To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  Actually, she didn’t hear anything at all before she suddenly glanced down at her near-naked body and saw that it was covered in clotted blood. She saw the bandages around her wrists, the bag of blood hanging from the stand – and she realised that she had failed. That was why she started to cry. Her family were gathered around her, and it was obvious, it was immediately obvious that they thought they were tears of joy. But they were tears of sadness. Sadness at still being alive.

  He stood up and went over to the window. The musicians seemed to have halted their accordion playing. Perhaps someone had silenced them with a generous glass of schnapps. He could see right down to the shore of Orsasjön. If she had been by his side, it would have been a fantastic evening view. Now, it was quite unimportant. Like everything had been for so long. When had the turning point come? Was she the only turning point, or had there been other, smaller points along the way? He had left them behind once his compulsory education was over. No more school. He had continued tinkering about with things with the same all-consuming intensity as he had with the bark boats. He started to feel a certain pride over being able to fix anything, anything at all; being able to take something apart and then put it back together again. And he continued his whittling, though no longer making bark boats but abstract wooden sculptures. He hadn’t even understood that they were sculptures until someone told him. It was a kind of life, in any case, so long as he kept the others at a distance. Everyone else. And then that strange invitation had turned up. Class reunion. Meet his old classmates. As though they hadn’t already invited him one time too many.

  He was convinced they had sent the invite by mistake, that he just happened to have been left on a list from which he should have been crossed out. Still, he felt like he really should go. He was almost twenty. It was far enough back in time that it didn’t bring him down. He would show them that he existed as a purely physical indictment. You didn’t manage to kill me. No hate, just his very presence as proof. He went, convinced that he would be mocked or left on the outside, if not tied up, abused and pissed on. But that wasn’t how it was. All of the old tormentors were there. All of them. And none of them seemed to have the faintest memory of how they had tortured him. They treated him well, even laughed at their memories. Together. Cheerily. Like happy children. And he realised that the torture had taken place almost incidentally, without much thought, that they actually had no idea what they had done to him. Worst of all would be meeting the girl that had been the driving force. The boys he could live with, but the degradation of meeting the girl who had been the first to come forward and piss on him would be awful, he had also been firmly convinced of that. He was wrong there, too. And then some. She had grown into a wonderful young woman. It was clear from her eyes that she was the one feeling guilt and shame, not him. She was the only one who touched upon the forbidden part of the past.

  ‘Shit, we treated you so badly,’ was the first thing she said, and he was able to meet her eyes as she said it. What he saw was something even worse. It was the first time he had seen anything like it. His eyes didn’t leave hers that entire evening. He sat, reading a terror beyond comprehension deep within her dark eyes. And in that moment, he knew that he wanted to know everything. Absolutely everything.

  She stood up and went over to the window. People had slowly begun to return to Falkenberg. The town was no longer completely deserted. If he had been by her side, it would have been tempting to go out into town. Now, it was quite unimportant. What had stopped her from taking the step for so long? For the first time, a glimmer of light was peeping through from the past. There was someone she went to, someone she could tell anything to, someone who listened. Uncle Jubbe.

  She remembered his expression, how his face had clouded over in that special way, the awkwardness in the way that he stroked her hair while she sobbed silently, how his tears fell into her hair and slowly made their way down to her scalp. But eventually, even Uncle Jubbe wasn’t enough. She had slashed her wrists, lengthways rather than crossways, not as a warning but as a final solution. One which turned out not to be final at all. She was invited to the class reunion while she was in hospital. It was almost like a taunt. As though the last part of her mask had been ripped off, exposing a corroded skull. The toughest girl in the class. Her wrists had healed, but she refused to leave the hospital. Every day, she begged the doctor to find a new complication, and her doctor had done it, with an increasingly troubled expression. Until finally, it couldn’t go on any longer. She went to her old school’s reunion party. At the far end of the bar in the unbearable golf club, she saw the person she wanted to meet least of all, the person she had vented her self-loathing on. He looked different. So alive, as though reborn, and so awfully, wonderfully different to the others. They were all the same. At the very moment she uttered her first words to him, she knew that they belonged together. She said: ‘Shit, we treated you so badly.’

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  22

  THEY HAD AGREED to meet in Sundberg’s Konditori down by Järntorget. Though it was Midsummer, it was still open. She assumed it was because of the Germans. Not the Germans who had built Järntorget five hundred or so years ago, but the Germans strolling up and down Västerlånggatan that very day, wondering why everything was closed. Even the restaurants.

  But not Sundberg’s Konditori, Sweden’s oldest coffee shop. As a result, the cafe was chock-full of Germans looking for shelter from the rain. It was a gloomy Midsummer’s Day in Stockholm. The magnificent summer weather which had held for almost all of June was clearly a thing of the past. The rain was pelting down over Gamla Stan, washing Germans out from the alleyways. The fortunate ones washed up in Sundberg’s Konditori.

  He was sitting, cramped, at the back of the cafe. She thought to herself that he looked like Stalingrad. Surrounded by Germans.

