The Beast (ewert grens)

by Anders Roslund

  Margareta stood very still, her eyes following the helicopters until they disappeared from the sky above them.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ she said.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Let’s not walk on.’

  ‘Not until they’re well and truly gone.’

  ‘Not even then.’

  She had held her husband’s hand but now she pulled at his arm until it was round her waist; that was where she wanted it to be. He kissed her cheek lightly. The two of them stood together against the world with its helicopters and uniforms and noise. But she wanted to leave at once, and in her anxiety she needed him to hold her close. He looked at her full of concern, because she was never usually afraid. She was the more courageous of the two of them, he thought.

  Then, far away where the trees were thinning, he saw them, a policeman and his dog. They were moving slowly, the dog was looking for something, leading the man westwards, in the same direction as the helicopters had flown.

  ‘Goodness. One of those as well.’

  ‘It mightn’t be about the same thing.’

  ‘Come on, it’s got to be.’

  Now they were convinced that something had happened, here in their wood, during their private break from the outside world.

  They hurried down the slope and through the dense shrubs at its base, their measured pace and breathing rhythm broken; all that was gone now. They wanted to get out of the way of someone else’s hunt, someone else’s misery.

  It was Margareta who saw it first.

  A bright red thing.

  A small shoe. A little girl’s.

  A red, shiny leather shoe, with an eye-catching metal buckle.

  They had been walking as fast as they could. She ignored the shooting pains in her knee joints, and when Rune asked if she was all right, she just shook her head, pointing ahead to the fastest short cut, never mind if the going was harder. Better than having time to think about the gathering darkness around them, better than dealing with Rune’s worries about her. They had covered almost a kilometre. Not far to the metalled lane and the houses now.

  To pass a huge fir they let go of each other, walking round the tree on opposite sides.

  She spotted something under the fir’s sweeping branches and thought at first that it was a toadstool, prodded it with her foot, lifted it up. Twisting it round in her hands, she understood what it meant and looked around: where is she? Is she still here? The girl?

  She didn’t scream, only called out; it was no surprise to her after all. She held the red shoe gently and handed it to Rune when he came up to her.

  One more morning with the lie lurking in the back of his mind. He had been lying close to her, his hand touching her breasts, belly, thighs, he had kissed the back of her neck, whispered good morning into her ear, all the time doing his best to avoid having to face his betrayal.

  Now Lennart Oscarsson was in his office, watching through the window as the prison woke to a new day. Another lovely sunny day, as hot as yesterday, as every day last week. He sighed.

  Ever since he had fallen in love with Karin he had been haunted by fantasies about the day when she would ask him to accept that she’d met someone else, and that she was leaving him. Instead it was he whose love of another would break up their shared life. Who’d have believed it? She was beautiful, his looks were quite ordinary. She was outgoing, he was withdrawn. Her personality glittered, his never would. And yet it was he who had put their closeness at risk.

  He had to go down to Lund’s unit. On the way he nodded to two faces from the groups of trainees, people who wished they’d been placed anywhere but in a sex offender unit for their half-year of learning on the job. They despised their charges, not that he didn’t feel the same; they all did, the staff spat at the perverts all the time.

  The unit was silent and empty, an abandoned corridor, closed doors. The inmates were in the workshop; all were on work assignments, which is to say they did wood-turning, rings and building bricks to make educational toys, for a couple of kronor per hour. And whatever else was wrong with sex offenders, you had to admit that they trotted off to produce whatever rubbish was demanded of them without a murmur, no pissing about on the whole, unlike the so-called normals, drug-crazed would-be lifers, guys inside for robbery and violence and fraud, non-stop trouble the lot of them, either going on strike or doing a sickie.

  He stopped outside cell 11, Bernt Lund’s empty cell, let himself in. Lund was still on the loose, halfway through day two. They mostly couldn’t cope for long; it took concentration to keep out of sight, always stay watchful, do without sleep, and it also required strength and money. Chased by dozens of policemen, trailed by the public on the alert, the hiding places grew fewer with every breath.

  The room with its orderly rows of objects looked the same, except for the pile on the floor. He remembered how Grens, the old maniac, had knocked a lot of stuff off with his diary. The thin bloke, whose fortieth birthday had been ruined, had looked nervously at his colleague and then sighed when Grens aimed and did it again.

  The bedspread with its blotchy stripes was already ruffled and Lennart sat down on the bed, then lay down to see what Lund had seen, night after night. What had it been like for him? Had he been wanking with closed eyes, fantasising about little girls? Or had he thought up plans, how to rule and control a child, destroying its naivety the moment he set to work on it? Had he ever tried to empathise with the child’s fear and humiliation? What had it been like, living with his guilt in an eight-metre-square cell, alone with it evening, night, morning; it must have threatened to suffocate him until all he could do was run from it, beating two screws senseless to get away.

  Someone knocked. Who? The door opened and Bertolsson, the governor, stepped inside.

  ‘Lennart? What on earth are you up to?’

  He sat up, tried to smooth his unruly hair.

