‘Not exactly,’ said Hultin. ‘We have to give the Kvarnen Killer’s picture to the press.’
‘But we can do that without giving a source.’ And then, almost pleadingly: ‘Just as I’m saying it to you, Jan-Olov, I’m also saying it to Mörner and the Police Commissioner and the entire bloody force.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Jan-Olov Hultin neutrally.
‘Yeah,’ said Chavez, looking him in the eye. ‘You can’t afford to keep anything from Mörner after the Kentucky Killer. You’ve been given a second chance and you’re not planning on throwing it away.’
Hultin met his gaze without hesitation.
‘That’s where you’re wrong, Jorge. It’s the opposite, I have nothing to lose. Nothing at all.’
Chavez swallowed and came to a decision. He said: ‘They were taken by a paedophile living in Söder Torn. Haglund’s Semi, like Arto said. Sara Svenhagen arrested him, if you’ve heard of her.’
‘Of course,’ said Hultin. ‘I’ve known her since she was little. Brynolf’s daughter. A great policewoman.’
‘But Sara has been given orders by her boss to investigate that case in private. She can’t, under any circumstances, reveal anything related to her investigation. Not even internally.’
‘Hellberg,’ said Hultin, feeling weary. ‘A more modern detective superintendent than me. Why?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Chavez. ‘All I know is that Ragnar Hellberg has sworn her to absolute secrecy. She broke that already when she showed me the photographs. She developed them herself. At home. Because of a hunch that the paedophile might actually have captured the aftermath of the Kvarnen Killing. A hunch which was spot on.’
‘At home?’ Hultin asked knowingly.
Chavez was silent. Silent and proud. Proud of his silence.
‘Why are you going to such trouble for Sara Svenhagen?’ asked Hultin, though he was starting to understand.
Jorge Chavez took a step towards him, leaned over the desk and said clearly: ‘Because I love her.’
28
AND SHE LOVED him. It felt a bit pathetic.
She knew how it was meant to work. That love had to develop slowly and be carefully nurtured, that it took time and effort to create a relationship, that it wasn’t something that just popped up all of a sudden, ready-formed. She definitely didn’t believe in love at first sight. It hadn’t been very first sight, anyway.
Though almost.
She had thought herself immune. Thought that she had seen and heard far too much to be susceptible to Cupid’s arrows. She had thought that the paedophiles’ arrows had caused irreparable damage to her emotional life. But then she realised how strong people are, despite everything; how much we can really endure.
She put all of the critical questions to herself. Was this really love? Hadn’t he just turned up at a moment when her emotions were in turmoil? Hadn’t he used his thoroughly silky tongue in a pretty dishonourable way? Hadn’t she just fallen victim to a classic Latino seduction ritual?
But this questioning didn’t last long. She found herself thinking about him all of the time. She felt happy, expectant, longing. A new energy had grabbed hold of her, and she found herself working with a completely new drive.
Because, strangely enough, love didn’t have a paralysing effect on either of them, as it had done during their teens. Maybe this could be called a more mature love, one that seemed to have a positive effect even at work. Both were working harder than before, which seemed impossible, and both imagined that they were thinking more clearly. Jorge had neatly summarised the whole Sickla Slaughter, and Sara was able to take stock of her own situation with great clarity.
She had two things to do. First, she had a list to work through: the address list on which she had found John Andreas Witréus’s name, the one which had appeared so briefly on that temporary web page. Second, she had a computer to work through. John Andreas Witréus’s computer. By using the clues she found on his computer, she would try, first and foremost, to find the website which had detected his email address and added him to the list she had mistaken for a network. It was a potential network, after all. Someone, somewhere, was compiling the addresses of everyone who visited a certain website. This website had to be found and, in time, maybe the people behind this new means of gathering paedophiles could be identified.
It was a difficult job, but she was in full swing, without any kind of professional, technical help. Though by this point, she had become a kind of technical professional herself. She began to think that she could do anything at all with just a computer and a phone line.
How was it possible to live with your head held even slightly high in a world like this? Everything was for sale. Everything was possible for the right money. How many people across the globe were really active in this underground business? What had she come across? Was it… Hell?
For a moment, she imagined that it really was Hell. The proper, biblical Hell. The one which had always run like an undercurrent through normal human activity, finding ways to drag susceptible people down in keeping with the times. What was it that made people susceptible?
She was starting to contract the global conspiracy fever which infected all hackers from time to time. Most believed the theory that the American government was covering up UFOs in a secret vault somewhere, and was also responsible for producing Aids in laboratories and testing it in Africa. Others still believed in communism and the domino effect. She had got it into her head – and then she had started to keep an eye open – that these theories themselves were part of the conspiracy. The great conspiracy obviously didn’t consist of an elite group running the world from their headquarters somewhere, like in a cheap crime novel – it was about an invisible ideology. It didn’t need any physical border guards; it was about internalising them, making sure that the ideology was active in people’s minds. The twentieth century had been the age of democracy, but it was also the century in which it had been most fiercely challenged, above all from within. How could you – where the ‘you’ was essentially the market, the biggest and ultimately only ideology of the age, a completely uniform and utterly inflexible system of thought which built upon nothing other than maximising profits – how could you get people to believe that they had power while, at the same time, taking it away from them? By preventing them from thinking, of course.
All marketing is about getting people to stop thinking and to focus on different kinds of carefully crafted ideals instead. About selling an image. And what else? A massive accumulation of things like intellect-dulling entertainment television, causing every single teenager to want to be a presenter; celebrity obsession, porn, sports hysteria, thinking in terms of ethnicity, forcing people to spend their time making absurd choices about refuse-collection companies or electricity suppliers; the limitation of all economic thought to the personal sphere, which had increasingly started to become blurred with the stock exchanges, and biological determination, which Sara Svenhagen understood as being the crown on the idea which had to be spread whatever the cost: that we have absolutely no control over our own lives. Our brains were finally spongy enough, our self-confidence so lacking, for the death blow to be dealt: the thought that, actually, it doesn’t matter what we do or are subject to – our entire lives are controlled purely by our genes. That was the death blow, and it was now being suggested from all sides, in all manner of ways, all at once. Whatever you do, don’t believe that you can do anything about your lot: it has already been determined by an infinite number of generations before you.