After all of the toing and froing, protests and attempts at compromise, ‘Haglund’s Stick’ came to be known as ‘Haglund’s Semi’, though in order to remove Sune Haglund’s name from the tower once it was complete, it was officially named Söder Torn. That name hadn’t quite caught on.
People lived there in any case. The flats were abnormally expensive, but people lived there.
A man named John Andreas Witréus lived there, for example. He was a paedophile.
Sara Svenhagen stood between two uniformed police officers, looking up at the strange enormous metal ring which floated like a halo above Söder Torn. At that moment, she thought to herself that Haglund’s Stick really was beautiful. Perhaps her view was slightly coloured, but it really wasn’t so bad.
On the other hand, the combination of phallus, halo, semi and paedophile seemed to be telling her something that, for the moment, she couldn’t piece together. She had other things on her mind.
She looked out over Medborgarplatsen. It was strangely empty. Usually Stockholm’s busiest square, it was largely deserted. It was overcast and dreary. And completely deserted.
A caretaker let the trio into Söder Torn. The elegant stairwell smelt new and faintly perfumed. They thanked him and stepped into the lift. The taller of the policemen was carrying a short, black cement battering ram with handles. He held it ostentatiously in one hand. Sara thought that maybe she should give him an impressed look. Just to make sure of his goodwill.
It didn’t quite work.
The lift took them to the sixteenth floor. They wandered through a corridor, exquisitely adorned with flowers, and came to a door marked ‘Witréus’. Is that really a name? she wondered to herself, pointing silently at the door. Just to be on the safe side, she took her pistol out. The policemen positioned the battering ram just beneath the door handle, and glanced at her. She nodded. They broke the door open and rushed in.
By the window in the flat, which was shaped like a slice of cake, a grey-haired man in his sixties was sitting, dressed in a thin summer suit with a mauve tie. He lowered a long-lensed camera to stare straight down the muzzle of Sara Svenhagen’s pistol.
‘My God,’ he said quietly.
She could see clearly in his eyes that he knew what their visit was about.
‘John Andreas Witréus?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ the man whispered.
‘Put the camera down and raise your hands above your head.’
John Andreas Witréus did as he was told.
‘Lie flat on the floor,’ she continued, nodding to the assistants who had begun frisking him with a slight touch of brutality.
She wandered around the flat. It was fantastic. And pedantically clean. There were countless antiques. Old, elegant objects everywhere. The view out over the city was magnificent, in several directions. And in the bedroom, which had the atmosphere of British colonial India, the computer was on.
When she saw that, she felt a wave of complete, ice-cold calm. She had him. She returned to the living room.
One of the assistants was, for some reason, sitting on Witréus’s back. She heard it cracking and crunching.
‘I think that’s enough now,’ she said, taking the camera. It was a Canon, press photographer standard. Easily twenty thousand kronor’s worth.
The police assistant climbed off John Andreas Witréus.
‘Thanks,’ she said ingratiatingly, turning to the man lying on the floor. ‘What is it you take photos of?’
‘I’m very interested in photography,’ said Witréus, trying to sit up. The cracking continued.
‘I can see that,’ said Sara Svenhagen. The rest could be saved for the secluded interview room. She turned to the assistants. ‘Take him with you. Put him in an interview room; I’ll be there soon.’
They packed up and disappeared. She stood by the window, waiting until the police car had driven away. To the right, she could see the Södermalmshallarna and their cineplexes, and the edge of the enormous, strangely curved building which went by the name of Bofills båge. Straight ahead, Medborgarplatsen stretched out, full of empty cafes and bars, and then the old civic hall with its public baths and library. To the left, Götgatan and the right-hand corner of the Björns trädgård park.
She turned back to the expensive flat. She was doing her best to make the undeniable elegance of the place tally with the sleazy business of paedophilia.
Still, the officers in Auschwitz had lived in nice places, too.
Almost immediately, she found a whole series of child-porn films in the video cabinet. That dilemma was over and done with, at any rate. There was a great case for an arrest. She continued through the flat. In the bedroom, she found three extensive albums full of images of children.
The smaller of the two bathrooms had been turned into a darkroom. She switched on the red light and stepped into a strange world of pictures. Newly developed photographs were hanging from a clothes line. Veritable piles of photographs were strewn across the room. There must have been five, six thousand. And, for the most part, they all had the same subject.
She had expected a monstrous sight, the kind that changes the very core of a person. Thousands of pictures of children being sexually abused. Söder Torn as a kind of Tower of Babel, the reason God had turned His back on man. The flat as the country’s worst paedophile den. John Andreas Witréus as Dr Mengele.
But that wasn’t the case. Sure, there were pictures of children, but they all seemed to have been taken from the windows of Haglund’s Stick. Spring, summer, autumn and winter. Children skating on Medborgarplatsen’s artificial ice rink. Children running through the rain on their way from the cineplex. Children playing with hula hoops in the summer sunshine. Children skateboarding between dirty piles of snow. Children with little paper flags, on their way from the McDonald’s on the Götgatan – Folkungagatan crossroads. Children, children, children. And most of the photographs were fantastic. Beautiful pictures of children. They gave off a palpable affection for the existential form of children. In its own right. She felt deeply surprised.
They were black-and-white photographs, the date printed at the top. It was like a long documentation of the place, seen through a child’s eyes. She thought of the film Smoke, where Paul Auster lets Harvey Keitel document his own little corner of the world. There was nothing more to it.
John Andreas Witréus had documented his own sick little corner of the world. With a child’s eyes.
She looked up at the photographs hanging from the clothes line. The most recent date was 7 June. In a jam jar on the toilet seat, there were many more undeveloped films. She took the jar with her, together with a random selection of photographs. She made her way into the kitchen and found a carrier bag into which she put everything. She went back to the bedroom and picked up one of the albums, then back to the living room where she also placed the camera and a couple of the videotapes into the bag.