The Beast (23 page)

    It
was a beautiful church. White, proud and imposing, it dominated the small town,
towering so demandingly over it that Fredrik often asked himself if it could
ever have been suited to the congregation, or if it was a standard model in the
long-ago days when Christianity was law and human beings walked taller.

    He
liked it very much, regardless of his having left the Swedish Church long ago,
because nothing that he couldn't see with his own eyes truly existed for him,
and one of the things he could never see was whatever existence was supposed to
follow death. Just this church, and just this cemetery, was important to him.
It stood for life, for his childhood. Summer after summer, Fredrik had tagged
along with his grandad, the church warden, admiring everything he did: digging
deep graves, endlessly mowing the grass, arranging the golden numbers on the
black board to tell people which hymns to sing. He liked to help. Grandad had
allowed him to press the button that started the church bells tolling and,
after the service, collect up the bibles on a little trolley with rusty wheels.
The tall white altar candles in their heavy brass candlesticks were special and
he had to look carefully to make sure that they were properly lined up.

    Maybe
this was pure, overdecorated nostalgia, but never mind. What mattered was that
he'd been very happy, so happy that his grandad had replaced George Best as his
idol. He still loved the old man, now a silver-haired ninety-four- year-old,
pottering around on his sore legs, sipping black coffee at all times of the
day. Fredrik sometimes felt that this part of his past was his only future.

    He
looked across to Agnes. She was wearing something light-coloured, as they had
agreed. She looked worn. In her forties, she had still appeared to be in her early
twenties. Now, after three days, the years had caught up with her. As they do.
He wanted to hold her, wanted her to hold him. They needed each other now for a
little while longer. They would die together. Then without Marie there would be
nothing left for them to share.

    It
was a very quiet funeral, unadvertised. No mourners apart from Fredrik, Agnes
and Micaela. No one else, except the two detectives in charge of the
investigation, who had asked to be present for technical reasons. After some
hesitation he had said yes, they could do what they liked, as long as they kept
a low profile and sat at the back.

    He
walked alone across the grass between the graves. Some were visited and had
flower tributes, some were not; stones covered in moss and lichen that made the
inscriptions unreadable. When he was a child he had walked here, peering at all
the names and dates, calculated the ages of the dead and wondered at lives that
were sometimes so short while others could be so long, at babies who never learned
to walk, and at grown-ups who had been given a chance to choose what lives to
lead.

    Soon
his daughter would be buried under this lawn. She was only five years old.

    'Fredrik?'

    She
stood behind him, cautiously touching his shoulder. He wheeled round.

    'I
didn't hear you.'

    She
smiled a little.

    'How
are you? Forget that, I'd never understand. But I want you to know that I've
thought of you every second since I heard.'

    She was
one of the good people. He had known her for as long as he could remember;
Grandad had liked her, despite his reservations about female ministers. He was
an elderly man by then, but he had supported her from the start, done
everything to help the young woman in a world of men. Later on, Fredrik had
realised that she had been very young back then, although he had seen her as a
grown-up among all the others. Now that they were adults together, he felt they
were contemporaries.

    'Rebecca,'
he said. 'I'm so glad it's you.'

    'I've
been in this job for thirty years now. This is my worst fucking awful day
ever.'

    Fredrik
was taken aback. Her swear word hit him, hit the gravestones, her faith. He had
always seen her as security personified, but when he looked up her face was no
longer gentle and calm; it had turned tense and brittle, it seemed fractured.

    Fredrik
stared at the coffin in front of him. Wooden boards, flowers. He held on to
Agnes, she to him. They were standing in the front pew. Every movement set up
an echo in the empty church.

    There
was a child in that coffin. His child. He could not grasp the fact, he felt it
was just a very short time since she had been there and they had talked and
laughed and hugged. Agnes shook with weeping. He held her tighter still. He
seemed to have no tears left. The grief had invaded him, stolen everything. All
that was left was that gaping wound inside him.

    She
is no more.

    She
is no more.

    She
is no more.

    Maybe
he should have sung along. The organist had played something.

    They
left the echoing space together. Rebecca had cast some earth on the coffin and
uttered the old words. Afterwards she hugged them, but seemed unable to think
of anything comforting to say. Her own mixed feelings, grief and anger and
vulnerability, made her pull away abruptly, look at them, hug them once more
and then walk away.

    They
stood in silence on the gravel path in the sunshine. Again the past came back
to him; it was like the long summers when he had walked here with Grandad.

    Now
she was in a hole in the ground, like everybody else.

    'Please
accept our condolences.'

