Grens closed the car door, looked at his colleague, and shook his head.
“It never ends. The whole damn summer. And they’re still at it.”
Sundkvist stared down at the ground. A stone he wanted to kick.
“I told Jonas this was over. I told him the father was locked up. That he’d be there a while, until they let him out again. Jonas said that was super cool. That’s exactly what he said. It was super cool that the father got punished, that it was fair, also fair that he would get out again, because it was his little girl who’d been murdered first. I don’t know what to say now. He knows already, of course. There’s too much news on TV.”
They walked toward the wall. The small door in the big gate. Grens pressed the intercom.
“Yes?”
“Grens. And Sundkvist. City Police.”
“I remember. You can enter.”
They walked across the internal parking lot at Aspsås prison toward the central guard station, where they were waved past.
They stopped in the large entrance hall. They weren’t going much farther—they’d reserved one of the visitor’s rooms. The door was open, and they went in. There wasn’t much to it. Grens pointed to the plastic on the bed, to the roll of paper towels on the table, disgusted by the knowledge they were going to be meeting in the room for conjugal visits, where prisoners met their women once a month and fucked away the worst of their anxiety. They moved the table to the center of the room, put the two chairs on either side, and returned to the entrance hall to find one more chair. Put the tape recorder on the table, a microphone on either side.
————
He arrived flanked by two guards. Grens greeted him, then pointed to his companions.
“You two can wait outside.”
“We’ll wait in here.”
“You’ll wait outside. If we need you, we’ll let you know. This interrogation is closed.”
EWERT GRENS (EG): I’m turning this on now.
JOCHUM LANG (JL): Fine.
EG: Your full name.
JL: Jochum Hans Lang.
EG: Very well. Do you know why we’re here today?
JL: No.
Ewert glanced at Sven. He was tired. He was going to need some help. This bastard couldn’t be budged. Lang knew why he was there, not that that would help them.
EG: You need to answer our questions. You need to tell us why Fredrik Steffansson fell out of that shower and ended up a corpse shortly afterward.
There was silence in the room for a minute. Ewert stared at Jochum, who stared out the barred window.
EG: Enjoying the view?
JL: Yep.
EG: Goddammit, Jochum! We know Tinyboy stabbed Fredrik Steffansson!
JL: Great.
EG: We know that!
JL: Great, I said. Then why the hell are you questioning me?
EG: Because you, for some damn reason, knocked out Tinyboy. I want to know why.
Ewert Grens waited for Jochum Lang to respond. He looked at him, realized that this bastard would be very dangerous as a free man. Large, broad-shouldered, shaved head, steady eyes, he’d definitely slaughtered a few.
JL: He owed me money.
EG: Come on!
JL: Quite a bit.
EG: Bullshit! Dragan shoved aside the task force and you took down Tinyboy. You were mad at him for putting his knife into Steffansson.
Grens stood up. Red in the face. He leaned over the table toward Lang, lowered his voice.
EG: Stop this now, goddammit. We’re on the same side for once. If you just tell us Tinyboy was the one who did it, I promise no one will ever know you talked. Do you understand that if no one in your unit talks, then Fredrik Steffansson’s murderer will go free?
JL: I didn’t see anything.
EG: Help me!
JL: Not a goddamn thing.
EG: Hello?
JL: Turn off the tape recorder.
Grens searched for a while until he found the button that stopped the tape from rolling.
“Satisfied?”
Jochum Lang leaned over to the tape recorder, making sure that it really was off. He looked up, his face tense.
“Grens, goddammit! You know the rules here. No matter what crime’s committed inside these walls, whoever leaks is dead. Let’s just say this. And listen very carefully to me. Yes, Grens, we know who took down Steffansson. And that fucker is on his way out of here forever. Feet first. That’s all. Now I want to go back to my cell.”
It was a quarter past eight. The interview with Jochum Lang hadn’t even taken half an hour, and Grens sighed. This was exactly what he’d expected. Had he ever gotten anyone in prison to talk? These damn rules of honor. You could stab someone to death—that was fine. But if you talked, you were in trouble. Honor, my ass.
He slapped his hand hard on the table.
“What do you think, Sven? What the hell do we do?”
“We don’t have much of a choice.”
“No. That’s true.”
Ewert turned on the tape recorder, rewound the tape a bit, then let it roll. He wanted to make sure everything was working. First, Jochum Lang’s voice, leisurely, uninterested. Then his own, angry, strained, he knew that’s how he sounded, but it still surprised him when he heard it—his voice was always higher, more aggressive than he remembered it. Sven also listened to the tape, now he looked up from the floor.
“I don’t think we should interrogate Tinyboy Lindgren tonight. We’ll just hear more of this if we do. He’s not gonna say anything more than Lang. Let’s just check in with him, talk for a moment informally. It can’t get any worse.”
