To the Top of the Mountain

28

AND SHE LOVED him. It felt a bit pathetic.

She knew how it was meant to work. That love had to develop slowly and be carefully nurtured, that it took time and effort to create a relationship, that it wasn’t something that just popped up all of a sudden, ready-formed. She definitely didn’t believe in love at first sight. It hadn’t been very first sight, anyway.

Though almost.

She had thought herself immune. Thought that she had seen and heard far too much to be susceptible to Cupid’s arrows. She had thought that the paedophiles’ arrows had caused irreparable damage to her emotional life. But then she realised how strong people are, despite everything; how much we can really endure.

She put all of the critical questions to herself. Was this really love? Hadn’t he just turned up at a moment when her emotions were in turmoil? Hadn’t he used his thoroughly silky tongue in a pretty dishonourable way? Hadn’t she just fallen victim to a classic Latino seduction ritual?

But this questioning didn’t last long. She found herself thinking about him all of the time. She felt happy, expectant, longing. A new energy had grabbed hold of her, and she found herself working with a completely new drive.

Because, strangely enough, love didn’t have a paralysing effect on either of them, as it had done during their teens. Maybe this could be called a more mature love, one that seemed to have a positive effect even at work. Both were working harder than before, which seemed impossible, and both imagined that they were thinking more clearly. Jorge had neatly summarised the whole Sickla Slaughter, and Sara was able to take stock of her own situation with great clarity.

She had two things to do. First, she had a list to work through: the address list on which she had found John Andreas Witréus’s name, the one which had appeared so briefly on that temporary web page. Second, she had a computer to work through. John Andreas Witréus’s computer. By using the clues she found on his computer, she would try, first and foremost, to find the website which had detected his email address and added him to the list she had mistaken for a network. It was a potential network, after all. Someone, somewhere, was compiling the addresses of everyone who visited a certain website. This website had to be found and, in time, maybe the people behind this new means of gathering paedophiles could be identified.

It was a difficult job, but she was in full swing, without any kind of professional, technical help. Though by this point, she had become a kind of technical professional herself. She began to think that she could do anything at all with just a computer and a phone line.

How was it possible to live with your head held even slightly high in a world like this? Everything was for sale. Everything was possible for the right money. How many people across the globe were really active in this underground business? What had she come across? Was it… Hell?

For a moment, she imagined that it really was Hell. The proper, biblical Hell. The one which had always run like an undercurrent through normal human activity, finding ways to drag susceptible people down in keeping with the times. What was it that made people susceptible?

She was starting to contract the global conspiracy fever which infected all hackers from time to time. Most believed the theory that the American government was covering up UFOs in a secret vault somewhere, and was also responsible for producing Aids in laboratories and testing it in Africa. Others still believed in communism and the domino effect. She had got it into her head – and then she had started to keep an eye open – that these theories themselves were part of the conspiracy. The great conspiracy obviously didn’t consist of an elite group running the world from their headquarters somewhere, like in a cheap crime novel – it was about an invisible ideology. It didn’t need any physical border guards; it was about internalising them, making sure that the ideology was active in people’s minds. The twentieth century had been the age of democracy, but it was also the century in which it had been most fiercely challenged, above all from within. How could you – where the ‘you’ was essentially the market, the biggest and ultimately only ideology of the age, a completely uniform and utterly inflexible system of thought which built upon nothing other than maximising profits – how could you get people to believe that they had power while, at the same time, taking it away from them? By preventing them from thinking, of course.

All marketing is about getting people to stop thinking and to focus on different kinds of carefully crafted ideals instead. About selling an image. And what else? A massive accumulation of things like intellect-dulling entertainment television, causing every single teenager to want to be a presenter; celebrity obsession, porn, sports hysteria, thinking in terms of ethnicity, forcing people to spend their time making absurd choices about refuse-collection companies or electricity suppliers; the limitation of all economic thought to the personal sphere, which had increasingly started to become blurred with the stock exchanges, and biological determination, which Sara Svenhagen understood as being the crown on the idea which had to be spread whatever the cost: that we have absolutely no control over our own lives. Our brains were finally spongy enough, our self-confidence so lacking, for the death blow to be dealt: the thought that, actually, it doesn’t matter what we do or are subject to – our entire lives are controlled purely by our genes. That was the death blow, and it was now being suggested from all sides, in all manner of ways, all at once. Whatever you do, don’t believe that you can do anything about your lot: it has already been determined by an infinite number of generations before you.

If you’ve got an older relative who is a paedophile, then you know that you’ll become one yourself. There is no real reason to resist temptation. It would only be in vain.

She began to get agitated. It was time to return to reality.

There was an enormous collection of paedophile sites on Witréus’s computer, most of them known to her, some of them unknown, some well hidden behind faked headings like ‘Calendar of activities at Gothenburg University’ or ‘Spitfire aeroplanes: a historical outlook’. It could be anything at all, anywhere at all, any time at all. These hidden pages opened on Witréus’s computer, revealing, once again, a parallel universe. Everywhere, she came across address lists of varying types.

Above all, she was confronted by a series of pseudonyms she hadn’t come across before. They were mentioned in various strange presentations and, as a rule, appeared alongside email addresses of a certain type: ‘xxxxxxx@hotmail.com’. From these previously unknown websites, she compiled a list of pseudonyms: ‘crushy_tomboy’, ‘limmeystone’, ‘rippo_man’, ‘sweetfacepowder’, ‘lungan’ and ‘brambo’. From these she went further, searching for IP addresses. It wasn’t easy. These figures hadn’t made the same mistake as John Andreas Witréus. The IP addresses belonged to official institutions from around the world, the pseudonyms to Swedish numbers.

She logged into the central police computer and searched the paedophile unit’s material for those six pseudonyms. Three of them had already been found and arrested. Remaining were: ‘rippo_man’, ‘sweetfacepowder’ and ‘brambo’. In the more extensive material from the international Operation Cathedral, she eventually found both ‘rippo_man’ and ‘sweetfacepowder’. Both had been traced back to Sweden, and they had managed to find the computers from which these pseudonyms were used.

Then things got really complicated.

Following an extremely thorough search of the material, she realised the following: that some policeman had already been to all these home pages. The name ‘rippo_man’ only appeared alongside ‘brambo’.

But now ‘brambo’ was gone.

This ‘brambo’ was nowhere to be found in the files.

Yet the policeman who entered ‘rippo_man’ into the reports must have known about ‘brambo’. Adding ‘rippo_man’ to the report without also adding ‘brambo’ was gross misconduct.

She saw that ‘rippo_man’ had already been arrested for distribution of child pornography and for sexually assaulting children. He was a twenty-four-year-old medical student from Linköping who had, in April, earned himself a four-year prison sentence in Hall.

But why the hell, why the bloody hell was this pseudonym ‘brambo’ missing from the investigation?

The more she searched, the clearer the pattern became.

The investigating officer had deliberately left ‘brambo’ out of the reports. And the investigating officer was from her own group. From CID’s own division for paedophile cases.

A deep, heartfelt unease coursed through her.

She clicked the up arrow and watched the text fly by. She was heading for the top of the document.

To the investigating officer’s name.

The doorbell rang.

She knew who it was. She had been waiting for him all day. She loved him.

But she couldn’t talk about this. Not right now.

The text scrolled past. The bell kept ringing.

She had to find the name. Now.

Come on, please; come on!

She shouted, desperate: ‘Hang on a sec, I’m coming!’

The bell kept ringing.

The text stopped. She saw the name.

It was as she had thought.

Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg.

She closed the document and ran towards the door.

Jorge Chavez would never forget the hug she gave him when the door finally opened.