To the Top of the Mountain

16

NOTHING BUT WORK, work, work. Though from home.

She looked out onto Surbrunnsgatan. Never before had her little corner of the world felt so abandoned. The midsummer weather was in two minds; sometimes sun, sometimes rain, occasionally lots of rain. And she was surfing. In cyberspace. Surfing the Web.

At that moment, the rain was beating against the window. Surbrunn’s rain. One of those magnificent little showers. Short, intense, fleeting.

Sara Svenhagen had almost forgotten her public holiday anxiety. The kind that drives the suicide rate up during those very days when medical staff are paid holiday overtime. That notorious lump in the chest. The voice saying: you’re alone, you know. Completely alone.

No one wants you.

She knew she shouldn’t have felt that way. It was her who didn’t want anyone, not the other way round, but public holiday anxiety didn’t seem to discriminate. It sunk its teeth in. It spoke unwelcome truths.

No lights went on in the windows on the other side of the street. Not a person went by down on the pavement. Not one car engine started the entire day. The city was deserted. For once, it wouldn’t be Stockholm topping the violence statistics. It was missing both its perpetrators and victims.

They were in the countryside.

She could have celebrated Midsummer at her parents’ villa in Tyresö. The family wouldn’t have been complete, though. That was some comfort in her sorrow. She knew that for her dad, it was also work, work, work. The difference being that Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen was in seventh heaven. Two magnificent cases to crack. First the Kumla explosion, then the Sickla Slaughter. She imagined the strict, grey man being coloured in and given a carnivalesque sheen. She could just picture him dressed in a colourful grass skirt, little purple tassels spinning on his nipples. She smiled. The lump disappeared.

She looked around the small flat. It wasn’t so stupid after all. Her inner sanctum.

She returned to the computer.

Since 19:36:07 on Thursday 24 June, she had allowed herself only a wink or two of sleep. Eighteen hours ago. That was when she had saved the address list from that strange, fleeting website.

Sure enough, it was an address list. An address list for paedophiles. A network which, to a large extent, certainly seemed to touch upon other known networks, but still: it was a completely new list. No names, of course. No real, physical addresses, but a list of email addresses, several of which she had never come across before. The fact was, her head was full of them. Overfull, maybe. About to burst, maybe.

Those short spells of sleep had immediately been invaded by the nightmare. The glowing stomach, the shadow, the penis, forcing its way into her and towards the child. She was convinced that the dream was trying to tell her something. Something vital. But she couldn’t understand what. She only knew the fear she felt when she woke in the moment of death. She felt that the dream went much too far to be able to deliver a message. Any message was drowned out by horror.

Anyone can open an email address anonymously online. Hotmail was the favourite. There were millions of addresses ending in @hotmail.com. Access was unlimited. But there were always tracks; behind all the camouflage there was always an IP address, the computer’s own fingerprint. Finding this IP address using the email address was sometimes impossible – when the person was particularly good with computers, for example – though sometimes, even if it was complicated, it was still possible.

But even if you managed to find the IP address, it wasn’t by any means certain that you would find a physical person behind it. Most paedophiles were smart enough not to open these email accounts from their own computers, but from a public computer connected to the Internet, in the Kulturhuset or the Kungliga biblioteket, for example. That said, it was a bit more difficult to enjoy the forbidden fruits in these public places. Masturbating to babies who had been raped didn’t exactly belong in the open spaces in the Kulturhuset. Normal practice was to check your mail on a public computer, transfer the images onto a disk and then enjoy them from the safety of your home. You were safe then. No tracks, other than the physical. Every now and then, material from this or that computer was downloaded in one place or another. When this happened, it was possible to link a physical person to that time frame and that computer, but it wasn’t easy. The easiest to catch were the blockheads, those people who, every once in a while, let their impulses take over and risked downloading material to their own computers, using their computer’s unique IP address. In that moment, the tracks were established.

So far, Sara had counted three blockheads on the latest list. Tracing them was a complicated process, one that involved several automatic elements, operations she could have carried out in her sleep. If she ever slept, that was. Through a complex interplay of the central police computer, Interpol, the Internet and the intranet, she had managed – having gone through around a third of the list – to find eighteen IP addresses already. Eight of them were Swedish. Five led back to public institutions. The others to private citizens in Boden, Lund and Borås.

She was starting to grow tired of cyberspace. Now and then, she caught sight of the crop-haired little thing in the computer screen. By now, she was no longer mistaking it for a young boy. It was her. The living, breathing Sara Svenhagen. That was how she looked. She was no virtual paedophile victim, but a real policewoman. She needed to get stuck into some practical police work soon. And so she was searching feverishly for a Stockholm number in the address list. None had turned up so far, but that was what she was looking for. So that she could strike right away. In person. So that she could physically look the man in the eye.

And confirm the old chestnut: that the paedophile didn’t think of himself as evil. On the contrary, he was nice, he took the child’s inherent sexuality seriously while the rest of the world misunderstood their nature and made them asexual. The paedophile gave the children the most important gift of their lives: he gave back the sexuality which had been taken away from them.

She had heard it all before. But she would never be able to understand it.

The question was whether the list was enough of a catch to begin a grand international offensive. That is, would she be forced to wait six or so months before taking action, alongside the Americans and Brits and Germans and French, not forgetting the Belgians? And what would happen during that time?

It was a question of conscience even before it existed in the material world; a classic moral dilemma, only in virtual form. If a physical Stockholm address turned up, one that Sara Svenhagen could go for immediately, should she do it? She was forced to weigh the risks and chances against each other. On golden scales. The risk that the virtual Stockholm paedophile would violate more children against the risk he would squeal to the rest of the network, therefore causing harm to considerably more children. The chance of catching a man with even more information about paedophiles against the chance of catching an entire network.

