Free A summer with Kim Novak by Håkan Nesser Page A

his face must look like now. Not to mention how his head must be feeling.
    In any case, there were a few rain showers on Sunday evening, and while Edmund was lying on his bed trying to write a letter to his mother in Vissingsberg, I drew the first panels of Colonel Darkin and the Mysterious Heiress .
    As the evening unfolded, I remember thinking how pleasant it was.
    The more the summer progressed, the more my brother Henry was consumed with his existential novel. He was almost secretive about it. He often slept long into the day, got up and took a dip in the lake and sat down by the typewriter with coffee and a cigarette. Ideally out on the lawn by the wobbly garden table, weather permitting. Which it did, for the most part. When the question of supper arose, he almost always bowed out of kitchen duty and tossed Edmund and me five or ten kronor to take care of it: fetch provisions, cook and do the washing up.
    It didn’t bother us. Though money was tight, our basic needs were met, and it was nice to be able to buy an ice cream now and again. At Laxman’s or by Fläskhällen. Or a few loose cigarettes; we couldn’t always be nicking them from Henry, even if he would probably never have noticed.
    After dinner Henry would disappear in Killer, and at least two out of three evenings Edmund and I were in bed before he returned. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the Facit’s staccato clatter and the tape deck playing Eddie Cochran. The Drifters. Elvis Presley. He had recorded ‘Wooden Heart’ on several places on the tape. When the music ended, the birds singing in the bushes under the window took over. Sometimes I asked Henry how it was going with his book, but he never felt like talking about it.
    ‘It’s going,’ he’d say and take a drag from his eternal Lucky.
    It’s going.
    I was vaguely curious about what he was writing, but he never left any papers out and I didn’t want to ask him more than once. One night, just after he’d driven away in Killer, I happened to catch sight of a sheet still in the machine on the desk. There were just a few lines on it; I cautiously sat down on the chair and turned the roller up a few notches so it would be easier to read.
    I think I read the text five or six times. Maybe because I thought it was good, but also because it was so unexpected. Unexpected and eerie:
comes at him from behind, suddenly and immediately, stopping at just the right point. A step on the gravel, no more than one, hand tightly gripping the shaft, and then a brief fatal blow. When steel meets skull the sound that is born is mute. The reverse of a sound, audible because it is more silent than silence, and when the heavy body unites with the earth the summer night is dense and smiling enigmatically; everything slips into everything else and
    He’d stopped there. I twisted the roller back, feeling like a thief in the night. As Benny’s mother would say.
    Cancer-Treblinka-Love-Fuck-Death, I thought. What sort of book are you writing, brother Henry?
    It took a few days to plan our night raid on Karlesson’s shop, and on Thursday, the day before Midsummer’s Eve, we did the deed. Henry had apparently decided to stay home that night, but we said that we had something to do under the cover of night and soon after nine we were on our way. Henry didn’t seem bothered.
    ‘If you get up to no good, make sure you don’t get caught,’ he said without looking up from his typewriter.
    We took four apple juices and a French loaf as provisions, and just over ten kronor, so we could each buy a sausage special at Törner’s on the square before he closed at eleven.
    At first all went as planned. It was a gusty night; a headwind was blowing over the plain, but we pulled into the square in Kumla at around quarter to eleven. Rain was in the air and there was barely a soul on the street. After we’d eaten our sausages and drained our apple juices, Törner sputtered home in his catering van and