The Beast by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Page A

week's images,
and every week their demands escalated. Next time must somehow offer more than
last time; naked children had been enough but not any more, children sitting
still had to start moving and touching each other. Then touching wasn't enough;
the children had to be raped, then raped more viciously. The next set of
photographs must score more highly than the previous lot, at any cost. Seven
paedophiles, a closed circle, showing off their own crimes in their own neatly
scanned and formatted pictures.
        They
had been at it for almost a year before they were caught.
        All
the time they had been competing with each other, running qualifying heats in
child pornography.
        Bernt
Lund had been one of the seven. He was the only one in prison, the only one who
could solely contribute photos that had been taken in the past, but his crimes
meant that his high status was beyond dispute, as was his right to join the
ring.
        When
the ring was broken, three of the others were convicted and sent off to serve
fairly long prison sentences. A fourth, a man called Håkan Axelsson, was being
tried, but the remaining two had not been charged because the evidence was so
patchy. Everyone knew about them but that was neither here nor there; the 'not
proven' classification was sufficient to free them. And so they were free to
recruit new child porn contacts in the shadowy marketplace that had grown up
around the investigation.
        There
were lots of them out there. For each one down, there was one ready to go.
        Ewert
was cursing himself. He should have inspected Lund's cell then. But the police
had been constantly pushed for time, always under media pressure, invariably
targets for public outrage. He had felt too harassed to visit Aspsås himself
and had sent two junior colleagues to interrogate Lund, whose cell had been
stacked to the ceiling with his illegal handiwork. Mostly CDs with thousands of
pictures showing tormented children. It was all very bad, and conclusive
enough, but if he had gone himself he would have picked up more about the man.
Maybe he wouldn't have been at such a loss now that Lund had got ahead of them.
        Lennart
unlocked the door.
        'There.
All yours. Tidy is one word for it.'
        Ewert
and Sven stepped inside and then stopped. Despite its standardised ordinariness
- about eight square metres, one window, the usual furnishings - the room was
very odd indeed. Full of objects, all lined up, as if for an exhibition.
Candlesticks, stones, pieces of wood, pens, bits of string, items of clothing,
folders, batteries, books, notebooks, all were arranged in lines stretching
along the floor, across the bedspread, the windowsill, the shelves. Each object
was separated from the next by what looked like exactly two centimetres. It
made Ewert think of an unending row of dominoes, upright until one piece is
moved out of place and it's all over.
        Ewert's
diary had a small ruler marked along its edge. He aligned it with a row of
stones. Two centimetres, twenty millimetres exactly, between the stones. The
pens on the windowsill were twenty millimetres apart. On the shelves, the books
were twenty millimetres apart too, and the same went for the bits of string on
the floor and between the battery and the notebook and the packet of
cigarettes. Everywhere, twenty millimetres.
        'Does
it always look like this?'
        Lennart
nodded.
        'Yes,
it does. Before taking off the bedspread at night he puts the stones on the
floor, one by one, measuring the distances as he goes along. In the morning he
goes through the whole performance in reverse after he's made the bed and put
the bedspread back on.'
        Sven
moved some of the pens. Dead ordinary biros. The stones were ordinary stones,
one more pointless than the next. Plain, empty folders and notebooks.
        'This
is too much. I don't get it.'
        'Nothing
to it. What is it you don't