It became quiet in the room. Eventually, Hannu said, “Then Rebecka is still in danger.”
“I’m afraid so. The murderer can’t know if Sten or Jacob had time to reveal anything to her. She seemed to feel a great deal of anguish and she was very frightened.”
“But why can’t the chick spit out what she knows?” Fredrik asked.
“Rebecka is a private person. Maybe she has no idea what it’s all about. Maybe she has a faint idea but doesn’t want to admit it to herself, suppressing everything that’s threatening. Maybe she’s in denial. I don’t know.”
“If the murderer took the time to destroy the hard drives, then he may have also destroyed the diskettes or removable disks. But maybe he still has them, so he can use the information they contain. Maybe they’re hidden somewhere in the area,” Fredrik suggested.
“Or they’re with the murderer,” Hannu added.
It would have been meaningless to destroy the hard drives and leave any removable disks. All the important information that was on the hard drives would also have been backed up, unless they had neglected this step. Had they? Not everyone was conscientious enough to back up their data.
“Could we have missed a place in the houses where you can hide discs or diskettes?” Irene asked, without much hope.
“Hardly. The houses have been gone over with a magnifying glass. Remember, the technicians found the hiding place behind the panel in the cottage,” Fredrik answered.
“The hiding place, yes. . Rebecka said that was used as a kind of safe. Who needs a safe in a cottage?” Irene asked.
“Maybe they feared a break-in. Break-ins at summer cottages are rising astronomically,” the superintendent muttered.
“But it wasn’t that far to the rectory. Why did they need a hiding place for important things at the cottage?” Irene persisted.
“Maybe he needed to hide the bottles from the wife,” Fredrik suggested.
“But according to Rebecka, everyone in the family knew about the hiding place.”
“What’s the guy like?” Hannu asked. A certain confusion arose until they concluded that he meant Christian Lefévre.
“A John Lennon lookalike who’s a thoughtful employer. He’s very worried about Rebecka. Overprotective. He’s tried to keep the police away from her. Having met Rebecka, I now understand him better. She really is in bad shape,” said Irene.
“Is it possible that she’s pretending to be sicker than she really is?” Andersson asked, with a hint of interest in his voice.
“No. She’s terribly ill. And Dr. Fischer told Gl. . Inspector Thompson that he had begun treating her for depression last fall. He seems to be a well-known doctor. Nice office.”
“And Lefévre and Rebecka don’t seem to have something going on?” Fredrik wondered.
“No. Not that I could tell.”
“Irene has to go back,” Hannu said, looking at the superintendent.
Andersson turned red. “That’s not possible. Do you know what it costs?”
“Rebecka holds the answer,” Hannu said.
“Possibly. But we’ll wait. She’s too damn sick to help us, according to Irene.”
Irene decided it was appropriate to break into the conversation. “I’ve spoken with the pastor at the Swedish Seaman’s Church in London. He promised to get in touch when Rebecka improves.”
“Then we wait until then,” Andersson concluded.
IT TOOK quite a while before Irene managed to get ahold of the right person. The one who had been most involved in the investigation was on Easter vacation in Idre but after a good deal of wandering about the telephone exchange, she was able to speak with an officer named Lisa Sandberg. Irene introduced herself and explained the reason for her call.
“My question, then, is what kind of work Rebecka Schyttelius and Christian Lefévre did for you at Save the Children.”
“It’s no secret from the police, even if I don’t want you to spread it around. There are probably a lot of people who would like to see Schyttelius’s and Lefévre’s heads on a platter,” Lisa Sandberg said seriously.
“The information will remain confidential. Only the investigation team will learn of it,” Irene assured her.
“Okay. What happened was that, out of sheer luck, we received a tip about a network of pedophiles who were spreading child pornography on the Internet. They had created a Web community, which is like a closed club, on the Internet. We traced them but didn’t have the ability to get into their archives of pictures and films.
“Then someone in our group mentioned Rebecka Schyttelius and that she worked with a very clever guy. They had done similar jobs for the WHO. We contacted Rebecka, and she and her partner came here. We gave them all the information we had, and they went back to London and started to work from there. They were able to get access to the group without being discovered. It turned out that there were fifty-seven people, from all over Scandinavia, in the community. They had a bulletin board and a chat site where they met at certain times and discussed pictures and fantasies. This is the largest child pornography ring ever identified in the Nordic region.”
“I remember reading about it in the paper last winter. There were a lot of people who one wouldn’t have suspected would ever be arrested for something like that.”
“A professor of comparative literature who was about to retire, a female municipal commissioner who was a mother of four, a famous Danish furniture designer. . Well, there were a lot of surprises. But that’s what we learned from this investigation: It’s never possible to predict who’s going to be obsessed with child pornography.”
“How were you able to identify all of these people?”
“It was very difficult. Everyone used nicknames and anonymous E-mail addresses. It was Rebecka’s and Christian’s work that made it possible to locate so many.”
“Was it possible to identify all of them?”
“No. Five remained unidentified: two in Sweden, two in Norway, and one in Denmark.”
“What were the ‘names’ of the ones in Sweden?”
“Peter and Pan.”
“Were Peter and Pan connected? It almost sounds that way. Peter Pan.”
“No. We also thought that, but we found nothing to support it.”
“So Rebecka and Christian made their way into this group, and then revealed the identities of those involved?”
“Yes. They followed the group’s activities for a few months and collected evidence. For example, they found out when, where, and how the E-mail addresses had been used in connection with other activities on the Web. They systematically revealed who had hidden themselves behind nicknames. If I understood it correctly, they traced them through the computer. I guess there’s something called an IP address number. . I’m not very good when it comes to the technological aspect.”
“No, I understand. That’s why you asked Rebecka and Christian for help.”
“Yes. They did a fantastic job. The pictures and films are of the worst kind and show violent assaults on children. A grown man having sexual intercourse with a three-month old baby; small girls and boys only five or six years old being raped in front of the camera; and so on. The network held visual documentation of thousands of sexual assaults on children. You could say that the admission ticket to the club was that you submitted your own pictures or films to the archive.
“We’re in the process of trying to identify the children. It’s a difficult job. The pictures came from all over the world. All of us who have seen them have been sickened. They’re terrible images, and I’ve had problems sleeping and sometimes felt depressed-for no immediate reason-after viewing them. I realize that it’s the terrible pictures that pop up in my head that are affecting me.”