The Beast (ewert grens)

by Anders Roslund

  II

  (A WEEK)

  Fredrik caught the two o’clock ferry. The ferries, in their moss-green and sun-yellow livery, set out every hour on the hour. Crossing the strait between Okö and Arnö took only four or five minutes, but marked the divide between mainland and island. For him, it symbolised a shift from time that raced to time that lingered. He had bought an old cottage on the island a month or so before Marie was born, when writing at home had looked like becoming impossible. The cottage had been half ruined, and surrounded by a jungle, but it was only fifteen minutes away by car. During the first couple of summers Agnes had helped him recreate a house and a garden from this ruin in the wilderness. Eventually a novel trilogy had emerged from it, books that had sold rather well and were now being translated into German, which really pleased his publishers, only too aware that the market for foreign publication rights was tough.

  Fredrik knew he wouldn’t be able to write anything today, but had made up his mind to pretend to himself he might. He went through the routine, settled down in front of the little square screen with his pile of untidy notes at hand. Quarter of an hour passed, half an hour, three quarters of an hour. He turned on the television in the room next door, it was companionable to have it mumbling away at low volume. It joined the commercial radio station that was playing worn pop tunes, too familiar to attract any attention.

  After a while he decided to take a short walk. He went down to the water’s edge and observed people messing about in boats, a simple but pleasing show that was always on.

  Still nothing written, not a word. He must stay until he had one phrase that looked worth keeping on paper.

  The telephone rang.

  These days it was always Agnes. Everybody else had stopped trying. Knowing what a rude bastard he was when someone disturbed him in mid-sentence, it was amazing that he hadn’t realised sooner that people had been scared off. It was only when the writer’s block had tightened its grip and the screen stayed forever blank that he discovered how emptiness had crept up on him. He didn’t know what to think about it, his isolation seemed both beautiful and ugly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No need to sound so cross.’

  ‘I’m writing.’

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘Well. It’s a bit slow at the moment.’

  ‘That’d mean nothing, then.’

  It was no good lying to Agnes. They had seen each other naked too often.

  ‘Yes, roughly. I’m sorry. What do you want?’

  ‘We’ve got a daughter, remember? I’d like to know how she is. We do phone each other at times and it’s always about her, you know that. I tried earlier, but you made Marie put the phone down so I didn’t get to hear anything. Now I want some answers.’

  ‘Marie is fine. Really, she is, all the time. For one thing, she’s one of those rare people who don’t suffer when it’s as hot as it is now. She gets that from you.’

  He had a vision of Agnes’ tanned body, imagined what she looked like now, curled up in her office chair, wearing a thin dress. He had longed for her every morning, every day, every night until he learned to control it by shutting her image away, learned to be brisk and no-nonsense and free.

  ‘What about school? What happens when you leave her there now?’

  Aha, Micaela, you want to know about Micaela. Good! Agnes must be troubled by his relationship with a woman much younger than either of them. Never mind that it wouldn’t make Agnes come back to him, she wouldn’t crawl just because he loved someone who was as beautiful as that, but he felt good about it. Childish maybe, but enjoyable.

  ‘It’s much better now. This morning it took maybe ten minutes and then she was off, playing Indians with David.’

  ‘Indians?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what they’re up to now.’

  He started to wander about holding the phone, left the small kitchen with the table where he worked and went into the even smaller sitting room to sit down in an armchair. Her timing had been perfect, he couldn’t have endured staring at the blank computer screen for much longer.

  He was just about to ask her about her life in Stockholm, how she was getting on, although this was something he hardly ever did because he feared what she might say, maybe that she loved her new life and had found somebody special to share it with, but then his mind suddenly fixed on an image on the mumbling television set in the middle of the room.

  ‘Agnes, wait. Hold it.’

  The black-and-white still showed a smiling man with short darkish hair. Fredrik recognised the face. He had seen it recently. He had seen it today: it was the man on the seat by the school gate, the father waiting outside The Dove. They had nodded to each other. Now a new image, still of the father, but this time in colour. The photo had been taken inside a prison; there was a wall behind the man and he was flanked by two prison guards. He was waving to the camera, or at least that was what it looked like.

  Fredrik turned the sound up. The excitable voice of a reporter came on; they were all taught to sound like that, to rattle off words with the same emphasis on every one, neutral voices without personality.

  The voice said that the father on the bench, the man in the pictures, was Bernt Lund, a thirty-six-year-old who had been convicted in 1991 of several violent rapes of underage girls, then convicted again in 1997 for more rapes of children, and finally found guilty of the so-called Skarpholm cellar murders, two nine-year-old girls who had been sadistically abused and killed. He had been held in one of the secure units for sex offenders at Aspsås prison, but today, in the early hours, he had escaped from a hospital transport.

  Fredrik sat there, silently. He couldn’t hear, raised the volume but still couldn’t hear.

  That man in the picture. Fredrik had nodded to him.

  A man from the prison had a microphone shoved in his face; he was sweating profusely and stammered when he spoke.

  An older, grim-faced policeman said he had no comment and added a plea for the public to communicate any information about sightings.

