The Darkest Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

corners of his mouth and a black leather bag in his hand. “It was Mogge who thought we should come here.”
    “To Siberia,” said Freddy, pulling the bowl of chips Henrik had provided toward him.
    “Mogge? Morgan Berglund?”
    “Sure thing,” said Tommy, sitting down on the sofa next to his brother. “You’re pals, right?”
    “We
were
,” said Henrik. “Mogge’s moved away.”
    “We know, he’s in Denmark. He was working in a casino in Copenhagen, illegally.”
    “Dirty dealing,” said Freddy.
    “We’ve been in Europe,” said Tommy. “For almost a year. Makes you realize how fucking small Sweden is.”
    “Fucking backwater,” said Freddy.
    “First of all we were in Germany—Hamburg and Düsseldorf, that was fucking brilliant. Then we went to Copenhagen, and that was pretty cool too.” Tommy looked around again. “And now we’re here.”
    He nodded and put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
    “Don’t smoke in here,” said Henrik.
    He had been wondering why the Serelius brothers had left the big cities of Europe—if things had indeed been going so bloody well down there—and traveled up to the isolation of small-town Sweden. Had they quarreled with the wrong people? Probably.
    “You can’t stay here,” said Henrik, looking around his one-bedroom apartment. “I haven’t got room. You can see that.”
    Tommy had put the cigarette away. He didn’t appear to be listening.
    “We’re Satanists,” he said. “Did we mention that?”
    “Satanists?” said Henrik.
    Tommy and Freddy nodded.
    “You mean devil worshippers?” said Henrik with a smile.
    Tommy wasn’t smiling.
    “We don’t worship anyone,” he said. “Satan stands for the strength within human beings, that’s what we believe in.”
    “The force
,” said Freddy, finishing off the chips.
    “Exactly,” said Tommy. “‘Might makes right’—that’s our motto. We take what we want. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?”
    “No.”
    “A great philosopher,” said Tommy. “Crowley saw life as a constant battle between the strong and the weak. Between the clever and the stupid. Where the strongest and cleverest always win.”
    “Well, that’s logical,” said Henrik, who had never been religious. He had no intention of becoming religious now, either.
    Tommy carried on looking around the apartment.
    “When did she cut and run?” he asked.
    “Who?”
    “Your girl. The one who put up curtains and dried flowers and all that crap. You didn’t do it, did you?”
    “She moved out last spring,” said Henrik.
    A memory of Camilla sprang unbidden into his mind, lying reading on the sofa where the Serelius brothers were now sitting. He realized that Tommy was a bit smarter than he looked—he noticed details.
    “What was her name?”
    “Camilla.”
    “Do you miss her?”
    “Like dog shit,” he said quickly. “Anyway, like I said, you can’t stay …”
    “Chill out, we’re staying in Kalmar,” said Tommy. “That’s all sorted, but we’re thinking of working here on Öland. So we need a bit of help.”
    “With what?”
    “Mogge told us what you and he used to do in the winter. He told us about the summer cottages …”
    “I see.”
    “He said you’d be happy to start up again.”
    Thanks for that, Mogge
, thought Henrik. They had quarreled about the division of the money before Morgan left—perhaps this was his revenge.
    “That was a long time ago,” he said. “Four years … and we only did it for two winters, really.”
    “And? Mogge said it went well.”
    “It went okay,” said Henrik.
    Virtually all the break-ins had been problem free, but a couple of times he and Mogge had been spotted by the people next door and had to make their escape over stone walls, like kids stealing apples. They had always worked out at least two escape routes in advance, one on foot and one in the car.
    He went on: “Sometimes there wasn’t anything of value … but once we found a cupboard, it was really old. A