To the Top of the Mountain (40 page)

His reaction was important.

Since her conversation with Gunnar, Sara had devoted her time to finding out as much as possible about Nedic’s organisation. The drugs squad had a lot to offer when it came to its structure. The most important new addition was Ljubomir Protic, who had known Rajko Nedic for practically his entire life but had only recently entered the organisation as Nedic’s right-hand man. From the outside, he seemed like the weakest link – but, on the other hand, there was an internal band of friendship that was even stronger.

His reaction was clear. He paled slightly. He tried to maintain his polite, obliging expression, but the colour of his face changed. It was the reaction she had been hoping for.

She turned to the other police officers.

‘Take him with you,’ she said, wandering through the gates of paradise.

Ljubomir was in an interrogation room. It felt strange. Just him and the walls. The moment he blew on them, they would come tumbling down. He knew it. And so he tried to refrain from breathing. It felt as though life was being blown out with each breath.

Eventually, there was almost nothing left.

He had been there for two hours now. No one had been in to see him, but he knew that someone was watching him. From somewhere within. And by this point, the great man would surely know where he was. He couldn’t really see any kind of future.

He remembered what the great man had drilled into him. A rule book to use in the event of a confrontation with the police. Always be polite and obliging. Deny everything with an expression of regret. Be aware of yourself and the smallest of expressions. Don’t say a single unnecessary word.

The great man had already made it clear to him that he was seen as a security risk. He knew roughly what he would be thinking by this point. Two hours with the police. He’s already told them everything he knows. Good job he doesn’t know anything.

But the great man didn’t know
which
police unit he was with. The paedophile police. And he really did know
everything
about that.

The door opened and the short-haired policewoman came in. Finally. She seemed so unassuming. Young. Having your life shattered by a young woman wasn’t so unusual after all, despite everything. And now she had been gathering her aces. Would he be able to keep calm – if
that place
was brought up?

She brought it up immediately.

Sara Svenhagen placed a pile of papers on the table and said: ‘By this point, he’ll think you’ve told us everything, right? Which means your life isn’t worth much. So you might as well tell us everything. About his paedophile den with the golden soundproofed walls, for example.’

‘Do you really think it’s that easy to crack the organisation?’ Ljubomir asked, sounding like he was reeling off a line he’d learned by heart. ‘Don’t you think it’s stronger than that?’

‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘When it comes to the drugs. Then it’s practically impossible to bring down. All the safety locks are still in place there. But this isn’t about the drugs. It’s about the
back route
into the organisation. Via Rajko Nedic’s sexual escapades.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sara,’ said Ljubomir. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Of course not. What do you think about child pornography, Ljubomir? What do you think of small girls’ vaginas, split to the navel by broken Coca-Cola bottles? What do you think of five-year-old boys whose anuses are so ruptured that the shit just runs straight out of them?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Ljubomir, staring at her.

‘I’m going to show you hundreds of pictures of your employer in such situations, and you’re going to look at every single one of them, even it it means pinning your eyelids to your forehead. Do you understand?’

Ljubomir looked at the young woman with the cropped hair. He could see her determinedness and knew that it was over. He would fight it, but only because it was ingrained in him that he should fight. But it was over. He would start to cry. He would be forced to go to
that place
and see everything he’d been turning away from his entire life. It would all collapse in on him. He knew that when he looked into Sara Svenhagen’s eyes. And he knew she could see it.

‘Rajko Nedic, using the pseudonym “brambo”, has been particularly active in online paedophile circles. It’s only now that we’ve managed to identify him. In practice, he’s already out of the game. It would be good if you could tell us more, Ljubomir. What happened? Was he already a paedophile when you came to Sweden, two youths with the world at their fingertips? Was there something in his childhood that made him into what he is?’

‘I want a lawyer,’ said Ljubomir.

‘You wanted one two hours ago, too. The same applies now: you can’t. The only thing you can do is look at these pictures. Your employer put them online. He’s the most careful leader there is when it comes to the drugs trade, but he’ll happily share pictures of his penis inside small children with the world. I’ve been working with paedophiles for a long time, much too long, but this strange, almost overpowering desire to share their perversions is something I’ll never understand. It undoes all their caution.’

