Free Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl

increased.”
    “And what about the wound on your lip?” she said more faintly.
    “The TV celebrity,” he snickered. “The one who kicked Mörner in the ass.”
    “Is it really all about drugs?”
    “No,” he sighed. “This thing kills faster.”
    She was already halfway into the realm of sleep. “A weapon?”
    “Not exactly. It’s best if I don’t say more. But there’s a risk that I’ll have to put in some overtime. Good thing summer’s over.”
    Then she was asleep.
    He patted her cheek, then turned to the pile of books on the nightstand. On his way back from Marieberg he had stopped by the library at Fridhemsplan and looked up “Hassel, Lars-Erik,” in the new computer system. He got hold of the Maoist manifesto from 1971 and two parts of the somewhat later documentary novels.
    The manifesto was unreadable—not for ideological reasons, but because it presupposed an understanding of the technical terminology of dialectical materialism. Hjelm didn’t understand a word. And this was written by the man who later freely lambasted Swedish authors with accusations of elitism.
    The documentary novels, though, were profoundly educational. The plot of one centered on a manor in Västmanland at the turn of the century. Step by step the reader could follow each class, from the landowner, whose inherited brutality was hidden behind fancy upper-class manners, to the oppressed farm laborers’ heroic struggle for their daily bread. Hjelm was vaguely familiar with the concept. The problem was that everything was hyperidealized. The message overshadowed the characterizations. The uneducated masses had to be schooled inpolitics. It was like a medieval allegory, an undisguised textbook in the true faith. The censorship of sleepiness was relentless.
    The day on which one of Sweden’s last levees broke ended with yet another assault on a police officer. Just as the living room clock struck midnight, Lars-Erik mounted a posthumous attack on Paul Hjelm: the right corner of
The Parasite of Society
struck his left eyebrow.
    The Kentucky Killer’s visit to Sweden entered its second day.

8
    Arto Söderstedt lived with his wife and five children in the inner city and thought it wonderful. He was convinced that the children thought it wonderful too, from the three-year-old to the thirteen-year-old. Every time he dropped them off at day care and school, he found himself surrounded by self-tormentors who were convinced that their children’s greatest dream was to have their own garden patch to romp around in. He often thought about the psychosocial mechanisms that caused the majority of inner-city parents to have a constant guilty conscience.
    The suburban parents he met were different. All of them made an extreme effort to convince their friends that they had found heaven on earth. As a rule, upon closer inspection, the heaven that was suburbia turned out to consist of three things: one, you could let the children out in the yard and avoid being in their vicinity; two, it was easier to park your car; and three, you could grill outdoors.
    The tension-loaded contradiction between thwarted conscience and inflated self-esteem often resulted in yet another family moving van heading north, south, or west.
    Söderstedt had seen the grass on both sides of the fence. Whenthe A-Unit was made permanent, his family had moved from Västerås, with its private homes, to Bondegatan on Södermalm. Personally, he didn’t miss the forced interaction with neighbors he had nothing in common with, nor the competition-oriented self-righteousness that came with homeownership, nor the fixation on the car, nor the enormous distance to everything, nor the useless public transportation system, nor the barbecue parties, nor the tranquil state of vegetation, nor the artificial proximity to nature, nor the predictable discussions about hoses, nor the lawn and the garden that sucked up more time than money, nor the architecture that lacked history and