Pen 33

by Anders Roslund

  Like a closing statement. He’d already written down the key words, which is what he’d learned to do, to summarize, to articulate the big picture to see it for himself, and then break it down one question at a time. Now, he raised his voice, he knew it was weak, but there wasn’t much he could do about that—loudness only lent false authority.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Grens. However, society’s failure does not give him the right to execute an alleged rapist and killer. What if Lund is innocent? You don’t know for sure. Above all, Steffansson didn’t know for sure. What is it you want? Shall we say that he had the right to execute Lund because he’d seen him near the crime scene? Is that the society you’d like to police? People going around this town taking the law into their own hands? Sentencing other people to death? I don’t know, the law book I have doesn’t say anything about the death penalty. We have a responsibility, Grens. We have to show every single citizen that if you act as Steffansson did, you’ll be locked up for life. Even if you are a grieving father.”

  Grens had a ceiling fan. The kind you found in hotels on the Mediterranean. Ågestam hadn’t noticed it before, not until it stopped and the room fell silent. He looked at it, then at the old man in front of him, searching his face, wondering where all this fear came from. He was convinced that’s what this was about, fear that had turned into inaccessibility and aggression. What was it he was so afraid of? Why was it so difficult for him to be present, to speak without swear words and accusations? After all the stories he’d heard, even at university, here he was, Grens, the cop who took his own path, who was better than the others. And now? He couldn’t see what it was they’d been talking about. He saw a pathetic bastard who’d painted himself into a corner and sat there, alone and past his prime and unable to change.

  The CD was in Grens’s hand. The Classics of Siw, twenty-seven tracks. The detective opened the box and took out the thin piece of plastic. Put his fingers on the shiny surface, marking it with grease, he turned and twisted it, then put it back in its case.

  “Are you done?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then you can take this back. I don’t have one of those machines.”

  He handed it to Ågestam, who shook his head.

  “It’s yours. If you don’t want to play it, you can throw it away.”

  The older man put the bit of plastic aside. It was Wednesday, two weeks since Lund had overpowered two guards and escaped. A little girl was dead. Her killer was dead. The girl’s father sat in a building not far from here, behind a closed door, waiting to be arrested and tried. A prosecutor twat would soon be seeking life in prison for him.

  Some days he didn’t want to do this anymore. Sometimes he looked forward to the day this would all be over.

  Dead bodies were somehow worse when it was hot outside. They reminded him of those nature films he’d come to detest, pretentious voiceovers guiding the viewer under the harsh sun of the African savannah, the flies buzzing insistently in the microphone, a predator on the hunt who is stalking her prey, about to throw herself over it, tear it to pieces, eat what can be eaten, and leave the rest—a piece of bloody meat to be attacked again, this time by the flies who are part of the process of decay, which smelled and hurried and annihilated.

  That was what he saw, the image he always carried inside him when he went through those locked doors and down those narrow stairs on his way to the autopsy rooms of Forensic Medicine.

  They’d been here a week ago, and he’d turned away when the fabric was lifted. The girl’s serene face on a body that had been torn apart. Ewert had nodded to him, told him that he could look away, that he didn’t need to rub more hopelessness into his chest, seek out any more meaninglessness.

  She had been so unreal. Too young, too much on her way, she’d just begun. He remembered her feet. They’d been so small, as a five-year-old’s feet are. There’d been saliva on them. Lund had licked them. After her death.

  “Sven?”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you?”

  Ewert was being neither superior nor sarcastic. He was asking because he wanted to know.

  “I hate this place. I don’t understand it. And Errfors seems so normal. How could you choose to work in this place? This is the end. Who needs that, who can stand it? How does a person who’s just sawed a dead body apart function?”

  They passed a large archive. Sven had visited it once. Binders, drawers, folders, shelf after shelf behind sliding doors, a catalog of dead people. He’d been searching randomly that time, along with a young coroner, looking for images they never found. The dead had been gathered in paper, typed notes in alphabetical order. He hoped he never had to open that door again. It had felt like tramping on graves, pawing at the only thing that was left.

