‘Yeah, pretty good. I always feel a bit shaken when I’ve been talking to one of them. They seem to be on a completely different planet. A parallel universe.’
‘How did he seem? What was his name? Wirsén?’
‘Witréus,’ she said. ‘John Andreas Witréus. And he seems… well, out of it. Here but not here. In some parallel existence, almost. You talk to him, but he’s not there. Not really. He wanted me to act as a therapist. Quite damaged, but quite harmless, too. A passive paedophile, I guess. Had quite a bit of porn but mainly took pictures. Loads of seemingly innocent pictures from his window up in Söder Torn. Of kids on Merborgarplatsen and the area around it. Hardly criminal.’
‘Have you had a chance to look at his computer?’
‘Yeah. What he said is probably true. He doesn’t seem to have any address lists himself, and doesn’t seem to have sent any pictures. Just received them. En masse. There must be about five hundred pictures in his inbox alone. No proper sender details, of course, but it should be possible to find that out. Witréus unwittingly ended up on an address list. It might not be a network.’
‘What could it be, then?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not really a computer expert. We’ll have to see what the specialists say.’
‘I’d rather the computer didn’t end up there.’
‘What? Why?’ Sara Svenhagen exclaimed.
Ragnar Hellberg leaned towards her. She guessed that he hadn’t brushed his teeth for some time.
‘I could pull rank on you, Sara. Say “just follow my orders” and nothing more. But I don’t want to. You’ve got to trust me. Let’s keep this between us. No one else.’
She scrutinised him. The young, comet-careerist superintendent. The party policeman. So subdued, so serious, so deflated. She didn’t understand.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask.’
‘I know that you know a hell of a lot about computers, Sara. You’d be able to get a lot from it yourself, right?’
‘Probably,’ she replied honestly.
‘And what? What is it if it’s not a network?’
‘It’s a list of addresses. It showed up for a few seconds on that temporary website on Thursday, at 19.36.07. I’ve got that address. But it stopped being of interest as soon as it revealed itself. It’s a free, anonymous American site. Since I’m convinced Witréus is telling the truth, I don’t think it’s a network. The addresses, they don’t know one another, they aren’t sharing pictures in the usual way. The list is a way of expanding the circle without risking anything. Everyone that’s visited a certain site – which is still unknown at this point – is bombarded with emails full of child porn.
‘Without having given their email address?’
‘I think so, yeah. They must’ve found a way to quickly identify a person’s email address. Something that we’d find very useful. Since most of the people who want an anonymous email address use Hotmail, I think it’s the key. You quickly identify the number of the phone line, check it off against the Hotmail users, and find an email address. It probably only takes a few milliseconds. I’m assuming it’s something new.’
‘So this means that there’s no alert risk, at least? If we let Witréus go, or let him talk to a lawyer, he won’t be able to warn the network?’
‘No. Because there is no network to contact. Theoretically, I suppose you could imagine him sending out general warnings via the paedophile sites, but it doesn’t seem likely. He’s staying in the closet. But are we really talking about letting him go?’
‘No,’ said Hellberg, leaning back. ‘No, of course not. We’ve got enough with the child porn. And we’re seizing the computer. Can you take it home and work on it there?’
‘Yeah, if necessary.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to be stubborn and say it is necessary. Anything else?’
‘Witréus had a jar full of undeveloped films. And a film in his camera. Is it OK if I take them home and develop them? Can I get the darkroom equipment from the stockroom?’
‘Buy it,’ said Ragnar Hellberg. ‘And give me the receipt.’
‘No tracks?’ said Sara Svenhagen, watching her boss.
‘No tracks,’ he nodded.
23
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. TIME to sum up the blood-soaked Midsummer weekend. Unusually high levels of drunkenness. Unusually high numbers of rapes. Unusually high levels of violence. Unusually high levels of Midsummer.
Though that wasn’t their concern.
Paul Hjelm hoped that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the meeting the day before. It had been a painful affair. Partly because half of the team was missing, with Söderstedt and Norlander at Kumla and Nyberg piecing together the remains of his ongoing cases, partly because it had taken a far from heroic course. Hultin had come in through his mystical old side door, dumped some papers on the desk, sat down and looked out over the gathering. No one in the unimpressive little congregation – Hjelm, Holm, Chavez – wanted to be the one to begin. All were going to say the same thing anyway: that nothing had happened. Hultin didn’t want to say it openly, either. And so they had just left, somewhat bewildered.
Their chances seemed slightly better today. Everyone was there, and the cat seemed to have loosened its grip on their tongues. There was small talk in the Supreme Command Centre, a faint murmur. Jan-Olov Hultin regarded them through his owl-like glasses, silencing the small talk with: ‘I have an confession to make.’
A strange opening line. They let him continue.
‘I warned Rajko Nedic.’
They looked at one another.
Chavez wrinkled his nose; otherwise, the outcry failed to materialise.
‘I thought it would be best to keep him under a tight rein. Also, I just wanted to introduce myself. I visited him at his house out in Danderyd. He wasn’t celebrating Midsummer. On the contrary, he was pottering about in a garden that looked like Eden.’
‘The toilet paper?’ asked Söderstedt.
‘Not Edet,’ Hultin retorted neutrally. ‘Eden.’
‘East of Eden,’ Hjelm alluded silkily.
‘What did he say, then?’ asked Chavez.
‘Nothing really,’ said Hultin. ‘He was talking about columbines being proof of God. Denied everything.’
‘How unexpected,’ Nyberg muttered.
‘So, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Hultin. ‘Time to go over the weekend’s successes. Anyone feel inclined?’
‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ said Chavez. ‘Something Åkesson said, out by the slaughter site in Sickla. About those bloody footprints next to the dry spot left by the briefcase. Eight prints, as it turned out. Four-year-old Reeboks, size 7.’
‘Four-year-old?’ Norlander asked, perplexed.
‘Apparently,’ said Chavez, glancing down at one of Brynolf Svenhagen’s forensic reports. There were a lot of them. Svenhagen was in ecstasy. The reports were flooding in. He had gone mad with excitement.
‘You can work it out from the model,’ Kerstin Holm said, in the know. ‘The soles look different every year.’
‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.
‘One: the tracks are going in the wrong direction,’ said Chavez stringently. ‘Two: Niklas Lindberg’s men don’t exactly seem the type to take any careless steps in blood.’
‘They were careless enough to get shot,’ said Hultin, shrugging. ‘Actually, half of them were shot, and by men they’d already frisked, judging by appearances. Maybe we’re overestimating their professionalism. And the fact that the footprints were going in the wrong direction surely only means that the person who picked up the briefcase and saw it covered in his friend’s blood was nervy. He took a couple of careless steps in the blood. In the wrong direction. By then he’d walked the blood off his trainers. He turned and went back. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.’
‘It was just an observation,’ Chavez mumbled, thinking about basket weaving and other stimulating activities for pensioners.