She pushed the pile of pictures towards him. He looked at it, and closed his eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Well, you’re going to.’

She held up the first picture.

It was
her
.

Of course, it was
her
right away.

It went on and on and on, and though he was crying, it went on and on. All were of
her
.

He fell to pieces. He couldn’t do it. He slumped forward onto the interrogation-room table, his tears spilling onto the printouts, causing the colours to run onto the table in one big mess, covering his face. When he looked up he was a clown, a sobbing, colourful clown.

‘I could’ve stopped it,’ he wept. ‘She came to me each time. After every single time, she came to me, sat on my knee and called me “Uncle Jubbe”; crying and crying, beyond tears, just staring at me without tears, unable to say a word because she had no words for it, and every time, I thought: this has to be the last time, otherwise I’ll have to kill the bastard, but I didn’t do it, I didn’t do anything at all. I just looked away as she sat on my knee and said “Uncle Jubbe” but really meant “Help me, Uncle Jubbe, something’s happening and I don’t understand it and you’re so kind and you can help me.” But I wasn’t kind, I was the worst of the worst, because I turned a blind eye and saw nothing.’

Sara Svenhagen closed her eyes for a moment, thinking wordlessly. She handed a tissue to Ljubomir Protic. He dried his eyes and looked down at the mix of colours on the paper. It looked like a paradise garden.

‘Who is “she”?’ asked Sara Svenhagen.

Ljubomir looked at her through the haze, wronged.

‘Sonja, of course,’ he said. ‘My little Sonja.’

‘And Sonja is . . .?’

‘Rajko’s daughter. His
daughter
, for Christ’s sake.’

‘And that’s her in these pictures?’

Ljubomir grimaced. Then he nodded.

‘How old is Sonja Nedic now? Twenty?’

‘Yes,’ said Ljubomir. ‘Exactly twenty.’

‘What kind of life does she live?’

‘She’s got her own car and her own flat. Studying maths at university. She tried to kill herself a year ago. Slashed her wrists. Lengthways. She almost died. But lately, whenever I’ve seen her in the house, she’s seemed happier. I remember thinking: I hope she’s found someone now, someone who can make her happy, who can give her a bit of the childhood she never had. I really hope so.’

‘Can you give us anything else?’

‘Rajko had the same childhood. I know, because I sat with him in the same way. As a child. In the little mountain village in eastern Serbia. Failed to comfort him in the same way. That’s why we left. To get away from it all. He thought he could leave his past behind and become someone else. But as soon as Sonja arrived, it returned. He started repeating his father’s actions. And I just sat there. Again. Jesus. Uncle Jubbe.’

‘What about the rest of the family?’

‘There are two children. He resisted temptation with the son. He’s three years older and involved in the organisation now. But he couldn’t resist Sonja. And the wife ignores it even more than I do. She shops her way out of reality, and Rajko cultivates his garden to create a paradise that he’s never understood.’

‘Other children?’

‘There have been others, too. I don’t know where he gets them from. Now that Sonja’s grown up, there are others. Maybe he buys them.’

‘Anything else?’

‘It’s too late now. I’ll tell you everything I know, Sara. You seem to be a capable woman, but I should tell you that I don’t actually know very much. I can start with his “security consultants”. Two disgusting Swedes, former policemen. From the Security Service. They’re called Gillis Döös and Max Grahn.’

‘You can tell the rest to the drugs squad. They’re waiting outside. What I want to know is where his paedophile den is. The flat with the soundproofed walls, covered in golden cushions.’

Ljubomir smiled slightly behind his smeared, coloured mask.

‘He’s there now,’ he said. ‘In
that place
.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sara Svenhagen exclaimed. ‘And you didn’t say anything?!’

‘No, no,’ said Ljubomir. ‘It has another function now, that flat. Nothing to do with children.’

Sara breathed out. She said: ‘And where is it?’

