Still Waters (Sandhamn Murders Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t care.
    What could have happened to Krister?
    They’d had a terrible fight after his mother’s funeral, and since then she had neither spoken to him nor heard anything from him for several months. At first she thought the fact that she had gone off to Kos served him right, but when he didn’t call and didn’t reply to her texts, she’d gotten really annoyed. She had even sent a postcard asking him to call her, but there had been no response.
    Fuck you, then, she had thought. He could trudge around back home in the slush while she enjoyed the Greek sunshine. God, men could be so miserable. They were like kids.
    And yet she really wanted to talk to him.
    There was only she and Krister left now. He was the closest thing she had to a brother. Even though his one-track mind and his lack of ambition irritated her, he was still family and could be good company. Sometimes he was the only company she had.
    Neither of them had children or a long-term partner. There had been many occasions when they had emptied yet another bottle of wine that he had “happened” to have with him from his work at Systemet, and she had wondered whether they would end up sitting there like this when they were retired. Lonely losers who hadn’t managed to get their act together. Old and bitter, passing their time complaining about everything.
    That was why she had hardly been able to believe it when the chance of a new life had suddenly come along. For the first time they had the opportunity to do something different, to live a proper life, far away from his work at the store and her smoky evenings in the casino. The chance for a serious amount of money for both of them.
    But Krister hadn’t had the courage. Kicki just didn’t understand it. It would have been so simple; she knew exactly what needed to be done, what needed to be said.
    After all, he had proof. Written proof.
    They had been sitting in his living room; Krister had been lolling on the sofa gazing at her, his eyelids heavy. His shirt was grubby, with several buttons undone. He pushed back his hair, which was in dire need of a wash, and shook his head.
    “You and your ideas. You know it would never work.” He topped off his glass of wine. “Want some?” He waved the bottle in her direction.
    She looked at him and sighed. “No, I don’t want any more wine. I want you to listen to what I’m saying.” She lit yet another cigarette, feeling furious. She took a deep drag and stared at him. This place was so depressing. A typical bachelor pad. “You could at least listen,” she tried again.
    But he had refused to take her suggestion seriously and had dodged the issue every time she’d brought it up. She had even dragged his mother into the argument, insisting that Cecilia would have wanted him to do it. She had gone over it time and time again.
    In the end she had lost her temper. “OK, you carry on sitting here, you fucking idiot,” she had yelled at him. “This is your chance for a decent life, and you don’t even have the guts to try!” She looked at him with utter contempt, seething with rage. “You’re such a fucking coward! You’ll end up sitting here in this dump until they carry you out in a box!”
    With that she had stormed out, and two days later she left for Kos without speaking to him again.
    And now she was regretting it.
    Things hadn’t been easy for Krister. His maternal grandparents had broken off all contact with his mother when she had gotten pregnant at eighteen. She had brought him up on her own and had provided for them both by working at Systemet. Being a single parent in the mid-1950s was no picnic, and Krister probably hadn’t been the easiest of children. When he left school with no qualifications, she had fixed him up with a job at Systemet, and he’d never left.
    He had never met his father nor his maternal grandparents. They had died without ever having seen him, embittered by the scandal to the very end.
    Kicki’s father had done