Reflected in the screen, she saw a young boy.
She stood up and started wandering around her little flat on Surbrunnsgatan. Was that why she had chopped off her long, golden hair?
To look more like a paedophile victim?
‘What got into your head?’ as Gunnar Nyberg had suddenly blurted out as they drank coffee and basked in the June sun at Annika’s Café & Restaurant.
Yeah, Sara, what got into your head? she asked herself. Identification with the victims? Did your subconscious feel like you were just too far removed from the horrible reality of it all? That you were working from a distance? That the computer, and the incessant access to work it offered, meant that you found yourself in eternal cyberspace? That the computer itself gave the awful reality of paedophilia an air of unreality, and so a redeeming feature?
The distance was great. She herself had had a calm, tranquil, grey, patriarchal childhood in the suburbs, a childhood with a police-related slant. Brynolf, cut from a traditional cloth, had boldly drilled his children not to speak four different languages by the time they were four, to compose symphonies by eight, or be tennis pros by the time they were twelve, but in forensic methods. He would let the children into a room, meticulously cleaned by his wife, get them to look around, and then send them to the toilet where they would wait to be let out. Something in the room would be different when they came back out of the toilet, and the children had to use empirical evidence and logic to work out what. These had actually been the only times that Sara had seen her father truly happy. Otherwise, he was neither good nor bad, neither warm nor mean, just austere. Like an old-fashioned patriarch.
No, the reason she pushed herself so hard couldn’t really be found in her upbringing. Still, she was even less convinced by the genetic explanation. Of course there wasn’t any kind of police gene in her, driving her towards the answers. There wasn’t any compassion gene which meant that she shared the pain of the abused children, either. And of course – even though it was something that was claimed on a daily basis in the context of public debate – there wasn’t any paedophile gene which caused whole family trees of men to expose themselves to children or sniff well-used nappies. A sickness, yes – a grotesquely sick world within a world. Genetic, no – there was no paedophile gene. She refused to believe that.
No, she understood the reason she worked her arse off about as much as she understood why she had suddenly chopped her hair off. The only thing she knew was that she had to keep going, that she had to get to the bottom of things whatever the cost, that she couldn’t let her own or anyone else’s laziness be the reason for any single child being sexually abused, if it could have been prevented. That was her driving force. Every little omission amounted to guilt, and that was why she took on an increasingly superhuman workload. ‘There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now’ was a statement that was more than true.
She had started having a recurring nightmare. It wasn’t something she could share with anyone. Not her boss, the party animal Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg; not with her mentor, the always running Ludvig Johnsson; not even with the new colleague she got on so well with, teddy bear Gunnar Nyberg.
No, she couldn’t share it.
She would never be able to share it.
It’s night. A woman is lying in a faintly lit hospital room. She’s alone. Her face is in darkness. Only her large stomach is illuminated. It’s as though it’s glowing with its very own internal light. She can almost see something moving inside, she imagines she can see life itself. The sanctity of life. She strokes her stomach gently. Suddenly, it’s no longer glowing. The delicate flame of life goes out. A shadow falls over her. At the same time, she feels a prolonged spasm of pain. She tries to cry out, but can’t. She has no voice. Just the shadow which turns into a body, into a man, a penis. The pain increases, turns into one long contraction. And at the same time, the exact same time, the shadow forces its way into her. She’s raped while she’s giving birth. That alone would be enough to make her die several times over, but it isn’t enough. The next insight is worse. It’s not her he’s after. She’s just an instrument, an obstacle that needs to be overcome on the way. And then, just as his penis reaches the child, just as he’s about to achieve that second penetration, she dies.
That’s when she wakes up. At the moment of death.
She closed her eyes.
Where does lunacy start?
When has someone simply seen too much?
She hadn’t even turned thirty yet, but she had seen everything.
An already shaky relationship had been obliterated as soon as she had been promoted and snatched up by Ludvig Johnsson and his paedophile hunters. Since that, there hadn’t been anyone. She didn’t even know if she believed in that kind of tenderness any more. She lived alone. Wanted to live alone.
She stood for a moment by the window facing out onto Surbrunnsgatan. The lights were going on in the building opposite. Private bubble after private bubble was being exposed.
Sara Svenhagen didn’t want to see them.
It was like they weren’t enough.
She returned to the computer, briefly glimpsing the young boy reflected in the screen, switched from the intranet to the Internet and clicked on ‘Favourites’.
In this folder she had saved the addresses of hundreds of paedophile websites, each one worse than the last.
She looked at the clock. Two minutes twelve seconds left.
If it was right. If she really had cracked the code.
It was a Swedish website. She had found out that it existed through the Japanese police force. It revealed itself for ten or so seconds once every other week, before disappearing again without a trace. No policeman had ever been able to get hold of it, but everything indicated that the website was hiding an address book, the addresses of a huge international network of members who sent pictures to one another. If this was right, then an extensive list of addresses would appear on this page which, in turn, would appear at 19.36.07 on Thursday 24 June. In one minute and forty-eight seconds. One click on a website which would be visible for fifteen seconds at most, and the whole list would be downloaded.
The mysterious code had been discovered during a raid on a paedophile in Nässjö. It had ended up with her because it was thought to be uncrackable; she still didn’t have party detective Hellberg’s full confidence. Party-Ragge’s. So she had been working in secret a lot. Never claiming any overtime. Spending hours and hours on cracking the code. And suddenly, she had done it. She thought. She hoped. It was quite a simple code. Once you found the key, the door opened wide. And from the cryptic Nässjö code, a Web address and time point emerged.
Not even Johnsson and Nyberg knew what she was working on.
19.35.40. Twenty-seven seconds.
She was completely motionless, her index finger resting perfectly still on the mouse button. It was now or never, there wouldn’t be a second chance. It would be gone for good.
She could see the vague outline of a stomach, glowing from within.
She had entered the address. Quickly moved the cursor back to where she needed to click. Everything was ready. The clock was counting down. 19.36.00.
Seven, six, five, four, three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
Enter.
Then there it was. The home page. Simple. Impenetrable.
But with one line selected.
She moved the cursor to it. Click.
Save to disk?
Yup.
The hard drive whirred gently. She had it.
And then the page was gone.
Sara Svenhagen leaned back in her chair. She smiled faintly. She could allow herself that.
A large stomach gleamed fluorescent in the darkness.
9