by Arne Dahl
‘He’s got great backing in here, after all,’ said Nilsson. ‘He’s Rajko Nedic’s right-hand man, he’s got at least three thugs from the former Yugoslavia as protection. Why didn’t he turn to them?’
‘Because he was hiding his injuries from them,’ said Norlander, nodding. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s talked,’ said Söderstedt, nodding. ‘He’s been tortured and squealed.’
‘On Nedic,’ said Viksjö, also nodding.
Eventually Bernt Nilsson also joined in, completing the nodding quartet.
‘And that’s what we weren’t meant to find out. That’s why he was wiped out so thoroughly. But they underestimated our technical competence.’
‘So why use such a sophisticated and clearly expensive explosive?’ asked Söderstedt.
‘If it’s that small – highly effective liquid and microscopic detonation device – then it’s presumably the only thing you can get into a high-security prison. Still, even now it should be impossible to smuggle a hydrogen bomb in behind the walls.’
Söderstedt sighed and waved the fax.
‘I can’t help quoting our chief forensic technician Brynolf Svenhagen: “Pearls before swine.”’
8
CHIEF FORENSIC TECHNICIAN Brynolf Svenhagen had a daughter. This daughter’s name was Sara. Sara worked for CID’s child pornography division. The child pornography division was, for the moment, unstaffed. Unstaffed didn’t mean that no one was working, however. Working was precisely what Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen’s daughter was doing.
Though she was working from home.
She had told her colleagues Gunnar Nyberg and Ludvig Johnsson, friends since childhood (and she quoted herself in the gloomy dusk): ‘I’m just going to relax. Unwind. There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now.’ The last part was true, the first false. She had lied. All the same, it was a white lie.
She ran her hand over her newly cropped blonde hair, clicking away with the mouse. She was connected to the central police computer. The intranet. She would be working for hours yet. She knew herself that well.
Though she didn’t recognise herself.
Suddenly, though not for the first time, she caught sight of her reflection in the computer screen. Yet again, her instinctive reaction was to think that she had ended up in the ‘Favourites’ folder in Internet Explorer, landing on yet another paedophile site.
Reflected in the screen, she saw a young boy.
She stood up and started wandering around her little flat on Surbrunnsgatan. Was that why she had chopped off her long, golden hair?
To look more like a paedophile victim?
‘What got into your head?’ as Gunnar Nyberg had suddenly blurted out as they drank coffee and basked in the June sun at Annika’s Café & Restaurant.
Yeah, Sara, what got into your head? she asked herself. Identification with the victims? Did your subconscious feel like you were just too far removed from the horrible reality of it all? That you were working from a distance? That the computer, and the incessant access to work it offered, meant that you found yourself in eternal cyberspace? That the computer itself gave the awful reality of paedophilia an air of unreality, and so a redeeming feature?
The distance was great. She herself had had a calm, tranquil, grey, patriarchal childhood in the suburbs, a childhood with a police-related slant. Brynolf, cut from a traditional cloth, had boldly drilled his children not to speak four different languages by the time they were four, to compose symphonies by eight, or be tennis pros by the time they were twelve, but in forensic methods. He would let the children into a room, meticulously cleaned by his wife, get them to look around, and then send them to the toilet where they would wait to be let out. Something in the room would be different when they came back out of the toilet, and the children had to use empirical evidence and logic to work out what. These had actually been the only times that Sara had seen her father truly happy. Otherwise, he was neither good nor bad, neither warm nor mean, just austere. Like an old-fashioned patriarch.
No, the reason she pushed herself so hard couldn’t really be found in her upbringing. Still, she was even less convinced by the genetic explanation. Of course there wasn’t any kind of police gene in her, driving her towards the answers. There wasn’t any compassion gene which meant that she shared the pain of the abused children, either. And of course – even though it was something that was claimed on a daily basis in the context of public debate – there wasn’t any paedophile gene which caused whole family trees of men to expose themselves to children or sniff well-used nappies. A sickness, yes – a grotesquely sick world within a world. Genetic, no – there was no paedophile gene. She refused to believe that.
No, she understood the reason she worked her arse off about as much as she understood why she had suddenly chopped her hair off. The only thing she knew was that she had to keep going, that she had to get to the bottom of things whatever the cost, that she couldn’t let her own or anyone else’s laziness be the reason for any single child being sexually abused, if it could have been prevented. That was her driving force. Every little omission amounted to guilt, and that was why she took on an increasingly superhuman workload. ‘There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now’ was a statement that was more than true.
She had started having a recurring nightmare. It wasn’t something she could share with anyone. Not her boss, the party animal Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg; not with her mentor, the always running Ludvig Johnsson; not even with the new colleague she got on so well with, teddy bear Gunnar Nyberg.
No, she couldn’t share it.
She would never be able to share it.
