He knew there wasn’t going to be any writing done today, but he still turned on the computer, put out the stack of half-finished outlines, and stared into the electronic square. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. He turned on the television, just to have some company on the other side of the room, silent images and low volume. He turned on the radio, a commercial station; hits he’d heard several times before and didn’t really need to listen to. He took a short walk down to the water, looking through his binoculars at the passengers on the deck of the ferry outside. People in boats were a play without a plot.
Not one word yet. But he was going to sit here until he wrote one.
The phone.
It was always Agnes nowadays. Everyone else had stopped calling. It took him a year to even notice. He knew he got angry as hell when a call disturbed him in the middle of a sentence. He found it hard to hide that fact when he answered, so he’d managed to scare them off one by one, and then, when the block came and the screen turned white, he realized how the emptiness had crept slyly in, both beautiful and ugly.
“Yes?”
“You don’t need to sound so annoyed.”
“I’m writing.”
“What, exactly?”
“It’s going a bit slow right now.”
“So you mean nothing.”
“Basically.”
He couldn’t fool Agnes. They’d seen each other naked.
“I’m sorry. What do you want?”
“We have a daughter together. I wanted to know how she’s doing. That’s what we call each other about sometimes. I tried to call earlier. You made Marie hang up. So I didn’t get an answer. Now I want one.”
“Good. She’s good. She seems to be one of the few people who doesn’t mind the heat. She takes after you.”
He saw Agnes’s dark body in front of him. He knew exactly what she looked like, even now, the way she was sitting in an office chair, curled up against the backrest, thin dress. He’d wanted her every morning, every day, every night, but now he’d learned to shut it off, to be brusque, and irritable, and free.
“And nursery school? How did it go leaving her?”
Micaela. You want to know something about Micaela. It felt good to know that she was bothered by his relationship with a woman who was much younger than she was. He realized it didn’t matter. She wasn’t coming back just because he made love to a woman as beautiful as her. But it felt good in a childish way, and he couldn’t keep himself from enjoying it.
“Better. Today, it took ten minutes. Then she ran off and started playing Indians with David.”
“Indians?”
“That’s what they’re playing these days.”
He sat down in the tiny kitchen at the table, his workplace. Then he stood up, took the cordless phone into an even smaller room, which he called the living room, and sat down in an armchair. She’d called at just the right time. He could look away from the blank screen. He was just about to ask her how things were in Stockholm, how she was doing for real, which he hardly ever did, afraid of the answer, afraid to hear she was doing well, and that she was also seeing somebody. He was trying to figure out a casual way to say it, and thought perhaps he’d found it, when a picture came on the muted television that he always kept on.
“Agnes, wait a moment.”
A still image in black and white, a smiling man, dark, short-haired. He recognized that face. He’d just seen it. Today. It was the father on the park bench. Outside the Dove. They’d said hello to each other. He’d been sitting on the park bench just outside the gate, waiting.
Fredrik walked over to the television, raised the volume.
A new picture of the father. One in color. From a prison. A wall in the background. Two guards on either side of him. He waved toward the camera. At least it looked like he did.
A hurried reporter’s voice. They sounded alike, all of them. Rattling on, stressing every word, neutral voices without personality.
The voice said that the man in the picture, the father from the park bench, was thirty-six years old and named Bernt Lund. That in 2006 he’d been sentenced for a series of rapes of underage girls. That in 2013 he’d been convicted again for the same crime, which culminated in the so-called Skarpholm murders, two nine-year-old girls brutally molested and murdered in a basement storage unit. That early this morning he’d escaped from custody while being transported to a hospital from Aspsås prison’s unit for sex offenders.
Fredrik Steffansson sat, silent.
He couldn’t hear it, raised the volume, but couldn’t hear. The man in the picture. He’d said hello to him.
A prison administrator with a microphone in his face stammered while sweat ran down his forehead.
A senior police officer with a sullen countenance replied with a no comment and ended with a plea to the public to report any sightings to the authorities.
He’d said hello to him.
The man had been sitting on the park bench outside the gate, and he’d nodded to him once on the way in and once on the way out.
Fredrik couldn’t move.
He heard Agnes shouting from the phone, her sharp voice tearing into his ear. He let her shout.
He shouldn’t have greeted him. He shouldn’t have nodded at him. He lifted the phone.
“Agnes. I can’t talk now. I have to make a call. I’m hanging up now.”
He pressed a button on the phone, waiting for the dial tone. She was still there.
“Agnes, goddammit! Hang up!”
He threw the phone on the floor, stood up quickly, ran to the kitchen, to the jacket hanging on one of the chairs, found his mobile, and called Micaela’s number, called the nursery school.
Lars Ågestam looked across the courtroom. A mediocre collection of people.