  Ludvig Errfors greeted them cordially. No sterile clothing this time either, nor did he offer any to the two police officers. They went into the autopsy room, the same hall that Marie Steffansson had been in. The coroner gestured toward the table.

  “I autopsied both of the basement murder victims. I autopsied the Steffansson girl. Now, I’ve autopsied their murderer.”

  Ewert struck the man that lay before him lightly on the leg.

  “This motherfucker? He was bound to end up here. But you know? You know for certain that this was our perp, this time, too?”

  “I told you that last week. It was exactly the same procedure. Same assault. I’ve worked here longer than they recommend, and I’ve never seen such violence visited upon a child before.”

  He pointed to the body under the fabric.

  “We’ll prove it soon. In black and white. For the trial, you’ll have a DNA sample. We already had his sperm. I’m quite sure, and the prosecutors and judges and judicial system will get it in writing.”

  “That prosecutor twat is going to push for a life sentence for Steffansson.”

  Sven looked at Ewert in surprise.

  “Yep. That’s how it goes. He’s trying to fill his suit.”

  Errfors moved the body slightly, directly under the lamp, then turned to Sven and smiled kindly.

  “It doesn’t look too good. I don’t know . . . You had some difficulty last time. You might want to look away?”

  Sven nodded, made brief eye contact with Ewert, then turned his back. Errfors lifted the fabric back.

  “You see. Not much of a face left. Steffansson hit him in the forehead. Like an explosion. We used his teeth to establish his identity.”

  The coroner pushed the table slightly, now directed the light toward the stomach.

  “He was hit first here in the hip. The bullet went straight through, destroyed part of the skeleton. Two shots. One in the hip, one in the head. It’s consistent with the evidence I’ve read. The statements from witnesses described two bangs.”

  Sven didn’t need to look. He was listening. Could see it anyway.

  “Are you done?”

  Errfors laid the fabric back over the body.

  “Now we are.”

  Sven turned back to the outline of a man’s body, looked at Lund’s face in front of him. What was the purpose of such a sick person’s life? How much had he understood of what had happened, what he’d done? To destroy your own kind like that, were you still human then? He’d asked those questions before, they always came to him more clearly when in front of the lifeless.

  They got ready to leave, jackets on, and slowly finished their conversation.

  “Before you go . . . I think there’s something else you’ll want to see.”

  Errfors moved from the table and opened the glass cabinet that stood along the wall.

  “This. This was his. I found it when I undressed him.”

  A gun. A knife. Two photographs and a handwritten note.

  “This, a gun, as you probably know better than I do, was attached to his leg. This, a type of knife I’ve never seen before, extremely sharp, kept in a holster on his forearm.”

  Bernt Lund had been armed. He’d been
prepared to defend himself.

  “And that idiot wants life. For a disturbed devil with a weapon who was hunting little girls outside a nursery school.”

  Sven picked up the photos and the handwritten note, lifted them up to the light, and studied the amateurish photography.

  “These girls have been photographed outside the school where he was shot. They have summer clothing on. These are fresh images. We’ll examine it.”

  Ewert handed back the two weapons, examined the photos and the note, and chuckled, as he’d chuckled at Ågestam this morning.

  “Lund even had their names. This is exactly what we needed. He was planning to kill two more.”

  The detective held up the photographs again, two girls, the same age as the Steffansson girl, light sun-bleached hair, smiling in the pictures, sitting on the edge of the sandbox, smiling at something only they know.

  “Do you know what this means? By murdering Bernt Lund, Fredrik Steffansson has almost certainly saved their lives. Two girls under the age of six can smile again tomorrow thanks to Steffansson.”

  Then Grens did as he usually did—Sven had seen it several times—he grabbed the corpse in front of him, knocked lightly on it a few times at the shoulder and hip, then pinched the foot, the toes under the fabric, he pinched and twisted and said something with his mouth facing in the other direction. It was difficult to hear.