  He gave her a slight wave. Normally, when you had arranged to meet Party-Ragge, Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, he would stand up abruptly, smile broadly, wave enthusiastically and shout loudly. But not this time. Just that restrained little wave.

  He was wearing a faded green T-shirt, jeans and tattered sandals; this wasn’t how he normally looked. And his dark, mid-length hair above his little black Lenin beard, she had definitely never seen it look so dishevelled. There were hints of purple beneath his eyes. What had he been doing over Midsummer? Working? On ‘administrative stuff, I suppose you could say’?

  Sara Svenhagen thought that he looked younger when he was serious, hardly thirty. That wasn’t the case with men in general. They almost always looked younger when they laughed. Though, on the other hand, they only laughed when they were young. Properly laughed.

  A little paradox in the midst of the Midsummer rain.

  He was sitting at the very back of the cafe, next to a door she soon realised was the toilet. It slammed shut with high frequency. She shook the water from her clothes and sat down next to him with a little cup of coffee. No Danish pastries. It wasn’t the time.

  ‘Hi, Sara, everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty good. I always feel a bit shaken when I’ve been talking to one of them. They seem to be on a completely different planet. A parallel universe.’

  ‘How did he seem? What was his name? Wirsén?’

  ‘Witréus,’ she said. ‘John Andreas Witréus. And he seems . . . well, out of it. Here but not here. In some parallel existence, almost. You talk to him, but he’s not there. Not really. He wanted me to act as a therapist. Quite damaged, but quite harmless, too. A passive paedophile, I guess. Had quite a bit of porn but mainly took pictures. Loads of seemingly innocent pictures from his window up in Söder Torn. Of kids on Merborgarplatsen and the area around it. Hardly criminal.’

  ‘Have you had a chance to look at his computer?’

  ‘Yeah. What he said is probably true. He doesn’t seem to have any address lists himself, and doesn’t seem to have sent any pictures. Just received them. En masse. There must be about five hundred
pictures in his inbox alone. No proper sender details, of course, but it should be possible to find that out. Witréus unwittingly ended up on an address list. It might not be a network.’

  ‘What could it be, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not really a computer expert. We’ll have to see what the specialists say.’

  ‘I’d rather the computer didn’t end up there.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Sara Svenhagen exclaimed.

  Ragnar Hellberg leaned towards her. She guessed that he hadn’t brushed his teeth for some time.

  ‘I could pull rank on you, Sara. Say “just follow my orders” and nothing more. But I don’t want to. You’ve got to trust me. Let’s keep this between us. No one else.’

  She scrutinised him. The young, comet-careerist superintendent. The party policeman. So subdued, so serious, so deflated. She didn’t understand.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask.’

  ‘I know that you know a hell of a lot about computers, Sara. You’d be able to get a lot from it yourself, right?’

  ‘Probably,’ she replied honestly.

  ‘And what? What is it if it’s not a network?’

  ‘It’s a list of addresses. It showed up for a few seconds on that temporary website on Thursday, at 19.36.07. I’ve got that address. But it stopped being of interest as soon as it revealed itself. It’s a free, anonymous American site. Since I’m convinced Witréus is telling the truth, I don’t think it’s a network. The addresses, they don’t know one another, they aren’t sharing pictures in the usual way. The list is a way of expanding the circle without risking anything. Everyone that’s visited a certain site – which is still unknown at this point – is bombarded with emails full of child porn.

  ‘Without having given their email address?’

  ‘I think so, yeah. They must’ve found a way to quickly identify a person’s email address. Something that we’d find very useful. Since most of the people who want an anonymous email address use Hotmail, I think it’s the key. You quickly identify the number of the phone line, check it off against the Hotmail users, and find an email address. It probably only takes a few milliseconds. I’m assuming it’s something new.’

  ‘So this means that there’s no alert risk, at least? If we let Witréus go, or let him talk to a lawyer, he won’t be able to warn the network?’

  ‘No. Because there is no network to contact. Theoretically, I suppose you could imagine him sending out general warnings via the paedophile sites, but it doesn’t seem likely. He’s staying in the closet. But are we really talking about letting him go?’

  ‘No,’ said Hellberg, leaning back. ‘No, of course not. We’ve got enough with the child porn. And we’re seizing the computer. Can you take it home and work on it there?’

  ‘Yeah, if necessary.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to be stubborn and say it is necessary. Anything else?’

  ‘Witréus had a jar full of undeveloped films. And a film in his camera. Is it OK if I take them home and develop them? Can I get the darkroom equipment from the stockroom?’

  ‘Buy it,’ said Ragnar Hellberg. ‘And give me the receipt.’

  ‘No tracks?’ said Sara Svenhagen, watching her boss.

  ‘No tracks,’ he nodded.

  23

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON. TIME to sum up the blood-soaked Midsummer weekend. Unusually high levels of drunkenness. Unusually high numbers of rapes. Unusually high levels of violence. Unusually high levels of Midsummer.

  Though that wasn’t their concern.

