Andersson turned red. “That’s not possible. Do you know what it costs?”
“Rebecka holds the answer,” Hannu said.
“Possibly. But we’ll wait. She’s too damn sick to help us, according to Irene.”
Irene decided it was appropriate to break into the conversation. “I’ve spoken with the pastor at the Swedish Seaman’s Church in London. He promised to get in touch when Rebecka improves.”
“Then we wait until then,” Andersson concluded.
IT TOOK quite a while before Irene managed to get ahold of the right person. The one who had been most involved in the investigation was on Easter vacation in Idre but after a good deal of wandering about the telephone exchange, she was able to speak with an officer named Lisa Sandberg. Irene introduced herself and explained the reason for her call.
“My question, then, is what kind of work Rebecka Schyttelius and Christian Lefévre did for you at Save the Children.”
“It’s no secret from the police, even if I don’t want you to spread it around. There are probably a lot of people who would like to see Schyttelius’s and Lefévre’s heads on a platter,” Lisa Sandberg said seriously.
“The information will remain confidential. Only the investigation team will learn of it,” Irene assured her.
“Okay. What happened was that, out of sheer luck, we received a tip about a network of pedophiles who were spreading child pornography on the Internet. They had created a Web community, which is like a closed club, on the Internet. We traced them but didn’t have the ability to get into their archives of pictures and films.
“Then someone in our group mentioned Rebecka Schyttelius and that she worked with a very clever guy. They had done similar jobs for the WHO. We contacted Rebecka, and she and her partner came here. We gave them all the information we had, and they went back to London and started to work from there. They were able to get access to the group without being discovered. It turned out that there were fifty-seven people, from all over Scandinavia, in the community. They had a bulletin board and a chat site where they met at certain times and discussed pictures and fantasies. This is the largest child pornography ring ever identified in the Nordic region.”
“I remember reading about it in the paper last winter. There were a lot of people who one wouldn’t have suspected would ever be arrested for something like that.”
“A professor of comparative literature who was about to retire, a female municipal commissioner who was a mother of four, a famous Danish furniture designer. . . . Well, there were a lot of surprises. But that’s what we learned from this investigation: It’s never possible to predict who’s going to be obsessed with child pornography.”
“How were you able to identify all of these people?”
“It was very difficult. Everyone used nicknames and anonymous E-mail addresses. It was Rebecka’s and Christian’s work that made it possible to locate so many.”
“Was it possible to identify all of them?”
“No. Five remained unidentified: two in Sweden, two in Norway, and one in Denmark.”
“What were the ‘names’ of the ones in Sweden?”
“Peter and Pan.”
“Were Peter and Pan connected? It almost sounds that way. Peter Pan.”
“No. We also thought that, but we found nothing to support it.”
“So Rebecka and Christian made their way into this group, and then revealed the identities of those involved?”
“Yes. They followed the group’s activities for a few months and collected evidence. For example, they found out when, where, and how the E-mail addresses had been used in connection with other activities on the Web. They systematically revealed who had hidden themselves behind nicknames. If I understood it correctly, they traced them through the computer. I guess there’s something called an IP address number . . . I’m not very good when it comes to the technological aspect.”
“No, I understand. That’s why you asked Rebecka and Christian for help.”
“Yes. They did a fantastic job. The pictures and films are of the worst kind and show violent assaults on children. A grown man having sexual intercourse with a three-month old baby; small girls and boys only five or six years old being raped in front of the camera; and so on. The network held visual documentation of thousands of sexual assaults on children. You could say that the admission ticket to the club was that you submitted your own pictures or films to the archive.
“We’re in the process of trying to identify the children. It’s a difficult job. The pictures came from