrow at the Danish pastry which had been bought for him. He had been in the middle of a strict diet, but seemed to keep finding Danish pasties and cinnamon buns and macaroons and almond cakes at his helpless fingertips.
Sara Svenhagen had looked at him, slightly surprised. He had looked back. She was stunningly beautiful. In her thirties. Her thick, dark blonde hair, shining like gold somehow, ran like a waterfall down to the thin, twisted shoulder straps of her top; shoulder straps which lay delicately against her freckled, golden-brown skin.
It was true, he always got a bit lyrical when he looked at Sara. He wasn’t a dirty old man, he told himself time and time again, though two decades separated them. There wasn’t any desire there. She was more like an angel of salvation, a luminary, always there to drag him back up into the light of day after he had been looking into the darkest depths of humanity.
Because that was what CID’s paedophile hunters did: spent every day looking down into humanity’s, and above all mankind’s, worst conceivable depths. He could never have imagined anything so awful.
It had all been quite overwhelming for a while; things had only recently begun to calm down.
Gunnar Nyberg was the only member of the A-Unit who had emerged with his honour intact, even if this honour was internal and had never, under any circumstances, been allowed into the public eye. The lid had been screwed on, and there it remained. But internally, within the National Police Board, he had been given a halo, and if the very thought of him, the man that a group of investigative journalists from the police newspaper had named Sweden’s Biggest Policeman, as detective superintendent hadn’t been so absurd, he probably would have been promoted. He ruled himself out right away, to save the National Police Commissioner having to make excuses. No promotion, but he would be glad of some stimulating projects.
And so, Sweden’s Biggest Policeman ended up in front of a computer in the successful child pornography division of the CID. The man who had just started to live again, having been worn down by life in the muddy waters of shame. The man who had just found reconciliation with what he had believed to be irreconcilable. His children. His ex-wife. The witnesses and victim of his life’s greatest crime. The unforgettable wife-battering of his bodybuilding period. It was more than twenty years ago, but every single day he remembered the sight of his children staring, wide-eyed, at his wife’s split brow. He sang his pain away as the bass singer in a church choir in Nacka.
Then he had taken the step. Gunilla had long since remarried, in Uddevalla on the other side of the country. With shaking legs, he had made the journey down to visit her and Bengt. They had just sold their house and bought a place in the country on the island of Orust. That was where he went to visit them. She was completely different to how he remembered her, she had blossomed. She was a small woman, unexpectedly foul-mouthed, who, without hesitating, both forgave him and plied him with enough drink to make him cry through the night. A pathetic lump of meat. It did him good. Then he visited his daughter Tanja in Uddevalla. She was married and getting on in the world. Children could wait. She’d had a slightly more reserved, distant attitude, but even that went well.
But the best encounter of all had been with his son Tommy, living in Östhammar, just north of Stockholm. He was a farmer and had a son of his own called Benny. He spent as much time with them as he could; his fuel costs rocketing as a result. He didn’t give a damn that his clapped-out old Renault used up an abnormal amount of juice. His grandson was going to be spoilt, whatever the cost.
And it wasn’t only to his children he opened himself up, but women, too. Suddenly, after a twenty-year quarantine, he was able to think of himself as a sexual being. He started to look at women again, tentatively but without letting himself be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.
And just then, both perspectives were twisted in the most terrible way.
Children and sex.
After the first few shocks, when Sara and Ludvig had found him slumped over the computer, sobbing, he went to work with the most enthusiasm imaginable. Since the collapse of the A-Unit, the group had been CID’s A team of the moment. After a period of fruitless hunting, they were in the middle of a very successful spell, working closely with similar groups abroad. Before Nyberg arrived, they had been working with fifteen other countries on Operation Cathedral, led by the British National Crime Squad, which had mapped out an enormous paedophile network online. The first thing he got to work on at the end of October was something disgusting called ‘Paedo University’. In May of the previous year, the American police had begun an international effort called Operation Sabbatical, and at the end of October, there was a joint crackdown in the countries involved. At home, other parts of the group were working with all the tracks and networks that had come to light in connection with the twenty-two-year-old paedophile in Örebro who had recently been revealed as the country’s most horrendous child molester ever.
And so it went on. Gunnar Nyberg felt, for the first time, that he really was doing something important. He was saving children. And he continued doing it in his spare time. For the past year, he had been giving increasingly well-regarded talks on doping in the city’s schools. Free of charge, to the genuine surprise of the head teachers.
Who knew about the negative effects of anabolic steroids better than he did?
So, even though he spent his days focused on the most appalling sides of human desire, he felt that his life was shaping up quite well. Above expectations, considering what had happened with the Kentucky Killer.
