Free Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson Page A

sit and look at your back?”
    Thomas Söderberg went over to the pudgy little man and placed his hands on his shoulders.
    You little shit, he thought. You’re not a gifted enough orator to speak in an arena. A theater. A marketplace. You have to have everybody sitting right there in front of you, and a lectern to hang on to if it gets tricky. But I can’t let your inadequacy get in my way.
    “Remember what we said, brother,” said Thomas Söderberg to Gunnar Isaksson. “We must hold fast now. I promise you this will work. People will be allowed to weep, to call out to God, and we—God—will triumph tonight. Tell your wife to bring a flower to place on the spot where his body lay.”
    The atmosphere will be incredible, thought Thomas Söderberg.
    He made a mental note to get several more people to bring flowers and lay them on the floor. It would be just like the spot where Olof Palme was murdered.
    Pastor Vesa Larsson was still sitting in exactly the same spot as during the conversation with the police, leaning forward. He took no part in the heated discussion, but sat there with his face buried in his hands. He might possibly have been crying, it was difficult to see.

 
    R ebecka and Sanna were sitting in the car on the way into town. Gray pine trees, weighed down with snow, swept past in the beam of the headlights. The uncomfortable silence was like a shrinking room. The walls and the ceiling were moving inward and downward. With each passing minute it became more difficult to breathe properly. Rebecka was driving. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the speedometer and the road. The intense cold meant that the road wasn’t slippery at all, despite being covered with packed snow.
    Sanna sat with her cheek resting on the cold window, winding a lock of her hair tightly around her finger.
    “Can’t you just say something,” she said after a while.
    “I’m not used to driving on roads like this,” said Rebecka. “I find it difficult to talk and drive at the same time.”
    She could hear how obvious the lie was, as clear as a reef just below the surface of the water. But it didn’t matter. Perhaps that’s what she wanted. She looked at the clock. Quarter to eight.
    Don’t start anything, she told herself firmly. You’ve rescued Sanna. Now you have to row her to the shore.
    “Do you think the girls will be all right?” she asked.
    “They’ll have to be,” replied Sanna, straightening up in her seat. “And we won’t be long, will we? I daren’t ring anybody to ask for help; the fewer people who know where I am, the better.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m frightened of journalists. I know what they can be like. And then there’s Mum and Dad . . . but let’s talk about something else.”
    “Do you want to talk about Viktor? About what happened?”
    “No. I’ll be telling the police soon anyway. We’ll talk about you, that’ll calm me down. How are things with you? Is it really seven years since we saw each other?”
    “Mmm,” replied Rebecka. “But we’ve had the odd chat on the phone.”
    “To think you’ve still got the house in Kurravaara.”
    “Well, Uncle Affe and Inga-Lill don’t think they can afford to buy me out. I think they’re annoyed because they’re the only ones putting work and money into the house. But on the other hand, they’re the only ones getting any pleasure out of it as well. I’d like to sell it really. To them or to somebody else, it’s all the same to me.”
    She wondered whether what she had just said was true. Did she really get no pleasure from her grandmother’s house, or from the cottage in Jiekajärvi? Just because she was never there? Just the thought of the cottage, the idea that there was somewhere that belonged to her, far away from civilization, deep in the wilderness, beyond marsh and forest, wasn’t that a kind of pleasure in itself?
    “You look, how shall I put it, really smart,” said Sanna. “And sure of yourself, somehow. Of course, I