The politically appointed lay judges with their tired, ignorant eyes; Judge van Balvas, who had already acted unprofessionally at the beginning of the case, clearly showing her prejudice toward people indicted of sex crimes; the accused, Håkan Axelsson, who had yet to show any emotional awareness whatsoever of how his alleged crimes affected the young children involved; the prison guards stationed behind him trying their best to look like they understood what was going on; the seven journalists on the press bench at the front taking notes continuously, but still incapable of getting even the outlines of a trial correct; the two women on a bench in the back, who came to all the trials because they were free entertainment and a civil right; and, finally, the group of pimply law school students in the very back that—as he himself had done just a few years ago—viewed a trial about the despair of abused children as homework and the chance for a good grade.
He wanted to scream at all of them, tell them to leave the courtroom or, at least, to shut the fuck up.
But he was a well-mannered, ambitious, and relatively new prosecutor who wanted more for himself than to spend his time prosecuting sex offenders and junkies, who wanted to move up up up, and who was smart enough to keep his opinions to himself. He made the indictment, prepared the prosecution, and when the trial came, he knew more about it than anyone else in the room. It would take one hell of a defense lawyer to even try to win the case.
And Kristina Björnsson was one. One hell of a defense lawyer.
She was the one person in this courtroom he couldn’t call mediocre—experienced, brilliant, the only one he’d encountered so far on the opposing side who defended idiots over and over and still considered them more important than her lawyer’s fees. And, therefore, one of the few who had the complete respect of her clients. One of the first stories he’d heard when he started at law school was about Kristina Björnsson and her coin collection. She was a numismatist, with apparently one of the better collections in the country—a collection that had been stolen sometime in the early ’90s. It caused a lot of commotion in the country’s prisons, and through the prisoner organizations a peculiar search was conducted in the underworld. After a week, two burly guys with ponytails showed up at Björns
son’s home bearing flowers and an intact collection, wrapped in gift paper and curly string. Every coin was in its place, in plastic case after plastic case. Attached was a letter, painstakingly written by three professional criminals who specialized in art and antiquities, a long letter in which they begged for her forgiveness, swore they’d had no idea who the coins belonged to, and that they could help her complete her collection if she ever decided to consider methods that were not entirely legal. If Lars Ågestam ever found himself in need of a defense lawyer, he would turn to Kristina Björnsson.
She’d done a good job this time, too. Håkan Axelsson was an emotionally dead piece of shit who deserved a long prison sentence, and that’s what the prosecution would insist on—given the pictorial evidence of abuse presented in CD-ROM form, the witness statements from two of the other seven pedophiles who participated in the bizarre distribution of child pornography at eight o’clock on Saturday evenings, and the defendant’s own confession—but still that pig would likely end up with only a year or two. Björnsson had patiently responded to charge after charge. She claimed her client suffered from a serious psychological condition and, therefore, belonged in psychiatric care. She knew she’d never get that, but she’d opened the way for a compromise that seemed impossible when Axelsson first confessed to the crime, and she was close to getting it. She’d stuck to her defense, and the lay judges liked her. It became clear that they were probably heading toward a sentence of violation with mitigating circumstances when one of the lay judges pointed out that the children had dressed provocatively.
Lars Ågestam’s blood was boiling. That fucking municipal politician had sat in front of him, in a gray suit, talking about children’s clothing and about an encounter between people and about who shared responsibility. Ågestam had been closer than ever to punching those despicable lay judges and telling them, and his own career, to go to hell.
He’d followed the trials of three of the other child pornographers closely. They’d received long sentences, and Axelsson was just as guilty, but Kristina Björnsson and that piece of shit had formed their archaic pact, and if Bernt Lund hadn’t escaped this very morning, there might have been an acquittal and a loss of prestige for an ambitious young prosecutor. Lund’s disappearance had brought those journalists to the front bench with a sudden heightened interest in Axelsson’s trial. Their stories would now move from page eleven to page seven; each link between Axelsson and Sweden’s most hated and wanted man would result in double columns and, at least, a one-year prison sentence to avoid public scrutiny.
Ågestam did not want any more sex crimes for a while.
They took too much energy. It didn’t matter if the perpetrator and the victim were no more than two anonymous names on a piece of paper, the crime got to him, made it hard for him to maintain his distance, his governmental calm, plus, an affected prosecutor risked becoming completely useless.
He wanted a bank robbery, a murder, a case of fraud. Sex crimes were predictable. Everyone had already made up their minds, honed their arguments a long time ago. Before the Axelsson trial, he’d tried to understand, read what there was to read on the dissemination of child pornography, had taken a course at the Crown Prosecution Service to learn the basics of dealing with sexual violence—four prosecutors and three lawyers spending their evenings trying to lay the foundation to build better sentences.
He didn’t want to prosecute any more sex crimes and he definitely didn’t want the Bernt Lund case whenever Lund showed up again. Lund provoked too many emotions. His crimes were so extreme Ågestam didn’t even want to read about them, much less write about them for a case.
He’d be sure to stay far away when the time came.
Fredrik Steffansson opened the front door, searched for his keys, then left it unlocked and ran for the car.
Marie.
He ran and wept and jerked open the car door.
