The Beast

by Anders Roslund

  On the whole, Lund's life outside was hard to follow, because he had moved around a lot, always trailing financial complications. Now and then he had obviously attempted to organise relationships with others. As Fredrik took notes, he sought to understand what it was he needed, tried to read the reality he could not reach.

  Vincent turned and looked at his old friend.

  'I wish you'd skip this.'

  Fredrik didn't answer, just clenched his jaw tight and stared back.

  'Fine. Glare away. It doesn't change what I think.'

  Vincent rose, took the two mugs and wandered off to the machine in the corridor outside. Fredrik looked at his disappearing back for a moment. Then he picked up one of the two phones and dialled her number.

  'Hi. It's me.'

  He had woken her.

  'Fredrik?'

  'Yes.'

  'Not now. I took a sleeping tablet, I'm still too weary.'

  'Just one thing, a question. When we cleared your dad's flat there were two sacks full of stuff. Where did they go?'

  'What's this about?'

  'I simply want to know.'

  'I don't have them. The sacks were left in the attic, back in Strängnäs.'

  Vincent came back carrying the refilled mugs. Fredrik put the receiver down.

  'Agnes - it wasn't easy.'

  'How is she?'

  'Terrible.'

  Vincent nodded, handed Fredrik a mug, drank some coffee himself.

  'Let's do whatever has to be done; it's hotting up out there. A plane has come down near Moscow.'

  He started searching the Trade Register, essentially listings of small and medium-sized businesses. Again the ID number was the magic key opening all locks to a stranger's life.

  'B. Lund Taxis.'

  'What?' Fredrik had heard, but asked anyway.

  'It's a cab firm, registered as B. Lund Taxis. It hasn't been deregistered.'

  Fredrik came over to read for himself.

  'Look. It was set up in 1994.'

  Fredrik laughed, just a short bark.

  'Now what?'

  'Nothing.'

  'You're laughing at fucking nothing, are you? Remember who I am?'

  'Absolutely nothing.' Fredrik laughed again.

  'Come off it. You turn up here, just twenty-four hours after you buried your daughter, still wearing your funeral suit, and you stand around having a giggle. At nothing. Excuse me for asking. And shut up.'

  'Calm down.'

  'Calm down? That's so fucking great. Fantastic. Now what do you want? Business data?'

  'That's enough.'

  'Collaterals? Registration numbers?'

  'Nothing more. It's fine.'

  It was raining.

  The last three weeks had been dry, but now, suddenly, he felt drops hit his forehead. He took shelter in the car and started the windscreen wipers, but after a little while the shower was over. Getting out of town was easy this early on a Saturday morning and he drove quickly across the Liljeholm Bridge and on towards Strängnäs.

  He had put his notes on the dashboard and kept stealing cautious glances at them as he drove. A provincial block of flats. An address in the far north, then in Enköping, which was near Strängnäs, then in central Stockholm. All that seemed irrelevant. But B. Lund Taxis, that was something else, a company of several years' standing.

  Stockholm's dull outskirts made him want to listen to music, and he started rooting around in the box under the driver's seat. He would put on Creedence and 'Proud Mary'. He would sing aloud and forget that his grief was refusing to join in.

  When he arrived in Strängnäs it was pouring with rain. The water was washing off a dull membrane that had grown to cover buildings and people and all other life-forms. Everyone seemed to feel released and joyous. Despite the downpour he had seen no umbrellas anywhere in the town and no one running for shelter. Now, after parking the car, he observed the man just in front of him and the woman walking a bit further away, saw both slowing their pace and letting their clothes get soaked through as they turned their smiling faces upwards. His own wet suit came away from his body and he stepped out lightly, breathing in the damp, oxygen-rich air. He walked slowly towards his house, wanting the rain to wash away three weeks of heat and dust.

  When he opened the front door, she was there, waiting for him in the hall, holding a couple of masks, one with the grin of the Big Bad Wolf, the other one with a Little Pig's snout. She called to him, Daddy! Come and play, hurry, please, Daddy, eager as all five-year-olds are.

  He went to the fridge, took a carton of orange juice and sat down on a kitchen chair, drank three large glasses, listening to the silence of the house. It seemed to demand something of him.

  He moved the chair to get closer to the phone. Micaela would be back soon, so he had to get on with it. Just two calls, that was all.

  First the number. It was in the Yellow Pages; he recognised the big company logo from calls he had made before. A woman answered.

  'Enköping Taxis.'

  'Hello. My name is Sven Sundkvist. Could you please put me through to your personnel department?'

  'One moment.'

