Anders Roslund - The Beast

They reached cell number eleven. Alone among the others in the corridor this door was bare. The temporary occupants of the rooms behind all the other doors had decorated them laboriously with posters and newspaper cuttings and photos.

Ewert had time to think that he should have been here six months ago. He should have stepped inside the door to Lund’s cell. At the time he had been investigating a child pornography ring, which had given him his first real insight into the closed society of new-style paedophiles, structured round internet connections and databases and secret mail addresses. He had seen their images of naked or partly undressed children, penetrated and humiliated children, tortured children, lonely children. Initially, he and his colleagues had thought that this pornography exchange was part of a foreign network of dark vice and profit and inscrutable agreements, but it turned out differently, more discreet, smarter and more challenging.

Just seven men, a select society of serious, recidivist sex offenders. One locked up, most of them just released from prison.

They had created their own virtual display cabinet. Their contributions to the show were downloaded on the net and run on their computers at set times, as if following a performance schedule. Once a week, same time, Saturday, at eight o’clock. They sat in front of their screens, waiting for that week’s images, and every week their demands escalated. Next time must somehow offer more than last time; naked children had been enough but not any more, children sitting still had to start moving and touching each other. Then touching wasn’t enough; the children had to be raped, then raped more viciously. The next set of photographs must score more highly than the previous lot, at any cost. Seven paedophiles, a closed circle, showing off their own crimes in their own neatly scanned and formatted pictures.

They had been at it for almost a year before they were caught.

All the time they had been competing with each other, running qualifying heats in child pornography.

Bernt Lund had been one of the seven. He was the only one in prison, the only one who could solely contribute photos that had been taken in the past, but his crimes meant that his high status was beyond dispute, as was his right to join the ring.

When the ring was broken, three of the others were convicted and sent off to serve fairly long prison sentences. A fourth, a man called Håkan Axelsson, was being tried, but the remaining two had not been charged because the evidence was so patchy. Everyone knew about them but that was neither here nor there; the ‘not proven’ classification was sufficient to free them. And so they were free to recruit new child porn contacts in the shadowy marketplace that had grown up around the investigation.

There were lots of them out there. For each one down, there was one ready to go.

Ewert was cursing himself. He should have inspected Lund’s cell then. But the police had been constantly pushed for time, always under media pressure, invariably targets for public outrage. He had felt too harassed to visit Aspsås himself and had sent two junior colleagues to interrogate Lund, whose cell had been stacked to the ceiling with his illegal handiwork. Mostly CDs with thousands of pictures showing tormented children. It was all very bad, and conclusive enough, but if he had gone himself he would have picked up more about the man. Maybe he wouldn’t have been at such a loss now that Lund had got ahead of them.

Lennart unlocked the door.

‘There. All yours. Tidy is one word for it.’

Ewert and Sven stepped inside and then stopped. Despite its standardised ordinariness - about eight square metres, one window, the usual furnishings - the room was very odd indeed. Full of objects, all lined up, as if for an exhibition. Candlesticks, stones, pieces of wood, pens, bits of string, items of clothing, folders, batteries, books, notebooks, all were arranged in lines stretching along the floor, across the bedspread, the windowsill, the shelves. Each object was separated from the next by what looked like exactly two centimetres. It made Ewert think of an unending row of dominoes, upright until one piece is moved out of place and it’s all over.

Ewert’s diary had a small ruler marked along its edge. He aligned it with a row of stones. Two centimetres, twenty millimetres exactly, between the stones. The pens on the windowsill were twenty millimetres apart. On the shelves, the books were twenty millimetres apart too, and the same went for the bits of string on the floor and between the battery and the notebook and the packet of cigarettes. Everywhere, twenty millimetres.

‘Does it always look like this?’

Lennart nodded.

‘Yes, it does. Before taking off the bedspread at night he puts the stones on the floor, one by one, measuring the distances as he goes along. In the morning he goes through the whole performance in reverse after he’s made the bed and put the bedspread back on.’

Sven moved some of the pens. Dead ordinary biros. The stones were ordinary stones, one more pointless than the next. Plain, empty folders and notebooks.

‘This is too much. I don’t get it.’

‘Nothing to it. What is it you don’t get?’

‘I don’t know. Something. Why? Why does he lick children’s feet, for instance?’

‘Why do you think it matters to know why?’

‘It matters who this guy is, inside. Where he’s going, what it’s for. But the bottom line is, I want to find the motherfucker so I can go home and eat some cake and drink a glass. Or three.’

‘You’ll never know what he’s like inside. Not a hope, I’m sorry. There’s nothing like a reason in any of all this. He doesn’t know himself why he licks the feet of his victims, dead or alive. I’m convinced he doesn’t have a clue why he lines things up two centimetres apart either.’

Ewert was holding up his diary at face level. He put his thumb as a marker at the two-centimetre mark, forcing them all to look.

‘Control. That’s all. They’re like that, all of them. They enjoy rape, because when they do it they call the shots. Power and control. Though this one is extreme, he’s actually just like the rest. His rows of stones and so forth are all about order, structure, being in charge.’

He lowered the diary, placed it at the end of the row of stones and swept the lot down on to the floor.

‘But we know that. And we know he’s a sadist. We know what power does to men like Lund. His cock goes hard, that’s how it works. He controls someone, that person is powerless. Only he decides how to hurt them and how much. It’s what gives him his kicks, makes him come in front of tied-up, broken nine-year-olds.’

He did his trick with the diary to the biros on the windowsill. One by one they hit the floor.

‘Come to think of it, the pictures. The computer ones. Did he sort them too?’

Lennart fixed his gaze on the piled-up biros on the floor. No sign of order now. Then he met Ewert’s eyes, looking surprised, as if the question was new to him.

‘Sorted? How do you mean?’

‘Well, how did he do it? I can’t fucking remember. Faces, eyes, yes. How bloody abandoned they all looked. But not distances, how the images were related to each other.’

‘I don’t know. I should, maybe, but I don’t. Didn’t even think about it. But I will find out, if you think it’s important.’

‘Yes it is. It’s important.’ Lennart sat down on the bed. ‘Tomorrow, will that do?’

‘Not really.’

‘OK, later. When we’re done here. The file is in my room.’

They turned the cell inside out. They inspected every corner of what had been Bernt Lund’s home for four years, touched everything, sniffed around.

There was no information to be had. He had not had a plan.