  ‘I can’t really tell. I came here and… I wanted to know what it was like.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. None the wiser.’

  Bertolsson looked around the cell.

  ‘Christ. What a complete nutter.’

  ‘I think that’s it. My new insight. Lund didn’t understand a thing. No remorse. He’s incapable of seeing any point of view other than his own.’

  Bertolsson kicked the piled-up objects on the floor. It didn’t fit. Chaos on the floor, total conformity and order everywhere else. Lennart couldn’t be bothered explaining.

  ‘Too bad. I’ve been looking for you because I need to talk to you about another madman. One of Lund’s colleagues, as it were. One of the seven in the child porn ring.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Name of Axelsson. Håkan. Couple of minor past convictions. Sentenced tomorrow in the child pornography case. He’ll have to do time, but probably won’t get as long a spell as he deserves. Enough to miss out on both Christmas and Easter, though.’

  ‘Where do I come in?’

  ‘He’s at Kronoberg now, which means transfer to here, but you haven’t got any vacancies.’

  Lennart yawned, a big, long yawn, thought for a minute and lay down again.

  ‘I’m sorry. These characters make me tired.’

  Bertolsson ignored him.

  ‘That is to say, this cell is empty, but won’t be for long. Lund should be back pronto.’

  ‘There you are. Sex crime is quite the fashion. Perverts are queuing up.’

  Bertolsson straightened the slats in the blind to let in the bright sunlight. A day was happening out there. It was easy to forget. Inside the institution, specific days did not stand out, one from the other; instead everything congealed into lumps of months, years, into waiting.

  ‘We’ll have to place him in one of our normal units. Just for a couple of days, a week at most. Until we find a cell somewhere more appropriate.’

  Lennart started to sit up, got halfway, leaned on his elbow and turned towards his boss.

  ‘Arne, what are you saying
now?’

  ‘He’s not allowed to bring the indictment into the unit anyway.’

  ‘It doesn’t fucking well matter. The others will find out and you know what will happen next.’

  ‘Just a few days. No more. Then he’ll be transferred.’

  Lennart sat up straight.

  ‘Hold it. I know you know. If he is finally transferred anywhere from a normal unit, it will be in an ambulance. No other option.’

  It wouldn’t smell; he had been here before and he knew that. It didn’t help to know. Already on the stairs, his nose, his brain instinctively registered the stench of death.

  Sven, as a detective inspector based in Stockholm, had of course visited the Institute of Forensic Medicine more times than he could remember, it was part of his job. He knew he had to turn up, but he also knew that he would never, ever stop hating it, that he would never, ever learn to watch the dead man or woman, human beings who had been breathing, talking and laughing not long before, being opened up and sawn into chunks by a man - almost always a man - in a white coat. The stranger’s hands would root around inside the corpse, examine the torn-out innards under bright lights, throw the whole lot back inside the carcass and roughly stitch it together. To cover up what they had done, the corpse on its trolley would be decorously draped, so as not to offend the bereaved who came to inspect it and declare that this was indeed the person they had been living next to, when they had all been full of hope.

  Ewert was standing next to him while they waited for someone to open the security lock from the inside. Sven thought of how differently his colleague reacted to the dead the mortuary. Ewert didn’t seem to sense the presence of death. To him, the dead were just things. Before leaving, he would often lift the cloth, pinch some accessible body part and say something vaguely funny, as if to prove it beyond insult.

  The medic had arrived at the other side of the glass door and was looking for his key-card. It was Ludvig Errfors, one of the most experienced guys here. Sven had time to tell himself that he was pleased that Errfors had been picked, because after all an autopsy on a child must be the hardest to do; they’d be less used to dissecting children. If any one of them was likely to have come across enough little bodies for the procedure to become routine, then this was the man.

  Errfors found his card and the lock clicked open.

  After the greetings, the pathologist asked about Lund. They told him there was no news. He shook his head and started speaking about the autopsies of the two dead girls in the Skarpholm cellar. It had been his case and he kept commenting on it, while he briskly led the way downstairs.

  He was saying that he had never before seen such extreme violence towards children.

  Then he stopped in mid-step, turning a very serious face up at them.

  ‘That is, not until today.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘I recognise the type of violence. Lund’s trademark.’

  Bottom of the stairs, then a short corridor, first room on the right. That was where Errfors usually worked.

  The dreaded trolley was there, right in the middle of the room. And now there was a smell, though not strong. The ventilation system hummed, steadily shifting volumes of air. If it hadn’t been a mortuary, Sven would not have known that the smell came from a dead body.

  They didn’t have to put on sterile green gowns; Errfors was too experienced not to know when rules could be broken. He switched off all the lamps apart from the one over the trolley, its bright cone of light illuminating the stage in the darkened space.

  ‘This is how I prefer it. No reflections from shiny surfaces to disturb the examination.’

  They saw a child’s face, looking peaceful, as if asleep; recognised Marie from her parents’ photos.

  Errfors was rummaging in a plastic case. He produced a pair of big black-rimmed glasses with magnifying lenses, and a couple of A4 sheets of paper.

  ‘Now. She is less serene-looking under the cover.’