  Fredrik waited. A woman introduced herself as Liv Steen.

  'Good afternoon. I am Sven Sundkvist, detective inspector with the Stockholm City Police, violent crime squad.'

  'What can I do for you?'

  'I'm looking for information about one of the local firms you sometimes use. The owner is a Mr Bernt Lund, ID 640517-0350. His company is called B. Lund Taxis.'

  'I still don't quite understand what you want.'

  'I need information quickly. Specifically, which routes did you have him booked for?'

  'Look, this was several years ago.'

  'Very well. Could you just check any bookings to primary schools or day nurseries?'

  'I see… well. Look, we usually don't provide this kind of information just for the asking.'

  Fredrik hesitated. This woman was doing the right thing. He was unused to lying and didn't like it; it was so complicated to work out where the limit went and if he had passed it.

  'Ms Steen, this is a murder case.'

  'Is that supposed to make a difference?'

  'It has been covered in the media recently. A sex crime, the victim was a little girl.'

  It was very hard to say. He couldn't stand much more of this. The woman hesitated.

  'Detective Inspector… Sundkvist, is that right?'

  'Yes.'

  'Is it OK for me to phone you back?'

  'Of course. If it makes you feel better.'

  A long pause.

  'I don't want to cause any trouble. I'll deal with it now.'

  'Thank you.'

  He heard her looking through files, heard the clicking sounds as metal ring-bindings opened and snapped shut. His wet suit was sticking to him again and he had started to sweat.

  'Sorry to keep you waiting. Here we are. Eight bookings to day nurseries, four in Strängnäs, and four in Enköping.'

  'And the addresses, please.'

  She turned more pages in her files, then read them out to him.

  He recognised all four in Strängnäs; one of them was The Dove. Lund knew it well after driving there for almost a year. After escaping he had returned to a familiar place, where he knew how the children came and went, where the exits and entrances were.

  Fredrik thanked Liv Steen for her help. Now his second call.

  'Agnes, it's me again.'

  'I don't feel any better now.'

  'I know. Don't worry. Just one thing. The key to that attic. Do you know where it is?'

  'There is no key because there's no lock. I never bothered.

  Somehow it was Dad's things and had nothing to do with me.'

  'Good. Thanks.'

  He wanted the call to end there, now that he knew all he needed to know.

  'Why do you ask?'

  'He had some things of Marie's. Things she made at school and gave him. I want to take care o
f them.'

  'Why?'

  'I just do. Must I argue the case for everything?'

  He was thirsty and drank most of a second carton of juice. Then he wrote a note, just a few lines to explain he'd be away for a while but would come back home as soon as he could. He stuck it on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a ladybird.

  It was still raining, but less hard.

  He walked across the street to the block of flats opposite and took the lift to the attic floor.

  * * *

  He got up from the seat.

  It was hard, made from thick wooden planks covered in graffiti. He had been sitting there all morning, for four hours by now, and he felt uncomfortable, stiff all over.

  He had watched the little sluts come and go, knew how they moved, what they looked like when they chatted. Good-looking whores, like that other one; they didn't have any tits to speak about, but long, slender legs and knowing eyes that had seen cock before.

  He liked the two blondes best. Always happy, they were. He knew their names, they spoke so loudly, and he had a few photos. He had looked so long at their images that he felt he knew the girls well.

  They were quite grown up, in a way.

  Both were the kind of whore who knows what she wants. When their parents brought them to school, they hardly waved goodbye. He had often thought of little bitches like that, who felt they were in charge, thought of what he would say to them and what he would do to them.

  He felt lonely now. Having watched and waited for so long, it was time they got together, the three of them. The parents would be late, their sort always were.

  He checked the time. Five past eleven. Almost six hours to go.

  In the afternoon. Like with the other one.

  Whores like to be outside in the afternoon. It had been too hot earlier, but now after the rain they would be out in the grounds for a long time, that's what they liked to do. It would be crowded, what with all the kids around, and the local fuzz wouldn't notice a thing. He knew just what he would do.

  * * *

  It was dark. Fredrik had been in the attic only once before, when he and Agnes had come here to store what little was worth keeping from Birger's flat. Agnes' father had simply stopped living, between one breath and the next, apparently having made an instant change-over from being alive to being dead. They had found him naked in bed, propped up to read a magazine, Boating News, which he was still holding; the reading lamp was lit and on the bedside table his diary lay open at the day's date, with a completed note about the midday temperature and extent of rainfall, as well as recording his trip to the corner grocer's to hand in his pools coupon at the tobacco counter and then get something for his supper. Below this entry he had added a few lines about feeling oddly tired and the beginnings of a headache, for no reason he could think of, and that he had taken a couple of aspirin.

