The Crow Girl (12 page)

Her legs hit Martin’s mum’s thigh with each step she takes, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She walks on, focused. As if Victoria belonged with them.

‘Will you be coming back next summer?’ she asks, feeling the woman’s cheek against hers.

‘Yes, we will,’ she whispers. ‘We’ll come back to you every summer.’

That summer Martin has six years left to live.

KARL LUNDSTRÖM WAS
going to be charged with child pornography offences, as well as the sexual abuse of his daughter, Linnea. As Sofia Zetterlund turned off towards Huddinge Hospital she reflected on what she knew of his background.

Karl Lundström was forty-four years old and had a senior position at Skanska, where he was responsible for a number of the largest construction projects in the country. His wife, Annette, was forty-one, and their daughter, Linnea, fourteen. Over the past ten years the family had moved half a dozen times, between Umeå in the north and Malmö in the south, and were currently living in a large turn-of-the-century villa at Edsviken in Danderyd. At the moment there was an extensive police investigation trying to identify whether or not he was actually part of a larger paedophile ring.

Always on the move, she thought as she turned into the car park. Typical behaviour for paedophiles. Moving to escape discovery and to get away from suspicions about odd behaviour within the family.

Neither Annette Lundström nor their daughter Linnea wanted to admit what had happened. The mother was in despair and denied everything, whereas the daughter had retreated into an apathetic state of complete silence.

She parked outside the main entrance and went in. On the way she decided to take one last look at her notes.

From what had emerged from police interviews, it was clear that Karl Lundström was an extremely complex individual. In the transcripts he talked about how he and the other members of the suspected paedophile ring behaved. He spoke of a physical attraction to children that was seldom noticed by other people, but which paedophiles instinctively recognised in one another. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, they could identify one another’s inclinations simply by their body language or the way they looked around them.

On the surface, at least, he matched well with Sofia’s previous experiences of a certain sort of man with paedophile or ephebophile personality disorders.

Their main weapon was the ability to control, manipulate and build up trust and implant guilt and subordination in their victims. In the end there was often a form of mutual dependency between victims and perpetrators.

Their interest in children wasn’t the only thing they had in common. They also shared the same view of women. Their wives were under their control. They knew what was going on, but never intervened.

‘Well, we may as well get this out of the way. You’re here to evaluate whether or not I can be held responsible for my actions. What do you want to know?’

Sofia looked at the man seated in front of her.

Karl Lundström had thin, fair hair that was starting to go grey. His eyes were tired and slightly swollen, and she thought they expressed a sort of mournful solemnity.

‘I’d like us to talk about your relationship with your daughter,’ she said. It was just as well to get straight to the point.

He ran his hand through his stubble.

‘I love Linnea, but she doesn’t love me. I have abused her, and I’m admitting that to make things easier for all of us. For my family, I mean. I love my family.’

His voice sounded weary and disengaged, and his apathetic tone made what he said sound false.

He had been arrested after a lengthy period of surveillance, and the child pornography found on his computer included several images and video clips of his daughter. What option did he have but to confess?

‘In what way do you think it will make things easier for them?’

‘They need protection. From me and from others.’

His claim was so peculiar that she felt it demanded a follow-up question.

‘Protection from others? Who do you mean?’

‘The sort of people only I can protect them from.’

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and she could smell his body odour. He probably hadn’t washed for several days.

‘If I tell the police what this is all about, Annette and Linnea can have their personal details made confidential. Because they know too much. There are dangerous people out there. A human life is nothing to them. Believe me, I know. God has nothing to do with these people, they aren’t His children.’

She realised that Karl Lundström was referring to the players in the child sex trade. In interviews with the police he had explicitly claimed that Organizatsiya, the Russian mafia, had threatened him repeatedly, and that he feared for his family’s lives. Sofia had spoken to Lars Mikkelsen, who thought Karl Lundström was lying. The Russian mafia didn’t work the way he had described, and his claims were full of contradictions. Besides, he hadn’t been able to provide the police with a single concrete piece of evidence suggesting any threat.

