Anders Roslund - The Beast

Grens was a large man, heavy and tired. His hair had receded to a grey, bushy ring. He moved in short, brisk bursts, due to his odd gait, a kind of limp. His stiff neck was due to a near-garrotting, a memento of leading a raid on the premises of a Lithuanian hitman. They kept Grens in hospital for quite a while afterwards.

He had been a good policeman, but didn’t know if he still was. At least, he wasn’t sure if he felt up to it for much longer. Did he hang on to his job because he couldn’t think of anything better to do? Had he inflated the importance of policing, made too much of it to drop everything when the time came? After a few years, not one of the buggers round here would remember him. They’d recruit replacement DCIs, new lads without a history, lacking a sense of what had mattered before, who had had power back then, informally of course, and why that was.

He often thought that everyone should be taught how to debrief, from the word go, whatever job you were training for. Novices should learn that the professional ins-and-outs they came to value were worthless in the end, and that you were around in your job only for a short while. It was a small part of your life that was at stake; you were there one moment, gone the next. Look at himself. There’d been others ahead of him and did he care about them? Hell, no. He didn’t.

Someone knocked on the door. Some saddo who had come to plead with him to turn down the music. Sodding bunnies.

But it was Sven, the only one in the house with some steel in him.

‘Ewert?’

‘Yes?’

‘Big trouble.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Bernt Lund.’

That got to him. He raised his eyebrows and put down the paper he held.

‘Bernt Lund? What’s with him?’

‘He’s walked.’

‘The fuck he has!’

‘Again.’

Sven Sundkvist liked his old colleague and didn’t get fazed by the old boy’s sarcasm. He knew that Ewert’s bitterness, his fears, came from being too close to the day when he’d be forced to stop working, the day when he would be told that thirty-five years in service amounted to no more or less than precisely thirty-five years.

At least Ewert wanted something. He believed in what he did, unlike most of the others. So, never mind his surliness, his fits of bad temper, his oddities.

‘Come on, Sven. Get on with it.’

Sven gave an account of Lund’s hospital transport, the whole trip from Aspsås to Southern General’s casualty entrance. He described how he had used his elaborate body- belt chains to batter the two officers. Afterwards he had made off with the van. Now he was at liberty out there, probably stalking girls, children, little kids who’d just started school.

Ewert got up during this and limped restlessly about the room, waddling round his desk, manoeuvring his big body between the chair and the stand with potted plants. He stopped in front of the wastepaper bin, aimed with his good foot and kicked it hard.

‘How fucking stupid can you get, letting Lund out with only two escorts? What was Oscarsson thinking about? If he only could’ve been arsed to call us, we’d have sent a car and then that fucking freak wouldn’t have been at large!’

The kick had sent the bin flying, spewing banana peel and empty snuffboxes and torn envelopes all over the floor. Sven had seen it all before, and waited for the next instalment.

‘Åke Andersson and Ulrik Berntfors,’ he said. ‘Two good men. Andersson is the tall one, well over one hundred and ninety-something. Your age.’

‘I know who Andersson is.’

‘Now what?’

‘Tell you in a while. Can’t think now.’

Sven felt tired. It came over him suddenly. He wanted to go home. Home to Anita, to Jonas. He had finished for the day and couldn’t bear thinking about what had happened, that a child might be violated any moment now, or anything else to do with Bernt Lund. After all, he’d swapped to get the morning shift, because they’d planned to celebrate. He had some bottles of wine and a posh gateau in his car. They were meant to be drinking his birthday toast, soon.

Ewert noticed Sven’s tired eyes, his straying thoughts. Damn, he shouldn’t have kicked that effing bin. Sven disapproved of that kind of thing. Better say something. Be calm, cool.

‘Sven, you look tired. How are things?’

‘Oh, all right. I was about to leave. Go home. It’s my birthday today.’

‘Is it? Congratulations! How many years?’

‘Forty.’

Ewert whistled, then made a bow.

‘Well I never. Shake hands!’

He held out his hand, Sven grabbed it firmly and they shook for quite a long time. Then Ewert spoke.

‘But, young man. Regrettably, forty or not forty, you’re going nowhere now.’

Ewert had bad breath. Normally they never got that close.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Let me tell you something.’

Ewert pointed at his visitor’s chair. He was impatient, jabbing towards it with his index finger. Sven pulled his hand away and went to perch on the edge of the chair, still ready to leave any minute now.

‘I was in it up to my neck, the last time.’

‘The girls in the basement.’

‘Two girls, both nine years old. He had tied them up, jerked off all over them, raped them, cut them. Just like the time before. They were lying on this bare cement floor, staring at us. The medic confirmed that they’d been alive when Lund cut them, stuck a metal object into them, into the vagina, the anus. I don’t believe it, because I can’t bear to believe it. Have you thought about that, eh, Sven? That you can believe whatever you like, if you put your mind to it?’

Ewert Grens scared quite a few people. He didn’t stay put where you left him. His body was restless inside his creased shirt, his too-short trousers. Sven understood why people kept away from him, he had avoided the man himself. But he always felt that it was wrong to set out planning to humiliate someone. Simple enough rule. Anyway, he’d kept himself to himself until it seemed Ewert had accepted him. Even selected him, not that Sven understood why. The old boy must have needed someone and it happened to be him. Now Ewert didn’t seem dangerous any more. Big and grey and intense, but not dangerous.

He was sad, grieving over the two girls. He didn’t cry, not tears yet.

‘I did the questioning. I kept trying to look Lund in the eye: No way. No fucking way. He stared above me, past me, through me. I interrupted the session several times to demand that he look straight at me.’

Grens, you don’t get it.

Grens, listen.

I thought you were one of the guys who’d get it.

I don’t get the hots for all kids.

You’ve no reason to say that.

I only go for some of them, the ones who’re a bit… bigger.

Like that blonde, plump one.

You know the kind.

That’s important, Grens.

They’re whores.

Little slags with small feet.

Who think about cock.

They fucking well shouldn’t do that, you know.

Fucking little slags with tight cunts, they shouldn’t be thinking about cock all the time.

Human beings looked at each other when they talked. But no, not him. No way.

He looked at Sven. Sven looked at him. They were human.

‘I understand. And I don’t. If he’s one of those who don’t look at you, then why wasn’t he locked up in a special psycho institution? Like Säters secure? Or Karsudden? Or Sidsjön?’

Ewert bent to pick up the bin. He pulled out the tobacco from under his upper lip.

‘That’s what used to happen. His first time inside he got three years in Säter. But last time he was caught his mental disorder was diagnosed as minor. And then it’s off to the jug like everyone else. These days. Sex offenders’ unit, not a secure madhouse.’