Anders Roslund - The Beast

Åke hated, Ulrik knew that. Not that they’d ever talked about it, but it hadn’t been hard to work out. And maybe one day Ulrik would too, when scum like Lund had screamed ‘cunt’ at him once too often. He had done the person-to- person contacts, so far. Someone had to. Driving these people was a job. But when Lund shouted ‘cunts’ for the third time, he realised that this was it. He knew, from the moment Andersson got up.

Maybe if he kept observing the steps leading up to the Casualty door, he wouldn’t have to see whatever was going on. If it came to an inquiry, he didn’t want to have to lie.

The area in front of Casualty was quiet, no parked cars, no people. That’s what Åke said afterwards, adding that even if it hadn’t been so deserted, even if other people had been about and able to watch what he did, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. Running to the back of the bus, rage and hatred blinkered him.

He pulled the door open. The handle was small. His hand was made on the same scale as the rest of him and it was hard to push it in between metal and metal.

Then everything went horribly wrong.

Bernt Lund was screaming ‘cunt, cunt’ over and over, in a high falsetto voice. He hit out with the chains gripped in one hand, the long chains that ran under his clothing, linking handcuffs, leg-irons and belt. Åke didn’t have time to see, to take in what was happening, as the heavy iron links tore into his face and ripped it open. He fell to the ground and Lund leapt out of the van, swinging the chains against the fallen man’s head and face until his victim passed out. Then he used his boots, kicking belly, kidneys, crotch, kicking and kicking until the tall guard lay quite still.

Ulrik had kept staring straight ahead. Åke was taking his time beating the hell out of the nonce. Lund was still screaming ‘cunt’; he could obviously take a lot. Then Ulrik began to feel bad about it. Åke had been at it for too long, enough now for Christ’s sake, or things might go seriously wrong. When he opened the door to climb out and stop him from causing some kind of emergency, Lund moved in. Using a long chain he broke the window, hit Ulrik in the face, pulled him outside and kept hitting. All Ulrik remembered afterwards was the hellish screeching voice and the moment Lund pulled his trousers down to hit his exposed penis with the chain, screaming that he would have buggered them if they hadn’t been such big bastards. Too big for him, only little whores would take him inside, only small arses were good enough.

The distance between his front door and the steel gate leading to his place of work was 180 paces. Lennart Oscarsson counted them almost every time. Once he’d done the distance in 161 paces, his record. It was a few years ago, when he was really fit. Until the assault he used to train with the inmates in the gym. Then, early one morning, someone beat a sex offender to pulp with dumbbells and barbells. The medic had said the marks were clear and easy to identify. No one had known the first thing about the incident, of course. Not one single fucking soul had noticed that a human being was being clubbed, presumably screaming his head off, unseen and unheard, until the final darkness fell. The weight-training area was awash with blood afterwards, yet apparently no one had the faintest idea why. For a long time afterwards he didn’t go there. Not because he was frightened; nobody was quite cretinous enough to risk a new round of sentencing just to get even with a boss. It wasn’t fear, it was disgust, he couldn’t bear being in a room where one of the men in his charge had been robbed of his right to a life.

He rang the bell, waited for a sense of being watched in the small camera above his head and a voice coming through the loudspeaker. Turning round, he looked at his home, at the sitting room and bedroom windows. All dark, roller blinds halfway down. No face to be glimpsed, no body moving about.

‘Yes?’

‘Oscarsson here.’

‘Opening up.’

He stepped inside, blinked, inside an enclosed world now. The other one of his two worlds. Standing in front of the next door, he knocked on the windowpane of the guardroom and waved to Bergh, who was taking his time. Stupid bugger, what made Bergh tick was a mystery. At last he waved back and pressed a button. The door buzzed open; the long corridor behind it smelled of disinfectant and something else, something unmistakable.

A boring day ahead. Unit meeting, communication. The staff were well on their way to losing themselves in a labyrinthine schedule of meetings that they had imposed on themselves. Each meeting made endless pointless decisions about pointless routine matters that landed everyone within an ever more rigid framework. Actual problem-solving needed a different approach, needed sharp minds and driving energy. The meetings fed a sense of security, but created nothing.

And the coffee machine was fucked up as well. He kicked it. Then he fed coins into the soft-drinks machine. Coke apparently contained caffeine too.

‘Morning, Lennart.’

‘Morning, Nils.’

Nils Roth, senior wing officer. He and Oscarsson had come to Aspsås at the same time and advanced in the service side by side. Together they had experienced the anxiety of the novice change into the weary calm of the veteran. They walked into the meeting room together. The room with its long table, overhead projector, whiteboard could have belonged to any management outfit.

Everybody greeted each other; all eight senior wing officers were there, and the prison governor, Arne Bertolsson. Quite a few were drinking coffee. Lennart looked hard at the mugs and turned to the new man, what was his name, Månsson.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘The machine.’

‘It’s out of order.’

‘Not when I tried it. Only minutes ago.’

Arne Bertolsson called them to order, sounding irritable. He had been fiddling with the overhead projector. It made a noise, but that was all. The screen stayed blank.

‘This thing’s bloody useless.’

Bertolsson crouched down to examine whatever buttons he might push next. Lennart looked at him, then at the line-up of men at the table. Eight of them, his immediate colleagues, people in whose company he spent hours and hours, day after day, but had never got close to. Apart from Nils, that is. As for the rest, he hadn’t been to their homes and none of them had visited his. A beer in town, the odd football match, but never at home. What did that make them? Not friends, anyway. But they were all of about the same age, and looked alike too. A room full of middle-aged taxi drivers.

Bertolsson gave up.

‘Sod this. And the agenda too. Who wants to start?’

Nobody, it seemed. Månsson drank a mouthful of his coffee. Nils scribbled on a notepad. No one spoke. The routine of these meetings had broken down and everyone felt at a loss.

Lennart cleared his throat.

‘I’ll start.’

The others breathed sighs of relief; something was on the agenda at least.

Bertolsson nodded.

‘I’ve been on about this before, but the fact is, I know what I’m talking about. I suppose no one has forgotten the fatality in the gym? No? Exactly. But has it made any flaming difference whatsoever? The men from the normal units are shuttling in and out of the gym at the same time as my lot. There was another incident yesterday. It might’ve turned nasty if Brandt and Persson hadn’t stepped in promptly.’

Not a peep from the bench of the accused. But he bloody well wouldn’t back down. He had seen what the weights could do to a human body.

Having watched everyone in turn as he spoke, Lennart’s eyes lingered on the only woman in the room. Eva Barnard and he had clashed more than once before. He couldn’t relate to her in any way, she only knew the textbook stuff and not the traditions, the unspoken rules, which drew their power from simply having been there, always.