  It was the fifth consecutive year that Bengt Söderlund spent his vacation at home. They’d rented a cottage on Gotland one year, a few kilometers outside Visby, and it turned out to be too expensive, and the weather was rainy. It was his first visit to the island everyone raved about, but after an endless week, he’d decided to never go there again. They’d gone to Ystad the year after that, another summer cottage, windy and not much countryside. They’d seen Österlen, so now they didn’t have to see it again. Two summers with a caravan, heavy traffic, and kids that wouldn’t go to sleep. Once, they’d gone to Rhodes, ninety-degree weather for two weeks, and they only left their hotel room in the evening for dinner. A couple of bus trips to Stockholm, city slickers everywhere, the kind who walked up escalators. Bengt and his wife didn’t need much more. The company did best when they stayed at home, and they did best, too. There was swimming in Tallbacka, two places if you counted the smaller lake, so the kids had something to do, and they had time, could take walks in the village, could have sex undisturbed now and then when the kids were out of the house, drink coffee in the garden, invite people over for dinner occasionally.

  Right now, Bengt and Elisabeth were sitting at the kitchen table, just as Ove and Helena walked past their open windows. They waved them in to share in their usual fika snack: coffee and cinnamon buns. It was easy to get along with Ove and Helena. There’d been a brief period, almost ten years ago, when things had been strained between them, when they’d avoided each other as much as possible for a few months. Ove and Elisabeth had carried on too long with each other at a midsummer party, so the couples’ friendship temporarily cooled until they all realized this village was too small to hide from each other. Eventually, they all ended up screaming loudly at each other late one night outside the kiosk, screaming until everything had been said and everyone understood that Ove and Elisabeth had no intention of breaking up any existing relationships—it had been just drunken curiosity stemming from their school years, and when someone turned on the overhead light in the kitchen, they knew immediately in the strong glare that there was nothing between them. None of them had ever discussed it again after that night outside the kiosk. Everyone had said what they had to say.

  Ove held a newspaper in his hand. Bengt had a copy on the kitchen table. There wasn’t much news these days, now that the Russian plane crash had been investigated, except for the Stockholm pedophile who’d murdered a five-year-old girl and her father who shot him. For the second week in a row, the front page was dominated by the story, by the latest interviews, the most recent analyses. The story belonged to everyone, and everyone had the right to an opinion. The girl and her father belonged to every family.

  They’d been talking about the Stockholm pedophile every time they met since this all started, since the escape and the murder, except Elisabeth, who refused to participate. She’d sat in silence, and when they’d asked her why, she told them they were being childish, that their hate and devotion to the topic were somehow wrong. They’d tried to explain, defend themselves, but finally let her be—it wasn’t illegal to be childish, and if she didn’t want to talk she didn’t have to.

  Bengt poured the coffee, dark roast with drops of cream in it. It smelled like coffee should, like home, warm and cozy. He served them one by one and offered some of yesterday’s cinnamon buns—that’s how they liked them too, better for dipping when they had a bit of crust. He pointed to the picture of Fredrik Steffansson. A passport photo, the same picture they’d been publishing for the last few days.

  “I would have done the same thing. Without blinking.”

  Ove dipped his bun, pressing it against the bottom of his cup.

  “Me too. If you have girls, that’s how it is, that’s just how you think.”

  Bengt picked up the newspaper, turned and twisted it.

  “But I wouldn’t have done it like him. I wouldn’t be thinking about anyone else. I’d have done it for my own sake. Pure revenge.”

  He looked around, waiting for the others’ reactions. Ove nodded. Helena nodded. Elisabeth stuck her tongue out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m so tired of all of you. Tired of hearing you harp on about this, morning, noon, and night. Every time we meet. Flasher-Göran, pedophiles, hatred!”

  “You don’t have to listen.”

  “Revenge? That’s bullshit. He hasn’t done anything. Hasn’t touched anyone. He stood naked by a flagpole. You’re pathetic.”

