It was true, he always got a bit lyrical when he looked at Sara. He wasn’t a dirty old man, he told himself time and time again, though two decades separated them. There wasn’t any desire there. She was more like an angel of salvation, a luminary, always there to drag him back up into the light of day after he had been looking into the darkest depths of humanity.
Because that was what CID’s paedophile hunters did: spent every day looking down into humanity’s, and above all mankind’s, worst conceivable depths. He could never have imagined anything so awful.
It had all been quite overwhelming for a while; things had only recently begun to calm down.
Gunnar Nyberg was the only member of the A-Unit who had emerged with his honour intact, even if this honour was internal and had never, under any circumstances, been allowed into the public eye. The lid had been screwed on, and there it remained. But internally, within the National Police Board, he had been given a halo, and if the very thought of him, the man that a group of investigative journalists from the police newspaper had named Sweden’s Biggest Policeman, as detective superintendent hadn’t been so absurd, he probably would have been promoted. He ruled himself out right away, to save the National Police Commissioner having to make excuses. No promotion, but he would be glad of some stimulating projects.
And so, Sweden’s Biggest Policeman ended up in front of a computer in the successful child pornography division of the CID. The man who had just started to live again, having been worn down by life in the muddy waters of shame. The man who had just found reconciliation with what he had believed to be irreconcilable. His children. His ex-wife. The witnesses and victim of his life’s greatest crime. The unforgettable wife-battering of his bodybuilding period. It was more than twenty years ago, but every single day he remembered the sight of his children staring, wide-eyed, at his wife’s split brow. He sang his pain away as the bass singer in a church choir in Nacka.
Then he had taken the step. Gunilla had long since remarried, in Uddevalla on the other side of the country. With shaking legs, he had made the journey down to visit her and Bengt. They had just sold their house and bought a place in the country on the island of Orust. That was where he went to visit them. She was completely different to how he remembered her, she had blossomed. She was a small woman, unexpectedly foul-mouthed, who, without hesitating, both forgave him and plied him with enough drink to make him cry through the night. A pathetic lump of meat. It did him good. Then he visited his daughter Tanja in Uddevalla. She was married and getting on in the world. Children could wait. She’d had a slightly more reserved, distant attitude, but even that went well.
But the best encounter of all had been with his son Tommy, living in Östhammar, just north of Stockholm. He was a farmer and had a son of his own called Benny. He spent as much time with them as he could; his fuel costs rocketing as a result. He didn’t give a damn that his clapped-out old Renault used up an abnormal amount of juice. His grandson was going to be spoilt, whatever the cost.
And it wasn’t only to his children he opened himself up, but women, too. Suddenly, after a twenty-year quarantine, he was able to think of himself as a sexual being. He started to look at women again, tentatively but without letting himself be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.
And just then, both perspectives were twisted in the most terrible way.
Children and sex.
After the first few shocks, when Sara and Ludvig had found him slumped over the computer, sobbing, he went to work with the most enthusiasm imaginable. Since the collapse of the A-Unit, the group had been CID’s A team of the moment. After a period of fruitless hunting, they were in the middle of a very successful spell, working closely with similar groups abroad. Before Nyberg arrived, they had been working with fifteen other countries on Operation Cathedral, led by the British National Crime Squad, which had mapped out an enormous paedophile network online. The first thing he got to work on at the end of October was something disgusting called ‘Paedo University’. In May of the previous year, the American police had begun an international effort called Operation Sabbatical, and at the end of October, there was a joint crackdown in the countries involved. At home, other parts of the group were working with all the tracks and networks that had come to light in connection with the twenty-two-year-old paedophile in Örebro who had recently been revealed as the country’s most horrendous child molester ever.
And so it went on. Gunnar Nyberg felt, for the first time, that he really was doing something important. He was saving children. And he continued doing it in his spare time. For the past year, he had been giving increasingly well-regarded talks on doping in the city’s schools. Free of charge, to the genuine surprise of the head teachers.
Who knew about the negative effects of anabolic steroids better than he did?
So, even though he spent his days focused on the most appalling sides of human desire, he felt that his life was shaping up quite well. Above expectations, considering what had happened with the Kentucky Killer.
He had looked out over Lake Mälaren. The lake in high summer. A few weeks into June, the weather didn’t really know what it should be doing, but the sun had just broken through the clouds and was spreading its newly churned butter over the freshly baked bread of the water of Riddarfjärden, garnishing it with sails in all the colours of the rainbow. The air felt unusually fresh, which was only partly due to the absence of traffic. On Västerbron Bridge, the queues were now being caused by a growing troop of runners.
Gunnar Nyberg had turned back to Sara Svenhagen. Her expression had told him that she had answered something he had already forgotten.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ he had been forced to ask.
‘Ludvig ran through his sorrow over his family,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know? That he lost his family in a car accident a few years ago?’
‘What? Christ. He’s always seemed so… happy-go-lucky to me…’
‘It’s a front. He’s literally running for his life, every single day. Wife and two sons, just like that. Gone from one second to the next.’
‘Were you already working together then?’
‘Yeah, but not on this. It was before the police really understood how serious this child pornography was, how insanely widespread it is. No, we were working for Stockholm CID. He was my mentor, I suppose. It was Ludvig who built up the entire paedophile unit, and took me with him.’
‘And me, I guess.’
‘You knew each other already, didn’t you?’ Sara had asked. ‘How?’
Ground that had been so difficult to tread. Close to being erased by twenty years of agony. The past. That period. The steroid period.
It was no longer off limits.
‘We were in Police College together,’ Gunnar Nyberg had replied. ‘We were really close back then, shared a room. But we grew apart, when he turned into a good policeman and I became a bad one. And I didn’t even know that he’d lost his family.’
‘That’s what time does,’ Sara had said, placing her hand on his.
He had smiled. Crookedly, he thought. He had smiled crookedly, and looked around the table. They were having a coffee. Five paedophile hunters. His new A-Unit.
Whose boss, the comet-careerist Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, generally called Party-Ragge, had suddenly stood up and pointed.
‘The pack’s coming.’
They had left the Strandcafé and pushed through the crowds towards Norrmälarstrand and the water’s edge. Nyberg could leave his pastry to the vigilant grey sparrows without a bad conscience.