Anders Roslund - The Beast

‘You know what I’m like.’

She pulled him close, her naked body against his, sleepily warm, awake but not quite.

‘You must sleep, my old darling.’

‘Old?’

‘You can’t cope if you don’t sleep. You know that. Come on. Sleep.’

She looked at him, kissed him, held him.

‘I was thinking about Frans.’

‘Fredrik, not now.’

‘I do think about him. I want to think about him, I’m listening to Marie next door and I’m thinking about how Frans too was a child when he was beaten, when he watched me being beaten. When he caught the train to Stockholm.’

‘Close your eyes.’

‘Why should anyone beat a child?’

‘If you keep your eyes closed for long enough you go to sleep. That’s how it works.’

‘Why should anyone beat a child, who will grow up and learn to understand and judge the person who’s been beating it? At least, judge the rights and wrongs of that beaten child.’

She pushed at him to turn him on his side with his back towards her, then moved in close behind him, twisting into him until they were like two boughs of a tree.

‘Why keep hitting a child, who will construe the beatings as Daddy’s duty and look to its own failings for the reason. I’m not good enough, not tough enough. The child will tell itself that it’s his or her own fault, partly at least. Christ almighty, I was into that kind of crap myself. I forced myself to believe it, not to feel violated and abandoned.’

Micaela slept. Her breathing was slow and regular against the back of his neck, so close that the skin became damp. Through the window came the sounds of another bus. It stopped outside, reversed, stopped again, reversed. Perhaps the same one as yesterday, a large coach.

Lennart Oscarsson carried a secret. He wasn’t alone in this, but felt as if he were. The pain of it rode him, curled up on his right shoulder, slept inside his chest, occupied all the space inside his stomach. Every evening he decided to let it out the following morning. Once he had set it free, he could sit back quietly, contemplating days without a secret for company stretching out ahead.

He didn’t have the strength, couldn’t do it. He was screaming, but nobody listened. Maybe to scream properly you actually had to open your mouth?

He did the same things every morning. Sat in the kitchen at their round pine table, spooning yoghurt into his face. Karin was always there at his side. She was his life, this beautiful woman, whom he had loved beyond reason ever since he’d met her for the first time, sixteen years ago. She drank her usual coffee with hot milk, ate rye bread and butter, read the arts pages in the morning paper.

Now. Now!

He should tell her now. Then it would have been said. She had every right to know. Others didn’t, but she did. It was so simple. A couple of minutes, a few sentences, that was all. They could finish their breakfasts, leave for their daily work. He would return home that night freed from having to hide it. He put the spoon down, drank the last of the yoghurt straight from the container.

Lennart took pride in his work at Aspsås prison. He held a senior post, chief officer in charge of a unit, and had ambitions to advance further. He took every opportunity for study leave, joined every course, reckoned you had to show willing, and he did, in the knowledge that somewhere, someone was taking notes.

Seven years ago he had taken over the running of one of Aspsås’s two units for sex offenders. His working life had become focused on people locked up for violating those whom they had been charged to protect. These men had broken the strongest taboo left in society, they were outcasts; he was responsible for them and for the staff who were employed to care as well as to punish. Punishing and trying to understand, this was what they were meant to do, care and punish and remain aware of the difference. His views were his own, he felt what he felt, but he did show willing, and someone, somewhere, kept notes on his progress.

At the same time his bloody awful secret had started growing. How he wished he could tell. The outcome couldn’t be any worse than now, when the betrayal lived inside his marriage and made every word he and Karin exchanged suspect, filthy.

He got up, picked up the dirty dishes and stacked the dishwasher. Wiped the table, rinsed the cloth.

He wore a blue uniform. Officers’ uniforms looked the same throughout the Swedish prison service, rather like a cab driver’s outfit. He dressed for work in the kitchen: trousers, tie, shirt. Meanwhile he hoped that Karin and he would exchange a few words, about anything as long as it stopped him feeling so bloody hypocritical.

‘Look at the weather, Lennart. It’s windy outside. They say it’ll stay like this all day. You need your gloves.’

Karin came close to him and stroked his cheek. He pressed his face against her hand, rubbed against it, needing the contact. She was so beautiful. He wished she knew.

‘It’s not cold yet. And I’ve only got a few hundred metres to go.’

‘You know that’s not the point. You’ll regret it afterwards, when your joints start hurting.’

She held out his leather gloves. He put them on. Kissed her, first her lips, then her shoulder. Put on his jacket and stepped outside, looked across to Aspsås. It was only two minutes’ stroll away. Its grey concrete wall dominated the village.

When Åke Andersson climbed out of the driver’s seat, he was propelled by an emotion different from anything he had felt before. His rage, his damned hatred, had overwhelmed him.

He had taken a lot of crap from prisoners for thirty years, hated them but stayed in control, silently driven them from police cells to courts, from hospitals to prisons. He had ferried the lowlife but left the talking to his mates, just kept his eyes on the road and minded his own business. But that fucking beast was too bloody fucking much.

Åke had nearly lost it last time he had had to transfer that animal, knowing that he was holed up in the back of the van, knowing about the tortures he’d carried out, what the girls had looked like when he’d finished with them. Afterwards, his sneering grin and utter callousness haunted Åke’s dreams, the crimes were replayed over and over again, throughout the nights; one bad morning he didn’t get to the loo in time and threw up in the hall, as if his enforced control had congealed and swelled his stomach until there was no more room.

It was that third ‘cunt’ coming through the hatch that tore it. Åke lost his grip, had no idea what he should do next, no sense of duty left. He couldn’t answer for the consequences now; his mind was filling with images of the little girls, their cut-up genitals, they’d been tortured with a pointed metal object. His big body hurled itself towards the back door of the van.

Ulrik Berntfors had driven Lund once before, that was all, on the second day of the girls-in-the-basement trial. He’d been new to the job and the trial was the biggest he’d been involved in, lots of journalists and photographers crowding the reserved seats. Two nine-year-old girls; it pulled at the heartstrings and sold newspapers. He was ashamed of his reaction at the time, he hadn’t really thought about the girls, not understood, had been too inexperienced. He had simply felt special, almost proud, as he walked along at Lund’s side. But afterwards his own daughter asked him why Lund had killed the two girls, why he’d wanted to destroy them. She was only a year older than the victims and had read every piece of news carefully, formulating questions for her dad, who knew the man who had done it and had walked next to him, as seen on TV, lots of times. Of course he couldn’t answer her, but understanding was dawning on him. His daughter’s fears and her questions had taught him more about his job than any course he had attended.