    The
two policemen had come up behind them. Both were in black suits; maybe it was
police etiquette, maybe their own sense of decorum.

    'I
have no children, but I have lost people close to me. I can at least try to
understand how you feel.'

    The
older, limping policeman, Grens, had sounded awkward, almost harsh, but Fredrik
realised that it was seriously meant and had taken an effort.

    'Thank
you.'

    They
reached out, shook hands. Sundkvist said something inaudible to Agnes.

    'I
don't know if it makes any difference to you,' Grens said. 'Still, I'd like you
to know that we'll have him locked up soon. A big team is chasing him.'

    Fredrik
shrugged.

    'True,
you don't know if it matters to us. It doesn't. It won't bring our daughter
back.'

    'I
can see that, and I'm sure I would've felt the same. But it's our job to find
him, bring him to justice so he can be punished and, above all, stopped from
committing more of these crimes.'

    Fredrik
had just taken Agnes' hand, half turning round to walk away. He wanted to be
alone with her, share his grief with her. But these words made him look back at
the policemen.

    'What
do you mean?'

    'Well,
since Tuesday we have kept every nursery and primary school under
surveillance.'

    'Is
that the kind of place where you expect to catch him?'

    'Yes.'

    Fredrik
let go of Agnes' hand, examined her face. She seemed passive, waiting. She
would have to wait a little longer.

    'What
schools, how many?'

    'In
this town, and around it. Lots of places, it's a large area.'

    'And you
watch out in this way because you think there's a chance he'll do it again?'

    'More
than a chance. We're quite certain he'll strike again.'

    'How
can you be certain?'

    'His
past history. And the very clear psychiatric profile. Every specialist in the
country has examined him; he has probably been probed and prodded more than any
other prisoner in the land. The message is the same every time. He'll do it
again, and again. His only other option is to kill himself.'

    'And
you believe this to be true?'

    'Well,
take just the fact that he let you see him before… before this happened. It is
significant. Our psycho-experts think so, anyway. It means that he has thrown
off the last restraints and now there is nothing else left in him except lust
to destroy, and self-hatred.'

    He
took her hand again.

    The
churchyard seemed very large. He was alone. She was alone.

    They
would carry on living, he perhaps with Micaela, Agnes with someone, not him.
But they would always be alone.

    He
drove Micaela home first, to their home together, and held her for a long time.
Then he and Agnes went out for a meal, just the two of them.

    They
found a place where they could sit outside, it was a cramped backyard, but it
meant that they were on their own. A light breeze was blowing, which helped
against the heat. Afterwards he drove Agnes to the train, but just as she was
about to buy her ticket he offered to take her to Stockholm and she accepted.
It meant that they didn't have to say goodbye there and then. Instead they
could sit together for another hour. They needed the space, even if it was just
to drive a hundred-odd kilometres on busy roads; it would at least afford them
the time to try to understand and accept that, by losing their child, they had
also lost their relationship with each other, that they were two grown-ups with
nothing but their grief in common.

    They
said little, because there was nothing much to say. She didn't want to go
straight back to her empty flat and said she preferred to be dropped off
outside a shop. They hugged, she kissed his cheek lightly and he stayed
watching until she had disappeared round a corner.

    Afterwards
he drove aimlessly round central Stockholm, which was strangely empty apart
from stray tourists, maps in hand, now that the heat had made most of the
people leave. He stopped twice, once to eat an ice-cream on a bench, once to
buy mineral water from a bored cafe owner, and drifted on through the gathering
dusk as the city went through its evening routines. The night never became
properly dark, it was a Nordic summer's night, and anyway the artificial
big-city lights shattered the darkness. In the end he parked in a leafy lane on
Djurgården Island and fell asleep, still in the driver's seat, his head leaning
against the side window.

    His
clothes were sticking to him, his light suit crumpled. He had woken early,
unwashed and sore after five hours' sleep. Outside, the clucking of bright-eyed
ducks mingled with shouting from drunken teenagers going home after an all-
night session somewhere.

    He
started the car and drove unhesitatingly to the Television Centre.

    It
was three years since he had last seen Vincent Carlsson. He had just moved from
newspaper journalism to the national newsdesk of the
Rapport
and
Aktuellt
programmes when Fredrik had come to see him. Vincent's place had
been at the back of a huge room, where he spent most of his time distributing
e-mails and short news items to the buzzing hive of reporters. About a year
ago, he had moved to the morning news. As he described it, his new job
consisted of carving up events and make news soup from the pieces. He had been
made a functional unit in the big news factory, and what with having acquired a
wife and children, the regular routine suited him just fine.