A bright red thing.
A small shoe. A little girl's.
A red, shiny leather shoe, with an eye-catching metal buckle.
They had been walking as fast as they could. She ignored the shooting pains in her knee joints, and when Rune asked if she was all right, she just shook her head, pointing ahead to the fastest short cut, never mind if the going was harder. Better than having time to think about the gathering darkness around them, better than dealing with Rune's worries about her. They had covered almost a kilometre. Not far to the metalled lane and the houses now.
To pass a huge fir they let go of each other, walking round the tree on opposite sides.
She spotted something under the fir's sweeping branches and thought at first that it was a toadstool, prodded it with her foot, lifted it up. Twisting it round in her hands, she understood what it meant and looked around: where is she? Is she still here? The girl?
She didn't scream, only called out; it was no surprise to her after all. She held the red shoe gently and handed it to Rune when he came up to her.
One more morning with the lie lurking in the back of his mind. He had been lying close to her, his hand touching her breasts, belly, thighs, he had kissed the back of her neck, whispered good morning into her ear, all the time doing his best to avoid having to face his betrayal.
Now Lennart Oscarsson was in his office, watching through the window as the prison woke to a new day. Another lovely sunny day, as hot as yesterday, as every day last week. He sighed.
Ever since he had fallen in love with Karin he had been haunted by fantasies about the day when she would ask him to accept that she'd met someone else, and that she was leaving him. Instead it was he whose love of another would break up their shared life. Who'd have believed it? She was beautiful, his looks were quite ordinary. She was outgoing, he was withdrawn. Her personality glittered, his never would. And yet it was he who had put their closeness at risk.
He had to go down to Lund's unit. On the way he nodded to two faces from the groups of trainees, people who wished they'd been placed anywhere but in a sex offender unit for their half-year of learning on the job. They despised their charges, not that he didn't feel the same; they all did, the staff spat at the perverts all the time.
The unit was silent and empty, an abandoned corridor, closed doors. The inmates were in the workshop; all were on work assignments, which is to say they did wood-turning, rings and building bricks to make educational toys, for a couple of kronor per hour. And whatever else was wrong with sex offenders, you had to admit that they trotted off to produce whatever rubbish was demanded of them without a murmur, no pissing about on the whole, unlike the so-called normals, drug-crazed would-be lifers, guys inside for robbery and violence and fraud, non-stop trouble the lot of them, either going on strike or doing a sickie.
He stopped outside cell 11, Bernt Lund's empty cell, let himself in. Lund was still on the loose, halfway through day two. They mostly couldn't cope for long; it took concentration to keep out of sight, always stay watchful, do without sleep, and it also required strength and money. Chased by dozens of policemen, trailed by the public on the alert, the hiding places grew fewer with every breath.
The room with its orderly rows of objects looked the same, except for the pile on the floor. He remembered how Grens, the old maniac, had knocked a lot of stuff off with his diary. The thin bloke, whose fortieth birthday had been ruined, had looked nervously at his colleague and then sighed when Grens aimed and did it again.
The bedspread with its blotchy stripes was already ruffled and Lennart sat down on the bed, then lay down to see what Lund had seen, night after night. What had it been like for him? Had he been wanking with closed eyes, fantasising about little girls? Or had he thought up plans, how to rule and control a child, destroying its naivety the moment he set to work on it? Had he ever tried to empathise with the child's fear and humiliation? What had it been like, living with his guilt in an eight-metre-square cell, alone with it evening, night, morning; it must have threatened to suffocate him until all he could do was run from it, beating two screws senseless to get away.
Someone knocked. Who? The door opened and Bertolsson, the governor, stepped inside.
'Lennart? What on earth are you up to?'
He sat up, tried to smooth his unruly hair.
'I can't really tell. I came here and… I wanted to know what it was like.'
'And?'
'Nothing. None the wiser.'
Bertolsson looked around the cell.
'Christ. What a complete nutter.'
'I think that's it. My new insight. Lund didn't understand a thing. No remorse. He's incapable of seeing any point of view other than his own.'
Bertolsson kicked the piled-up objects on the floor. It didn't fit. Chaos on the floor, total conformity and order everywhere else. Lennart couldn't be bothered explaining.
'Too bad. I've been looking for you because I need to talk to you about another madman. One of Lund's colleagues, as it were. One of the seven in the child porn ring.'
'Who's that?'
'Name of Axelsson. Hakan. Couple of minor past convictions. Sentenced tomorrow in the child pornography case. He'll have to do time, but probably won't get as long a spell as he deserves. Enough to miss out on both Christmas and Easter, though.'
'Where do I come in?'
'He's at Kronoberg now, which means transfer to here, but you haven't got any vacancies.'
Lennart yawned, a big, long yawn, thought for a minute and lay down again.
'I'm sorry. These characters make me tired.'
Bertolsson ignored him.
'That is to say, this cell is empty, but won't be for long. Lund should be back pronto.'
'There you are. Sex crime is quite the fashion. Perverts are queuing up.'
Bertolsson straightened the slats in the blind to let in the bright sunlight. A day was happening out there. It was easy to forget. Inside the institution, specific days did not stand out, one from the other; instead everything congealed into lumps of months, years, into waiting.
'We'll have to place him in one of our normal units. Just for a couple of days, a week at most. Until we find a cell somewhere more appropriate.'
Lennart started to sit up, got halfway, leaned on his elbow and turned towards his boss.
'Arne, what are you saying now?'
'He's not allowed to bring the indictment into the unit anyway.'
'It doesn't fucking well matter. The others will find out and you know what will happen next.'
'Just a few days. No more. Then he'll be transferred.'
Lennart sat up straight.
'Hold it. I know you know. If he is finally transferred anywhere from a normal unit, it will be in an ambulance. No other option.'
It wouldn't smell; he had been here before and he knew that. It didn't help to know. Already on the stairs, his nose, his brain instinctively registered the stench of death.
Sven, as a detective inspector based in Stockholm, had of course visited the Institute of Forensic Medicine more times than he could remember, it was part of his job. He knew he had to turn up, but he also knew that he would never, ever stop hating it, that he would never, ever learn to watch the dead man or woman, human beings who had been breathing, talking and laughing not long before, being opened up and sawn into chunks by a man – almost always a man – in a white coat. The stranger's hands would root around inside the corpse, examine the torn-out innards under bright lights, throw the whole lot back inside the carcass and roughly stitch it together. To cover up what they had done, the corpse on its trolley would be decorously draped, so as not to offend the bereaved who came to inspect it and declare that this was indeed the person they had been living next to, when they had all been full of hope.