  He had nodded to that man, twice. The man had been sitting there all the time; Fredrik had nodded on the way into the school, and again on the way out.

  Fredrik had turned rigid, but now he could hear Agnes shouting in the phone; her sharp voice hurt his ears. Let her jabber.

  He shouldn’t have nodded. Shouldn’t have.

  ‘Agnes,’ he finally said into the receiver. ‘I can’t talk any more. I must phone somewhere. I’ll put the phone down now.’

  He pushed the button and waited for a signal. She was still there.

  ‘Agnes! Fuck’s sake! Get off the line!’ He threw the phone on the floor, ran into the kitchen, grabbed his mobile and rang Micaela, rang the school.

  Lars Ågestam scanned the courtroom. What a drab, disappointing lot.

  The magistrates, political appointees to a man and woman, watched the proceedings with bored, ignorant eyes. Judge von Balvas had begun the trial with a totally unprofessional statement to the effect that she was prejudiced against any person charged with sexual crimes. Håkan Axelsson, the accused paedophile, had given up and was unable even to pretend an understanding of what his acts might have done to the children. The guards behind the accused tried to stare neutrally into mid-distance, while the seven journalists, who seemed agitated and were taking notes furiously, would make mistakes about the most straightforward events in their facts boxes. At least two faces in the public gallery belonged to familiars, women who turned up to enjoy the performance and justified it by chattering about their civic rights. And there was the group of law students, seated at the back as he himself had once been, busily making over the despair of violated children into a piece of useful coursework, hoping for a good z:i at least.

  He felt like insisting that the court should be cleared, or screaming at the lot of them to keep a very, very low profile, or else. He didn’t, of course. Lars Ågestam was a nicely brought-up young man, a newly appointed prosecutor ambitious for
better cases; he wanted to go up in the world, up up up, and was smart enough to keep his opinions to himself, to stick to his last and prepare his prosecutions so carefully that he knew more than anyone else around. Only an outstandingly good lawyer for the defence would have a chance of getting the better of him.

  Kristina Björnsson was an outstandingly good lawyer, bloody well excellent.

  She was the only one in the room who did not fit in with the overwhelming mediocrity. She was experienced, even wise. So far he had never come across anyone else from the defence side who still believed that even the worst, most moronic of clients was more worthwhile than the size of their fee. Consequently, she was also one of the few who had the clients’ full confidence.

  Kristina Björnsson had figured in one of the first anecdotes he had been told when he started attending trials as a student. She was a well-known coin collector and her collection, allegedly one of the best in private hands, had been stolen ten-odd years ago. The news started off an almighty fuss inside all the prisons in the land. An unprecedented, strictly underground search order went out and within the week two heavies with long ponytails turned up at Björnsson’s front door with her collection, accompanied by an apologetic letter and a bouquet of flowers. Every single coin was in place. The letter had been laboriously scripted by three pros in the art and antiques racket, who wanted Kristina to know they were truly sorry. They wouldn’t have traded for the collection if they had known whose it was, and should she ever fail to acquire a coin legally, she need only ask and they would see what could be done.

  Lars Ågestam reflected that if he ever needed a lawyer, Björnsson would be his choice. She was good this time too. Håkan Axelsson was yet another unfeeling swine, who deserved nothing better than a very long spell inside, and the prosecutor should have had a cast-iron case, given that his primary evidence was a stack of CDs containing digitised images of humiliation and violence. There were corroborating statements too; some members of Axelsson’s paedophile ring had talked. But still it looked as if this particular sicko would escape with a couple of years, because Kristina Björnsson had patiently countered every point the prosecutor made, arguing grave psychological disturbance and hence her client’s need for care in a secure psychiatric unit. She wouldn’t get her care order, of course, but somehow she had persuaded the magistrates of what had seemed impossible at first: namely that there were other options, compromise solutions. The magistrates approved, that much was obvious, and one of them seemed to feel that the exploitation thing had been pushed too hard, since in his view one of the children had been provocatively dressed.

  Lars Ågestam raged inwardly. That local council jobsworth, straight from some political backwater, had been droning on about children’s clothes nowadays, mixing in stuff about human encounters and shared responsibilities; he was asking for a bloodied nose. Ågestam was very close to telling him and all his moronic colleagues to go to hell. His career plans would have gone the same way, of course, ruined in one unsmart move.

  He had followed the trials of other porn ring members; so far three out of the seven had been convicted and sentenced to appropriately long terms in prison. Axelsson was just as guilty, but Björnsson and her tame band of old fools had reached some unholy agreement, so if Bernt Lund hadn’t done a runner that very morning they might even have doled out a suspended sentence, a serious loss of face for any aspiring prosecutor. The fact that Lund was on the loose had got the journalists all excited and they showed more interest in Axelsson than they had so far, knowing that by now whatever they wrote would shift from page 11 to page 7 or better. Any link between Axelsson and Sweden’s most wanted, most hated man would turn into many column inches. If only to avoid a nasty public row, Axelsson would surely get at least one year in prison.

  Once this was over, Ågestam did not want any more sex crimes. Not for a long while.

