'Hello there,' he said finally.
They shook hands quickly, Sven was introduced and the three of them started walking together towards the main entrance. Bergh was in the guard's post and nodded at Ewert, a familiar face. Sven was different.
'Where do you think you're going?'
Lennart turned back.
'Come on, Bergh. He's with me. City Police,' he said irritably.
'I've no notification.'
'They're investigating Lund's escape.'
'None of my business. Unlike who gets in here, which is. So why no notification, then?'
Sven intervened, just in time to stop Oscarsson from shouting something he'd regret later.
'Look, here's my ID. OK?'
Bergh studied the mug shot and entered Sven's ID number in the database.
'Hey, it's your birthday today. What are you doing here, mate?'
'Never mind. Are you letting me in?'
Bergh waved him through and they filed into the corridor. Ewert laughed.
'What a tosser! Why do you keep such an idiot around? He makes it harder to get in than out of this place.'
His mood changed as they walked along the regulation passageways with their regulation murals. Some showed a bit more talent than others; all were would-be therapeutic projects led by hired consultants. He sighed. Always blue background, always the obvious symbolism of open gates and birds flying free and more liberation shit of that sort. Organised graffiti for grown-ups, signed Benke Lelle Hinken Zoran Jari The Goat 1987.
Lennart opened a metal door. Inside, a noisy gang of inmates were being escorted to the gym by two officers in front and two behind. Ewert sighed again. He knew quite a few of the villains, had interrogated them or testified against them. There were even a couple of ancient lags that he had run in during his days on the beat.
'Hi there, Grensie. On the chase, are you?'
It was Stig Lindgren, one of the inhabitants of the World of Outcasts. He was a permanent fixture behind the walls and would never survive anywhere else. Lock him up and throw the key away, the old fucker had no other options. Ewert had grown fed up with his type.
'Shut your gob, Lindgren, or I'll tell your useless mates why you're called Dickybird.'
Then upstairs to A Unit, sex offenders only.
Lennart walked ahead, Ewert and Sven followed, looking about. Regulation stuff again: television corner, snooker table, kitchen, cells. But the crimes were different in that they aroused as much hatred in the World of Outcasts as among ordinary citizens.
They reached cell number eleven. Alone among the others in the corridor this door was bare. The temporary occupants of the rooms behind all the other doors had decorated them laboriously with posters and newspaper cuttings and photos.
Ewert had time to think that he should have been here six months ago. He should have stepped inside the door to Lund's cell. At the time he had been investigating a child pornography ring, which had given him his first real insight into the closed society of new-style paedophiles, structured round internet connections and databases and secret mail addresses. He had seen their images of naked or partly undressed children, penetrated and humiliated children, tortured children, lonely children. Initially, he and his colleagues had thought that this pornography exchange was part of a foreign network of dark vice and profit and inscrutable agreements, but it turned out differently, more discreet, smarter and more challenging.
Just seven men, a select society of serious, recidivist sex offenders. One locked up, most of them just released from prison.
They had created their own virtual display cabinet. Their contributions to the show were downloaded on the net and run on their computers at set times, as if following a performance schedule. Once a week, same time, Saturday, at eight o'clock. They sat in front of their screens, waiting for that week's images, and every week their demands escalated. Next time must somehow offer more than last time; naked children had been enough but not any more, children sitting still had to start moving and touching each other. Then touching wasn't enough; the children had to be raped, then raped more viciously. The next set of photographs must score more highly than the previous lot, at any cost. Seven paedophiles, a closed circle, showing off their own crimes in their own neatly scanned and formatted pictures.
They had been at it for almost a year before they were caught.
All the time they had been competing with each other, running qualifying heats in child pornography.
Bernt Lund had been one of the seven. He was the only one in prison, the only one who could solely contribute photos that had been taken in the past, but his crimes meant that his high status was beyond dispute, as was his right to join the ring.
When the ring was broken, three of the others were convicted and sent off to serve fairly long prison sentences. A fourth, a man called Håkan Axelsson, was being tried, but the remaining two had not been charged because the evidence was so patchy. Everyone knew about them but that was neither here nor there; the 'not proven' classification was sufficient to free them. And so they were free to recruit new child porn contacts in the shadowy marketplace that had grown up around the investigation.
There were lots of them out there. For each one down, there was one ready to go.
Ewert was cursing himself. He should have inspected Lund's cell then. But the police had been constantly pushed for time, always under media pressure, invariably targets for public outrage. He had felt too harassed to visit Aspsås himself and had sent two junior colleagues to interrogate Lund, whose cell had been stacked to the ceiling with his illegal handiwork. Mostly CDs with thousands of pictures showing tormented children. It was all very bad, and conclusive enough, but if he had gone himself he would have picked up more about the man. Maybe he wouldn't have been at such a loss now that Lund had got ahead of them.
Lennart unlocked the door.
'There. All yours. Tidy is one word for it.'
Ewert and Sven stepped inside and then stopped. Despite its standardised ordinariness – about eight square metres, one window, the usual furnishings – the room was very odd indeed. Full of objects, all lined up, as if for an exhibition. Candlesticks, stones, pieces of wood, pens, bits of string, items of clothing, folders, batteries, books, notebooks, all were arranged in lines stretching along the floor, across the bedspread, the windowsill, the shelves. Each object was separated from the next by what looked like exactly two centimetres. It made Ewert think of an unending row of dominoes, upright until one piece is moved out of place and it's all over.
Ewert's diary had a small ruler marked along its edge. He aligned it with a row of stones. Two centimetres, twenty millimetres exactly, between the stones. The pens on the windowsill were twenty millimetres apart. On the shelves, the books were twenty millimetres apart too, and the same went for the bits of string on the floor and between the battery and the notebook and the packet of cigarettes. Everywhere, twenty millimetres.
'Does it always look like this?'
Lennart nodded.
'Yes, it does. Before taking off the bedspread at night he puts the stones on the floor, one by one, measuring the distances as he goes along. In the morning he goes through the whole performance in reverse after he's made the bed and put the bedspread back on.'
Sven moved some of the pens. Dead ordinary biros. The stones were ordinary stones, one more pointless than the next. Plain, empty folders and notebooks.
'This is too much. I don't get it.'
'Nothing to it. What is it you don't get?'
'I don't know. Something. Why? Why does he lick children's feet, for instance?'
'Why do you think it matters to know why?'
'It matters who this guy is, inside. Where he's going, what it's for. But the bottom line is, I want to find the motherfucker so I can go home and eat some cake and drink a glass. Or three.'
'You'll never know what he's like inside. Not a hope, I'm sorry. There's nothing like a reason in any of all this. He doesn't know himself why he licks the feet of his victims, dead or alive. I'm convinced he doesn't have a clue why he lines things up two centimetres apart either.'