Anders Roslund - The Beast

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.