It’s night. A woman is lying in a faintly lit hospital room. She’s alone. Her face is in darkness. Only her large stomach is illuminated. It’s as though it’s glowing with its very own internal light. She can almost see something moving inside, she imagines she can see life itself. The sanctity of life. She strokes her stomach gently. Suddenly, it’s no longer glowing. The delicate flame of life goes out. A shadow falls over her. At the same time, she feels a prolonged spasm of pain. She tries to cry out, but can’t. She has no voice. Just the shadow which turns into a body, into a man, a penis. The pain increases, turns into one long contraction. And at the same time, the exact same time, the shadow forces its way into her. She’s raped while she’s giving birth. That alone would be enough to make her die several times over, but it isn’t enough. The next insight is worse. It’s not her he’s after. She’s just an instrument, an obstacle that needs to be overcome on the way. And then, just as his penis reaches the child, just as he’s about to achieve that second penetration, she dies.
That’s when she wakes up. At the moment of death.
She closed her eyes.
Where does lunacy start?
When has someone simply seen too much?
She hadn’t even turned thirty yet, but she had seen everything.
An already shaky relationship had been obliterated as soon as she had been promoted and snatched up by Ludvig Johnsson and his paedophile hunters. Since that, there hadn’t been anyone. She didn’t even know if she believed in that kind of tenderness any more. She lived alone. Wanted to live alone.
She stood for a moment by the window facing out onto Surbrunnsgatan. The lights were going on in the building opposite. Private bubble after private bubble was being exposed.
Sara Svenhagen didn’t want to see them.
It was like they weren’t enough.
She returned to the computer, briefly glimpsing the young boy reflected in the screen, switched from the intranet to the Internet and clicked on ‘Favourites’.
In this folder she had saved the addresses of hundreds of paedophile websites, each one worse than the last.
She looked at the clock. Two minutes twelve seconds left.
If it was right. If she really had cracked the code.
It was a Swedish website. She had found out that it existed through the
Japanese police force. It revealed itself for ten or so seconds once every other week, before disappearing again without a trace. No policeman had ever been able to get hold of it, but everything indicated that the website was hiding an address book, the addresses of a huge international network of members who sent pictures to one another. If this was right, then an extensive list of addresses would appear on this page which, in turn, would appear at 19.36.07 on Thursday 24 June. In one minute and forty-eight seconds. One click on a website which would be visible for fifteen seconds at most, and the whole list would be downloaded.
The mysterious code had been discovered during a raid on a paedophile in Nässjö. It had ended up with her because it was thought to be uncrackable; she still didn’t have party detective Hellberg’s full confidence. Party-Ragge’s. So she had been working in secret a lot. Never claiming any overtime. Spending hours and hours on cracking the code. And suddenly, she had done it. She thought. She hoped. It was quite a simple code. Once you found the key, the door opened wide. And from the cryptic Nässjö code, a Web address and time point emerged.
Not even Johnsson and Nyberg knew what she was working on.
19.35.40. Twenty-seven seconds.
She was completely motionless, her index finger resting perfectly still on the mouse button. It was now or never, there wouldn’t be a second chance. It would be gone for good.
She could see the vague outline of a stomach, glowing from within.
She had entered the address. Quickly moved the cursor back to where she needed to click. Everything was ready. The clock was counting down. 19.36.00.
Seven, six, five, four, three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
Enter.
Then there it was. The home page. Simple. Impenetrable.
But with one line selected.
She moved the cursor to it. Click.
Save to disk?
Yup.
The hard drive whirred gently. She had it.
And then the page was gone.
Sara Svenhagen leaned back in her chair. She smiled faintly. She could allow herself that.
A large stomach gleamed fluorescent in the darkness.
9
UP AND DOWN, back and forth, over and over.
Like the pendulum of a clock. Tick-tock.
Five or six boys aged about ten or twelve were skateboarding in Björns trädgård, a park in Södermalm. Two hardened police officers watched them from a bench.
The last time Paul Hjelm had been in Björns trädgård, it had been the city’s shabbiest, most run-down public space. A playground for junkies and drunks. Now it was more like an oasis with its elegant little cafe, Viva Espresso, its abundance of greenery, its play area and skateboard ramp. And, soon, Stockholm’s first mosque.
You really could talk about a metamorphosis there, Paul Hjelm thought.
And not only there. The whole area around Medborgarplatsen had changed character. Now it was the beating heart of Södermalm. The district around the crossroads of Götgatan and Folkungagatan was not only the area that newly arrived provincials first made their way to, was not only known as the most dangerous place in Stockholm, but was also the city’s most pub-filled area. Within a five-minute radius from Medborgarplatsen metro station, there were no fewer than sixty-five pubs. People were always hanging around the traditional hot-dog stand on the corner of Götgatan and Tjärhovsgatan. And opposite, on the other side of Götgatan, on the edge of Medborgarplatsen, the lavish establishment called London New York had a big outdoor serving area. On the other side of Medborgarplatsen, the queue to the always-packed pub with the rather more domesticated name of Schnapps snaked.
In other words, there must have been plenty of witnesses out there when twenty men came rushing out of Kvarnen, some ten or so metres away. The hardly stimulating task of finding them had been delegated to the Södermalm local police.
On the other hand, though, what would these potential witnesses actually have seen? A bunch of men charging out of the pub and running away? That wasn’t anything especially remarkable in these parts. The local police had a fairly hopeless search ahead of them.
