The Beast Page 20

  They drank to that. A group of boys came in, the lads from outside the shop, the mock-wankers. The gang drifted over to the gaming machines, hung around watching the players, applauded when anyone won anything. One or two tried it on, went to the counter to order a beer. No go. Nobody even tried to get change for the machines, that line cut no ice. The limit was eighteen for drink and gambling, and that was that, even in Tallbacka.

  Helena, Ove's wife, was impatient. She knocked on the tabletop to catch their attention and then looked at each one of them, in the end addressing her husband.

  'Ove, we've got girls of our own now.'

  'So we do.'

  'So is it their turn soon?'

  'They should've cut his balls off back then, after the sentence.'

  Bengt nodded, then rose and pointed in the direction of his house.

  'I don't get it, there are two thousand decent people in this place. Who's my neighbour? A filthy paedophile! What can I do? Will someone kindly tell me what I'm meant to do!'

  The gang of wankers were getting fed up with peering over the shoulders of the gamers. Instead they got hold of the remote control and switched the telly on. The sound was too loud and Bengt waved irritably at them until the volume was low enough.

  'You don't answer. What am I supposed to do? Fuck's sake, we can't keep someone like that here. No way.'

  Helena suddenly shouted, so loudly that her voice cracked.

  'Away with him. He's got to go. Ove! Do you hear me?'

  Bengt chewed a handful of peanuts. Slowly swallowed.

  'Right. We must get him out of here. If he won't, we'll shove. What I'm saying is, if he isn't gone in two weeks' time I'll do him in.'

  Another round, Bengt paid again and kept the receipt. He was going to write it off against the firm's expenses. Meals, he called it.

  They started drinking from the large cool glasses, but were stopped short when Ove suddenly wolf-whistled. The piercing sound cleaved through the smoke-laden air. Instant silence. Ove pointed at the telly and shouted in the direction of the boy with the remote.

  'Hey, turn it up!'

  'Fucking make up your mind.'

  'We want to hear this. Turn up the telly or I'll clock you one.'

  The camera had been following Fredrik Steffansson, being escorted slowly along one of the corridors in the Kronoberg remand prison. He had pulled his jacket over his head.

  'It's that father, the one who shot the paedophile. Killed the beast.'

  Stillness had fallen over the pub, as most people stared at the screen. Fredrik Steffansson waved dismissively at the camera, shook his head and then stepped outside the image. A woman came along, then stood in front of him. The camera moved to close-up and a microphone materialised in front of her mouth. It was Kristina Björnsson, the defence lawyer.

  'You're quite right. My client does not deny the actual event. He did shoot Bernt Lund. It was a deliberate killing, planned several days ahead.'

  The camera panned in even closer. A reporter tried to get a question in, but she raised her voice and continued.

  'This was not murder, however, but something quite different. It was reasonable force, used in extreme circumstances.'

  Bengt was amazed and delighted. He slapped the table.

  'Did you hear that!'

  As he looked around, the others nodded slowly. They followed every camera-move keenly, took in every new argument by Steffansson's lawyer.

  'It was only a matter of time before Bernt Lund would attempt another crime. We are all agreed that this is the case, after studying his personality profile. My client is convinced that by taking Lund's life he saved the life of at least one child.'

  'Too fucking true!'

  Ove smiled, leaned over to plant a kiss on his wife's cheek.

  The eager reporter tried again, the question that she hadn't been allowed to put earlier.

  'How does your client feel?'

  'As well as can be expected in the circumstances. I don't need to remind you that he has lost his little daughter in the most distressing way possible. Also, as a citizen, he is deeply disappointed that society failed to protect not only his child, but also other potential victims. Instead he himself is locked up and will stand trial. He is taking the consequences of ineffective law enforcement.'

  Helena stroked her husband's cheek. Then she took his hand and pulled him up, as she rose from the table.

  'He did the right thing.'

  She lifted her glass in a toast, turning first to Bengt, then to Ola and Klas and, finally, to her husband.

  'Do you know what he is, that Fredrik Steffansson? Do you? He's a hero, a real old-fashioned hero. Here's a toast to Fredrik Steffansson!'

  They all followed her lead, silently raised their glasses and emptied them.

  They stayed in the pub for longer than they usually would. Jointly they arrived at a decision, not the means of bringing it about, but that it would happen. They had passed the critical stage and the process would continue.

  It was their Tallbacka, their community, the very stuff of how they lived day after day.

