Summertime Death by Mons Kallentoft Read Free Book Online

missing.
    One girl has been attacked, possibly raped, in the Horticultural Society Park. A long shot? Hardly. It’s not impossible. Time, and their work, will turn up any connections if they exist.
    But for now they’re keeping an open mind, as the cliché has it. For now they’re staring out at the tarmac of Brokindsleden through the windscreen, the cycle path alongside the main road empty and the heat snakelike, scentless. The air seems to be utterly still, shimmering, low in oxygen. The wheat-fields have been flattened by the heat, as if an immense hot fist had pressed the plants back into the ground and said to them: Don’t think that your lives are possible, not this summer, this year will be a year of burning.
    Zeke’s hands at the wheel of the Volvo.
    Steady.
    Like his son Martin’s hands on his hockey stick.
    At the end of the season Martin received an offer from the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he turned it down. His girlfriend is expecting a child and wants it to be born in Linköping. And the team’s main sponsors, Cloetta and Saab, joined forces and came up with a multi-million-kronor offer to persuade Martin to stay.
    ‘Now the lad’s rich,’ had been Zeke’s comment. ‘And he’ll get even richer if he moves to the States.’
    And it had sounded as if Zeke wanted Martin to move, as if he’d had it up to here with ice hockey and glory and praise and money.
    ‘Ice hockey. What a fucking useless game.’
    Malin had asked him what he thought about becoming a grandfather.
    ‘You must be excited, and proud.’ But Zeke had just muttered in reply. She had let the matter drop, once the baby was born he’d be beaming with joy, she was sure of that. The child would stroke his shaved head and say ‘prickle, prickle,’ and Zeke would love it.
     
    Sturefors.
    They are driving in silence, now approaching the edge of the small community.
    Malin closes her eyes.
    If the heat is scentless out there, what does the inside of the car smell like?
    Air freshener and Aramis aftershave.
    What do the gardens smell like now? What did they used to smell of?
    Freshly mown grass.
    A little girl’s feet moving over the blades of grass, drifting forward. Alone in the garden. It smells of Dad. Mum. I hear her shouting, following me through the house, complaining, and how Dad backs down and I want him to stand up for me, contradict her, let me know that I’m good enough.
    And how he stands there limply next to Mum, his mouth open as she shouts at me, how his own hesitant protests disappear back into his mouth as she stubbornly carries on.
    The wind in my hair as I cycle past the houses, along the streets on my way to school. My feet beneath me, feet pounding the jogging track.
    This is a competition, everything is a competition.
    And one night when you thought I was asleep, when I was lying outside your door, I remember it now, only now, in this air-conditioned car, I remember what you said, you said: She must never find out. This must stay a secret.
    Mum’s sharp voice. The tone of someone who has never found her place in the world.
    Dad, what is it that I must never know?
    The boys’ football matches in the pitch behind the red-painted school-building. The red shirts of the home team.
    Bodies, warm. The floodlights on. Bankeberg SK, Ljungsbro IF, LFF, Saab. All the teams, the boys, the girls alongside, under the covers down in the cellar, what if someone comes?
    Lilac hedges. Wooden fences, stained green. Families trying to be families. Children who are children. Who go swimming, and who know that they will eventually follow in their parents’ footsteps.
     
    Sturefors.
    Low blocks of flats and villas situated close to the Stångån River. Most of them built in the late sixties and seventies. Some built by the families themselves, by craftsmen planning their own homes, others bought by engineers, teachers, civil servants.
    No doctors out here then.
    But there must be now.
    Doctors and engineers behind the tall, yellowing