The key was in the ignition, with the rest of his keys hanging off it. He started the car and backed hastily out through the narrow entrance.
She hadn’t been there.
Micaela had listened to his incoherent statements, put the phone down, and started searching for her. First indoors, then outdoors. Nowhere to be found. He’d screamed, and Micaela had asked him to calm down. He’d lowered his voice and then raised it again and screamed louder than before, about the park bench and what he saw on the news, and the father sitting on the park bench in photos in front of a prison wall.
He’d hung up, and now he sat in the car and drove the narrow, winding road in panic, still weeping, still screaming.
He was sure of it. The man on the bench was the man in those photographs. He held the steering wheel with one hand while calling the Stockholm police, screaming his message. After a few minutes, they put him on the phone with someone on duty. He explained what happened, that he’d seen Lund outside a nursery school in Strängnäs, and that his daughter, who should be there, was gone.
It was three kilometers from the house to the ferry. He sped past the abandoned school at Skvallertorget and a few meters later past a thirteenth-century stone church. Three people in the cemetery, one watering flowers, one standing quietly on the grass in front of a tombstone, one raking the gravel path.
He was a few minutes late, the ferry had just left and was already halfway across. It went from the mainland every hour and came back to the island ten minutes later. He looked at the clock, fourteen minutes past three, honked several times, flashed his lights.
Meaningless.
He called. The ferry pilot rarely heard the phone ringing, but it was quieter than usual, no wind, no boats in sight. Fredrik got hold of him and tried to explain, and the pilot promised to return as soon as he dropped off the cars he was carrying.
Why the hell had they gone to nursery school?
Why the hell hadn’t they stayed at home when it was already half past one?
The ferry landed on the other side of the water, and for Fredrik time stood still. Marie wasn’t inside, and she wasn’t outside. He thought about how his daughter had become more than a human, he’d made her more, maybe too much more. After Agnes it felt as if Marie had become the guardian of all of his love—he bombarded her with it—she was also the guardian of all the love Agnes directed at her. She was responsible for both of them, and he’d often thought that it wasn’t right, that no one should have to be more than just a human being, shouldn’t be forced to bear more love than they could, and a five-year-old wasn’t that big.
He called Micaela again. No answer. One more time. Her phone was switched off. He was transferred to an electronic voice, which asked him to leave a message.
It had been a long time since he’d wept. Even when Agnes moved out. He just wasn’t able to anymore, and he had tried, decided to without success. It couldn’t be forced, and when he thought back, he realized he’d never wept as an adult.
He was shut off.
Or at least he had been.
Therefore, he couldn’t comprehend anything—the awful fear that had taken hold of him and the tears that wouldn’t stop. He’d often imagined it would feel good to cry, but this, this was more a theft, something pouring out of him, while he sat in the driver’s seat like a huge, lonely hole.
The bright yellow and ocean-blue ferry had turned around now, four cars had driven off on the other side, and it was on its way back to make an extra trip. It was balanced on two rusty wires, like a moving rail in the water, and they clanged rhythmically and loudly against the metal where they were connected, getting louder as the ferry approached. He lifted his hand up toward the cabin—they always greeted each other. And he drove on board.
Water surrounding him. The ferry lazily following its route. Fredrik kept seeing the photographs from this afternoon’s news. First the mug shot in black and white. He’d been smiling. The moment in front of the prison wall. He’d stood surrounded by guards, waving at the camera. Fredrik tried to rid himself of that face, but it overwhelmed him, refused to stop. T
hat smiling and waving man had raped children. One by one. He knew it now. He remembered. Two girls had been molested and murdered in a cellar. They’d been destroyed. Lund had left them cut, torn, beaten, like used-up dolls in a pile. He’d read about it back then. But he hadn’t been able to comprehend it. It was unthinkable. He’d read about it, and shared in the public fury, but it still felt like something that might never have happened. What he read didn’t seem real. The media coverage of the trial had washed over him day after day until he wasn’t capable of seeing it.
There was an older man up in the cabin of the ferry. Fredrik had only seen him piloting in the mornings until now, a retiree who was filling in until someone younger could be transferred here from a route they were canceling up north. A wise man who could see Fredrik’s desperation and chose not to go downstairs and shoot the shit like he usually did about the weather and housing prices. He’d listened when Fredrik called and signaled that he had wanted to know what this was about, but now he stayed away, and Fredrik would thank him for it, next time.
On the other side, the older man’s German Shepherd was tied to one of the trees near the shore, barking with joy when his master waved. Fredrik revved the engine and left the ferry as soon as it reached land.
He was scared. So scared.
She never went anywhere without telling someone. She knew Micaela was inside and that she was supposed to tell her if she wanted to go out to the yard, beyond the fence.
The man on the park bench outside the gate. Cap, fairly short, fairly skinny. He’d greeted him.
Arnövägen, nine kilometers on a curvy dirt road, then Road 55, eight kilometers on narrow asphalt. There were few other cars on the road. He increased his speed, drove faster than ever before.
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