The Other Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

diplomat. But he had been lost in that world right from the outset. He understood nothing of the collective social rules that everyone else seemed so comfortable with.
    His career ended up going backward. He started high, then clambered quickly but surely downward. From the embassy in Ankara, to Skopje in Macedonia, then Chisinau in Moldova, before ending up in Khartoum in Sudan, where his post was so vague that no one really knew what it involved.
    His family tried to give him advice about the future. Miles couldn’t bear it. Changing careers was his only escape, and he applied for a job as far away from the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service as he could imagine: the police.
    His family stopped talking to him. Their disappointment was immense, as was his feeling of liberation.
    Miles Ingmarsson was now forty-five, wiry, and in pretty good shape, thanks to his habit of doing sit-ups and push-ups before going to bed. He had dark hair with streaks of gray, his face and eyes reminiscent of an old-style film star. But the way he looked was mostly overshadowed by his posture, which was weighed down by an invisible sadness that not even Freud would have understood, and certainly not Miles himself.
    He had a serious addiction to strippers. It was only around them that he was able to relax. The warmth exuded by feminine company, just being allowed to look for a while—breasts, curves, the essence of femininity…It wasn’t about sex. More a sort of warped compulsion for security that he had never managed to find anywhere else. And God knows he had tried—everywhere and everything. Alcohol, hash, food, exercise, gambling. Nothing worked as well as striptease. He went to the strip club five times a week, all year round.
    Now he was sitting there at a table in a dark corner, staring at a thin woman with silicone breasts as she performed a pole dance to cheap, electronic, eastern European music. She was very bad at it. He felt like telling her she didn’t have to dance, that she could forget all that and just stand there, maybe just move a bit….
    His cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket.
    “Yes?”
    Tommy Jansson from National Crime wanted to know what he was doing.
    “I’m having lunch,” Miles replied.
    “
Do you want to come and work for me?
”
    The woman spun around the freshly polished pole far too fast and with very little balance.
    “OK,” Miles said as he continued to watch the entertainment.
    —
    There was always a moment of shame involved in leaving a strip club in broad daylight. Seven seconds of what it took to open the door, step outside, close the door again, and walk off, soaking up the looks on the faces of anyone nearby:
a perv
.
    Miles pushed through the snow that had been falling heavily all morning. Now it was lying there, shoved up onto the sidewalks for pedestrians to kill themselves on so motorists could pass unimpeded.
    Keeping close to the walls, he fished a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck the filter tip between his lips, and lit it with his Zippo. He sucked the smoke in as he walked, allowing it to burn holes in his lungs before letting it out again. Then two quick, deep drags, one after the other, to calm the craving and give him a destructive sense of pleasure.
    He had spent the past few years in the Economic Crime unit, where he investigated uninteresting cases that rarely led anywhere. Which was fine: he never had to feel involved.
    But now Tommy Jansson had called. Tommy wanted to meet, Tommy wanted a chat. There was a “blue-light” evening at that pub in the Klara district in the city center where all the cops hung out. And tonight there’d be ambulance staff and firemen as well. They all met up and drank themselves senseless in the middle of the week. Miles had been a few times, didn’t like it. The paramedics were retarded, the firemen either stupid or gay—or both. And his
colleagues
, as a certain type of cop insisted on calling other officers, were so far removed from