  These cases sapped your strength somehow, no matter if the criminal and the victim were no more than names on pieces of paper, because he still invariably lost his professional detachment, his calm bureaucrat’s distance. Trouble was, emotional involvement in a prosecutor was worse than useless.

  So with any luck, he’d get bank robberies, murder, maybe a little fraud. Please. Less exciting crimes, less opinionated chatter from everyone. He had tried hard to understand the child porn fanatics, read all there was to read, attended a professional course, but nothing fundamental had changed. He wanted no more of this. Above all, he did not want anything to do with putting Bernt Lund back inside. Too much emotion, crimes too appalling to think and write about.

  When they caught Lund he would keep his head well down.

  He ran out to the car, leaving the front door unlocked, no time to find his keys.

  Marie.

  He was crying. Tore open the car door. There were his keys, on the same ring as the ignition key. He reversed the car at speed through the narrow gate.

  She had not been in the school.

  Micaela had listened to his urgent flood of questions and statements, put the receiver down and gone off to look for Marie. First inside, then outside. The girl was nowhere. He had screamed. Micaela had asked him to please speak more calmly; he had pulled himself together, then lost control of his voice so that it rose to a shout again. He always came back to the father on the seat outside and the TV news and the father who was in the photo taken in front of a prison wall. Then he put the receiver down and ran for his car.

  He drove along the winding country roads in a panic, crying and screaming.

  The father waiting outside the school was the man in the photos, he was sure of it. He let go of the wheel with one hand to phone the emergency number, stating his message at screaming pitch. Within a minute he was connected to the duty officer. He explained that he had seen Lund outside a nursery school in Strängnäs, his daughter’s school, and that she had disappeared.

  Three kilometres from the house to the ferry station. He drove on, past the charming square and the thirteenth- century church, past the cemetery where people were tending graves in the still heat of late afternoon, but for all his urgency he missed the ferry. He checked the time, barely four minutes late, pushed the car horn, blinked with his headlights, all pointless of course. Then he phoned the ferry. It was quieter than usual and the ferryman heard it ring. Fredrik managed to explain enough and was promised that they would come straight back for him.

  Why had he taken Marie to that fucking school?

  Why hadn’t they simply stayed at home? It had been half past one already.

  Fredrik watched as the ferry reached the other side of the narrow straits, looked at the time that kept moving on unbearably. Marie had not been there, not inside the school and not outside either, and he thought of his little daughter, who had grown into a human being while he had been with her; maybe she’d grown too fast. Once Agnes had left, it was Marie who received all his deepest love; he offered up all the old feeling for Agnes, for everyone, to Marie and she alone had to cope with that concentrated love, and she stored it and also somehow returned it. More than once he’d thought it wasn’t fair; no one should be made to represent other people and forced to hold more love than there was room for; a five-year-old is not very big after all.

  He phoned Micaela again. No reply. And the same again. Her telephone must be switched off. The signals rang out and then a tinny voice asked him to leave a message.

  He hadn’t cried for a long time, not even when Agnes moved out. There had been times he’d actually tried but it was impossible; it was as if his reservoir of tears had dried up. Thinking back he realised that as an adult he had never wept; the flow had been turned off. Until now.

  Perhaps that was why he still hadn’t quite taken in what was happening to him, the gut-wrenching fear that wouldn’t let go and the damnable tears streaming down his cheeks. He had imagined that weeping might be a relief, but it was not, only something that poured out uncontrollably, leaving a huge empty space inside him.

 
The yellow-and-green ferry came chugging back empty, making a thumping noise as it hit the two rusty steel cables which served as mobile rails in the water. The closer it came, the louder the noise. He waved towards the cabin, he always greeted the ferryman, and drove on board. The water spread out all around him as the ferry moved placidly along its set route.

  The images kept passing through in his mind. Lund in black and white, a kind of smile on his face. Then Lund standing in front of the prison wall, between the guards; he had been waving. That smiling, waving creature raped children. Fredrik remembered enough about the girls-in-the- cellar case. Lund had mutilated, torn and beaten his victims until they were like worn-out, rejected dolls. Fredrik, like the rest of the public, had been outraged and at the same time unable to cope with what he read about the case, and somehow it was still as if all that could not have happened, as if the news story could not be true. The media had been watching every move in the trial for weeks, but he still didn’t fucking well understand.

  The ferryman was the older of the two, a semi-retired stand-in for the younger one. He had seen enough to grasp Fredrik’s desperation and wisely kept off the usual chit-chat to pass the time. Fredrik would thank him one day, much later, for his understanding.

  They reached the other side, where the ferryman’s dog had been tied up. The dog barked with pleasure at seeing his master again. Fredrik raced off the ferry the moment it hit land.

  He was so intensely afraid. Terrified.

  She would never go away without telling someone. She knew Micaela was there and she knew she must not go anywhere outside the fence without letting her know.

  That man. Cap on his head, quite short and quite thin. He had nodded to him.

  Across Arnö Island, nine kilometres of winding gravel. Then Road 55, eight kilometres of accident-prone tarmac. Not many cars around at this time of day. He increased his speed.