————
The governor of Aspsås prison, Arne Bertolsson, decided to isolate Unit H that evening. They’d all been sitting for a while now, locked in their own cells without the right to go out into their unit. They ate, peed, and counted the hours in silence. Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist could, therefore, walk freely down an empty corridor. A man had just died here. A man who they’d come to like and respect. They walked into the battered guard station where Jochum Lang had broken through the guards and reached Tinyboy, then rammed his head into a wall. Grens touched the still visible mark, traces of blood and wallpaper torn to pieces. They walked over the remains of a mirror and a two-way radio as they went out, sharp remnants against their shoes. There, outside, in the TV corner, lay an overturned table and a card game on the floor. A short distance away a shattered aquarium, pieces of glass, sand, and shiny fish. The linoleum they walked on was still wet, so they both slipped, the soles of their shoes leaving tracks as they continued toward the cells.
They approached the shower room, stopped at the large pools of blood. He’d been lying there not long ago. Grens looked at Sundkvist, who shook his head. They followed the stains into the shower room. He’d been cut several times before he even reached the shower, somewhere close to the sink: the white porcelain shone a bright red.
Tinyboy was in bed. Wearing tracksuit bottoms and bare-chested. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
They said hello. Tinyboy took the two policemen by the hand and smiled broadly—his face scratched, one eye hidden by swelling, the gold chain glistening on his bare chest.
“Grens and his lackey. Well, I’ll be damned. To what do I owe the honor?”
They both looked searchingly at the cell. It was homey. Someone who’d been here a long time. Someone who regarded it as a home. A television, a coffee maker, flower pots, red-checked curtains, one wall covered with posters, the other covered with a huge photograph.
“My daughter. Same as here.”
He pointed to a frame on the bedside table. The same girl, not very old, smiling, blonde, plaits with bows.
“Would you like something? Tea?”
Grens answered.
“No, thanks. We just drank some dishwater. When we met Jochum Lang.”
Tinyboy pretended not to hear the last part. If he had any response to the fact that they’d already interrogated one
of the other inmates, he certainly didn’t show it.
“Just as well. No tea. Then I’ll make some for myself.”
He took the jug of water from the simple table and turned on the machine. A few heaped spoons of leaves from a plastic jar.
“Sit down, dammit.”
Grens and Sundkvist sat down on the bed. It was clean, the room. Also smelled clean, he had a pomander hanging from the curtain rod, and Grens swept his hand through the air.
“You’ve fixed this place up.”
“When you’re in here for a while. Well, there’s not much more of a home than that.”
“Flowers and curtains.”
“Don’t you have a home, Grens?”
The detective superintendent clenched his jaw, ground his teeth. It occurred to Sven that he had no idea if Ewert had flowers and curtains. He’d never been to his home. How odd, he knew him well, they spoke to each other often, Ewert had visited him and Anita several times, but he’d never been to Grens’s apartment.
Tinyboy poured his tea, drank it hot. Grens waited until he put down the cup.
“We’ve met a few times, Stig.”
“That’s true.”
“I remember you as a teenager. We picked you up in Blekinge. You put an ice pick into your uncle’s scrotum.”
The images, Tinyboy fought against them again, he could see Per, bleeding, could feel how he wanted to castrate him, pull his scrotum apart and laugh.
“You understand that you are suspected of having stabbed someone again. Right? That we’re here because we believe you killed Fredrik Steffansson a few hours ago?”
Tinyboy sighed, rolled his eyes, sighed again.
“I understand that I am a suspect. I understand that very well. Me—and the rest of the unit.”
“It’s you I’m talking to now.”
Tinyboy turned serious now.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing for sure, he got what was coming to him. That’s all I’ll say. He was a fucking pedo who got what he deserved.”
Grens heard what Tinyboy said but didn’t understand.
“Stig. Are we talking about the same thing? There are many words you could use to describe Fredrik Steffansson. But pedophile is not one of them. Quite the contrary.”
Tinyboy put down the cup he’d just lifted, looked in surprise at the two policemen, his voice frantic.
“What the fuck do you mean?”
They both saw his surprise, felt the shift in his mood. Tinyboy’s reaction was genuine.
“What I mean is, have you ever watched the news?”
“I do now and then. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Then you’ve been following the story of the father who shot and killed his five-year-old daughter’s rapist and murderer?”
“Followed a bit. I saw the beginning. I don’t like that sort of thing. This little girl here, I don’t know, I can’t take it.”
Tinyboy pointed at the photograph again, the one on his bedside table, blond hair with braids.
“I didn’t see much but understood well enough. I thought her father was a real fucking hero. They should die, those bastards. Die! What the hell does this have to do with the pedo?”
Grens glanced at Sundkvist. They had the same thought simultaneously. He turned back to Tinyboy but said nothing.
“What the hell is it, Grens? What the fuck does that perv have to do with it?”
“The father was Fredrik Steffansson.”
Tinyboy stood up from his chair. His face started twitching.
“You shouldn’t . . . say bullshit like that right now.”
“I wish I was bullshitting.”
He turned to Sven again, gestured to Sven’s briefcase.
“Give those to me.”
