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

Nilsson from the Security Service, the crime database in his head. ‘But there are a couple of other Slavs of the same kind here. Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic, Risto Petrovic.’
    ‘So these three people are “a couple of other Slavs of the same kind”,’ Söderstedt said in summary.
    This summary earned him a sharp look from Bernt Nilsson.
    ‘Though you can’t really say that he spent much time with anyone, really,’ the prison governor said. ‘He kept himself to himself.’
    Norlander retook the command.
    ‘What we need are the following. One: an interrogation room. Two: the guards, especially Erik Svensson. Three: to get past the deafening ringing in the four neighbours’ ears. Four: “a couple of other Slavs of the same kind”. And five: constant updates from forensics and the doctors. Are Qvarfordt and Svenhagen in charge?’
    Those present stared at the former hay sack, astounded.
    After a moment, Bernt Nilsson nodded stiffly.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ Norlander said formally while he picked the baby sick from his shoulder in paper-thin, white flakes, ‘tomorrow is Midsummer’s Eve and I’m planning to devote it to my newborn daughter, not violent thugs in the Kumla Bunker. So let’s get to work.’
    He cast one final glance into the burnt-out cell. He shouldn’t have done so.
    The crime scene technician was just coaxing a rough, burnt lump loose from the cell wall with a kind of large spatula. He weighed it in his hand, turning it round. For a moment, it ended up staring at Viggo Norlander.
    The lump was staring. In the shapeless piece of unidentifiable material, a human eye was wedged. Completely unspoilt. As though it could still see.
    He imagined that it was staring at him accusingly.
    ‘False eye,’ said the technician, grinning.

5
    IT WAS TIME for a coffee break.
    It was just after lunch, and for the third time that Thursday, it was time for a coffee break. They would manage to fit at least three more in before it was time to go home. To celebrate Midsummer.
    Probably by having a coffee break, Gunnar Nyberg thought, staring down into his untouched mug of black coffee.
    One of his ascetic’s coffee breaks, as Ludvig Johnsson called them.
    Johnsson himself wolfed down at least four Danish pastries a day; he was thin as a rake.
    ‘It’s your metabolism,’ Sara Svenhagen had explained a week or two earlier, on Saturday 12 June to be precise, just after half two in the afternoon. The paedophile hunters, as the group was unofficially called, were having a coffee break in the Strandcafé on Norrmälarstrand.
    ‘You ruined your metabolism when you were Mr Sweden,’ she had continued didactically. ‘The anabolic steroids knocked the whole thing out of kilter. Ludvig’s the exact opposite, he’s got the build of a marathon runner. He probably ran his way out of his sorrow. Sixty kilometres a week.’
    ‘Sorrow?’ Nyberg had asked, glancing with sorrow at the Danish pastry which had been bought for him. He had been in the middle of a strict diet, but seemed to keep finding Danish pasties and cinnamon buns and macaroons and almond cakes at his helpless fingertips.
    Sara Svenhagen had looked at him, slightly surprised. He had looked back. She was stunningly beautiful. In her thirties. Her thick, dark blonde hair, shining like gold somehow, ran like a waterfall down to the thin, twisted shoulder straps of her top; shoulder straps which lay delicately against her freckled, golden-brown skin.
    It was true, he always got a bit lyrical when he looked at Sara. He wasn’t a dirty old man, he told himself time and time again, though two decades separated them. There wasn’t any desire there. She was more like an angel of salvation, a luminary, always there to drag him back up into the light of day after he had been looking into the darkest depths of humanity.
    Because that was what CID’s paedophile hunters did: spent every day looking down into humanity’s, and above all man kind’s, worst conceivable depths.