Gieger Page 27

  Hannah was staring at a drunk teenage brat who was grinning at her. She threw her drink at his face and he became furious, clenching his fists and getting up. When Sara flashed her police ID, he calmed down, although he sauntered away from them with the standard phrase: ‘Fucking cunt.’

  ‘The worst of it came afterwards,’ said Hannah, the food making her burp. ‘One day the old bastard called my parents at home and asked for me. Asked whether I wanted to come to a party. I was terrified he would tell my parents about what had happened, so I did as he said. I went there, had a glass of wine even though I was only fourteen or something, and then he put me on the sofa next to some other old creep who was constantly grinning and topping up my glass. Once I was drunk, he led me upstairs to some room and raped me. I cried and said no, but that didn’t make any difference. And when he left, he put three hundred kronor on the bed. I took the money and put it in a box at home. I felt so fucking sick every time I saw that box. Then one day I took the cash and went into town, clothes shopping. I got appreciation for my new clothes the next day at school, and then it felt a bit better. When I was beautiful on the outside, I could forget how dirty I felt on the inside. The next time the bastard called, I just thought about all the stuff I’d buy if I got more money. So I went there. To another disgusting bloke. And then again. And again. I was already worthless, so I didn’t think it mattered. But do you know the worst thing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I had friends who wondered where I’d got all the cash from. So I took them to him. Two or three girls who also got raped and broken. I ruined their lives. And all they wanted was to buy some nice clothes.’

  34

  Sara hadn’t been able to sleep. Martin had been snoring, but that didn’t usually prevent her from dropping off. Unlike everyone else she knew, she thought snoring sounded quite homely, and she actually found it easier to sleep when she could hear her husband driving the pigs to market. Between the snores it was deathly quiet. The size of the apartment meant that the noise from the pubs down on Kornhamnstorg didn’t find its way up to their bedroom.

  Sara had been lying there, staring at the ceiling – a coffered ceiling in dark wood, one of the many stylish details that Martin was so uninterested in, despite having paid so much money for the flat. She’d taken the chance to enjoy having the whole family together, and realised that she had no idea how many more nights of this she would have. And she’d been sorry that she’d not had enough sense to appreciate these occasions sufficiently until now.

  But above all, it had been what Hannah had told her that had been running through her head. It had been hard to take in, but Sara had felt it would be disrespectful towards Hannah to simply dismiss it. Was there any way of checking whether it was true?

  Sara had been tossing and turning, wide awake, for a couple of hours, thinking it over before she got up. She realised she had to know – if only for her own sake.

  So now she was back at the house. The fairytale palace of her childhood. Which was now a crime scene where she wasn’t supposed to be.

  She looked around, but no one was out and about this early. She still ducked slightly when she walked past C.M.’s house, which was closest to the road – the house they’d called ‘the factory’ when they were little because of the strange name on his expensive Fabbri gun. It was funny that those kinds of oddities were still stuck in her head. It was obvious that it was impossible to choose what you remembered.

  She went round to the back of the Bromans’ house and retrieved the spare key from the usual spot before unlocking the door and going inside.

  The house felt so different now. It had gone from lost paradise to crime scene, and now it was some sort of ghost house, with a secret hanging over it. A house of horror.

  Stellan Broman had filmed his own rape of a young girl. If Hannah’s story was true, Sara didn’t think that Stellan would have got rid of that film.

  And she’d worked in street prostitution for long enough to be convinced that the story was true.

  She’d also been involved in enough raids of sex criminals and people in possession of child pornography to know that that kind of person never got rid of their collection. It became a fixation of sorts. They might have tens of thousands of videos and pictures – far more than they could ever look through – but they still always wanted more. It was almost manic.

  As if they were the final litres of water on the planet.

  But where had he hidden the film?

  Sara had already searched the house and watched all the films she’d found. Generally speaking, a common method was to put a different label on the film – something dull like ‘lecture on Sarek national park’ or ‘caravan holiday’ – and hide it openly among other films.

  But Stellan must have hidden it somewhere else.

  She started from the top.

  The attic was full of old furniture and boxes filled with Christmas decorations, Easter decorations, summer gear and the sisters’ outgrown clothes. At the top of one box was the Wham! top that Malin had been wearing one of those times she’d said that Sara couldn’t come to their house anymore because their real friends had returned. A Monday in late August, when the schools had just gone back.

  As if she hadn’t already known. The same scenario at the end of each summer.

  Sara noticed that Agneta had also begun to save things belonging to her grandchildren. Box after box of old baby clothes, milk bottles, cuddly toys, bibs. Mini Rodini, Elodie Details and even Gucci. All neatly folded and labelled. There was even a printed photo of each grandchild as a baby affixed to their respective box.

  But no films.

  In the garage, there were oil cans, cleaning fluids and spray paint canisters lining the shelves. Winter tyres for the car were neatly wrapped in plastic and stacked on top of one other. There were tools and a couple of old booster seats for the kids. No secret compartments, no films.