Mikkelsen had said he thought Karl Lundström wanted his family’s identities protected for the simple reason of saving them from any shame.

Sofia suspected that Karl Lundström might be trying to construct something that could be seen as extenuating circumstances for himself. Taking on some sort of heroic role, in marked contrast to what had actually happened.

‘Do you regret what you’ve done?’ Sooner or later she had to ask.

He looked oddly distant.

‘Do I regret it?’ he said after a moment’s silence. ‘It’s complicated … Sorry, what was your name? Sofia?’

‘Sofia Zetterlund.’

‘Of course. Sofia means wisdom. A good name for a psychologist … Sorry. OK, well …’ He took a deep breath. ‘We … I mean, me and the others, we were free to swap wives and children with each other. And I think this happened with Annette’s tacit consent. And the other wives’ as well … In the same way that we men instinctively found each other, we were also careful in our choice of wives. We met in the home of shadows, if you get what I mean?’

The home of shadows? Sofia thought. She recognised the phrase from the preliminary report.

‘Annette’s brain is switched off, somehow,’ he went on without waiting for her to reply. ‘She isn’t stupid, but she chooses not to see things she doesn’t like. It’s her self-defence mechanism.’

Sofia knew this phenomenon wasn’t unusual. There was often a degree of passivity in those close to the events that allowed this sort of abuse to continue.

But Karl Lundström’s answer was evasive. She had asked if he regretted what he had done.

‘Did you never realise that what you were doing was wrong?’ she tried instead.

‘You’ll have to define the word “wrong” if I’m going to understand what you mean. Culturally wrong, socially wrong or wrong in some other way?’

‘Karl, try to tell me about what’s wrong in your own way rather than anyone else’s.’

‘I’ve never claimed to have done anything wrong. I’ve merely acted from an impulse that all men actually have, but suppress.’

Sofia realised that the defence speech had begun.

‘Don’t you read books?’ he went on. ‘There’s a clear line from antiquity to today. Read Archilochus … “A spray of myrtle she bore joyfully in her hand, and glorious roses in her hair, my shadow fell upon her shoulders, and the virgin’s body awoke the flame of love in old men …” The Greeks wrote about it. Alcman’s lyric poetry praises the sensuality of children. “Childless the lonely man lives his life and misses them bitterly. And devoured by his longing he goes to the home of shadows …” In the twentieth century Nabokov and Pasolini wrote the same things, to mention just two. Although Pasolini wrote about boys.’

Sofia recognised further phrases from his interviews with the police.

‘What did you mean when you said that you met in the home of shadows?’ she asked.

He smiled at her.

‘It’s just an image. A metaphor for a secret, forbidden place. There’s plenty of poetry, psychology, ethnology and philosophy to console yourself with if you want to feel understood. I’m not alone, of course, but it feels as though I’m alone in my time. Why is what I desire wrong now?’

Sofia could tell that this was a question he had been wrestling with for a long time. She knew that paedophile desires couldn’t really be cured. It was more a matter of getting the paedophile to recognise that their perversion was unacceptable and that it harmed others. But she didn’t interrupt, she wanted to hear more about his reasoning.

‘It isn’t fundamentally wrong, it isn’t wrong for me, and I don’t actually think it’s wrong for Linnea either. It’s a constructed social or cultural wrong. Ergo, it isn’t wrong in the true sense of the word. The same thoughts and feelings were current two thousand years ago, but what was culturally right then has become culturally wrong. We’ve simply been taught that it’s wrong.’

Sofia thought his reasoning was provocatively irrational.

‘So according to you, it isn’t possible to re-evaluate an old assumption?’

He looked confident.

‘No. Not if it goes against nature.’

Karl Lundström folded his arms and suddenly looked hostile. ‘God is nature …’ he muttered.

Sofia sat in silence and waited for him to go on, but when nothing came she decided to shift the focus of the conversation.

