To the Top of the Mountain (21 page)

After all of the toing and froing, protests and attempts at compromise, ‘Haglund’s Stick’ came to be known as ‘Haglund’s Semi’, though in order to remove Sune Haglund’s name from the tower once it was complete, it was officially named Söder Torn. That name hadn’t quite caught on.

People lived there in any case. The flats were abnormally expensive, but people lived there.

A man named John Andreas Witréus lived there, for example. He was a paedophile.

Sara Svenhagen stood between two uniformed police officers, looking up at the strange enormous metal ring which floated like a halo above Söder Torn. At that moment, she thought to herself that Haglund’s Stick really was beautiful. Perhaps her view was slightly coloured, but it really wasn’t so bad.

On the other hand, the combination of phallus, halo, semi and paedophile seemed to be telling her something that, for the moment, she couldn’t piece together. She had other things on her mind.

She looked out over Medborgarplatsen. It was strangely empty. Usually Stockholm’s busiest square, it was largely deserted. It was overcast and dreary. And completely deserted.

A caretaker let the trio into Söder Torn. The elegant stairwell smelt new and faintly perfumed. They thanked him and stepped into the lift. The taller of the policemen was carrying a short, black cement battering ram with handles. He held it ostentatiously in one hand. Sara thought that maybe she should give him an impressed look. Just to make sure of his goodwill.

It didn’t quite work.

The lift took them to the sixteenth floor. They wandered through a corridor, exquisitely adorned with flowers, and came to a door marked ‘Witréus’. Is that really a name? she wondered to herself, pointing silently at the door. Just to be on the safe side, she took her pistol out. The policemen positioned the battering ram just beneath the door handle, and glanced at her. She nodded. They broke the door open and rushed in.

By the window in the flat, which was shaped like a slice of cake, a grey-haired man in his sixties was sitting, dressed in a thin summer suit with a mauve tie. He lowered a long-lensed camera to stare straight down the muzzle of Sara Svenhagen’s pistol.

‘My God,’ he said quietly.

She could see clearly in his eyes that he knew what their visit was about.

‘John Andreas Witréus?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ the man whispered.

‘Put the camera down and raise your hands above your head.’

John Andreas Witréus did as he was told.

‘Lie flat on the floor,’ she continued, nodding to the assistants who had begun frisking him with a slight touch of brutality.

She wandered around the flat. It was fantastic. And pedantically clean. There were countless antiques. Old, elegant objects everywhere. The view out over the city was magnificent, in several directions. And in the bedroom, which had the atmosphere of British colonial India, the computer was on.

When she saw that, she felt a wave of complete, ice-cold calm. She had him. She returned to the living room.

One of the assistants was, for some reason, sitting on Witréus’s back. She heard it cracking and crunching.

‘I think that’s enough now,’ she said, taking the camera. It was a Canon, press photographer standard. Easily twenty thousand kronor’s worth.

The police assistant climbed off John Andreas Witréus.

‘Thanks,’ she said ingratiatingly, turning to the man lying on the floor. ‘What is it you take photos of?’

‘I’m very interested in photography,’ said Witréus, trying to sit up. The cracking continued.

‘I can see that,’ said Sara Svenhagen. The rest could be saved for the secluded interview room. She turned to the assistants. ‘Take him with you. Put him in an interview room; I’ll be there soon.’

They packed up and disappeared. She stood by the window, waiting until the police car had driven away. To the right, she could see the Södermalmshallarna and their cineplexes, and the edge of the enormous, strangely curved building which went by the name of Bofills båge. Straight ahead, Medborgarplatsen stretched out, full of empty cafes and bars, and then the old civic hall with its public baths and library. To the left, Götgatan and the right-hand corner of the Björns trädgård park.

She turned back to the expensive flat. She was doing her best to make the undeniable elegance of the place tally with the sleazy business of paedophilia.

Still, the officers in Auschwitz had lived in nice places, too.

Almost immediately, she found a whole series of child-porn films in the video cabinet. That dilemma was over and done with, at any rate. There was a great case for an arrest. She continued through the flat. In the bedroom, she found three extensive albums full of images of children.

The smaller of the two bathrooms had been turned into a darkroom. She switched on the red light and stepped into a strange world of pictures. Newly developed photographs were hanging from a clothes line. Veritable piles of photographs were strewn across the room. There must have been five, six thousand. And, for the most part, they all had the same subject.

She had expected a monstrous sight, the kind that changes the very core of a person. Thousands of pictures of children being sexually abused. Söder Torn as a kind of Tower of Babel, the reason God had turned His back on man. The flat as the country’s worst paedophile den. John Andreas Witréus as Dr Mengele.

But that wasn’t the case. Sure, there were pictures of children, but they all seemed to have been taken from the windows of Haglund’s Stick. Spring, summer, autumn and winter. Children skating on Medborgarplatsen’s artificial ice rink. Children running through the rain on their way from the cineplex. Children playing with hula hoops in the summer sunshine. Children skateboarding between dirty piles of snow. Children with little paper flags, on their way from the McDonald’s on the Götgatan – Folkungagatan crossroads. Children, children, children. And most of the photographs were fantastic. Beautiful pictures of children. They gave off a palpable affection for the existential form of children. In its own right. She felt deeply surprised.

They were black-and-white photographs, the date printed at the top. It was like a long documentation of the place, seen through a child’s eyes. She thought of the film
Smoke
, where Paul Auster lets Harvey Keitel document his own little corner of the world. There was nothing more to it.

John Andreas Witréus had documented his own sick little corner of the world. With a child’s eyes.

She looked up at the photographs hanging from the clothes line. The most recent date was 7 June. In a jam jar on the toilet seat, there were many more undeveloped films. She took the jar with her, together with a random selection of photographs. She made her way into the kitchen and found a carrier bag into which she put everything. She went back to the bedroom and picked up one of the albums, then back to the living room where she also placed the camera and a couple of the videotapes into the bag.

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.’