She went over to the computer and checked whether it was password-protected. It was. She switched off the password protection, shut the computer down and packed it up. Every single disk went into the carrier bag.
Then she pulled the broken door closed, taped a sign to it explaining that the flat was a crime scene, and waited for one of the uniformed officers to return.
‘Have you called for a locksmith?’ she asked.
He nodded.
She nodded.
‘Take the computer,’ she said, heading off.
She strolled down through Fatbursparken, past Bofills båge, glancing up at the enormous clock above Södra Station. Then she arrived at the police station at Fatbursgatan 1. Without further ado, she walked through reception and followed the police assistant’s extended forefinger to the interview room. John Andreas Witréus was waiting; he looked like a bank manager on summer holiday. Without a word, she placed the things on the table. The pile of photographs, the jam jar filled with rolls of film, the album of pictures, the videotapes, the camera. She looked at him.
He squirmed. Caught.
Like a child.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said courteously.
‘I don’t actually think that you’re a practising paedophile,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘But on the other hand, you know that the laws regarding possession of child pornography have become stricter recently.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly, looking down at the table. ‘Was it the Internet?’
‘We’ll come back to that. You had a really successful firm down in Varberg that produced some kind of filters for Volvos, right? Subcontractor. You started the firm sometime in the sixties, and after you won the Volvo contract, the value went through the roof. When you sold it five years ago, you got countless millions for it. And now the Volvo contract’s been cancelled, and the firm’s collapsed. Nicely done.’
‘Is this about my business?’ John Andreas Witréus asked, completely confused.
‘No,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘I’m just summarising. You sold the firm and became financially independent. You blew a couple of million on the flat in Söder Torn, bought yourself a magnificent set of furniture, and then spent your time sitting in your window, peeping and taking photographs of children from the sixteenth floor. Why?’
He was silent, gazing down at his bright white knuckles. He looked up, and said: ‘I like children.’
She held up a videotape. She opened the photo album, and held one of the pages a few centimetres from Witréus’s face.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t bloody like children. You desire children. There’s a hell of a difference. Why do you take these pictures?’
He was staring at his knuckles. After almost thirty seconds, she took the album away and was met by a completely defenceless gaze. A defenceless, questioning gaze. One which actually seemed to be looking for an answer to her question.
‘I think,’ said Sara Svenhagen, ‘that you hate your sexuality, that more than anything else, you’d like to be castrated. You think that you like children, but you really just want to be a child. You want to be a child. You sit up there in Haglund’s Semi and tell yourself that you’re taking photos from a child’s perspective, but really you’ve put a distance of sixteen floors between you. As if to emphasise the distance. Unobtainability itself. By definition, it’s an impossible project. You’re sitting at a safe distance, manically taking pictures. Five, six thousand pictures since you moved in just a year or two ago. You’re looking for the perfect picture of childhood, but you’ve made it impossible yourself. You’ve placed yourself, completely intentionally, at such a distance that it’ll be impossible to take the perfect picture, the one which would make you a child. The whole thing is about your never-ending, unconditional longing to be a child. And so when the desire sets in, you punish yourself by violating the most precious thing: the child inside you. Like all paedophiles, you don’t give a damn about actual children, real children. It’s always all about you. When you’re sitting there, getting off on children who’ve been mistreated, it’s the child inside you that you’re punishing. That’s what’s mocking you, by never being able to show its face in the light of day. The one with a grip around your testicles, about to split you in two.’
John Andreas Witréus stared at Sara Svenhagen. She felt almost sweaty, as though her voicebox had been for a jog.
‘Yeah,’ he whispered. ‘Could be.’
‘But I don’t care about you,’ she said bluntly. ‘I want to know how you ended up in a paedophile network online.’
Witréus blinked. His entire being seemed to be a wall, closing in and closing in until there was nothing left to close in. Until there was nothing but wall. He couldn’t relinquish his very self. He was completely stuck in himself.
‘I don’t actually know,’ he said eventually. ‘I was looking at pictures on some site. Then the pictures started flooding into my inbox. I don’t know how. They must’ve got hold of my address on some site.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m not. I never lie. But I keep myself to myself. For fifty years, I’ve carried my secret with me. I’ve never, ever acted on my desires; it isn’t real, it’s virtual, and I’ve never, ever met any of… my kind. That’s the last thing I want. I’d despise them. Pigs. Swine. The ones who travel to Thailand to buy children. Never. I don’t want that, it’s not that I want. I swear I don’t have any idea how I ended up on that list. My inbox is overflowing with pictures and I have no idea how it happened.’
Sara Svenhagen paused to think. If this was true, then it was a new strategy. It would mean interesting new opportunities. Was it possible to capture the email address of every visitor to a website? If so, how the hell did you do it?
She watched John Andreas Witréus closely. He was shaken and moved and thinking about one thing only. The only thing he had thought about his entire life. Himself.
And he was telling the truth.
She was convinced of that now.
But she couldn’t feel sorry for him. She hadn’t come that far.
Or so she told herself.
20
‘SHIT, I HAD it!’
Bullet’s face scrunched up as though he’d had a mouthful of acid. He adjusted the headphones, twisting and tuning a device in front of him. The LEDs on it remained black.
He had found the signal three times now.
And lost it.
The first time, they had stormed out of the cellar and into the metallic-green van. Bullet first, spinning like a ballerina with the antenna in the air, eyes on the device in his hand and headphones around his neck. Then Rogge, carrying Danne Blood Pudding. Then the golden one himself, still sceptical.
‘Still got it!’ Bullet yelled, jumping into the passenger seat. Rogge pushed Danne in through the back doors and ran round to the driver’s seat. They sped off.
‘Try the E4 southbound,’ Bullet continued. ‘That’s where it should be.’
Then it was gone. The signal tone disappeared from the headphones, and the LEDs went dark.
‘Fuck,’ said Bullet. ‘Keep going on the E4 anyway. We’ve got to find it again. We’ve got the best chance there.’
They kept just at the upper edge of the speed limit. 118 kilometres per hour, max. To be stopped for speeding would be a death blow. Since it was Midsummer weekend, it wasn’t impossible that the pigs had put a few extra traffic checks on. Though, on the other hand, it wasn’t exactly likely.