HE HAD BEEN WAITING in the car for almost two hours when the right moment popped up. He could see the children playing outside the preschool through the small camera that was mounted on the rear window. They fought over the bikes, threw gravel, and cried with their snotty noses.
He didn’t have any kids. He had never liked them, not even back when he was a kid. He’d done everything he could to fit in with them back then: he wore the right clothes and said the right things, but no one had noticed his desperate, tiny attempts, and his desire to be normal had turned into disdain for people his own age. These days, kids mostly just disgusted him. Their list of problems was never-ending: snot, pimples, scabs, warts, lice, eczema. Children were small, helpless reservoirs of infection that had no reason to exist, except to be mean. He had only truly understood the cruelty of children once he had grown up. In contrast to kindness, which had to be taught, nurtured, and developed, evil existed naturally from birth and grew more cunning throughout the years.
At 4:07 p.m., he left the car to pick them up. There were enough parents around by then that the staff wouldn’t have time to pay much attention to him. He knew what Lovisa and Mark, three and five years old, looked like from Facebook. He found them straightaway in the playground, and they swallowed his explanation without protest: he was a colleague of their mother’s and she was stuck in a meeting she couldn’t get out of before preschool ended. The promise of McDonald’s helped to cement his story as truth.
It wasn’t quite so simple with the staff. The heavy one was suspicious, and bluntly asked him who he was, making it clear that they couldn’t hand the kids over to a stranger. He declared in an insulted tone that he wasn’t a stranger but the children’s father, feeling fortunate that the children weren’t standing nearby. The heavy one grew flustered and embarrassed.
He explained that he travelled a lot for work and usually wasn’t able to come pick them up. Today was a surprise. In the end, Fatso accepted his explanation but pointed out that he should let them know in advance if he was going to surprise them again.
Now they were in the back seat, deep in a drug-induced sleep. He waited for their mother to arrive. On the camera screen in the back window he saw Camilla Lindén slamming her car door and hurrying over to the preschool, late as usual. She came rushing back three minutes later and started poking at her phone, unaware that she was about to hear an automated message telling her that the number she was trying to reach was not in service.
He watched as she punched the number in again and listened to the same message. She threw her handbag into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and tore off, tires screeching. He was more relaxed than she was — he turned the key in the ignition, began to follow her, and activated the camera’s automatic face detection, which would guide the swivel-mounted laser with the help of the algorithms he had programmed himself.
If everything worked as he had planned, they would never be able to figure out what had happened.