Now. Now!
He should tell her now. Then it would have been said. She had every right to know. Others didn't, but she did. It was so simple. A couple of minutes, a few sentences, that was all. They could finish their breakfasts, leave for their daily work. He would return home that night freed from having to hide it. He put the spoon down, drank the last of the yoghurt straight from the container.
Lennart took pride in his work at Aspsås prison. He held a senior post, chief officer in charge of a unit, and had ambitions to advance further. He took every opportunity for study leave, joined every course, reckoned you had to show willing, and he did, in the knowledge that somewhere, someone was taking notes.
Seven years ago he had taken over the running of one of Aspsås's two units for sex offenders. His working life had become focused on people locked up for violating those whom they had been charged to protect. These men had broken the strongest taboo left in society, they were outcasts; he was responsible for them and for the staff who were employed to care as well as to punish. Punishing and trying to understand, this was what they were meant to do, care and punish and remain aware of the difference. His views were his own, he felt what he felt, but he did show willing, and someone, somewhere, kept notes on his progress.
At the same time his bloody awful secret had started growing. How he wished he could tell. The outcome couldn't be any worse than now, when the betrayal lived inside his marriage and made every word he and Karin exchanged suspect, filthy.
He got up, picked up the dirty dishes and stacked the dishwasher. Wiped the table, rinsed the cloth.
He wore a blue uniform. Officers' uniforms looked the same throughout the Swedish prison service, rather like a cab driver's outfit. He dressed for work in the kitchen: trousers, tie, shirt. Meanwhile he hoped that Karin and he would exchange a few words, about anything as long as it stopped him feeling so bloody hypocritical.
'Look at the weather, Lennart. It's windy outside. They say it'll stay like this all day. You need your gloves.'
Karin came close to him and stroked his cheek. He pressed his face against her hand, rubbed against it, needing the contact. She was so beautiful. He wished she knew.
'It's not cold yet. And I've only got a few hundred metres to go.'
'You know that's not the point. You'll regret it afterwards, when your joints start hurting.'
She held out his leather gloves. He put them on. Kissed her, first her lips, then her shoulder. Put on his jacket and stepped outside, looked across to Aspsås. It was only two minutes' stroll away. Its grey concrete wall dominated the village.
When Åke Andersson climbed out of the driver's seat, he was propelled by an emotion different from anything he had felt before. His rage, his damned hatred, had overwhelmed him.
He had taken a lot of crap from prisoners for thirty years, hated them but stayed in control, silently driven them from police cells to courts, from hospitals to prisons. He had ferried the lowlife but left the talking to his mates, just kept his eyes on the road and minded his own business. But that fucking beast was too bloody fucking much.
Åke had nearly lost it last time he had had to transfer that animal, knowing that he was holed up in the back of the van, knowing about the tortures he'd carried out, what the girls had looked like when he'd finished with them. Afterwards, his sneering grin and utter callousness haunted Åke's dreams, the crimes were replayed over and over again, throughout the nights; one bad morning he didn't get to the loo in time and threw up in the hall, as if his enforced control had congealed and swelled his stomach until there was no more room.
It was that third 'cunt' coming through the hatch that tore it. Åke lost his grip, had no idea what he should do next, no sense of duty left. He couldn't answer for the consequences now; his mind was filling with images of the little girls, their cut-up genitals, they'd been tortured with a pointed metal object. His big body hurled itself towards the back door of the van.
Ulrik Berntfors had driven Lund once before, that was all, on the second day of the girls-in-the-basement trial. He'd been new to the job and the trial was the biggest he'd been involved in, lots of journalists and photographers crowding the reserved seats. Two nine-year-old girls; it pulled at the heartstrings and sold newspapers. He was ashamed of his reaction at the time, he hadn't really thought about the girls, not understood, had been too inexperienced. He had simply felt special, almost proud, as he walked along at Lund's side. But afterwards his own daughter asked him why Lund had killed the two girls, why he'd wanted to destroy them. She was only a year older than the victims and had read every piece of news carefully, formulating questions for her dad, who knew the man who had done it and had walked next to him, as seen on TV, lots of times. Of course he couldn't answer her, but understanding was dawning on him. His daughter's fears and her questions had taught him more about his job than any course he had attended.
Åke hated, Ulrik knew that. Not that they'd ever talked about it, but it hadn't been hard to work out. And maybe one day Ulrik would too, when scum like Lund had screamed 'cunt' at him once too often. He had done the person-to- person contacts, so far. Someone had to. Driving these people was a job. But when Lund shouted 'cunts' for the third time, he realised that this was it. He knew, from the moment Andersson got up.
Maybe if he kept observing the steps leading up to the Casualty door, he wouldn't have to see whatever was going on. If it came to an inquiry, he didn't want to have to lie.
The area in front of Casualty was quiet, no parked cars, no people. That's what Åke said afterwards, adding that even if it hadn't been so deserted, even if other people had been about and able to watch what he did, he probably wouldn't have noticed. Running to the back of the bus, rage and hatred blinkered him.
He pulled the door open. The handle was small. His hand was made on the same scale as the rest of him and it was hard to push it in between metal and metal.
Then everything went horribly wrong.
Bernt Lund was screaming 'cunt, cunt' over and over, in a high falsetto voice. He hit out with the chains gripped in one hand, the long chains that ran under his clothing, linking handcuffs, leg-irons and belt. Åke didn't have time to see, to take in what was happening, as the heavy iron links tore into his face and ripped it open. He fell to the ground and Lund leapt out of the van, swinging the chains against the fallen man's head and face until his victim passed out. Then he used his boots, kicking belly, kidneys, crotch, kicking and kicking until the tall guard lay quite still.
Ulrik had kept staring straight ahead. Åke was taking his time beating the hell out of the nonce. Lund was still screaming 'cunt'; he could obviously take a lot. Then Ulrik began to feel bad about it. Åke had been at it for too long, enough now for Christ's sake, or things might go seriously wrong. When he opened the door to climb out and stop him from causing some kind of emergency, Lund moved in. Using a long chain he broke the window, hit Ulrik in the face, pulled him outside and kept hitting. All Ulrik remembered afterwards was the hellish screeching voice and the moment Lund pulled his trousers down to hit his exposed penis with the chain, screaming that he would have buggered them if they hadn't been such big bastards. Too big for him, only little whores would take him inside, only small arses were good enough.
The distance between his front door and the steel gate leading to his place of work was 180 paces. Lennart Oscarsson counted them almost every time. Once he'd done the distance in 161 paces, his record. It was a few years ago, when he was really fit. Until the assault he used to train with the inmates in the gym. Then, early one morning, someone beat a sex offender to pulp with dumbbells and barbells. The medic had said the marks were clear and easy to identify. No one had known the first thing about the incident, of course. Not one single fucking soul had noticed that a human being was being clubbed, presumably screaming his head off, unseen and unheard, until the final darkness fell. The weight-training area was awash with blood afterwards, yet apparently no one had the faintest idea why. For a long time afterwards he didn't go there. Not because he was frightened; nobody was quite cretinous enough to risk a new round of sentencing just to get even with a boss. It wasn't fear, it was disgust, he couldn't bear being in a room where one of the men in his charge had been robbed of his right to a life.