Back to shame.

‘You say there are people you want to protect your family from. I’ve read your interviews with the police, where you say you were threatened by the Russian mafia.’

He nodded.

‘Are there any other reasons why you want Annette’s and Linnea’s identities to be kept confidential?’

‘No,’ came the short answer.

She wasn’t convinced by his self-assured attitude. On the contrary, his unwillingness to discuss the matter indicated doubt. There was shame in this man, even if it was buried deep within him.

He leaned forward over the desk. The intensity in his eyes had returned, and she backed away when she caught his odour.

It wasn’t just sweat. His breath smelled of acetone.

‘I’m going to tell you something,’ he went on. ‘Something I haven’t told the police …’

His mood swings were starting to concern Sofia. The stench of acetone could be a sign of a lack of calories and nutrition, an indication that he wasn’t eating. Was he on any medication?

‘There are men, perfectly ordinary men around us, maybe one of your colleagues, a relative, I don’t know. I’ve never bought a child, but these men have …’

His pupils seemed normal, but her experience of psychoactive medication told her something was wrong.

‘What do you mean?’

He leaned back and seemed to relax slightly.

‘The police have found things that are compromising on my computer, but if they want to find the real stuff, they ought to be looking in a cottage up in Ånge. There’s a man called Anders Wikström. The police ought to take a look in his cellar.’

Lundström’s eyes were darting about, and Sofia doubted the truth of what he was saying.

‘Anders Wikström bought children from a man from Organizatsiya. The third brigade or whatever they call it. Solntsevskaya Bratva. There are two videotapes in a cupboard. On the first one there’s a four-year-old boy and the man is a paediatrician from the south of Sweden. You never see his face in the film, but he’s got a birthmark on his thigh, like a clover leaf. On the second film there’s a seven-year-old girl with Anders, two other men and a Thai woman. From last summer. It’s the worst of the films.’

Karl Lundström was breathing shallowly through his nose, and his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down as he spoke. Sofia felt physical disgust looking at him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear more, and she realised she was having difficulty maintaining an objective attitude to what he was saying.

But no matter how she looked at it, it was her duty to listen and try to understand him.

‘Last summer?’

‘Yes … Anders Wikström and the fat man in the film. The others who were there didn’t want to say what their names were, and you can see the Thai woman doesn’t really want to be there. She was drinking a lot, and on one occasion when she didn’t do as Anders said, he hit her.’

Sofia didn’t know what to think.

‘I understand that you’ve seen the films,’ she tried. ‘But how do you know all the details about the recording?’

‘I was there when they were filmed,’ he said.

Sofia knew she’d have to tell the police what he had just told her.

‘Had you had other experiences of this sort of abuse?’

Karl Lundström looked sad. ‘I’ll tell you how it works,’ he said. ‘Right now something like five hundred thousand people are hooked up on the Net swapping pictures and films of child pornography with each other. To take part you have to produce your own material. It isn’t hard if you’ve got the right contacts. Then you can even order children online. For a hundred and fifty thousand you can have a Latin American boy. Officially he doesn’t exist, you own him. It goes without saying that you can do what you like with him, and the way it usually ends is that he disappears. You have to pay for that as well if you can’t handle killing him yourself. That often costs more than the hundred and fifty thousand, and you don’t haggle with people like that.’

None of this was new to Sofia. It was in the interview transcripts. Yet she still felt nausea rising. As a pressure in her stomach, a dryness in her throat.

‘Are you saying that you yourself have actually
bought
a child?’

Karl Lundström smiled distantly. ‘No. But, like I said, I know people who have. Anders Wikström bought the children who were in the films I told you about.’

Sofia swallowed. Her throat was burning and her hands were trembling.

‘How did it feel to witness all that?’

He smiled again. ‘I got excited. What do you think?’

‘Did you participate?’

He let out a laugh. ‘No, I just watched … As God is my witness.’

Sofia looked at him. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes looked mournful and empty.