Bengt Söderlund woke early. Two weeks of holiday left. The days were precious now. He had only slept for a few hours every night during the previous week. Only when he kept busy did he have a chance to forget that Elisabeth and the girl had gone and that he didn't even know where they were. At first he had hardly been off the phone, trying her parents and friends and mates from her old job, but no one had seen her. Once that was clear, he didn't bother with telling them why he asked. He wouldn't have any of these buggers laughing at him, no way.
They had agreed to meet at half past nine. He snapped his fingers and Baxter came running to his side. Only a few minutes to go, so he checked at the sitting-room window and there they were, Ove and Helena, Ola and Klas.
They said hello, shook hands, that's how they'd been greeting each other since they were quite young. That's how you did it in Tallbacka.
His garden shed was large and easily seen from Flasher-Göran's windows, so he would see them go inside, and wonder what they were up to. He could stick his wondering up his arse. In the shed Bengt had lined up, end to end, his two tried and trusted sawing-horses, made of long, sturdy planks supported by angled legs. Ove and Klas brought a large plastic sack each, filled with empty glass bottles, in total forty, about half of them for wine, three quarters of a litre capacity, and half for mineral water, 33cc capacity.
They lined up the bottles on the sawing horses and Ove got the lid off the oil drum in the corner behind the lawn mower. It was full to the brim with petrol. He lowered a can under the surface to fill it, watching the bubbles rise. Dribbling petrol as he went, he walked over to the row of bottles, where Helena was waiting with a large plastic funnel in her hand. Ola filled the first bottle to the halfway mark. They moved on to the next bottle; she held the funnel in place, he poured in petrol until the bottle was half full. They carried on like that until all the bottles were done and they had used up over twenty litres of petrol.
Meanwhile, Bengt had spread out an old sheet over the wood basket and used his knife to cut it systematically into forty strips, roughly thirty by thirty centimetres. He pushed a rolled-up strip into the top of each bottle, so that only a small head of cloth protruded.
Then they all set to, placing the filled and stoppered bottles tidily into a big box and making sure that they fitted in securely. A small box with ten cigarette lighters, two each in case one went bust, was put next to the big one.
It hadn't taken them that long. There was still an hour or two to go before noon.
Fredrik was sitting in the centre of the court. His eyes were closed. He wanted to look around but he
Lars Ågestam (LÅ): Steffansson murdered Bernt Lund without a trace of compassion and concern about the other man's life. There are, to my mind, no mitigating circumstances. I will therefore plead that the court recognises his responsibility for this act by sentencing him to a lifetime prison term.
couldn't find the strength to. This was the fifth and last day, and he wanted to be back in the cell and
Kristina Björnsson (KB): Fredrik Steffansson was watching outside the nursery school. He knew that if he did not shoot Bernt Lund, two more little girls would have been sexually violated and killed. We even know who they were.
piss in the washbasin, just as usual, that was all there was. This room was packed with people, all around him, making him feel so bloody lonely.
He remembered how he had felt the first Christmas after Agnes had left him, a few weeks before he met Micaela for the first time. He had not kept track of the passing days, just kept doing the things one must do, so that Christmas Eve turned up unexpectedly. He had tried to get rid of it but failed, so by five o'clock in the afternoon, when it was totally dark outside, he had gone out and tried to have a drink in one of the few Stockholm pubs that were still open. He'd never forget the people holed up in there, isolated in their communal solitude. The atmosphere was so bitter and dull that he found it hard to breathe and staying on was almost unbearable until the programme called Jonsson's Christmas started up on the telly over the bar and became a focal point, which they could gather round for half an hour. The programme was about them somehow, so they had laughed and warmth had enveloped them all for a while, until the evening had suddenly passed, one more for the road and a last cigarette, and then everyone had gone home to his or her scruffy, fusty digs.
He could look around the court now. Now, as then, he was surrounded by strangers, all sucked into a system they didn't truly understand, but which made them feel cheated of their future. Take the prosecutor,
LÅ: According to the criminal law, third chapter, paragraph 1, whoever takes the life of another shall be convicted of murder and sentenced to a prison term, which must exceed ten years and may extend to a life term.
who demanded a life sentence, or the defence lawyer,
KB: According to the criminal law, twenty-fourth chapter, paragraph 1 , an act which is in self-defence or in defence of others and uses reasonable force is a crime only if, in view of the nature of the attack, the intent and significance of what is attacked and other relevant circumstances, it is self-evidently indefensible.
who pleaded reasonable force, or the magistrates, who seemed not to be listening most of the time, or of course the journalists and court recorders, who sat behind him, writing away and drawing and memorising, all stuff which he wasn't allowed to see; he would not learn who they were or what kind of reality they represented. Furthest back was the public, the audience he supposed, there to satisfy their collective curiosity, something he detested them for, their hunger for thrills; they were rubbing their hands with glee at having got close enough, actually being free in real life to stare at the dad-whose-little-girl-was-murdered-so-he- shot-the-murderer.
LÅ: Mr Steffansson planned the murder of Bernt Lund over a period of four days. In other words, it was a premeditated act and he did have sufficient time to reconsider. According to his own statement, Steffansson regarded the killing of Lund as equivalent to eliminating a mad dog.
He didn't want to see them and avoided turning round, they ate him, tore the flesh of his face and burrowed inside his mind. Micaela was there and he wanted to show her something, say something, so he had turned a few times to look for her,
KB: Reasonable force is defined as that used when facing threats with regard to life, health, property or other judicially understood interests, in self-defence or in defence of others. We believe it self-evident that the lives of two little girls were endangered and that Fredrik Steffansson, by acting as he did, saved two young lives
but he feared the eyes fastened on him and the noses sniffing for his scent and so he avoided reminding them and her that he was somebody with something to say.
Hours passed as he sat there, facing forward, eyes closed, refusing to listen. He had seen Marie stuck in a bag on a trolley in the forensic place. Her face had been beautiful, her chest taped together, and her genitals pierced and cut to pieces, and her feet were much too clean, and bore traces of saliva. He, who spoke against, and she, who talked for, had both asked him questions and he had replied, but it was unreal, meaningless.
Only the little girl in the body bag meant anything to him.
The summer was dying slowly. The heat that had ruled for so many weeks was dissolving and being replaced by cooler air, until it seemed only a distant memory. People started complaining when the showers merged into days of rain, claimed that they felt the cold, something that recently had been simply unthinkable. As the damp infiltrated the layers of sweaters and thick trousers, the newspapers gave up on the dad who shot the paedophile and ran headlines about how elderly Germans, who could read fish entrails and foretell the weather, had insisted that conditions this autumn and winter would be dire.