Jeanette reads the titles, and a lot of the films speak for themselves. ‘Photo Lolita’, ‘Little Virgins’, ‘Young Beautiful Teens’, and ‘That’s My Daughter’. One of the films has a Post-it note stuck to it, and Jeanette sees that it says the film shows a girl tied down and assaulted by an animal.
She works out fairly quickly how the archive is categorised. In most cases by the date when the assaults occurred and, when that isn’t known, by the time of seizure. The locations of the seizures remind her of the lists of places in her old school atlas. Obviously the big cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malm?. If the number of sick individuals is constant, then there should be more of them there. Smaller towns such as Link?ping, Falun and G?vle, mixed up with villages she’s never heard of. From north to south, east to west. No community seems too small, too remote or too well-to-do not to contain people with paedophile tendencies.
The names are all male. Shelf after shelf of men’s names. Common surnames like Svensson and Persson, but also a few that sound more aristocratic. Jeanette is struck by the low proportion of foreign names. It may be more common for migrants to beat their children, but they evidently don’t like abusing them sexually, Jeanette thinks, just as she finds a cardboard box labelled KARL LUNDSTR?M.
Almost holding her breath, she lifts the box down onto a table and opens it. Inside she finds about ten films. She reads their labels and sees that several were filmed in Brazil in the eighties, and remembers that Mikkelsen had called them cult films in paedophile circles, but no matter how cult they are, they hold no interest to her and she puts them back.
She tucks the others under her arm and makes her way to the young police officer’s office.
He’s sitting with his back to her. On his screen Jeanette can see a photograph of a bare-chested man standing beside a bed on which lies a naked Asian boy. The man’s face is distorted, and Jeanette thinks it looks like someone’s tried to conceal his identity.
‘Already finished, ready to throw up, or in need of a strong cup of coffee?’ He turns round and gazes at her with a serious expression.
‘All three,’ Jeanette says, looking him in the eye.
‘Kevin, by the way,’ he goes on, holding out his hand. ‘And if you’re wondering, it’s because Mum was crazy about Dances with Wolves. Well, I’m a bit older than that, but she liked Kevin Costner’s earlier films and wanted to give me an original name.’ He pauses, then his face breaks into a broad smile. ‘Mind you, at nursery school there were three Kevins and two Tonys. The one with the most unusual name was Bj?rn.’
‘Really?’ Jeanette realises that the young man is trying to keep the tone light for her sake, presumably to keep her spirits up. But she doesn’t feel up to smiling back.
He clears his throat. ‘I’ll get us some coffee before you go into the viewing suite and suffer a couple of hours of really unpleasant close contact with the worst of humanity. OK?’ He gets up, still smiling, and goes over to a coffee machine in one corner of the room.
‘Thanks, I could do with some,’ Jeanette says.
Kevin hands Jeanette a cup, then sits down again. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. We’ll see,’ she replies, tasting the coffee and discovering that it’s as strong as she was hoping for. ‘Maybe.’
They sit in silence, drink their coffee and look at each other for what feels like several minutes before Jeanette breaks the silence.
She points at the image of the half-naked man on the screen. ‘Do you know who that is?’
‘Yes, we found it on the Net and we think he’s Swedish.’
‘What makes you think that?’
He leans closer to the screen. ‘Can you see what that is?’ he says, putting his finger on an object on the bedside table, next to the naked boy.
‘No. What?’
‘If you zoom in and make the picture a bit sharper, you can see it’s a box of Swedish headache pills. According to the price tag it was bought sometime in April from a chemist in ?ngelholm. At the moment I’m checking debit card records that might match, and it looks like a certain preschool teacher is going to be getting a visit from us soon.’
‘As easy as that?’ Jeanette asks.
‘As easy as that,’ Kevin confirms, then goes on. ‘Whoever put these pictures online used Photoshop to hide the man’s identity, so now we’re trying to get his face back, but it’s difficult, and takes a lot of computer capacity. The FBI is doing the same, and I dare say they’ll get there first. They’ve got slightly more resources than we do.’
‘I saw that one of our colleagues is among the seizures,’ Jeanette says, putting her cup down.
‘Yes, that was Operation Sleipner.’ Kevin leans back. ‘We picked up about a hundred people, and apart from the one you’re referring to we got another couple of police officers in Stockholm.’
‘I’m not great at maths, but you said you picked up a hundred people, and three of them were police officers. In other words, three per cent were in the police. There are twenty thousand of us in the whole of Sweden, so we make up, what, .2 per cent of the population? That means that possession of child porn is over ten times more common among police officers than it is among other people.’
Kevin nods. ‘Well, I’d better get on. A seized computer has just arrived and I need to go through it – apparently it’s urgent.’ Kevin gets up from his chair. ‘And if you’re thinking that only men are interested in child porn, I can tell you that this computer comes from a woman.’ He opens the door and walks out. ‘I’ll show you where you can watch your films.’
Jeanette picks up the video cassettes and follows him out of the room.
‘A woman, you say?’
‘Just came in. A seizure out in H?sselby,’ he explains as he heads off along the corridor. ‘In Fagerstrand, if I remember rightly.’
‘Fagerstrand?’
‘Yes. Her name’s Hannah ?stlund. Or was. She’s dead now.’
Sunflower Nursing Home
VICTORIA LISTENS, TRYING not to interrupt Sofia. She has to make an effort to keep her anger in check, and chooses to concentrate on the internal illusion that she’s back in the house on Solbergav?gen.
‘If you were to speak to a neurosurgeon, he or she probably wouldn’t agree that capsulotomy is the same as lobotomy. Perhaps it could be described as an upgraded version of lobotomy, I don’t know, but just like lobotomy it was intended to check deviant behaviour …’