  In the basement was the boiler room with its stench of oil, the laundry room, the stuffy rec room and a guest room that smelled of mould. And a small, dark larder.

  She went through the rooms metre by metre. None of them seemed to contain any secret hiding place. Eventually, she flopped into the armchair in the rec room and checked the time on her mobile.

  It had taken almost three hours.

  And she had nothing to show for it.

  She had to think this through. Everything was based on Hannah having told the truth. Sara had decided she was going to believe her. Otherwise there was nothing to search for.

  The fact that she hadn’t found anything wasn’t all that strange in itself. If Stellan had filmed a rape, then it was highly likely that he’d hidden the recording well. A roll of film didn’t take up much room. Not even one from an old Super 8 camera.

  She had to go through the house again to search for secret compartments. She would have to open any kind of packaging that was big enough. Which room would Stellan have chosen to hide his treasure?

  The garden shed? That was where the attack had happened.

  No, he probably would have wanted it in the house, Sara thought to herself. She felt that that would have ensured greater control over it.

  Not the kitchen. Not the living room. It could definitely have been the attic or the basement – but she’d already searched those.

  She looked around.

  Why not the rec room?

  The projector was here, after all. He could be guaranteed privacy here.

  Sara remembered how Stellan had needed to be left in peace for hours on end while he worked when she and the sisters were little.

  And those hours had been spent in the rec room.

  If he’d watched the film here, then it would probably have been easiest to keep it in the same place . . .

  Sara looked around. She got up and tapped on the walls yet again, listening carefully for any echoing hollows. Then she moved the furniture, looked under the rugs and felt all over the stuffing of the armchairs and sofa with her hand
s.

  It had to be here somewhere.

  But where?

  Inside the light?

  Wouldn’t fit.

  Inside the stereo?

  Wait.

  The TV.

  The old-style TV. The broken one.

  A roll of film would definitely fit inside that. Several of them, in fact. And why else would it have been left here for all these years?

  Sara had thought Stellan had kept it as some sort of memento of his golden era. But she no longer thought that.

  With a slightly more adult perspective, why would Stellan have left an old TV rusting away there, year after year? Everything else in the house was carefully thought through and chosen. Why not just get rid of it?

  Because it had value.

  Contents.

  Sara went into the garage and fetched all the screwdrivers she could find. Then she carefully removed the back panel from the set.

  And there they were.

  Not just one film.

  There were several.

  She took out the top case and read. ‘Madeleine – 1.’ Then she got out the projector, raised the screen and rigged the roll of film into the equipment.

  She realised she was nervous. Worried about what she would see. But she had to see it. She dimmed the lights and started the film.

  The picture flickered and shook, and the colours were faded with age. Stellan was filming with the camera in his hand, and some of the shaking was possibly the result of his own excitement. The scene was the garden shed to the rear of the house, and he was documenting the body of a young woman.

  Rather, it was a girl’s body.

  No more than fourteen or fifteen, Sara thought to herself.

  A thin summer dress had been pulled up to her chin, so that the girl was left wearing only knickers and a bra. The camera slowly panned across her body. A man’s hand appeared in shot and disappeared behind her back. Stellan’s hand, with that wide gold wedding ring. Soon, the bra fell to the floor and Stellan zoomed in on a pair of young breasts. His hand stroked them, squeezed them and fingered them in an almost clinical way that turned Sara’s stomach. For a brief moment, the camera drifted up towards the face of the girl and revealed a pair of distant but terrified eyes.

  Then Stellan lowered the lens towards her hips, and Sara saw that he’d pulled her knickers down below her buttocks. He slowly prised the garment down to uncover her crotch. When his hand separated the girl’s legs in order to get to her sex, Sara had to turn away. After everything she’d seen as part of the prostitution task force, all the disgusting men with disturbed sexualities who used women’s bodies like slabs of meat, she’d thought she was immune.

  But she wasn’t able to cope with seeing this.

  Such a young girl.

  And the ice-cold, almost inhuman evaluation of the young body. She tried to look again, but she felt physically sick. She was on the verge of throwing up.

  She was both surprised and relieved by the strong reaction. At least it meant she hadn’t been desensitised.

  Poor girl.

  Girls.

  Hannah had been convinced that others had been affected.

  And there were a lot of rolls of film.

  Now Sara understood why Stellan had placed sheets of plywood in front of the windows in the shed, and why he didn’t want the sisters and Sara to be able to see inside. Why their spy games had met with such an abrupt end.

  She glanced at the projector screen again, and saw the thrusting so typical of porn films and then the finish. This time onto a young, clearly unwilling body. Probably completely sexually inexperienced. The last thing visible in shot was Stellan’s hand grasping a colourful towel and wiping the semen off her stomach.

  Then the reaction. Sara vomited. Straight onto the rug in the rec room.

  Repulsive bastard.

  Bloody swine.

  Her eye swept over the cases of rolls of film inside the hidden compartment.

  How many people’s lives had he ruined in this way?

  Young girls who had probably never dared to report him. Not an adult, not someone so well known and respected.

