The Beast (13 page)

    Ewert
didn't hold out his hand at once; he hung back for a few seconds because it
amused him to shame one of the many idiots that cluttered up his life.

    'Hello
there,' he said finally.

    They
shook hands quickly, Sven was introduced and the three of them started walking
together towards the main entrance. Bergh was in the guard's post and nodded at
Ewert, a familiar face. Sven was different.

    'Where
do you think you're going?'

    Lennart
turned back.

    'Come
on, Bergh. He's with me. City Police,' he said irritably.

    'I've
no notification.'

    'They're
investigating Lund's escape.'

    'None
of my business. Unlike who gets in here, which is. So why no notification,
then?'

    Sven
intervened, just in time to stop Oscarsson from shouting something he'd regret
later.

    'Look,
here's my ID. OK?'

    Bergh
studied the mug shot and entered Sven's ID number in the database.

    'Hey,
it's your birthday today. What are you doing here, mate?'

    'Never
mind. Are you letting me in?'

    Bergh
waved him through and they filed into the corridor. Ewert laughed.

    'What
a tosser! Why do you keep such an idiot around? He makes it harder to get in
than out of this place.'

    His
mood changed as they walked along the regulation passageways with their
regulation murals. Some showed a bit more talent than others; all were would-be
therapeutic projects led by hired consultants. He sighed. Always blue
background, always the obvious symbolism of open gates and birds flying free
and more liberation shit of that sort. Organised graffiti for grown-ups, signed
Benke Lelle Hinken Zoran Jari The Goat 1987.

    Lennart
opened a metal door. Inside, a noisy gang of inmates were being escorted to the
gym by two officers in front and two behind. Ewert sighed again. He knew quite
a few of the villains, had interrogated them or testified against them. There
were even a couple of ancient lags that he had run in during his days on the
beat.

    'Hi
there, Grensie. On the chase, are you?'

    It
was Stig Lindgren, one of the inhabitants of the World of Outcasts. He was a
permanent fixture behind the walls and would never survive anywhere else. Lock
him up and throw the key away, the old fucker had no other options. Ewert had
grown fed up with his type.

    'Shut
your gob, Lindgren, or I'll tell your useless mates why you're called
Dickybird.'

    Then
upstairs to A Unit, sex offenders only.

    Lennart
walked ahead, Ewert and Sven followed, looking about. Regulation stuff again:
television corner, snooker table, kitchen, cells. But the crimes were different
in that they aroused as much hatred in the World of Outcasts as among ordinary
citizens.

    They
reached cell number eleven. Alone among the others in the corridor this door
was bare. The temporary occupants of the rooms behind all the other doors had
decorated them laboriously with posters and newspaper cuttings and photos.

    Ewert
had time to think that he should have been here six months ago. He should have
stepped inside the door to Lund's cell. At the time he had been investigating a
child pornography ring, which had given him his first real insight into the
closed society of new-style paedophiles, structured round internet connections
and databases and secret mail addresses. He had seen their images of naked or
partly undressed children, penetrated and humiliated children, tortured
children, lonely children. Initially, he and his colleagues had thought that
this pornography exchange was part of a foreign network of dark vice and profit
and inscrutable agreements, but it turned out differently, more discreet,
smarter and more challenging.

    Just
seven men, a select society of serious, recidivist sex offenders. One locked
up, most of them just released from prison.

    They
had created their own virtual display cabinet. Their contributions to the show
were downloaded on the net and run on their computers at set times, as if
following a performance schedule. Once a week, same time, Saturday, at eight
o'clock. They sat in front of their screens, waiting for that week's images,
and every week their demands escalated. Next time must somehow offer more than
last time; naked children had been enough but not any more, children sitting
still had to start moving and touching each other. Then touching wasn't enough;
the children had to be raped, then raped more viciously. The next set of
photographs must score more highly than the previous lot, at any cost. Seven
paedophiles, a closed circle, showing off their own crimes in their own neatly
scanned and formatted pictures.

    They
had been at it for almost a year before they were caught.

    All
the time they had been competing with each other, running qualifying heats in
child pornography.

    Bernt
Lund had been one of the seven. He was the only one in prison, the only one who
could solely contribute photos that had been taken in the past, but his crimes
meant that his high status was beyond dispute, as was his right to join the
ring.

    When
the ring was broken, three of the others were convicted and sent off to serve
fairly long prison sentences. A fourth, a man called Håkan Axelsson, was being
tried, but the remaining two had not been charged because the evidence was so
patchy. Everyone knew about them but that was neither here nor there; the 'not
proven' classification was sufficient to free them. And so they were free to
recruit new child porn contacts in the shadowy marketplace that had grown up
around the investigation.

