Her mouth tastes of glue and she feels euphoric, as if she had the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.
She tries twisting her body, but it’s stuck tight. She can’t do it, no matter how hard she tries.
Not long ago she could drift, free as an astronaut in space, but now her body is tied down.
She starts to feel cold, an indescribable chill that makes her body shake inside.
Yet she still isn’t frightened.
It’s just the water inside her turning to ice.
The cold spreads out to her skin, and it feels like the ice inside is swelling and is going to burst out of her body, splitting her skin. Like when you put a glass bottle full of water in the freezer, and it breaks when the liquid expands into ice.
She smiles at the analogy.
Before she bursts and explodes into a thousand tiny fragments of glass she sees the man standing over her.
It’s Viggo Dürer.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
THE ROOM THAT Kevin, the young police officer, shows her into is claustrophobically small and in no way merits its name.
‘This is the viewing suite,’ he says sarcastically, gesturing for her to sit down.
She looks around. A desk, a computer screen and various different video players, so that you can look at most films regardless of format. In the middle of the desk is a mixer board that makes it possible to stop the film and move forwards or backwards frame by frame. There’s a switch to zoom in, and another to make the image sharper. Then other buttons and controls that she hasn’t got a clue about. And a muddle of cables and leads.
‘As soon as I find anything on Hannah ?stlund’s computer I’ll bring it in to you,’ he goes on. ‘Well, just call me if you need anything.’
Once Kevin has shut the door behind him the room falls completely silent, and not even the air conditioning is audible any more. She looks at the stack of video cassettes, hesitates, then grabs one of them and puts it in the machine.
There’s a crackle, and the screen in front of her begins to flicker. Jeanette takes a deep breath and leans back in the chair, at the same time putting her hand firmly on the wheel that will let her stop the film if it gets to be too much. She thinks of the deadman’s handle that makes a train stop if the driver has a heart attack.
The first film contains exactly what Karl Lundstr?m had said it did, and Jeanette can’t bear to watch more than a minute before turning it off. But since she knows she has to look through the whole tape, she focuses her eyes alongside the screen and fast-forwards.
From the corner of her eye she can see the film blurrily, without any details, but clearly enough to see if the scene changes. After twenty minutes the machine stops with a loud click, then begins rewinding the film automatically.
Jeanette knows what she’s just seen, but doesn’t want to believe it’s true.
She feels unable to absorb the fact that there are people who take pleasure in this. Who pay a lot of money to get hold of this sort of film, and risk their whole lives by collecting them. Why isn’t it enough to fantasise about the perverse and forbidden? Why do they have to turn their sick fantasies into reality?
The second film is, if anything, even more unpleasant.
During the thirty minutes or so while she spools through the film, keeping her eyes focused beside the screen doesn’t help, and instead she stares one metre above it.
On the wall is a photocopy of a cartoon. It shows a fat man, grinning and running towards the viewer with an iron bar in his hands. He’s wearing a striped hat, and his teeth would give a dentist nightmares.
The little girl in the film is crying as the three men take turns penetrating the Thai woman.
The man in the cartoon is wearing a pair of dark trousers, his chest is bare, and he’s got heavy boots on his feet. The look in his eyes is intense, almost crazy.
One of the men puts the girl on his lap. He strokes her hair and says something that Jeanette thinks is ‘Daddy’s little girl has been naughty’.
Jeanette notices the corner of her mouth getting wet, and when she licks her lips she can taste salt. Usually crying feels like a relief, but now it only enhances the feeling of disgust and impotence, and she finds herself thinking about the death penalty and people getting shut away and forgotten about. Doors to be locked and keys thrown away. She even sees scalpels performing castrations in anything but a chemical way, and for the first time in a very long time she feels hatred. An unreasonable, unforgiving hatred, and for a moment she understands why some people choose to publicise the names and pictures of convicted sex offenders without thinking of the consequences for their families.
At that moment she realises that she is a human being, even if she is a very bad police officer. A police officer and a human being. An impossible combination? Maybe.
The man in the cartoon is saying what she’s feeling, and she understands what it’s doing there.
That it has to be there so that the people working here don’t forget that they’re human beings as well as police officers.
Jeanette removes the film, puts it back in its box and inserts the third film.
Like the previous two, it starts with flickering noise. Then a shaky camera that seems to be looking for something, stops, zooms in, and the picture comes into focus. Jeanette thinks it looks like a hotel room, and gets a strong sense that this could be the film she’s searching for.
She hopes she might be wrong, but her gut feeling is telling her it’s the right one.
Whoever is holding the camera seems to realise that it’s far too close, zooms out again and adjusts the focus once more. A young girl is lying splayed out on a large bed, and beside the bed are three half-dressed men.
The girl is Ulrika Wendin, and one of the men is Bengt Bergman, Victoria Bergman’s father. The man Jeanette questioned when he was under suspicion for rape, and who was later released when his wife gave him an alibi.
Just as the door behind her opens and Jens Hurtig walks in, Jeanette looks up once more at the photocopied cartoon a metre above the ongoing rape.
The man in the cartoon is yelling, ‘With a decent iron bar you can take the whole world by surprise!’
Hurtig stops behind her, takes a firm grip of the back of the chair and looks at the screen showing the rape scene. ‘Is that Ulrika?’ he asks quietly, and Jeanette nods in confirmation.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it looks like it.’
‘Who are they?’ Jeanette feels Hurtig’s hands tighten on the chair. ‘Anyone we recognise?’
‘So far only Bengt Bergman,’ she replies. ‘But that one’ – she points at the screen – ‘he’s been in other films. I recognise his birthmark.’
‘Only Bengt Bergman,’ Hurtig mutters, and sits down as the camera sweeps around the room. A window with a view of a poorly lit car park, with the men’s grunting in the background, then back to the bed.
‘Stop!’ Hurtig says. ‘What’s that in the corner?’