Sven opened the briefcase, unzipped the main compartment. He thumbed through sheets of paper and plastic folders, found what he was looking for. Two newspapers. He put them on the table and Grens handed them to Tinyboy.
“Here. Read.”
Two tabloids. From the day after Fredrik Steffansson shot Bernt Lund. The headlines, just as bold in both editions, the contents the same: he shot his daughter’s murderer—saved the lives of two little girls.
Two photos next to the headline from an autopsy of the dead Bernt Lund. His next victims, already selected, in the courtyard outside their nursery school in Enköping, both smiling, one with blond hair and braids.
Tinyboy stared at the faces in the newspaper for a long time.
At the text.
At the pictures of two five-year-old girls.
Then at the photograph he had in the frame on his bedside table and magnified on the wall.
As if it were her. As if that were his girl on the front page of the newspaper.
He was still standing up.
He started to scream.
about pen 33
Writing the novel you just read was a strange journey. We knew where we wanted to go—to tell a story that begins from the perspective of the perpetrator and the child he destroys, just before a terrible sex crime, and ends with the actions taken by the child’s parent—but the subject matter wasn’t the straightest path to success for a debut.
We had no choice, though. It was the book we had to write.
We knew that children who are subjected to abuse experience terrible, lasting trauma. And we had firsthand experience of how such abuse impacts you, becomes part of your life without you being aware of it.
Conveying a sense of the lifelong curse every injured child carries and fights against became our first mandate, and we felt we had the right to express it through a work of dramatic tension, in the clothing of fiction.
In addition, we were both parents—at the time, I to two seven-year-old boys, Börge to a seven-year-old daughter. Parenthood provided us further license to tell this story. We could understand and imagine the sorrow of a father, the hate and anger he felt when his child—his love and life and reason for continuing to live—is violated, as the child in this story is violated.
We had so often had the thought, the one that most parents have: If anyone hurts my child, I will—just that one time—cross any boundary, strike back, do anything to make sure no other parent has to feel like this.
Most people stop right there, at that thought, even if the unthinkable happens. Most are controlled by limits, and maybe that’s what makes us human. But the father in this story, Fredrik Steffansson, does not stop at the thought. He sees his child raped, destroyed, and then does what many of us have only thought about.
Fredrik knows that most sex offenders repeat their crimes. He knows how awful it is when your sorrow is so great it leaks from your stomach. He feels he has no choice, that he has to make sure that his child’s murderer can never kill again.
So he takes up the hunt, finds the monster, and—as he says himself—puts him down like a mad dog. He does this, as he says, not for revenge, but to protect society from a threat the government will not or cannot defend against.
And right there, right in the middle of the book—what seems like a tidy finale to a crime novel, the father exacting revenge on his daughter’s murderer—that’s when our story really begins. Because before the writing we had three questions:
“How far would a parent go to protect his or her child’s life?”
“If you knew you could save the life of your child by killing the person planning to take that life, would you be prepared to commit murder?”
And so: “Whose life is most valuable?”
That last question seems so simple. The life of a sex offender, a pervert, is of course worth less than that of an innocent five-year-old child. But you’ve just read Fredrik Steffansson’s story, and he finds it’s not that easy . . .
Much of Pen 33 unfolds inside the walls of a prison, where in Sweden (as in North America and elsewhere around the world) there is one regulatory framework decided by the authorities and another one entirely that the prisoners themselves have created�
��a hierarchy of prisoners based on the crimes they’ve committed and the lengths of their sentences. A murderer with a life sentence is at the top of this hierarchy, and at the bottom are child molesters.
Pen 33 deals with people who are broken and who then strike back. That act of transformation was what moved us and, in telling it, turned Anders and Börge into Roslund & Hellström.
I had been working at SVT, the Swedish national public broadcasting service and by far Sweden’s largest news network—equivalent to the BBC. It was during my eighth year of fourteen as a news reporter, documentary filmmaker, news manager, and editor that our paths converged.
For several years I had been reporting on Swedish crime and I was told that there was a newly formed organization called KRIS—Criminals Returning to Society—an organization founded by a former criminal and addict. Several of the members had been in and out of the country’s prisons and knew that the crucial moment was the release itself, the moment of freedom, when the gates opened to the outside world. The moment when you decide whether to walk out of prison and seek out a new way of living or return to old friends and old behaviors.
KRIS would form a circle for newly released prisoners to exist in, a support network of people who understood your past but no longer participated in it. They would stand there at the gate, meet you upon release, and you would head out together from there.
I rang them up. It was the best damn thing I’d heard of for halting the cycle of crime. It happened to be Börge, one of the founders, who answered.
I asked if he would be willing to have a camera follow him, if I could come along, make a documentary—Lock ’Em Up—about the organization’s first year. We continued to meet, when in the course of life our roads would normally have diverged after the completion of our project.
We had certain similarities: The violations we wanted to discuss, the experience of questioning our roles as fathers, the fact that we had both volunteered to help former prisoners reenter society, and of course our love for the crime novel. We discovered that we clicked as narrators.
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