    There
were lots of them out there. For each one down, there was one ready to go.

    Ewert
was cursing himself. He should have inspected Lund's cell then. But the police
had been constantly pushed for time, always under media pressure, invariably
targets for public outrage. He had felt too harassed to visit Aspsås himself
and had sent two junior colleagues to interrogate Lund, whose cell had been
stacked to the ceiling with his illegal handiwork. Mostly CDs with thousands of
pictures showing tormented children. It was all very bad, and conclusive
enough, but if he had gone himself he would have picked up more about the man.
Maybe he wouldn't have been at such a loss now that Lund had got ahead of them.

    Lennart
unlocked the door.

    'There.
All yours. Tidy is one word for it.'

    Ewert
and Sven stepped inside and then stopped. Despite its standardised ordinariness
- about eight square metres, one window, the usual furnishings - the room was
very odd indeed. Full of objects, all lined up, as if for an exhibition.
Candlesticks, stones, pieces of wood, pens, bits of string, items of clothing,
folders, batteries, books, notebooks, all were arranged in lines stretching
along the floor, across the bedspread, the windowsill, the shelves. Each object
was separated from the next by what looked like exactly two centimetres. It
made Ewert think of an unending row of dominoes, upright until one piece is
moved out of place and it's all over.

    Ewert's
diary had a small ruler marked along its edge. He aligned it with a row of
stones. Two centimetres, twenty millimetres exactly, between the stones. The
pens on the windowsill were twenty millimetres apart. On the shelves, the books
were twenty millimetres apart too, and the same went for the bits of string on
the floor and between the battery and the notebook and the packet of
cigarettes. Everywhere, twenty millimetres.

    'Does
it always look like this?'

    Lennart
nodded.

    'Yes,
it does. Before taking off the bedspread at night he puts the stones on the
floor, one by one, measuring the distances as he goes along. In the morning he
goes through the whole performance in reverse after he's made the bed and put
the bedspread back on.'

    Sven
moved some of the pens. Dead ordinary biros. The stones were ordinary stones,
one more pointless than the next. Plain, empty folders and notebooks.

    'This
is too much. I don't get it.'

    'Nothing
to it. What is it you don't get?'

    'I
don't know. Something. Why? Why does he lick children's feet, for instance?'

    'Why
do you think it matters to know why?'

    'It
matters who this guy is, inside. Where he's going, what it's for. But the
bottom line is, I want to find the motherfucker so I can go home and eat some
cake and drink a glass. Or three.'

    'You'll
never know what he's like inside. Not a hope, I'm sorry. There's nothing like a
reason in any of all this. He doesn't know himself why he licks the feet of his
victims, dead or alive. I'm convinced he doesn't have a clue why he lines
things up two centimetres apart either.'

    Ewert
was holding up his diary at face level. He put his thumb as a marker at the
two-centimetre mark, forcing them all to look.

    'Control.
That's all. They're like that, all of them. They enjoy rape, because when they
do it they call the shots. Power and control. Though this one is extreme, he's
actually just like the rest. His rows of stones and so forth are all about
order, structure, being in charge.'

    He
lowered the diary, placed it at the end of the row of stones and swept the lot
down on to the floor.

    'But
we know that. And we know he's a sadist. We know what power does to men like
Lund. His cock goes hard, that's how it works. He controls someone, that person
is powerless. Only he decides how to hurt them and how much. It's what gives
him his kicks, makes him come in front of tied-up, broken nine-year-olds.'

    He
did his trick with the diary to the biros on the windowsill. One by one they
hit the floor.

    'Come
to think of it, the pictures. The computer ones. Did he sort them too?'

    Lennart
fixed his gaze on the piled-up biros on the floor. No sign of order now. Then
he met Ewert's eyes, looking surprised, as if the question was new to him.

    'Sorted?
How do you mean?'

    'Well,
how did he do it? I can't fucking remember. Faces, eyes, yes. How bloody
abandoned they all looked. But not distances, how the images were related to
each other.'

    'I
don't know. I should, maybe, but I don't. Didn't even think about it. But I
will find out, if you think it's important.'

    'Yes
it is. It's important.' Lennart sat down on the bed. 'Tomorrow, will that do?'
'Not really.'

    'OK,
later. When we're done here. The file is in my room.'

    They
turned the cell inside out. They inspected every corner of what had been Bernt
Lund's home for four years, touched everything, sniffed around.

    There
was no information to be had. He had not had a plan.

    He
had not known that he was going somewhere.