  The room was silent, well sound-insulated; the rustling of bits of paper invaded their aural space.

  ‘Traces of semen were found in her vagina and anus, and on her body. The perpetrator ejaculated over the body, before and also after death.’

  He lifted the cover. Sven turned his face away. He could not bear to look.

  ‘A hard object with a sharp point has been forcibly introduced into her vagina and caused severe internal haemorrhaging.’

  As he listened carefully, Ewert observed the exposed body of the little girl. He sighed.

  ‘He did exactly that last time.’

  ‘The acts were more brutal then, but yes, you’re right. The MO was the same.’

  ‘Seems he used a curtain rail then.’

  ‘Could be, but I haven’t been able to identify the object. Only that it was hard and pointed.’

  The pathologist produced the next sheet of paper.

  ‘I have established the cause of death. A powerful blow, probably the edge of the criminal’s hand, directed against the larynx.’

  Ewert noted the big bruise across her throat. He turned to Sven, who was still looking away.

  ‘Hold on, you.’

  ‘I can’t stand it.’

  ‘No need. I’m doing the looking.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Still, you should note that we’ve got him.’

  ‘We’ve got fuck all.’

  ‘Not once we pick him up. He has ejaculated all over her. Just like last time, there’s semen all over the place. And we’ve kept samples from last time. One DNA test will do the trick.’

  She had been lying in the wood. In his mind, Sven saw Margareta and Rune Lantz, an elderly couple still in love, sitting together and holding hands while the tears trickled from their eyes, right through the interrogation. Hers had been worst, a silent flow every time she was forced to describe what she had seen.

  Let’s sit down here. This stone.

  Yes.

  I want to ask you questions here, with the place in view. Can you cope with that?

  Yes.

  I want to know what happened, right from the start.

  May Rune stay with me?

  Of course.

  I don’t know…

  Please try.

  I mean, I don’t know if I can do this.

  Try, for the sake of the little girl.

  We take a walk, every evening. If it doesn’t rain too much.

  Here?

  Yes.

  Always the same way?

  Often a little different. The way. To make a change.

  What about this way?

  It was the first time, I think. Isn’t that right, Rune?

  Let’s keep this between the two of us now. Just you and me.

  Well, I didn’t remember it from before.

  And why did you walk just here?

  It happened because we heard the helicopter.

  What about the helicopter?

  I didn’t like it. Unpleasant, it was. And then that policeman with his dog. We started to hurry and it seemed like a short cut.

  What happened when you got here?

  Do you have a paper tissue? Or a hanky?

  I’m sorry. No.

  Forgive me for bothering you.

  Please, don’t apologise.

  We had been walking hand in hand. Then, by that fir tree, we let go.

  Why?

  It was big, blocking our way. We had to walk round it, on opposite sides.

  What happened next?

  I thought it was a toadstool. A bright red thing. I kicked it, not hard.

  What was it?

  A shoe. I realised once I’d kicked it that it was a shoe.

  What did you do?

  I waited until Rune came along. I just knew something was wrong.

  How do you mean that you just knew?

  Sometimes you feel things. This time everything was upsetting. The helicopters, the policeman and the dog. And then a shoe.

  Tell me what you did. Exactl
y.

  I took the shoe and showed it to Rune. I wanted him to see.

  And then?

  Then she was lying there.

  Where?

  On the ground. Under the tree. And I could see that she was destroyed.

  Destroyed?

  That she wasn’t whole. I saw it and Rune did too. She had been destroyed.

  She was lying on the ground, you say. Did you touch her?

  Why should we? She was dead.

  I have to ask you these things.

  I can’t cope any more now.

  Just a few more questions.

  I can’t.

  Did you see anyone here?

  The girl. She was lying there, looking at me. All destroyed.

  I meant someone else. Someone except you and Rune?

  No. We had seen that policeman. And his dog.

  No one else?

  I can’t any more. Rune, tell him I can’t.

  The pathologist was looking in his plastic folder for a third sheet of paper, but couldn’t find it. He left the trolley to search for it on a shelf.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something else for you that links this case with the past.’

  He came back, pulled the cover into place and Sven could look again.

  ‘We noted straight away that the soles of her feet were perfectly clean. The rest of her body was torn and bloody and dirty. We investigated and found traces of-’

  ‘Of saliva? Am I right?’

  Errfors nodded.

  ‘Yes, you are. Saliva, just like last time.’

  Ewert looked at her face. She wasn’t there. Her body was, but she wasn’t.

  ‘That’s Lund’s idea of foreplay. Licking their feet. And their shoes.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘But you just said…’

  ‘Not foreplay, that is. He licked the soles of this girl’s feet after death.’

  He hadn’t seen her for months. They had talked practically every day, but on the phone and only about Marie, things like what time she got up that morning, what she had for breakfast and what new words she had used. Had she played something different, had she cried, laughed, lived? Every moment of her growth was stolen from the parent Marie wasn’t with and they compensated as best they could by talking about her. Marie, and only Marie, brought them together without bitterness or accusations or regret about love lost.