Hjelm sighed gently and tried to count the people. From the bench where he was sitting, on the edge of Björns trädgård, he managed to count around fifty.
With the summer solstice just a few days before, it was still light. It was eight at night, and the sun was still shining as though it was the middle of the day. The air felt fresh, the summer-evening scents not differing in any tangible way from those in the city’s more rural districts. Birds were singing cheerfully and clearly. Rays of sunshine glittered on the windows of the buildings along the neighbouring street. Small children were still playing enthusiastically, watched over by drowsy parents. And the skateboarders would probably be there until darkness fell.
There was nothing to suggest that, less than a day earlier, a man had bled to death just a few metres away.
The general public’s fear of the Kvarnen Killer was limited, despite the efforts of the tabloids to whip up a panic. Presumably people had simply had enough of panicking.
It had been a violent year so far. The acute stages of NATO’s long bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, eighty days of ceaseless bombardment, were over. War from a distance. The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo had finally come to an end; the refugees had started to return to their mine-strewn homeland. Two American high-school students had celebrated Hitler’s birthday by cutting down their classmates with all manner of firearms. The parents had been bewildered. In Sweden, a twenty-two-year-old in Örebro had been exposed as one of the country’s worst ever paedophiles. Videotapes of rapes, an enormous collection of films and pictures and Web contacts. Within a few days, the trial would begin, but it was already clear that he would be sentenced to psychiatric care. Then there was the police murderer in Malexander. All three of the perpetrators had finally been caught. Three young men with Nazi sympathies who, cold as ice, had executed two policemen from Östergötland. One of them was a war veteran from Bosnia. Another had topped his acting career with a couple of shots to the back of a policeman’s head. He had been in Lars Norén’s deftly staged play Seven Three, where three Nazis advocated ethnic cleansing from the stage before the eyes of the powerless author, leading to a heated debate in the cultural pages of the papers. But hardly anywhere else. Not before the country united in horror over the Malexander murders, and placed the blame on the theatre.
A strange year.
Kerstin Holm turned towards him on the park bench.
‘What did your family say?’ she asked.
‘They’re at the cottage out on Dalarö,’ Hjelm replied. ‘I can paint the town red all night if I want to. Party all night with an old flame in Kvarnen.’
‘All in good time,’ Kerstin Holm smiled. ‘How are they?’
‘Good. Danne’s finally over the worst of his teenage madness. He’s seventeen and wants to join the police, strangely enough. I’m hoping it’ll pass. Tova’s fifteen, and absolutely unbearable. Every cell in her body is unbearable.’
‘And . . . Cilla?’
Paul laughed and looked at Kerstin. She peered back. He could see the thin rings around her irises, giving away her contact lenses. Her upper lip, bulging like she had been mistreated. Though only by the tobacco company, Gothia Snus AB.
‘Good, thanks,’ he said. ‘She’s ward sister now, rehab at Huddinge hospital. Normal hours. And enjoying a long holiday at the minute, thanks to all the leave they owed her.’
They sat in silence a while. The past moved like a ghost between them. Though it was like Little Ghost Godfrey. Or Casper. The world’s friendliest ghost.
It was a time they both looked back on with an open heart. And completely without bitterness.
Eventually, Kerstin Holm said: ‘Shouldn’t we feel guilty about not focusing one hundred per cent on finding the Kvarnen Killer?’
‘We have been, by the book. We can just look at this as . . . a pri
vate investigation. Outside working hours.’
‘We don’t dare put it down as overtime, then?’
‘That depends on the result, I guess.’
Kerstin sighed deeply, and stretched her arms out sideways. Her fingertips grazed the hair at the nape of his neck.
‘Let’s just hope there won’t be any more violence this summer,’ she said, without seeming to believe her own words.
‘We’ll have to see whether the Police Olympics’ll be enough to discourage them. World Police and Fire Games. You know there’s going to be a party in a couple of days? You’ll probably get to meet all of the others there, from the A-Unit.’
‘How embarrassed should I be that I don’t really get the appeal of these games?’
‘Very. You’re police, you know.’
They laughed for a moment.
‘It’s an American thing,’ Hjelm eventually said. ‘The world’s police, prison guards, customs officers and firemen are getting together to compete against each other for the first time in Europe. The boxing in particular should see a lot of criminals in the spectators’ seats. Watching the law going at one another.’
A chilly breeze blew life into the evening. It quickly turned cold, sobering their thoughts. Focusing them on the task.
‘It’s probably time to say what we’ve been thinking,’ said Kerstin.
When the one concrete bit of action – picking up Eskil Carlstedt – had gone down the drain, there hadn’t been much left to do. The barmaid, Karin Lindbeck, had produced a drawing of the Kvarnen Killer that seemed more reliable than the three earlier attempts. That was the one they had chosen to give to the press. It was already in the papers. There wasn’t much more they could do at that point. All of the city’s police districts were busy conducting their own separate hunts for Hammarby fans. The fate of the Kvarnen Killer was now in their hands. It was very much a regional case.
They had been listening to the interview tapes all afternoon. What was the sequence of events that was emerging? They had both been drawn to the same sections.