To the Top of the Mountain by Arne Dahl Read Free Book Online Page B

He could never have imagined anything so awful.
    It had all been quite overwhelming for a while; things had only recently begun to calm down.
    Gunnar Nyberg was the only member of the A-Unit who had emerged with his honour intact, even if this honour was internal and had never, under any circumstances, been allowed into the public eye. The lid had been screwed on, and there it remained. But internally, within the National Police Board, he had been given a halo, and if the very thought of him, the man that a group of investigative journalists from the police newspaper had named Sweden’s Biggest Policeman, as detective superintendent hadn’t been so absurd, he probably would have been promoted. He ruled himself out right away, to save the National Police Commissioner having to make excuses. No promotion, but he would be glad of some stimulating projects.
    And so, Sweden’s Biggest Policeman ended up in front of a computer in the successful child pornography division of the CID. The man who had just started to live again, having been worn down by life in the muddy waters of shame. The man who had just found reconciliation with what he had believed to be irreconcilable. His children. His ex-wife. The witnesses and victim of his life’s greatest crime. The unforgettable wife-battering of his bodybuilding period. It was more than twenty years ago, but every single day he remembered the sight of his children staring, wide-eyed, at his wife’s split brow. He sang his pain away as the bass singer in a church choir in Nacka.
    Then he had taken the step. Gunilla had long since remarried, in Uddevalla on the other side of the country. With shaking legs, he had made the journey down to visit her and Bengt. They had just sold their house and bought a place in the country on the island of Orust. That was where he went to visit them. She was completely different to how he remembered her, she had blossomed. She was a small woman, unexpectedly foul-mouthed, who, without hesitating, both forgave him and plied him with enough drink to make him cry through the night. A pathetic lump of meat. It did him good. Then he visited his daughter Tanja in Uddevalla. She was married and getting on in the world. Children could wait. She’d had a slightly more reserved, distant attitude, but even that went well.
    But the best encounter of all had been with his son Tommy, living in Östhammar, just north of Stockholm. He was a farmer and had a son of his own called Benny. He spent as much time with them as he could; his fuel costs rocketing as a result. He didn’t give a damn that his clapped-out old Renault used up an abnormal amount of juice. His grandson was going to be spoilt, whatever the cost.
    And it wasn’t only to his children he opened himself up, but women, too. Suddenly, after a twenty-year quarantine, he was able to think of himself as a sexual being. He started to look at women again, tentatively but without letting himself be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.
    And just then, both perspectives were twisted in the most terrible way.
    Children and sex.
    After the first few shocks, when Sara and Ludvig had found him slumped over the computer, sobbing, he went to work with the most enthusiasm imaginable. Since the collapse of the A-Unit, the group had been CID’s A team of the moment. After a period of fruitless hunting, they were in the middle of a very successful spell, working closely with similar groups abroad. Before Nyberg arrived, they had been working with fifteen other countries on Operation Cathedral, led by the British National Crime Squad, which had mapped out an enormous paedophile network online. The first thing he got to work on at the end of October was something disgusting called ‘Paedo University’. In May of the previous year, the American police had begun an international effort called Operation Sabbatical, and at the end of October, there was a joint crackdown in the countries involved. At home, other parts of the