The Beast (30 page)

    SS:
Fine.

    FS:
I'm assuming that you understand what I'm trying to say. Look, that man was
locked up. He escapes. You can't catch him. He tortures and kills Marie. He is
still on the run, police chase or no police chase. You know that he'll do it
again, to some other child. You know. And you know you can't stop him, you've
demonstrated that.

    Lars
Ågestam (LÅ): May I join you?

    SS:
Please have a seat.

    LÅ: I
put it to you that your intention was to take revenge.

    FS:
If society cannot protect its citizens, they have to do it themselves.

    LÅ:
You wanted to avenge Marie's death by killing Bernt Lund.

    FS:
I've saved the life of at least one child. Of that I'm convinced. That's what I
did it for. That was my real motive.

    LÅ:
Do you believe that the death penalty is just, Fredrik?

    FS:
No.

    LÅ:
This action of yours suggests that you do.

    FS: I
believe that taking a life sometimes saves lives.

    LÅ:
And you're the judge of whose life should be taken and who should be saved?

    FS: A
child playing outside its school? Or an escaped sex killer, who's planning to
violate and then slaughter that very child? And their lives are supposed to be
worth the same?

    SS: I
would like you to say why you weren't prepared to let the police go after him.

    FS: I
did consider it. But I decided against it.

    SS:
All you had to do was approach the officers stationed by the school gate, isn't
that so?

    FS:
Lund succeeded in escaping from the prison. Before that, he escaped from a
secure mental hospital. If I'd left it to the police, at best he would've been
captured and sent to a prison or a mental hospital. What if he had escaped
again?

    SS:
So you decided to be both judge and executioner? FS: I had no choice. It was my
only option. My one single thought was how to kill him so that he wouldn't be
able to do again what he did to Marie. Under any circumstances whatsoever.

    LÅ:
Have you finished?

    SS:
Yes.

    LÅ:
That's all, then. Fredrik, please listen carefully.

    FS:
Yes?

    LÅ: I
must put this to you formally.

    FS:
Go ahead.

    LÅ:
Fredrik Steffansson, I have to tell you that you are charged with murder and
will be tried in court.

    The
village was called Tallbacka. Village? Actually, it was quite a sizeable
community, with roughly two thousand six hundred inhabitants. There was a small
supermarket, a kiosk, a branch office of the Co-op savings bank, a rather plain
licensed restaurant, open both at lunchtime and in the evenings, a closed
railway station, one large, recently restored church, which was forever empty,
and two more popular free churches.

    You
took the day as it came, that was the kind of place it was.

    It
was a here-and-now for the people there, lives which had started in this place.

    It
was good enough for them, thank you; only stuck-ups wanted to get away. A day
was a day, no more and no less, no matter that the town had been tarted up with
two new slip-roads from the dual carriageway.

    Despite
being that kind of community, or maybe because of it, over the following months
Tallbacka was to become the most clear-cut example, among many others, of what
was a new legal phenomenon. It was here that people demonstrated the vacuum
separating legally correct court proceedings and the public's interpretation of
exactly what they signified.

    This
was a remarkable summer, one nobody would want to remember.

    Göran
was known locally as Flasher-Göran. He was forty- four years old, a trained
teacher, who had never worked since his practitioner's term at a nearby school
twenty years ago.

    Twenty
years was nearly half his lifetime, but he still hadn't been able to work out
why he did it.

    One
afternoon, his duties done for the day, he had stopped in the schoolyard and
undressed. He took off one piece of clothing after another. Standing stark
naked, just a few metres away from the patch of ground set aside for smokers,
he sang the national anthem, both verses, loudly but badly. Then he dressed
again, wandered off home, prepared the lessons for the following day and went
to bed.

    They
had allowed him to finish his training and sit the examination, which he
passed. During the few years that followed, he applied for every teaching post
that came up within a radius of a hundred or so kilometres of Tallbacka.
Despite endless labour at hot copiers, producing more pages of his ever more
polished curriculum vitae, he never even got an offer of an interview. There
was no need to copy his sentence, which always floated up on top of his
applications somehow, obscuring the rest of the documentation. He had paid a
fine, but it had not helped to mitigate the never-to- be-forgotten shame of
having exposed himself in front of under-age school children, in the schoolyard
and during school hours.

    Many
times he had considered leaving and going somewhere far away, where he could
apply for jobs untainted by rumours and speculation. Like many others in
Tallbacka, he was too gutless, too muddled, too local.

    The
day was very warm. True, it had felt even hotter yesterday, when he'd been away
buying roof tiles, but anyway, he was sweating and couldn't be bothered
changing from shorts to trousers. The three hundred metres to the shop seemed a
long way.