Somewhere during the course of her calculations, she suddenly started to understand the basic principle of market economics. Everything had a price. Or rather: a price could be put on everything. Absolutely everything. Every relationship, every sign of life. The question of conscience she was struggling with was an economic calculation. It was simple: plus and minus. Minimising the losses. The least possible damage. The smallest number of sexual assaults on minors.

It felt disgusting.

Necessary, but disgusting.

A price could be put on everything. Commercialisation of the intimate sphere. The transformation of humans from physical beings to legal entities to virtual people. All that was left behind was a number, a value, a share price.

She suddenly knew precisely why she had chopped off her hair.

And just then, the physical address for the IP address appeared. It was in Stockholm.

But it felt strange. Fatburstrappan 18. Somewhere in Södermalm.

And then reality hit her. The moral dilemma was, on closer consideration, fictitious, or at least not hers. She had forgotten one important factor.

Rank.

It was almost two on Midsummer’s Eve. Dancing around the maypole would already be well under way in many places. Friday. Followed by Midsummer and then Sunday. Weekend, with a minimal number of staff in the city. The majority were in the countryside. Her superiors would be dancing to Midsummer tunes. Ragnar Hellberg too, in all probability; comedy Superintendent Party-Ragge. But she had an emergency number. A mobile number.

The question was whether she wanted to contact Hellberg. There was no real hurry. The paedophile living at Fatburstrappan 18 might not commit any serious assaults during the Midsummer weekend. Though ‘might’ wasn’t enough for Sara Svenhagen. He might, on the other hand, celebrate Midsummer by indulging in a real orgy of sexual assault on minors.

What would Hellberg say? Maybe he would have already downed his first few schnapps and be wearing his party hat at a jaunty angle, rambling away. She couldn’t really say how well she knew Hellberg. He was the police force’s youngest and most up-for-a-laugh detective superintendent, though his was the kind of forced, businesslike fun. Everyone had to take part. That was an order. We’ll wear blue lights on our heads at the Stockholm Marathon, right? All of us? Right? But sure, he was competent enough when it really mattered. Still, she couldn’t really look past the way he had outmanoeuvred Ludvig Johnsson, the man who had already built up the entire paedophile division when the National Police Board brought in the more media-friendly careerist Ragnar Hellberg, and quickly promoted him. And Hellberg really did make a good impression on TV. Party-Ragge, who called reporters by their first names and always had a joke ready.

But she didn’t really know anything about him. Not whether he had a family, not where he lived, not whether he was hiding out at his place in the country, mobile phone switched off. Would the very fact that she had the cheek to contact him on Midsummer’s Eve close all doors? Would she get a telling-off from a herring-munching, loose-jawed Hellberg, mid-drinking song?

It was either/or. Either she would get a green light or she would get a red one. At the moment, it was yellow. Changed according to the EU standard.

She rang. Hellberg answered almost immediately, as though he had been waiting for her call. He didn’t seem to be in the midst of a paradise of schnapps and song; when his voice echoed down the line, she recognised, to her surprise, a hint of public holiday anxiety.

Was Party-Ragge sitting at home, just as lonely and abandoned as she was? Was his whole bon vivant attitude just a professional front? Inside, she felt quite surprised as she said: ‘I’ve found something.’

‘You’re working now?’ Hellberg asked, without the expected jovial tone in his voice which suggested that she should be rolling around in the Midsummer hay instead.

‘Yeah.’

‘Me too.’

‘On what?’ she exclaimed clumsily. Ragnar Hellberg didn’t seem the type to take his work home with him, even on normal weekdays.

‘Mmm,’ he said, seeming to chuckle. ‘Administrative stuff, I suppose you could say. What’ve you found, Sara?’

‘A new network.’

‘What? Is it the Nässjö code? It seemed uncrackable.’

‘Yeah, the Nässjö code. A blockhead in Stockholm. Fatburstrappan 18. Several others, too. It’s just a question of whether we should pick him up immediately, or wait for the rest and take them all together.’

‘Are there international numbers?’

‘The majority, yeah. But also in Boden, Lund, Borås. So far. I’ve got lots left.’

‘How many other countries?’

‘Three so far. The US, Germany, France. It’ll take time to organise an international effort.’

Yeah,’ said Hellberg, seeming to think it over. ‘And you want to clip its wings immediately, if I’ve understood you right. So that they don’t cast a shadow over the Midsummer blossoms?’

‘I guess I do,’ Sara Svenhagen admitted, without really understanding Hellberg’s flower analogy.

‘Sigh and groan,’ Hellberg articulated. ‘We can’t pick up Boden, Lund and Borås now. But we’ve got a chance here, I agree with you. OK. Two things. First, you need to find enough to arrest him and keep him. Under no circumstances can he make contact with anyone else who could warn the network. No conversations, no lawyers. Refer to the new rules. But – like I said – you have to find something in his flat.’

‘Are you suggesting that I-’

‘No, I’m not. Just make sure you find something.’

‘And second?’

‘This is between you and me. Solely.’

‘What? Why?’

‘That’s an order. OK?’

‘I don’t understand-’

‘OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Two rank-and-file officers from the local police to kick the door in. Give them only the minimum information. I’ll fix the authorisation. Go straight to Södra Station and take a couple of assistants with you. Don’t call ahead.’

‘I don’t really understand what’s-’

‘You understand what you need to understand. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Sara Svenhagen, confused, ending the call.

She looked at the receiver.

Was that really a green light she’d been given?