He had looked out over Lake Mälaren. The lake in high summer. A few weeks into June, the weather didn’t really know what it should be doing, but the sun had just broken through the clouds and was spreading its newly churned butter over the freshly baked bread of the water of Riddarfjärden, garnishing it with sails in all the colours of the rainbow. The air felt unusually fresh, which was only partly due to the absence of traffic. On Västerbron Bridge, the queues were now being caused by a growing troop of runners.
Gunnar Nyberg had turned back to Sara Svenhagen. Her expression had told him that she had answered something he had already forgotten.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ he had been forced to ask.
‘Ludvig ran through his sorrow over his family,’ she
said. ‘Didn’t you know? That he lost his family in a car accident a few years ago?’
‘What? Christ. He’s always seemed so . . . happy-go-lucky to me . . .’
‘It’s a front. He’s literally running for his life, every single day. Wife and two sons, just like that. Gone from one second to the next.’
‘Were you already working together then?’
‘Yeah, but not on this. It was before the police really understood how serious this child pornography was, how insanely widespread it is. No, we were working for Stockholm CID. He was my mentor, I suppose. It was Ludvig who built up the entire paedophile unit, and took me with him.’
‘And me, I guess.’
‘You knew each other already, didn’t you?’ Sara had asked. ‘How?’
Ground that had been so difficult to tread. Close to being erased by twenty years of agony. The past. That period. The steroid period.
It was no longer off limits.
‘We were in Police College together,’ Gunnar Nyberg had replied. ‘We were really close back then, shared a room. But we grew apart, when he turned into a good policeman and I became a bad one. And I didn’t even know that he’d lost his family.’
‘That’s what time does,’ Sara had said, placing her hand on his.
He had smiled. Crookedly, he thought. He had smiled crookedly, and looked around the table. They were having a coffee. Five paedophile hunters. His new A-Unit.
Whose boss, the comet-careerist Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, generally called Party-Ragge, had suddenly stood up and pointed.
‘The pack’s coming.’
They had left the Strandcafé and pushed through the crowds towards Norrmälarstrand and the water’s edge. Nyberg could leave his pastry to the vigilant grey sparrows without a bad conscience.
The lead group of the Stockholm Marathon had just passed by when they reached the blue-and-white plastic barrier. Whenever anyone grumbled about them forcing their way through, they found a police ID shoved in their face. Nyberg knew that people had been suspended for showing their ID when they were off duty, and had let the apparently not-too-scrupulous Hellberg clear the path.
The marathon route became more crowded. About a hundred people had passed when Nyberg shouted: ‘How will we spot him?’
‘You’ll see!’ Sara laughed.
And he had seen, you couldn’t have missed it.
Ludvig Johnsson had passed them with a blue flashing light on his head. He was running incredibly fast and waved cheerfully to the happily cheering paedophile hunters.
Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg had ducked under the blue-and-white plastic tape and slipped through a small gap in the string of marathon runners. The group followed behind him. Party-Ragge had been openly waving his ID at the rapidly approaching stewards, who stopped dead in their tracks and allowed the group of police officers to go past on important business. They jogged up Polhelmsgatan.
‘What’s going on now?’ Gunnar Nyberg had panted, his body not exactly made for jogging.
‘Now he’ll be bloody surprised to see us again, up on Fleminggatan,’ Sara had replied.
They had got there just in time to see the unmistakable blue light approaching. Sure enough, Ludvig Johnsson had laughed in surprise, pointed at the blue light and looked accusatively at them.
‘That damned light weighs a couple of kilos,’ Hellberg had laughed sadistically once Johnsson had disappeared out of view.
Then they could relax and have another coffee, before it was time to catch Johnsson down on the other side of the shipyard on Norrmälarstrand. That time, he hadn’t looked quite so fresh, and when they saw him for a second time on Fleminggatan, the blue light had disappeared. They never did find out where it had come off.
The whole group had then jumped into a police car which, blue lights flashing, had set off for Stockholm Stadium, where they stood on the running track, all with blue flashing lights on their heads, cheering home their exhausted marathon hero.
Gunnar Nyberg had felt strange with the flashing light strapped to his head. It was almost five o’clock, and he had been doing his best to join in, to have just as much fun as the others seemed to be having, to avoid thinking that it was for this he had given up his weekend with his grandson Benny in Östhammar.
And when he saw his stick-thin old friend receive the fabulous Sara Svenhagen’s heartfelt hug there in Stockholm Stadium, in the shadow of its fine old clock tower, he had felt like he could almost reconcile himself with it. Her golden hair wonderfully glossy in the gleaming late-afternoon sun.
That was then.
Now it was gone. Sara Svenhagen had chopped it all off. She looked like a different person. Just as appealing, of course, but in a completely different way. More interesting, maybe. Less of a luminary and more of a person. With everything that entailed.
‘What got into your head?’ said Nyberg, straight off.