    He
heard them when he crossed the road. He had known several of them since they
were toddlers, but now they were big boys of fifteen or sixteen, with voices
like grown males.

    'Show
your knob then!'

    'Fucking
peddo! Come on, flash!'

    They
emptied any Coke left and threw away the cans, to start a performance of
shouting and rubbing their crotches rhythmically with both hands.

    'Flash
cock. Flash cock. Peddo, peddo, peddo.'

    He
didn't look their way. He was determined not to look, whatever. They shouted louder
and louder. Someone threw a can at him.

    'Fucking
peddo show-off! Go home. Get it out and wank!'

    He
walked on, just a short stretch to go now, for once he was round the corner of
the old post office they wouldn't be able to see him anymore and the shop
wouldn't be far away. It was the only shop left, now that it had seen off its
two rivals. It stood there alone, displaying red sale price tags and today's
special bargains.

    He
was tired, just as he had been every day this long, hot summer. After his
hurried walk, breathing heavily, he sat down on the seat outside the shop, to
watch the passers- by with their carrier bags. They were all people he knew at
least by name. On the next seat along sat two girls of about twelve or
thirteen; one was his neighbour's daughter, the other her friend. They were
giggling the way girls do, laughing too hard to stop. They had never shouted at
him, they simply didn't see him except as 'him next-door', the man who came
round to cut the grass sometimes.

    Christ,
there was the Volvo. On the road going past the shop.

    He
always got a tummy ache when he spotted it. It meant trouble. Someone would
have a go at him.

    The
driver slammed on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt. Bengt Söderlund
climbed out. He was a large, powerfully built man of about forty-five, who wore
denims with a pocket for a measuring rod, hammer and Stanley knife, and a cap
with the text
Söderlund Contractor.
He walked up to the girls and spoke
loudly to them, and to Flasher-Göran and to Tallbacka at large.

    'You
two, come on! Get into the car. Now!'

    He
grabbed each girl by the nearest shoulder. They crouched a little, sensing
anger, twisted to get away, gave up, ran off towards the car.

    Söderlund
went up to Flasher-Göran, gripped his collar to pull him upright and shook him
hard. It hurt, the shirt collar burned against his neck.

    'Caught
you at it this time. Now I've seen for myself what you're up to. Swine!'

    The
girls in the car stared, too baffled even to attempt understanding.

    'I
don't fucking believe it. That's my daughter. Like to show it to her? Is that
it?'

    By
now the gang of teenage boys had turned up. They had heard the noises of a car
braking and a man shouting. It was a laugh to watch Söderlund set on
Flasher-Göran, it made their day. They ran the last bit to get close.

    'Hey!
Kill the peddo!'

    'Kill
him!'

    Hands
to crotches, wanking.

    Söderlund
didn't look their way, only gave his victim a last shake before dumping him on
the seat. Walking back to his car he delivered his final words at the top of
his voice.

    'Get
your fucking head round this. You've got two weeks. If you haven't buggered off
by then we'll kill you. You filthy swine! Two weeks, that's it!'

    The
car drove off with a roar.

    The
boys were still hanging about, but they had stopped their act, stopped shouting
abuse.

    They
had taken in what Söderlund had said and grasped that his words were for real.

    The
evening was beautiful, very still and twenty-four degrees in the shade. Bengt
Söderlund went outside. He turned towards his neighbour's house and spat. He
had come to detest the sight of it.

    Bengt
was a Tallbacka man born and bred, and had worked in the family building firm
until he finally took over the running of it. Both his parents had died within
a few weeks of each other; their fading away gained speed until they simply
weren't there any more. He had never considered death before. Not his problem,
put it that way. Now death invaded his life. After burying his father and his
mother he was left alone, facing his past, the time that had made him. His
daily round, his safe nest and the venue for his parties and adventures too.

    He
and Elisabeth had been in the same class at school and started going out when
they were both sixteen. They had three children, two who were old enough now to
have moved away, and one late baby, who was growing up too, but still
sheltering in the space between the worlds of a child and an adolescent.

    This
was his place. He knew what it smelt like, what passing cars sounded like. Time
had a special quality here, it was unhurried, and seemed to last for longer.

    At
noon the homespun restaurant next to the shop filled with local bachelors spending
their luncheon vouchers and chatting; they were working men who had never
learned to cook. By late afternoon the cafe transformed into a plain,
smoke-filled and rather crummy pub. It was a safe, neutral hang-out for couples
who weren't churchy and had nowhere else to go; it offered a discounted Beer of
the Week, with peanuts to go and two gaming machines in a corner.