  Had they turned the hatred on themselves?

  Had some of them thought that this was what it was like? Welcome to the adult world. Your body is no longer your own.

  The silence had made all of this possible, Sara thought to herself.

  When had this happened? During the hours when everyone thought Stellan was busy with his plants and flowers? Was that interest just a front? Was that why he’d hired a gardener? To conceal the fact that the only thing Stellan Broman did in his garden was rape young girls?

  Sara went to fetch a mop and bucket and wiped up the sick. Not out of consideration to Stellan and his rec room, but because the stench was awful and she needed to stay there for a bit longer.

  Then she went through a few more films, but she couldn’t cope with more. She just watched the beginning of each one. Some girls seemed drunk, others terrified; the odd one seemed defiant. But even those ones had a completely different look in their eyes later. Empty, resigned, devastated.

  He seemed to have been at it for years. Some girls reappeared, but this time they were markedly older.

  In later films, Stellan had begun to make a habit out of documenting their faces in detail first. Perhaps it had given him a bigger kick when even that part of their bodies was his property – the object of his desires. He always did the same thing. Grabbed hold of the girls’ chins and turned their heads back and forth for the camera. As if inspecting an animal at a livestock auction. Some of the girls looked up at him uncertainly, but most of them looked down. None of them looked into the camera.

  A couple of the faces were ones Sara recognised – from school. She took photos of the projector screen with her mobile in order to look them up, if possible. But she wasn’t up to watching everything in the hideaway. And perhaps she didn’t need to, either.

  Other films there had labels with men’s names on them. And the containers were more worn – as if they had been subjected to damp. But the rolls of film appeared to be intact. So when Sara had had enough, she threaded one of the men’s rolls into the projector.

  Had Stellan done the same thing with young boys?

  He hadn’t, it transpired when the film finally flickered into life. This time, the scene wasn’t the garden shed, but was instead the guest room in the house.

  The room where Sara herself had slept on the odd occasion. Had Stellan filmed his attacks in there as well? She was on the verge of vomiting again.

  But it wasn’t Stellan who was visible in shot, but a range of men. They were largely middle-aged or older. And the camera wasn’t shaky and handheld any longer but fixed – as if it were on a tripod. A full picture taken from a slightly greater distance.

  But the girls seemed the same. Although now they weren’t as passive. They seemed more indifferent and were more conspicuously inebriated. Sometimes almost senseless.

  The men were in control in these films, too – they appeared to be giving the girls instructions to turn in different directions, to look turned on and eager, to do degrading things.

  Film after film of Stellan’s young girls together with grown men. Old men, sometimes. Sara took pictures of them with her mobile.

  On the fifth roll of men there was a familiar face. Not from school, as had been the case with a couple of the girls, but from TV. He’d been a member of the government, or so she remembered. A fairly important minister. And now Sara was watching him have sex with a young girl. He was really het up as well, because after just a couple of minutes he was done. And when he’d dressed again, he took out his wallet and left a fifty-krona note on the pillow next to the immobile girl. Then he left.

  A government minister.

  Sara had to keep going, to see whether there were other high-ups who’d been recorded. She threaded roll upon roll of film, watched the beginning of each and took photos with her mobile of the men, noting the names on t
he labels.

  Two more perpetrators were immediately recognisable to her.

  First there was Thorvald Tegnér, the minister of justice. The old man she’d struck down in the brothel in Solna, but who hadn’t reported her. And then a former prime minister. Who was clearly partial to very young girls. Judging by his reasonably young appearance, the film had been recorded before he took office – perhaps even before he had become leader of the party. But that was probably how Stellan had operated. He’d arranged to have a hold on as many people as possible moving in the right circles. You never knew where people would end up. Sara assumed that Stellan and his handler had made good use of that particular sequence.

  She sat there for a long time, looking at the image of the former prime minister. He’d been married – Sara knew that. He’d had a somewhat father-of-the-nation style about him. How did someone like him manage to divide himself into two such different halves? Then it struck her that there was something off about the picture. A black edge was visible in the right-hand corner. She checked the other recorded encounters. The same thing. Sometimes the edge was a little wider, sometimes a little thinner. But it was there in almost every shot.

  As usual, she couldn’t stop when there was something she didn’t understand. She left the rec room and went up to the guest room on the second floor. When she stepped into the room and encountered the very bed that she’d seen used for so many rapes, her head swam. She felt her knees tremble and she thought she was going to fall over. But instead she looked around the room and pulled out her mobile to compare.

  The films had been recorded from an upwards diagonal angle with a camera that must have been fitted into the wall.

  Or behind it.

  Sara pulled out a chair and scrutinised the wall with its medallion wallpaper. There – in the middle of the medallions – there was a hole. Just a few centimetres across. She stuck her finger in and felt around. Nothing. She tapped on the wall and then went to check outside. A few metres further down the landing was the door to Stellan and Agneta’s bedroom. Sara went in there and looked at the smooth wall adjoining the guest room. There was a built-in wardrobe at either end.