Anders Roslund - The Beast

LÅ: This action of yours suggests that you do.

FS: I believe that taking a life sometimes saves lives.

LÅ: And you’re the judge of whose life should be taken and who should be saved?

FS: A child playing outside its school? Or an escaped sex killer, who’s planning to violate and then slaughter that very child? And their lives are supposed to be worth the same?

SS: I would like you to say why you weren’t prepared to let the police go after him.

FS: I did consider it. But I decided against it.

SS: All you had to do was approach the officers stationed by the school gate, isn’t that so?

FS: Lund succeeded in escaping from the prison. Before that, he escaped from a secure mental hospital. If I’d left it to the police, at best he would’ve been captured and sent to a prison or a mental hospital. What if he had escaped again?

SS: So you decided to be both judge and executioner? FS: I had no choice. It was my only option. My one single thought was how to kill him so that he wouldn’t be able to do again what he did to Marie. Under any circumstances whatsoever.

LÅ: Have you finished?

SS: Yes.

LÅ: That’s all, then. Fredrik, please listen carefully.

FS: Yes?

LÅ: I must put this to you formally.

FS: Go ahead.

LÅ: Fredrik Steffansson, I have to tell you that you are charged with murder and will be tried in court.

The village was called Tallbacka. Village? Actually, it was quite a sizeable community, with roughly two thousand six hundred inhabitants. There was a small supermarket, a kiosk, a branch office of the Co-op savings bank, a rather plain licensed restaurant, open both at lunchtime and in the evenings, a closed railway station, one large, recently restored church, which was forever empty, and two more popular free churches.

You took the day as it came, that was the kind of place it was.

It was a here-and-now for the people there, lives which had started in this place.

It was good enough for them, thank you; only stuck-ups wanted to get away. A day was a day, no more and no less, no matter that the town had been tarted up with two new slip-roads from the dual carriageway.

Despite being that kind of community, or maybe because of it, over the following months Tallbacka was to become the most clear-cut example, among many others, of what was a new legal phenomenon. It was here that people demonstrated the vacuum separating legally correct court proceedings and the public’s interpretation of exactly what they signified.

This was a remarkable summer, one nobody would want to remember.

Göran was known locally as Flasher-Göran. He was forty- four years old, a trained teacher, who had never worked since his practitioner’s term at a nearby school twenty years ago.

Twenty years was nearly half his lifetime, but he still hadn’t been able to work out why he did it.

One afternoon, his duties done for the day, he had stopped in the schoolyard and undressed. He took off one piece of clothing after another. Standing stark naked, just a few metres away from the patch of ground set aside for smokers, he sang the national anthem, both verses, loudly but badly. Then he dressed again, wandered off home, prepared the lessons for the following day and went to bed.

They had allowed him to finish his training and sit the examination, which he passed. During the few years that followed, he applied for every teaching post that came up within a radius of a hundred or so kilometres of Tallbacka. Despite endless labour at hot copiers, producing more pages of his ever more polished curriculum vitae, he never even got an offer of an interview. There was no need to copy his sentence, which always floated up on top of his applications somehow, obscuring the rest of the documentation. He had paid a fine, but it had not helped to mitigate the never-to- be-forgotten shame of having exposed himself in front of under-age school children, in the schoolyard and during school hours.

Many times he had considered leaving and going somewhere far away, where he could apply for jobs untainted by rumours and speculation. Like many others in Tallbacka, he was too gutless, too muddled, too local.

The day was very warm. True, it had felt even hotter yesterday, when he’d been away buying roof tiles, but anyway, he was sweating and couldn’t be bothered changing from shorts to trousers. The three hundred metres to the shop seemed a long way.

He heard them when he crossed the road. He had known several of them since they were toddlers, but now they were big boys of fifteen or sixteen, with voices like grown males.

‘Show your knob then!’

‘Fucking peddo! Come on, flash!’

They emptied any Coke left and threw away the cans, to start a performance of shouting and rubbing their crotches rhythmically with both hands.

‘Flash cock. Flash cock. Peddo, peddo, peddo.’

He didn’t look their way. He was determined not to look, whatever. They shouted louder and louder. Someone threw a can at him.

‘Fucking peddo show-off! Go home. Get it out and wank!’

He walked on, just a short stretch to go now, for once he was round the corner of the old post office they wouldn’t be able to see him anymore and the shop wouldn’t be far away. It was the only shop left, now that it had seen off its two rivals. It stood there alone, displaying red sale price tags and today’s special bargains.

He was tired, just as he had been every day this long, hot summer. After his hurried walk, breathing heavily, he sat down on the seat outside the shop, to watch the passers- by with their carrier bags. They were all people he knew at least by name. On the next seat along sat two girls of about twelve or thirteen; one was his neighbour’s daughter, the other her friend. They were giggling the way girls do, laughing too hard to stop. They had never shouted at him, they simply didn’t see him except as ‘him next-door’, the man who came round to cut the grass sometimes.

Christ, there was the Volvo. On the road going past the shop.

He always got a tummy ache when he spotted it. It meant trouble. Someone would have a go at him.

The driver slammed on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt. Bengt Söderlund climbed out. He was a large, powerfully built man of about forty-five, who wore denims with a pocket for a measuring rod, hammer and Stanley knife, and a cap with the text Söderlund Contractor. He walked up to the girls and spoke loudly to them, and to Flasher-Göran and to Tallbacka at large.

‘You two, come on! Get into the car. Now!’

He grabbed each girl by the nearest shoulder. They crouched a little, sensing anger, twisted to get away, gave up, ran off towards the car.

Söderlund went up to Flasher-Göran, gripped his collar to pull him upright and shook him hard. It hurt, the shirt collar burned against his neck.

‘Caught you at it this time. Now I’ve seen for myself what you’re up to. Swine!’

The girls in the car stared, too baffled even to attempt understanding.

‘I don’t fucking believe it. That’s my daughter. Like to show it to her? Is that it?’

By now the gang of teenage boys had turned up. They had heard the noises of a car braking and a man shouting. It was a laugh to watch Söderlund set on Flasher-Göran, it made their day. They ran the last bit to get close.

‘Hey! Kill the peddo!’

‘Kill him!’

Hands to crotches, wanking.

Söderlund didn’t look their way, only gave his victim a last shake before dumping him on the seat. Walking back to his car he delivered his final words at the top of his voice.