  * * *

  Lars Ågestam was bewildered, even though there weren't that many people about, but then he never had been any good at big stores. Six floors, escalators, free offers and tastings, rumbling messages over the loudspeaker system, credit card machines, queuing numbers. All the time, the pressure to buy buy buy. The queuing customers were daunting, too many; someone smelled strongly of sweat, someone's kids made a noise, some people acted as lost as he felt, a woman dropped the clothes she had picked to try on, a bloke kept searching for something in sportswear, and everything everything everything had been transported from elsewhere to end up here, neatly packaged and priced.

  Simply being inside this living hell floored him, but he couldn't think of another place to go. He never bought music, mainly because he had no time to listen, except to the car radio. The music department fazed him completely, shelf after shelf of recordings by alleged celebrities he'd never heard of. He spotted a young woman at an information counter. She was probably very pretty, though it was hard to tell behind the make-up and a hair-do that covered her eyes.

  'Siw Malmqvist, have you got anything by her?'

  She smiled. Was it a friendly smile or a sneer? How do young women smile?

  'I think so, somewhere in the Swedish section. I'll have a look.'

  She stepped outside her enclosure and waved to him to follow. He watched her back and blushed. Her clothes were, well… revealing.

  She held out a CD. The cover photo showed a woman, young back then, long ago.

  'Siw's Classics. Will this do?'

  Surely this was the right thing. He said he'd take it.

  By now she was smiling very broadly. He blushed again, but felt cross. Was she laughing at him?

  'What's the joke?'

  'Oh, nothing.'

  'I get the impression you're finding this funny.'

  'Not at all.'

  'Yes you do.'

  'It's just that you don't look right. I mean, like the type of person who buys Siw's songs.'

  Now he was smiling too.

  'What do they look like then? Older than me?'

  'I… yeah, not such… a suit.'

  'What?'

  'Like, cooler.'

  Safely outside in the street, he bought an ice-cream and decided to walk to Kung Island, then past the Crime Prosecution Service building, his place of work, and on to Scheele Street and the Violent Crime Squad offices.

  He felt quite tense, hung back a little and then almost forgot to knock. The familiar irritable voice.

  Ewert Grens was sitting behind his desk, but had swung the chair sideways and was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his thighs. His glaring eyes told his visitor to get lost, he wasn't welcome. No one was.

  'I've got something for you. Here.' Lars put the CD down on the desk. 'I'm sorry I was so rude about the music last time.'

  Grens said nothing. />
  'I hope you haven't got all the songs in this collection.'

  Still no response.

  'I'd like to talk to you for a while. I'll be straight with you, just as I was on Monday. I think you're bloody difficult, and a real bastard at times. But I need you. I haven't got anyone else to turn to in this case, no one who'll offer me the resistance I must learn to deal with. No one who will ask the right questions.'

  He gestured vaguely towards the visitor's chair. Was it all right to sit down? Ewert, still not uttering, waved distractedly as some kind of invitation.

  'I've got to tell you this. I actually threw up yesterday. Breakfast, lunch, the lot. Sheer funk. Instead of being handed my most important case on a plate, I've ended up having to prosecute a grief-stricken father for shooting at and killing a proven sex murderer. It can only go one way. That is, straight to hell. You don't have to be a genius to work that out.'

  Ewert shook his head, cackled briefly with laughter and spoke for the first time.

  'Serves you right.'

  Ågestam counted the seconds, his old trick in situations like this. Thirteen seconds. That mean old bastard must surely see that he was on top now, was being deferred to.

  'I'm going to push for a life sentence.'

  He really stuck his neck out and it worked.

  'Say that again?'

  'You heard me. I'm not going to stand for anybody appointing himself judge and jury.'

  'Why tell me? What's the fucking point you're making?'

  'No special reason. Well, I wanted to find someone to tell my ideas to. To test them.'

  Ewert cackled again.

  'Still scrabbling to get up the greasy pole, eh? Life, was that what you said?'

  'Aha. Yes.'

  'You know, half the punters who end up in prison have committed one or more violent acts. Fucking idiots to a man, but still human beings. And victims as well; almost all of them have been abused one way or the other, usually by their parents. Even I can see where that might lead.'

  'I know.'

  'Book learning. You should be out there, seeing for yourself.'

  Ågestam leafed through his notebook.

  'Steffansson freely admitted that he planned the murder over the course of four days. He had time to reconsider, but didn't. Not just judge and jury, he had to be the executioner as well.'

  'Planned, yes. But plans fail. He couldn't be sure he'd find Lund.'

  'When he did, he still had a choice. He could've alerted the police. Christ, your officers were on the spot. But that would've meant giving up the shooting he had been looking forward to.'

  'Sure, sure, he has committed murder. No fucking question about it. But life? No way. Unlike you, I've seen real action, forty years of it, and that has meant sometimes standing by as worse nutters than Steffansson got off with lesser sentences than that. And I've watched hordes of fancy little prosecutors trying to pass themselves off as hard men.'