‘By Hornstull. Hornsgatan 131. Four flights up. It has the name Ahlström on the door. But he has at least five men with him, so be careful, Sara. They’ve got lots of weapons.’

She nodded, looking at the man in front of her. Something had lit up in his eyes. Things which had been shut off and sealed up for years had been let out. Maybe he had, in some small way, repaid a tiny, tiny part of the debt to Sonja Nedic. His little Sonja.

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

Now Ljubomir could die in peace.

He was Uncle Jubbe again.

And now he was – finally – doing something about it.

43

PAUL HJELM HAD
killed.

He had been shot.

Seeming to be at death’s door, Kerstin Holm had said that she loved him.

Each of these things had been enough to change his life. He was forced to repress the whole lot in order to be able to take up the role of interrogator.

Hultin had allocated the roles, after all.

‘Bloody typical that Kerstin should go and get shot just now,’ he said gruffly. ‘You can take Jorge with you. The two of you can look after the interrogations of Kullberg and Petrovic.’

And so it came to pass that the former heroes became authorised interrogators.

Jorge Chavez had panicked during the firefight.

He had been given a slap by Hultin.

He had built strange walls between him and the woman he had recently fallen in love with.

These were also enough for a couple of metamorphoses. And these, too, had to be repressed.

They entered the interrogation room in an isolated area of the police station. Inside, a short but broad man was sitting, a gap in his teeth, eyebrow taped up and bruises on his face. He smiled sardonically at them.

‘Look who it is,’ said Agne “Bullet” Kullberg. ‘The crybaby.’

Chavez felt ill at ease. He sat down. Hjelm remained standing for a moment, looking at Kullberg. Trying to get a handle on him. Repressing the constant, nagging pain in his arm.

‘You’ve got a tough old bastard as a boss, though,’ Bullet continued.

‘Yup, Agne,’ said Hjelm. ‘We noticed that you were crying, that you were sick down the barrel of the gun. If we’re talking about crybabies.’

He sat down. The opening had been equalised. Now it was what followed that counted. Bullet seemed slightly deflated. He looked down at the table.

‘We need to know what Niklas Lindberg is planning,’ said Hjelm calmly.

‘You’ve been going on about that for a while now,’ Bullet said to the table. ‘But I don’t bloody know. We were after the ten million kronor. That was the only plan I had in mind.’

‘So it was a normal robbery then, Agne? Without any ideological overtones?’

‘Yeah, it was about the money. Nothing else.’

‘Tell us about that tracking device, Agne.’

‘Don’t call me Agne all the time.’

‘I promise, Agne. Tell us now.’

‘Well, down in Sickla we got a quick look at the radio before the briefcase vanished. There was a piece of paper with the frequency on it. Using the type of radio and the frequency, I could put together a device to find the little tracking signal that kind of radio always puts out. We found a couple of signals early on and followed it along the E4. Then it disappeared. We kept driving down to Skåne anyway, ’til we realised that the briefcase must’ve disappeared somewhere on the way. Probably westwards. So we started making our way north. And in Trollhättan we found the signal again. And in Falköping. And then Skövde was logical. It was beeping the whole time there. We just had to follow it right into the hotel room.’

‘Shouldn’t you use your talents for something more sensible?’

‘I’m hoping to get the chance to do more training in Kumla. Then I’ll be really honourable.’

‘Why did you steal so much on your way through western Sweden?’

‘Why not? We stole everything we came across because it was there. No other reason. We’re robbers and we were looking for money – and as long as the briefcase was missing, we had to make do with small change. A man’s got to live, after all.’

‘Not necessarily. Lots of people died along the way, Agne. You don’t seem to be missing your mates.’

‘They weren’t my mates. They were colleagues.’

‘And Lindberg?’

‘A good leader. Nothing more. A hell of a physique on that man.’

‘Practically all of your colleagues in the gang were organised right-wing extremists. Are you telling us there was no ideological motive behind it?’

‘I’m not an organised right-wing extremist.’

‘But you’re a member of a shooting club with other, known right-wing extremists, Agne. Among them a couple of shady colleagues of ours. People who’ve attracted attention in connection with the Palme murder.’