CELL 8 by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Read Free Book Online

positioned her there, then got cutlery and a glass and a hard plastic bib; the food was standing in the fridge, some sort of meat stew with rice.
    They sat opposite each other.
    Grens knew that he should tell her. Only he had no idea how.
    It didn’t change anything.
    He fed her at the same speed that he ate himself; the homemade stew had been reduced to a suitable brown and green and white mash on her plate. She ate well, she had a good appetite, she always had. He was sure that that was why she stayed so well, all these years in a wheelchair, far removed from other people’s conversations, as long as she ate and got energy, she would be there, wanting to live and keep on living.
    He was nervous. He had to tell her.
    She swallowed and something got caught in her throat; a severe coughing fit, he got up, held her until her breathing was regular again. He sat down and took her hand.
    “I’ve employed a woman.”
    It was hard to meet her eyes.
    “A young woman, like you, back then. She’s smart. I think that she’ll be good.”
    He wondered if she understood. He wanted to know. He wished it were possible to know if she was listening, if she was really listening.
    “It won’t affect us. Not like that. She could have been our daughter.”
    She wanted more food. A couple more spoonfuls of the brown stuff, one of the white.
    “I just wanted you to know.”
    By the time he was back out on the veranda by the entrance, it was blowing a mixture of snow and rain. He tied his scarf, buttoned his coat all the way up. He was down the steps and had started to walk across the parking lot when his mobile phone started to ring.
    Sven Sundkvist.
    “Ewert?”
    “Yes?”
    “We’ve found him.”
    “Bring him in for questioning.”
    “A foreigner.”
    “He kicked a person in the head.”
    “Canadian passport.”
    “I want you to bring him in.”
    The rain intensified, the drops mixed with snow seemed ever bigger, ever heavier.
    Ewert Grens knew that it wouldn’t help in the slightest, but he looked up at the sky and cursed the endless winter, damning it to hell.
    IT WOULD SOON BE LIGHT IN THE SMALL TOWN IN SOUTHERN OHIO THAT was dominated by the huge prison with high concrete walls. It was cold out, snow falling as it did throughout the winter, and the inhabitants of Marcusville would start their day by clearing the driveways to their houses.
    Vernon Eriksen did his last round through the corridors of locked-up people.
    It was half past five; one hour left, then he would finish his night shift, change into ordinary clothes, walk to Sofio’s on Main Street, a Mexican restaurant that did a decent breakfast, double blueberry pancakes and crispy fried bacon.
    He’d left West Wing and was on his way to East Block, his footsteps echoing on the walls that he still thought of as new, even though they’d been there for more than thirty years now. He could clearly remember the building at the edge of town that was to become high walls and cells that would accommodate prisoners, and for that very reason divided the inhabitants of Marcusville into two camps as it slowly grew: those who saw it as new job opportunities and a second chance for a backwater town, and those who saw it as a fall in property prices and a constant worry about the criminal elements in their midst. He hadn’t thought about it much himself. He was nineteen and had applied for a job in the newly opened prison and had then just stayed there. He’d therefore never had reason to leave Marcusville; one of the leftovers, a bachelor who instead clung to the work that had become his everyday as the years passed and now, now that he was over fifty, it was too late to break out. He sometimes went to Columbus for a dance, occasionally ate dinner with a woman some miles south in Wheelersburg, but that’s where it stopped, nothing more, no intimacy, he always left before.
    His life, it had somehow always been connected to death.
    He mused on it every so often, that it had