Anders Roslund - The Beast

Meanwhile, Bengt had spread out an old sheet over the wood basket and used his knife to cut it systematically into forty strips, roughly thirty by thirty centimetres. He pushed a rolled-up strip into the top of each bottle, so that only a small head of cloth protruded.

Then they all set to, placing the filled and stoppered bottles tidily into a big box and making sure that they fitted in securely. A small box with ten cigarette lighters, two each in case one went bust, was put next to the big one.

It hadn’t taken them that long. There was still an hour or two to go before noon.

Fredrik was sitting in the centre of the court. His eyes were closed. He wanted to look around but he

Lars Ågestam (LÅ): Steffansson murdered Bernt Lund without a trace of compassion and concern about the other man’s life. There are, to my mind, no mitigating circumstances. I will therefore plead that the court recognises his responsibility for this act by sentencing him to a lifetime prison term.

couldn’t find the strength to. This was the fifth and last day, and he wanted to be back in the cell and

Kristina Björnsson (KB): Fredrik Steffansson was watching outside the nursery school. He knew that if he did not shoot Bernt Lund, two more little girls would have been sexually violated and killed. We even know who they were.

piss in the washbasin, just as usual, that was all there was. This room was packed with people, all around him, making him feel so bloody lonely.

He remembered how he had felt the first Christmas after Agnes had left him, a few weeks before he met Micaela for the first time. He had not kept track of the passing days, just kept doing the things one must do, so that Christmas Eve turned up unexpectedly. He had tried to get rid of it but failed, so by five o’clock in the afternoon, when it was totally dark outside, he had gone out and tried to have a drink in one of the few Stockholm pubs that were still open. He’d never forget the people holed up in there, isolated in their communal solitude. The atmosphere was so bitter and dull that he found it hard to breathe and staying on was almost unbearable until the programme called Jonsson’s Christmas started up on the telly over the bar and became a focal point, which they could gather round for half an hour. The programme was about them somehow, so they had laughed and warmth had enveloped them all for a while, until the evening had suddenly passed, one more for the road and a last cigarette, and then everyone had gone home to his or her scruffy, fusty digs.

He could look around the court now. Now, as then, he was surrounded by strangers, all sucked into a system they didn’t truly understand, but which made them feel cheated of their future. Take the prosecutor,

LÅ: According to the criminal law, third chapter, paragraph 1, whoever takes the life of another shall be convicted of murder and sentenced to a prison term, which must exceed ten years and may extend to a life term.

who demanded a life sentence, or the defence lawyer,

KB: According to the criminal law, twenty-fourth chapter, paragraph 1 , an act which is in self-defence or in defence of others and uses reasonable force is a crime only if, in view of the nature of the attack, the intent and significance of what is attacked and other relevant circumstances, it is self-evidently indefensible.

who pleaded reasonable force, or the magistrates, who seemed not to be listening most of the time, or of course the journalists and court recorders, who sat behind him, writing away and drawing and memorising, all stuff which he wasn’t allowed to see; he would not learn who they were or what kind of reality they represented. Furthest back was the public, the audience he supposed, there to satisfy their collective curiosity, something he detested them for, their hunger for thrills; they were rubbing their hands with glee at having got close enough, actually being free in real life to stare at the dad-whose-little-girl-was-murdered-so-he- shot-the-murderer.

LÅ: Mr Steffansson planned the murder of Bernt Lund over a period of four days. In other words, it was a premeditated act and he did have sufficient time to reconsider. According to his own statement, Steffansson regarded the killing of Lund as equivalent to eliminating a mad dog.

He didn’t want to see them and avoided turning round, they ate him, tore the flesh of his face and burrowed inside his mind. Micaela was there and he wanted to show her something, say something, so he had turned a few times to look for her,

KB: Reasonable force is defined as that used when facing threats with regard to life, health, property or other judicially understood interests, in self-defence or in defence of others. We believe it self-evident that the lives of two little girls were endangered and that Fredrik Steffansson, by acting as he did, saved two young lives

but he feared the eyes fastened on him and the noses sniffing for his scent and so he avoided reminding them and her that he was somebody with something to say.

Hours passed as he sat there, facing forward, eyes closed, refusing to listen. He had seen Marie stuck in a bag on a trolley in the forensic place. Her face had been beautiful, her chest taped together, and her genitals pierced and cut to pieces, and her feet were much too clean, and bore traces of saliva. He, who spoke against, and she, who talked for, had both asked him questions and he had replied, but it was unreal, meaningless.

Only the little girl in the body bag meant anything to him.

The summer was dying slowly. The heat that had ruled for so many weeks was dissolving and being replaced by cooler air, until it seemed only a distant memory. People started complaining when the showers merged into days of rain, claimed that they felt the cold, something that recently had been simply unthinkable. As the damp infiltrated the layers of sweaters and thick trousers, the newspapers gave up on the dad who shot the paedophile and ran headlines about how elderly Germans, who could read fish entrails and foretell the weather, had insisted that conditions this autumn and winter would be dire.

Charlotte van Balvas breathed in the chilly, damp air with pleasure. She had longed for this time of year, when she could walk the streets without sweating and look around without narrowing her eyes against the light. Her skin went angrily red in sunlight and she used to hide in the courtroom, hanging back, and then hurry off to libraries and restaurants, waiting until her time came to join the others, the happily adjusted ones, in the streets again. Soon pale skin would look normal.

She was forty-six years old. As of this moment, she was frightened.

She had seen what they’d done to the prosecutor. They had threatened him and vandalised his home because he did what he had to do for the society he represented. To plead a life term in prison for a proven, premeditated murder was quite in order. As the judge, she had to cope with that troupe of clowns, the magistrates, although their sole reason for being there was that they had served their political masters faithfully. She would have to face them soon, at a meeting out of court, and somehow convince them that according to the law they all recognised, Fredrik Steffansson really deserved a long prison sentence.

She had no choice, she too represented a society that had outlawed lynch mobs and their rough justice.

She was almost there now. Around her, people walked hunchbacked under their umbrellas and she wondered about them. What did they think, would they have fired that gun? Did they believe some human beings had a better claim to live than others?