He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and she could smell his body odour. He probably hadn’t washed for several days.
‘If I tell the police what this is all about, Annette and Linnea can have their personal details made confidential. Because they know too much. There are dangerous people out there. A human life is nothing to them. Believe me, I know. God has nothing to do with these people, they aren’t His children.’
She realised that Karl Lundstr?m was referring to the players in the child sex trade. In interviews with the police he had explicitly claimed that Organizatsiya, the Russian mafia, had threatened him repeatedly, and that he feared for his family’s lives. Sofia had spoken to Lars Mikkelsen, who thought Karl Lundstr?m was lying. The Russian mafia didn’t work the way he had described, and his claims were full of contradictions. Besides, he hadn’t been able to provide the police with a single concrete piece of evidence suggesting any threat.
Mikkelsen had said he thought Karl Lundstr?m wanted his family’s identities protected for the simple reason of saving them from any shame.
Sofia suspected that Karl Lundstr?m might be trying to construct something that could be seen as extenuating circumstances for himself. Taking on some sort of heroic role, in marked contrast to what had actually happened.
‘Do you regret what you’ve done?’ Sooner or later she had to ask.
He looked oddly distant.
‘Do I regret it?’ he said after a moment’s silence. ‘It’s complicated … Sorry, what was your name? Sofia?’
‘Sofia Zetterlund.’
‘Of course. Sofia means wisdom. A good name for a psychologist … Sorry. OK, well …’ He took a deep breath. ‘We … I mean, me and the others, we were free to swap wives and children with each other. And I think this happened with Annette’s tacit consent. And the other wives’ as well … In the same way that we men instinctively found each other, we were also careful in our choice of wives. We met in the home of shadows, if you get what I mean?’
The home of shadows? Sofia thought. She recognised the phrase from the preliminary report.
‘Annette’s brain is switched off, somehow,’ he went on without waiting for her to reply. ‘She isn’t stupid, but she chooses not to see things she doesn’t like. It’s her self-defence mechanism.’
Sofia knew this phenomenon wasn’t unusual. There was often a degree of passivity in those close to the events that allowed this sort of abuse to continue.
But Karl Lundstr?m’s answer was evasive. She had asked if he regretted what he had done.
‘Did you never realise that what you were doing was wrong?’ she tried instead.
‘You’ll have to define the word “wrong” if I’m going to understand what you mean. Culturally wrong, socially wrong or wrong in some other way?’
‘Karl, try to tell me about what’s wrong in your own way rather than anyone else’s.’
‘I’ve never claimed to have done anything wrong. I’ve merely acted from an impulse that all men actually have, but suppress.’
Sofia realised that the defence speech had begun.
‘Don’t you read books?’ he went on. ‘There’s a clear line from antiquity to today. Read Archilochus … “A spray of myrtle she bore joyfully in her hand, and glorious roses in her hair, my shadow fell upon her shoulders, and the virgin’s body awoke the flame of love in old men …” The Greeks wrote about it. Alcman’s lyric poetry praises the sensuality of children. “Childless the lonely man lives his life and misses them bitterly. And devoured by his longing he goes to the home of shadows …” In the twentieth century Nabokov and Pasolini wrote the same things, to mention just two. Although Pasolini wrote about boys.’
Sofia recognised further phrases from his interviews with the police.
‘What did you mean when you said that you met in the home of shadows?’ she asked.
He smiled at her.
‘It’s just an image. A metaphor for a secret, forbidden place. There’s plenty of poetry, psychology, ethnology and philosophy to console yourself with if you want to feel understood. I’m not alone, of course, but it feels as though I’m alone in my time. Why is what I desire wrong now?’
Sofia could tell that this was a question he had been wrestling with for a long time. She knew that paedophile desires couldn’t really be cured. It was more a matter of getting the paedophile to recognise that their perversion was unacceptable and that it harmed others. But she didn’t interrupt, she wanted to hear more about his reasoning.
‘It isn’t fundamentally wrong, it isn’t wrong for me, and I don’t actually think it’s wrong for Linnea either. It’s a constructed social or cultural wrong. Ergo, it isn’t wrong in the true sense of the word. The same thoughts and feelings were current two thousand years ago, but what was culturally right then has become culturally wrong. We’ve simply been taught that it’s wrong.’
Sofia thought his reasoning was provocatively irrational.
‘So according to you, it isn’t possible to re-evaluate an old assumption?’
He looked confident.
‘No. Not if it goes against nature.’
Karl Lundstr?m folded his arms and suddenly looked hostile. ‘God is nature …’ he muttered.
Sofia sat in silence and waited for him to go on, but when nothing came she decided to shift the focus of the conversation.
Back to shame.
‘You say there are people you want to protect your family from. I’ve read your interviews with the police, where you say you were threatened by the Russian mafia.’
He nodded.
‘Are there any other reasons why you want Annette’s and Linnea’s identities to be kept confidential?’
‘No,’ came the short answer.
She wasn’t convinced by his self-assured attitude. On the contrary, his unwillingness to discuss the matter indicated doubt. There was shame in this man, even if it was buried deep within him.
He leaned forward over the desk. The intensity in his eyes had returned, and she backed away when she caught his odour.
It wasn’t just sweat. His breath smelled of acetone.
‘I’m going to tell you something,’ he went on. ‘Something I haven’t told the police …’
His mood swings were starting to concern Sofia. The stench of acetone could be a sign of a lack of calories and nutrition, an indication that he wasn’t eating. Was he on any medication?
‘There are men, perfectly ordinary men around us, maybe one of your colleagues, a relative, I don’t know. I’ve never bought a child, but these men have …’
His pupils seemed normal, but her experience of psychoactive medication told her something was wrong.
‘What do you mean?’
He leaned back and seemed to relax slightly.
‘The police have found things that are compromising on my computer, but if they want to find the real stuff, they ought to be looking in a cottage up in ?nge. There’s a man called Anders Wikstr?m. The police ought to take a look in his cellar.’