To the Top of the Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

You know, of course, that the most threatening thing about homosexuality through the years has been its ability to cross class boundaries?’
    ‘You live in Östermalm, the most exclusive neighbourhood in Stockholm, and you’re a director in the Patent Office, yes?’
    ‘Whose main dealings are with unemployed, working-class Hammarby fans from Bagarmossen and Rågsved.’
    ‘Pseudo-intellectual, by the way?’
    ‘The chap with the book.’
    ‘But why “pseudo”?’
    ‘It seemed forced, with that book. Like he was sort of showing off with an education that really, deep down, he didn’t have. And I wasn’t alone in eyeing him up, as you so tastefully put it, policewoman. He was a tasty little titbit. You don’t happen to have his address, do you?’
    ‘Not alone?’
    ‘Nope,’ said Sten “Hard Homo” Bergmark. ‘A group of macho gays were staring at him the whole time.’
    ‘A group of macho gays?’
    ‘You’re acting like my psychoanalyst right now, policewoman. Five hundred kronor an hour to repeat what I’ve just said.’
    ‘The difference being that I don’t earn five hundred kronor an hour.’
    ‘The table next to the door – how can I describe them? Skinheads who’ve passed the age limit. Thoroughbred Swedish bodybuilders. Five of them.’
    ‘And they were all staring at the reader?’
    ‘Three of them, the ones with their backs to the wall. Two were sitting with their backs to the room. They weren’t staring, for obvious reasons.’
    ‘And you’re sure they were staring at the reader?’
    ‘That’s certainly how my competition-conscious desire interpreted it. I was jealous. Who’d choose an eel if he’s got five beefsteaks within reach?’
    ‘Who else would they have been able to see?’
    ‘My God, policewoman. I only had eyes for him.’
    ‘Try.’
    Sten Bergmark sat stock-still. The scene loomed in his mind.
    ‘I was sitting at the table nearest the bar. A group of past-it cultural types were sitting next to me, discussing which Cornelis song should be sung from the as-yet unbuilt minaret on the other side of the park. Two couples were sitting right in front of me, quite unashamedly discussing their sexual fantasies. Behind them, next to our reader and by the wall, some foreign gentlemen were speaking in English with a Swede who was sitting with his back to me. They must’ve been in the skinheads’ field of vision. The student gang on the other side of our reader, too. And possibly some of the tipsy hen party by the window.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Kerstin Holm.
    ‘Hmm,’ said Paul Hjelm.
    The Hard Homo clasped hands behind his neck and leaned back.
    ‘But, noble police folk,’ he exclaimed, ‘wasn’t it a death we were meant to be discussing?’

4
    ARTO SÖDERSTEFT HAD decided to stop driving. He didn’t own a car, and drove only rarely on duty. Still, he had now done almost two hundred kilometres behind the wheel on a midsummer’s morning which had defied all adverse weather reports, and as his tired service Volvo left the nourishing plains of Närke county and turned off towards the waste ground beneath Kumla prison, he could no longer deny it.
    Driving was fun.
    Since he was an active member of an association which wanted to drastically reduce traffic in the inner city, especially in Södermalm, and particularly on Bondegatan where he and his large family lived, that admission was made somewhat shamefully.
    He eased off the accelerator, changed down to a lower gear, and turned to the passenger seat on which he was carrying horse feed.
    A hay sack.
    He poked the hay sack. It didn’t move. He poked it a little harder. It came to life, reaching instinctively for its shoulder holster.
    Viggo Norlander woke up.
    A magnificent patch of white baby sick had dried onto the right shoulder of his leather jacket. Arto Söderstedt laughed.
    ‘I’ve had five of them,’ he said in his clear Finland-Swedish accent. ‘Five babies have been sick on my shoulders. And still I never,