These pseudonyms had done their best to remain untraceable but could, when all went well, be identified after closer inspection. It became apparent that all these pseudonyms appeared in the extensive investigation material, a small part of which had been written by CID’s child pornography unit, of which she herself was a member. All the pseudonyms apart from one: ‘brambo’. Wherever this ‘brambo’ appeared online, another pseudonym, ‘rippo_man’, was also present. This ‘rippo_man’ turned out to have been convicted of sexual assault on children, among other things, thanks to the Swedish policeman who had put him away. This Swedish policeman should also have sent ‘brambo’ to prison, or at least tried to trace him, since ‘rippo_man’ and ‘brambo’ always appeared together on the hidden pages she had found. Yet that wasn’t the case. ‘Brambo’ had been deliberately deleted from the report. And in each instance, one man had been behind the investigation. Sara Svenhagen’s own boss, Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg.
She had two choices: either go straight for Hellberg, or try to find out more about ‘brambo’, if for no other reason than to have more of a leg to stand on in any direct confrontation with Hellberg. She had chosen the latter. It hadn’t been easy.
‘Brambo’ was an incredibly well-disguised figure. It was obvious that he had no intention of having his hidden desires revealed. He made use of a couple of extremely advanced, illegal computer programs which could be downloaded online, and which completely concealed the source. If you connected these programs, something which required professional knowledge, you could be entirely anonymous online. All the experts she spoke to were in agreement about that.
Then it struck her that Hellberg might simply have committed a minor breach of duty: he had deleted ‘brambo’ because the person behind it was untouchable.
But she didn’t stop there. She knew that the real Internet experts were hardly those employed by the police. Or by anyone else, for that matter. The real experts were the hackers. Often teenagers. Completely up to date. And so she had made her way into a number of online forums. With deliberate naive femininity, she threw her questions to the most advanced chats she could find. Chats where Chen, 18, was discussing the Pentagon’s new security system and the slow finance routines on the New York stock exchange with Bob, 16. She presented herself gallantly as a sexy nobody with problems, and received pubescent, testosterone-fuelled, virginal responses. Sure, those programs were old, several-month-old upgrades; they were crackable, but only by guys, people with dicks. You just do this. And suddenly she was through. As she saw the IP number appear on the screen, she thought about the perils and possibilities of the information society.
‘Brambo’s’ IP number could, after lots of toing and froing, be traced to a restaurant. To the Thanatos restaurant on Östermalm, right here in Stockholm.
Thanatos, she thought, as she searched the registry of businesses for an owner and manager. Wasn’t that the ancient Greeks’ kingdom of the dead? The deepest depths of Hades?
The deepest caverns of Hell.
Strange name for a restaurant.
Wasn’t it Freud, too? Eros and Thanatos? Our two strongest urges. The sex drive and the death drive?
The Thanatos restaurant was owned by Rajko Nedic.
Rajko Nedic, she thought to herself. Wasn’t he the drug dealer who always managed to get away? He had never figured in any child-porn context, had he?
She checked the times. ‘Brambo’ had been online at all manner of times. It was difficult to imagine anyone in the restaurant busying themselves with child porn down in the kitchen while the lunch rush was on. She checked with the network, Telia. The IP number had been subtly and secretly diverted. She would have to use all the police tricks she could think of to crack their wall of confidentiality.
Yes, the number was diverted. Home to Rajko Nedic in Danderyd.
Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Rajko Nedic wasn’t in the child-porn business. It was much simpler than that.
Rajko Nedic was a paedophile.
She started to collect all the images linked to ‘brambo’ that she could find online. It was a cavalcade of the usual kind. So normal, and so unbearable. Always the faces. It was always the children’s faces that grabbed hold of her and which she couldn’t let go, which held onto her, accusing her; accusing her for having escaped, for being able to have lived her childhood in peace, for not helping them right then and there, for being removed from the actual event. A terrible, silent, dampened scream of horror which rose towards the horizon and swept over the world, taking her with it and leaving her with nightmares about an awful double penetration in the middle of giving birth. Those eyes. Always so dark – ruined, but always crystal clear. Their acute prematurity. Their stolen childhoods. The inconceivably grotesque act.
Sara Svenhagen tried to calm herself down. She recognised the situation so well. She tried to become a policewoman again: objective, critical, chasing clues. It was always the same procedure, the same narrowing of the field of vision. It worked in the end.
Though through a haze of tears.
For the most part, it was a question of one child in the pictures, a dark little girl at different ages, but there were others, too. It was always the same room, the same background. The walls were clearly soundproofed – it looked like golden foam cushions had been stapled to the walls. Otherwise, there were no distinctive features. The perpetrator’s face could never be seen, and of his body, only his penis was visible. There was nothing special about it – aside from what it was doing.
In all probability, it belonged to Rajko Nedic.
OK, she thought, stretching. She looked around the flat. Traces of Jorge were everywhere. The sight of his boxer shorts on the bedside lamp filled her with warmth. It rose from her toes up to her hairline.
OK. Ragnar Hellberg had never seemed particularly comfortable online; his speciality was making jokes for the press. Still, he had obviously cracked the utterly complex code that she herself had cracked – with the help of the master hackers. He had realised what he had stumbled across: a way to trap the man who had never let himself be caught. A back route into the untouchable Nedic’s organisation. Why hadn’t he used that back route, then? Why had he made sure that not even the faintest trace of it was left in the investigation instead?
Because he had gone after Rajko Nedic in private?
Because Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg had been blackmailing Rajko Nedic for money?
Taking a sober view of it, there were two alternatives: either Hellberg had simply felt a certain shame over not being able to crack the ‘brambo’ pseudonym and erased it from the reports, or else he had used his knowledge of Rajko Nedic for blackmail purposes.
Sara Svenhagen was about to find out which of the two was correct, because through the hordes of German tourists, Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, also known as Party-Ragge, was pushing his way towards her. He stroked his little black beard as though deep in thought, and sank into the chair opposite her. He gestured, and asked: ‘Why here?’
‘I want it this way,’ was all she replied.
Ragnar Hellberg nodded. As though he understood.
‘Let’s hear it, then,’ he said.
‘Rajko Nedic,’ she said.
He looked at her. His gaze was sharper than she had ever seen it. Otherwise, there was no reaction.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘The “brambo” pseudonym is the drug dealer and restaurant owner Rajko Nedic. And you deliberately left “brambo” out of the investigation.’
He smiled. Ragnar Hellberg actually smiled. He laid his hand on top of hers and looked into her eyes.
‘Thanks,’ he said.