  Paul Hjelm hoped that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the meeting the day before. It had been a painful affair. Partly because half of the team was missing, with Söderstedt and Norlander at Kumla and Nyberg piecing together the remains of his ongoing cases, partly because it had taken a far from heroic course. Hultin had come in through his mystical old side door, dumped some papers on the desk, sat down and looked out over the gathering. No one in the unimpressive little congregation – Hjelm, Holm, Chavez – wanted to be the one to begin. All were going to say the same thing anyway: that nothing had happened. Hultin didn’t want to say it openly, either. And so they had just left, somewhat bewildered.

  Their chances seemed slightly better today. Everyone was there, and the cat seemed to have loosened its grip on their tongues. There was small talk in the Supreme Command Centre, a faint murmur. Jan-Olov Hultin regarded them through his owl-like glasses, silencing the small talk with: ‘I have an confession to make.’

  A strange opening line. They let him continue.

  ‘I warned Rajko Nedic.’

  They looked at one another.

  Chavez wrinkled his nose; otherwise, the outcry failed to materialise.

  ‘I thought it would be best to keep him under a tight rein. Also, I just wanted to introduce myself. I visited him at his house out in Danderyd. He wasn’t celebrating Midsummer. On the contrary, he was pottering about in a garden that looked like Eden.’

  ‘The toilet paper?’ asked Söderstedt.

  ‘Not Edet,’ Hultin retorted neutrally. ‘Eden.’

  ‘East of Eden,’ Hjelm alluded silkily.

  ‘What did he say, then?’ asked Chavez.

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Hultin. ‘He was talking about columbines being proof of God. Denied everything.’

  ‘How unexpected,’ Nyberg muttered.

  ‘So, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Hultin. ‘Time to go over the weekend’s successes. Anyone feel inclined?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ said Chavez. ‘Something Åkesson said, out by the slaughter site in Sickla. About those bloody footprints next to the dry spot left by the briefcase. Eight prints, as it turned out. Four-year-old Reeboks, size 7.’

  ‘Four-year-old?’ Norlander asked, perplexed.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Chavez, glancing down at one of Brynolf Svenhagen’s forensic reports. There were a lot of them. Svenhagen was in ecstasy. The reports were flooding in. He had gone mad with excitement.

  ‘You can work it out from the model,’ Kerstin Holm said, in the know. ‘The soles look different every year.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.

  ‘One: the tracks are going in the wrong direction,’ said Chavez stringently. ‘Two: Niklas Lindberg’s men don’t exactly seem the type to take any careless steps in blood.’

  ‘They were careless enough to get shot,’ said Hultin, shrugging. ‘Actually, half of them were shot, and by men they’d already frisked, judging by appearances. Maybe we’re overestimating their professionalism. And the fact that the footprints were going in the wrong direction surely only means that the person who picked up the briefcase and saw it covered in his friend’s blood was nervy. He took a couple of careless steps in the blood. In the wrong direction. By then he’d walked the blood off his trainers. He turned and went back. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.’

  ‘It was just an observation,’ Chavez mumbled, thinking about basket weaving and other stimulating activities for pensioners.

  ‘Size 7,’ said Hjelm. ‘Is that a small man? Or a woman? Eskil Carlstedt was at least a 12.’

  ‘11,’ said Chavez, his eyes on Qvarfordt’s forensic report.

  ‘There’s no real correspondence between shoe size and body size,’ said Holm. ‘Or any other anatomical size, for that matter . . .’

  ‘What else?’ asked Hultin. ‘Kumla?’

  Söderstedt and Norlander looked at one another. Both seemed to to be leaving the next word to the other. Eventually, Norlander said: ‘Everyone’s keeping their mouths shut.’

  ‘That’s because you always tell everyone to shut up,’ said Söderstedt. ‘I’m holding you personally responsible for all the shut mouths.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.

  Söderstedt continued, egged on by his own quick wit. ‘According to the guards, there was some kind of Nazi clique in Kumla. Nothing new, I know. Organised criminals always seem to be either immigrants or Nazis now
adays. Maybe what we’re seeing in the underworld is some kind of nasty prelude to a wider development in society. Or rather, some kind of clearer, less veiled version of the polarisation which is becoming more and more obvious in society.

  ‘I mean, what’s it really like when it comes to racism, if we really ask around in society? If we scratch the surface a little. At the moment, we don’t need to be especially worried about any political parties with Nazi tendencies or anything like that; but on the other hand, we should be more vigilant than ever when it comes to the enemy within. The enemy within ourselves, I mean. That’s where attitudes seem to have changed. A barrier has been lowered. It’s not easy to detect, but it’s a change from a few years back. It suddenly seems to be much easier to think of people as objects. As non-people. As people whose blood isn’t quite as red as our own. Is the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia really a strictly internal, historical Balkan affair, or does it have something to do with the wider change in . . . well, enlightened mentalities after all? How big a difference is there between sending all the immigrants to the outskirts, to Rinkeby or Hammarkullen or Rosengård, and driving people out of their home towns?’