  Fredrik had never got to know him. Birger had been hard to reach, a big, burly, aggressive man, who was so completely unlike his daughter in every way that it was just about impossible to believe them to be related at all.

  He went into the storage pen that belonged to Birger's old flat. Vaguely familiar things were stacked against the walls, boxes of clothes, a standard lamp, two armchairs, four fishing rods, a bicycle trailer. Getting ready to squeeze between the chairs, he heard the attic door open and held still in mid-movement.

  He listened and waited in the murky light. At least two of them; they were whispering.

  Then a high young voice, a boy's.

  'Hello-oo!'

  Silence, then more whispering.

  'Hello there, we're all coming in! Lots of us.'

  He recognised the voice, smiled, and was just about to call out when the other one, so far silent, spoke up, sounding a little older and tougher.

  'See? It works every time, I know that.'

  Two boys, who slowly found their way down the central aisle, on the look-out. He could hear their tense breathing, and spotted them when they were just a few pens away. He didn't want to scare them.

  'Hi, David!'

  Too late. The sudden voice had obviously alarmed them.

  'Look over here, it's me. Fredrik.'

  Now they were looking the right way and made him out where he stood among the boxes and chairs.

  The dark-haired, shorter one was David, but his mate was a new face, red hair and freckled skin. He was taller, more strongly built than David. The boys looked at each other with the disappointment ghost-busters feel when the awful spectral being they have been chasing turns out to be somebody's dad in the wrong place.

  David pointed at Fredrik.

  'Hey, that's just Marie's dad.'

  David had been Marie's best friend, they had been there for each other since way back, since their first efforts to walk. They had gone off to the same playground and the same nursery school, had supper and stayed the night in each other's homes, woken together in the morning before everybody else, making up for the brothers and sisters neither had.

  David fell silent again immediately. He felt very bad about saying Marie's name like that, because it must upset Fredrik now that Marie had become dead and would never come back, or so he had been told. He turned away, pulling at his mate's arm to make him come along.

  'Don't go. You stay, boys.'

  David looked back. He was crying now.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I forgot.'

  While Fredrik manoeuvred himself to get out from the store, he wondered how young children might construe death. Could they grasp that the dead were not with them and never would be, that dead people don't breathe, or see, or hear or come out to play ever again? He didn't think they could, and neither could he, not really.

  'David, come here. You too. What's your name?'

  'Lukas.'

  'OK. You too, Lukas.'

  Fredrik sat down on the dusty floor of reddish-brown pitted bricks, pointing to show that he wanted the boys to come and sit next to him, one on either side.

  'Sit here, and I'll tell you something.'

  They did as he asked. He put his arms round their shoulders.

  'David.'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you remember what we played in our house the last time you came?'

  'You were the Big Bad Wolf,' David said and smiled. 'We were the Little Pigs. We won. We always won!'

  'Sure, you won, as usual. Was it fun, do you think?'

  'Yes it was! It was great fun. Marie is good at playing.'

  She was standing in front of him. She was smiling, insisting that they must play now, just one more time. He sighed, the way he always did; she laughed and they played again.

  'She was good at playing. Great fun to play with. And she laughed a lot. You know all that, don't you, David?'

  'Oh yes. I know that.'

  'Good. So it's important to know too that you mustn't ever feel worried about saying Marie's name. It's fine, with me and with everybody.'

  David looked fixedly at the brick floor for a while. He was trying to understand. Then he spoke, first to Lukas, then to Fredrik.

  'Marie is fun to play with and I'm friends with her. But she has become dead.'

  'Yes, she has.'

  'But you won't get sad if I say her name?'

  'No, I promise I won't.'

  They stayed there for a good half-hour, while Fredrik told them about Marie being dead. He described her funeral, how the vicar had put spoonfuls of earth on her coffin before it was lowered into a hole in the ground. David and Lukas kept asking questions. Why do people have blood in their stomachs? How come a child can die before the grown-ups? How can it be that you talk to somebody one day and the next day you can't ever again?

  He hugged them both before they left, realising that this was the first time he had articulated the fact of Marie's death. The boys had made him. They had listened to his explanations and asked more questions when they weren't satisfied, forcing him to try harder. He had even spoken of his grief, admitting that he had not cried on
ce. This shocked them and they wanted to know why. He said truthfully that he didn't know the answer, but it must have to do with the way sadness could build up inside a person who somehow couldn't let it out.