  Ågestam breathed in deeply and checked his notebook again. He was determined to keep his cool and ignore the man's clumsy sarcasm. Then it came to him that what was happening was exactly what he wanted. The sour old bugger was cross-examining him. This would work as a kind of pre-trial trial. He smiled, still turning the pages, but without taking in his notes. He could polish his arguments now, muster his evidence. Great, he liked it, just like an exam oral.

  The pause, maybe his smile, had irritated Ewert.

  'What's your fucking problem now? Can't find what to say next from your shitty little book? For your information, this is a case of murder with extenuating circumstances. If pleading life gives you a hard-on, go right ahead. But be ready to settle for eight or ten years. You and I are both part of this society, you'd better put that in your notes, because it's a society that failed to protect Marie Steffansson. And other kids.'

  'I grasp the point you're making, of course. But does this failure by society justify the summary execution of a presumed sex killer? Consider the possibility that the victim was innocent, at least in this particular case. You know sod all about it, and - more to the point - Steffansson knows sod all about what the man he was shooting at was up to. Think again. Do you really think it is right to kill Lund because he is seen near the site of the crime? Is that the society you'd like to police? Where people take the law into their own hands, DIY executions and all? It will certainly make a change. The laws I learned about don't include anything about a death penalty. We are responsible, Grens. We must demonstrate that in our kind of society, anyone who acts like Steffansson will be locked up. For life. Grieving dad or not.'

  Silence. Then the murmur of a Mediterranean-style ceiling fan stopped and the silence became so profound that for the first time Ågestam actually noticed the fan's existence.

  He looked at it and then at the elderly man behind the desk. His lined face spoke of a bitterness, a deep-seated fear, that drove both his withdrawal from other people and his aggression towards them. What was the cause? Why was Grens so ready to reject, so prone to swear and accuse and insult? DCI Grens was well known nationally. Already at university Lars had heard the stories about him, the policeman who walked alone, but was better at his job than most. Now, having met the man, he was no longer convinced.

  All he saw was a pathetic old sod who had painted himself into a corner socially and had to put up with the consequences, isolated and angry.

  I don't want to become like Grens, it's a grim state of mind, he thought, almost as grim as being totally solitary.

  Ewert turned over the CD, a flimsy piece of plastic holding twenty-seven tracks. His fingers left greasy marks on the shiny surface.

  'Is that it? Are you done?'

  'I think so.'

  'Fine. When you leave, take this with you. I haven't got the right kit for playing it.'

  Ågestam shook his head.

  'It's a gift. It's yours now. If you have no use for it, throw it away.'

  The elderly man put down the silent piece of plastic.

  Today was the Wednesday of the second week since Lund's escape. Two guards had been badly beaten up.

  A little girl had died. Her killer had died.

  Her father was in custody awaiting trial. He would get prison for life if that poncy little prosecutor got his way.

  Sometimes Grens didn't want to be around anymore. He almost longed for when it would all be over.

  * * *

  Dead bodies are worse in hot weather. Sven was reminded of the kind of nature films that he had come to detest. Overbearing voiceovers guide the viewers though sun-baked African landscapes, flies buzz round the microphone and, sooner or later, some kind of furry predator starts running after its prey, jumps and bites its throat, rips the flesh off its bones, gulping down anything edible until sated and ready to amble into the long grass to sleep, leaving the bloody, rotting carcass behind for the flies and the heat to consume it until nothing is left.

  Every time he had to attend an autopsy such images haunted him with an inevitability he dreaded. In this place, barely a week ago, he and Ewert had observed the meaninglessly peaceful face of a little girl whose body had been ripped apart. He had not had to watch the damage done to her, he had been allowed to look away in an attempt not to face the lack of meaning all over again.

  Perhaps that was why she had seemed so unreal. Far too young to die, still promising so much life. He couldn't help remembering her tiny feet, their sadistic cleanliness.

  Ewert's concerned voice, without a trace of sarcasm, brought him back to the present.

  'Hey, Sven. How are things?'

  'This place gives me the creeps. I can't help it. Errfors seems a perfectly nice, normal bloke, so why did he pick this hellhole for his place of work? How does he stand it? Rooting around in cadavers. What kind of a life is that?'

  They were walking through the central archive, past sliding metal shelving packed with files, folders, boxes. It was a vast catalogue of death. The dead had become lines on paper, arrayed in alphabetical order. Sv
en had been here once before, he and a young medic who had helped him in a search. He hoped he'd never have to do it again, these data searches made him think uneasily about interfering with graves.

  Ludvig Errfors was waiting for them in the same autopsy room as before. He was in civvies, no sterile wraps, and as jolly and easy-going as ever.