  She sobbed, cleared her throat trying to steady her voice, her eyes wet.

  “I don’t recognize any of you anymore. You sit in my kitchen, pretending you’re involved. I’m not going to put up with this anymore.”

  Helena put her cup on the table, put her hand on Elisabeth’s.

  “Elisabeth, please calm down.”

  Elisabeth defiantly pushed her hand away. Bengt raised his voice.

  “Fuck her. She likes the fucking bastards. Pedophiles!”

  He turned to his wife.

  “You think this is why I’ve worked my whole life? Worked like a fucking dog? So our society would lock up a man who saved the lives of small children?”

  He turned toward the open window, demonstrated his anger by spitting through it. He watched it land on the lawn.

  He also heard the door. Next door. He knew exactly which door it was.

  “Fuck. There’s that bastard.”

  He went to the window, looked out.

  “The pervert’s going out.”

  Flasher-Göran locked the door behind him. Bengt turned to the others, looked at Elisabeth.

  “Pathetic, you say?”

  He leaned forward, leaned out the window, roaring.

  “Are you deaf, you fucking pervert? I don’t want to see you! Stay indoors, goddammit!”

  Flasher-Göran looked up, toward a voice he knew well. He then proceeded to walk along the gravel path to the gate. Bengt snapped his fingers. Twice. The Rottweiler came running immediately from the hall.

  “Here.”

  The dog ran to the window, past the kitchen table. Bengt grabbed his collar, held tight, gave the next command.

  “Baxter! Get ’im!”

  He let go of the dog, which immediately jumped out the window and through the garden, over the fence. Flasher-Göran could hear the loud barking getting closer. He started running for the shed where he kept a mower and tools and some scraps of wood, his heart pounding and his stomach reacting. He shit himself and kept running, his own feces streaming down his legs. He reached it, opened the door, and pulled it shut. The dog threw himself violently against the door, barking even
more loudly. Bengt stood in the window, Ove and Helena on either side, and he applauded hysterically.

  “Good boy, Baxter! You can stay there the rest of the day, you fucking pervert! Stay, Baxter.”

  The dog stopped barking and sat outside the toolshed door, staring at the handle.

  Bengt clapped, laughed, and turned to Elisabeth, who was still sitting at the table, saw her shake her head and could feel how she despised him.

  It felt like it had been a long time since the rain. One short day of coolness passed before the heat settled in again. It was more noticeable in a prison. The high wall, the open courtyard, the gravel area—the air was restricted, locked in, controlled. Hilding was walking by himself out onto the football field, wearing shorts, his chest bare. He was worried. Tinyboy was going to figure it out soon, find out who did it, and he wouldn’t give a shit that it was his closest friend. Hilding was going to get a beating, and he knew it. He was even expecting it.

  He’d run off Axelsson. The perv had gone to the guards and they’d snatched him away. Within a few minutes of his request, he was moved to voluntary isolation. Tinyboy had gone insane, suspected that somebody had warned him, but wasn’t sure and, most important, didn’t know who. He screamed like a madman and kicked the walls for a while, then he calmed down, even played Casino in the TV corner later that evening and managed to get two ten of diamonds in the same hand.

  Hilding dug deep into the wound on his nose. He walked from one football goal to the other. Counted the circuits. Sixty-seven laps. Thirty-three left. He shouldn’t have taken from their stash. But fuck it, the Axelsson situation had completely finished him. He considered it more of a reward. He deserved it, and he went in there to just take a little. He’d been alone in the shower room, lifted the ceiling tile and took down the Turkish Glass. He’d smoked a little, it was just as sweet as last time, and his body had felt calm again. Then he’d smoked a little more, inhaled the rest, and it had tickled like hell. Then he went to his cell and fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night realizing what had happened, sat up in his bed, and waited for the morning and for his beating. Tinyboy never showed up. He hadn’t discovered it. It had been a couple of days. He’d find out soon and attack. The hours went by. Hilding just waited, tore deeper into his wound, went around the netless goal one more time.