Ludvig Johnsson didn’t really seem to understand, sitting stick-thin in the café by the police station, wolfing down his third Danish pastry of the day. But Sara understood. She smiled slightly.
‘A fresh start,’ was all she said.
Gunnar Nyberg stared down into his untouched cup of black coffee and had nothing to say. For his part, he’d had enough fresh starts for a while.
Though there was that thing with women, of course . . .
Ludvig Johnsson shifted in his creaky chair on the narrow pavement outside the pleasantly named Annika’s Café & Restaurant by the police station on Kungsholmsgatan.
‘Still going with your ascetic’s coffee breaks, Gunnar?’ he asked.
Johnsson looked almost too fit, with his wiry body and neat bald patch just above his monk-like band of black hair. He was wearing a thin, pale linen suit, a greenish tie and a beige shirt, and he looked at least ten years younger than Nyberg, despite them being the same age, just under fifty. It always grieved him so much to see such a fit and healthy man gobbling down unhealthy food so often.
On the whole, it had been a strange experience to meet Ludvig Johnsson again. They had been very close for a short time twenty-five years ago. Gone through Police College together, virtually lived on top of one another, day in and day out. The division had been clear even then: Gunnar spent most of his time in the weights room, Ludvig running amok down on the track. Gunnar became Mr Sweden and an ugly Norrmalm policeman with a baseball bat. Ludvig went out to the provinces and became a friendly local policeman in Vänersborg. And now they had been reunited. As paedophile police, as an evening paper had carelessly called them. And surprisingly little had changed. They had both lost their families, in completely different ways, and on the other side of the abyss, they had found each other once more. Again, more a result of differences than similarities. Ludvig was nimble, supple, elegant, European. Gunnar was big, strong, a fighter; out-and-out Swedish.
‘I have to do it,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘I’ve still got twelve kilos to go before I’m down to being Sweden’s Second Biggest Policeman.’
Ludvig Johnsson laughed. ‘Yeah, I read that story. Did they talk to you first?’
‘Someone rang and asked if I still weighed a hundred and thirty-nine kilos. I said no, a hundred and forty-six. The entire story’s built on that conversation. Sweden’s Biggest Policeman.’
‘Well, listen,’ Ludvig Johnsson said abruptly, slapping his marathon-runner knees. ‘It’s bloody well time for Midsummer. One day to go. May the country’s paedophiles rest easy, at least for a couple of days. What’re you all doing?’
‘I’m going to see my grandson,’ said Nyberg without hesitation. ‘Dance around the Midsummer pole in Östhammar.’
‘I’m just going to relax,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Unwind. There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now.’
‘I’m going to renew myself,’ said Ludvig Johnsson cryptically.
Suddenly, a familiar voice could be heard on Kungsholmsgatan.
‘Well, well! If it isn’t Sweden’s Very Biggest Policeman!’
A short-haired, medium-blond man dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, a red pimple on his cheek, had appeared in sharp relief against the greyish facade of the police station. Nyberg allowed himself the trouble of standing up and spreading his arms. The two men hugged. When Nyberg let go, the other man looked as though he had just been embraced by an anaconda.
‘Distinguished paedophile hunters,’ said Nyberg jovially, ‘meet the hero of Hällunda. The pride of the police force, Paul Hjelm. Ludvig Johnsson and Sara Svenhagen.’
‘Hullo,’ said Johnsson.
‘Hi,’ said Svenhagen.
‘Hi,’ Hjelm panted, regaining his breath. ‘Congratulations on your latest crackdown, it seems to have gone really well.’
‘Thanks,’ said Svenhagen. ‘Yeah, it was a little reward for our efforts.’
‘Finally, we should add,’ said Johnsson.
‘What’re you busy with nowadays?’ asked Nyberg, patting Hjelm on the shoulder. ‘Where did you end up? Local CID?’
‘In the mundane, you could say, yeah. Right now it’s the Kvarnen Killer, if you’ve heard about that criminal mastermind.’
‘Pub brawl?’ Nyberg said thoughtlessly. ‘Aren’t you a bit . . . overqualified?’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Hjelm. ‘It’s shaping up to be something really interesting. We’ll see. I’m working with Kerstin by the way, Gunnar.’
‘That’s right!’ exclaimed Nyberg. ‘My old room-mate. She was meant to be going back home. So you ended up together? Good fit.’
‘A great fit,’ said Hjelm. ‘I’ve got to buy a couple of sandwiches from the delicious Annika’s, then we’re pressing on with the interrogations. It has its unexpected moments.’
‘What d’you say about Östhammar for Midsummer? Come up and meet the boy. Tommy.’
‘Thanks, but I can’t. I think the kids’ve got a lot going on. We’re renting the cottage on Dalarö again.’
‘Yeah, yeah, go and buy your killer sandwiches then,’ said Nyberg, ‘otherwise you’ll get a telling-off from Kerstin.’
