Victoria goes completely cold when she sees what he’s doing.
Martin is covered in soap, and his dad gives her a broad smile. He’s got one arm wrapped around Martin’s bottom, and is washing him with the other.
Victoria just stares.
‘We had a bit of an accident,’ Martin’s father says. ‘Martin messed his trousers while we were playing up in the forest.’
He gently rubs the boy’s genitals. ‘We need to get you properly clean, don’t we?’ he says.
Victoria watches as the man takes hold of the little penis with his thumb and forefinger. With his other hand he carefully rubs the pink bit at the end.
She recognises the scene. The dad with the child, the mum in the same room but looking the other way.
Suddenly the bowl feels so heavy that it slips from her hands. There’s an explosion of tomatoes, cucumber, onion and lettuce all over the floor. Martin starts crying. His mum puts her knitting down and gets up from the rocking chair.
Victoria backs away towards the door.
She starts running as soon as she’s in the hall.
She runs down the steps, stumbles and falls head first onto the gravel but gets up at once and continues running. She heads down the drive, out through the gate, along the road and home. In tears she shoves the door of the cottage open and throws herself down on her bed.
She’s in complete torment. She realises that Martin will be ruined, he’ll get big, he’ll become a man, he’ll be like all the others. She had hoped to protect him from that, give herself to save him. But she was too late.
Everything nice was gone, and it was her fault.
There’s a gentle knock on the door. She hears Martin’s dad’s voice outside. She crawls over to the door and locks it.
‘Is something wrong, Victoria? Why did you get so upset?’
She realises she can’t open the door now. It would be far too embarrassing.
Instead she creeps into the bedroom, opens the window at the back and climbs out. She walks in a wide curve around the outhouse and out to the road. When they hear her coming they turn round and walk towards her.
‘Ah, there you are, we thought you were inside. Where did you take off to?’
She feels she’s on the verge of laughter.
Mum, Dad, with the child in their arms, wrapped in a blanket.
They look so ridiculous. So scared.
‘I needed the toilet,’ she lies, not knowing where the words came from, but they sound good.
The mum carries her back to their cottage, and there’s nothing odd at all.
Her arms are safe, like arms usually are when everything’s OK again.
Her legs hit Martin’s mum’s thigh with each step she takes, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She walks on, focused. As if Victoria belonged with them.
‘Will you be coming back next summer?’ she asks, feeling the woman’s cheek against hers.
‘Yes, we will,’ she whispers. ‘We’ll come back to you every summer.’
That summer Martin has six years left to live.
Huddinge Hospital
KARL LUNDSTR?M WAS going to be charged with child pornography offences, as well as the sexual abuse of his daughter, Linnea. As Sofia Zetterlund turned off towards Huddinge Hospital she reflected on what she knew of his background.
Karl Lundstr?m was forty-four years old and had a senior position at Skanska, where he was responsible for a number of the largest construction projects in the country. His wife, Annette, was forty-one, and their daughter, Linnea, fourteen. Over the past ten years the family had moved half a dozen times, between Ume? in the north and Malm? in the south, and were currently living in a large turn-of-the-century villa at Edsviken in Danderyd. At the moment there was an extensive police investigation trying to identify whether or not he was actually part of a larger paedophile ring.
Always on the move, she thought as she turned into the car park. Typical behaviour for paedophiles. Moving to escape discovery and to get away from suspicions about odd behaviour within the family.
Neither Annette Lundstr?m nor their daughter Linnea wanted to admit what had happened. The mother was in despair and denied everything, whereas the daughter had retreated into an apathetic state of complete silence.
She parked outside the main entrance and went in. On the way she decided to take one last look at her notes.
From what had emerged from police interviews, it was clear that Karl Lundstr?m was an extremely complex individual. In the transcripts he talked about how he and the other members of the suspected paedophile ring behaved. He spoke of a physical attraction to children that was seldom noticed by other people, but which paedophiles instinctively recognised in one another. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, they could identify one another’s inclinations simply by their body language or the way they looked around them.
On the surface, at least, he matched well with Sofia’s previous experiences of a certain sort of man with paedophile or ephebophile personality disorders.
Their main weapon was the ability to control, manipulate and build up trust and implant guilt and subordination in their victims. In the end there was often a form of mutual dependency between victims and perpetrators.
Their interest in children wasn’t the only thing they had in common. They also shared the same view of women. Their wives were under their control. They knew what was going on, but never intervened.
‘Well, we may as well get this out of the way. You’re here to evaluate whether or not I can be held responsible for my actions. What do you want to know?’
Sofia looked at the man seated in front of her.
Karl Lundstr?m had thin, fair hair that was starting to go grey. His eyes were tired and slightly swollen, and she thought they expressed a sort of mournful solemnity.
‘I’d like us to talk about your relationship with your daughter,’ she said. It was just as well to get straight to the point.
He ran his hand through his stubble.
‘I love Linnea, but she doesn’t love me. I have abused her, and I’m admitting that to make things easier for all of us. For my family, I mean. I love my family.’
His voice sounded weary and disengaged, and his apathetic tone made what he said sound false.
He had been arrested after a lengthy period of surveillance, and the child pornography found on his computer included several images and video clips of his daughter. What option did he have but to confess?
‘In what way do you think it will make things easier for them?’
‘They need protection. From me and from others.’
His claim was so peculiar that she felt it demanded a follow-up question.
‘Protection from others? Who do you mean?’
‘The sort of people only I can protect them from.’