Sun Storm Read Free

exactly give you an appetite. Shall we go in?”
    “Do you want us to wait for you?”
    Fred Olsson was stamping his feet up and down in the snow. He was looking from Sven-Erik to Anna-Maria and back again. Sven-Erik was supposed to be taking over during Anna-Maria’s leave, so technically he was in charge now. But since Anna-Maria was here as well it was a bit difficult to know who was making the decisions.
    Anna-Maria kept quiet and looked at Sven-Erik. She was only there to keep him company.
    “It would be good if you could hang on,” said Sven-Erik, “so we don’t suddenly get somebody coming along who has no business here before the body has been collected. But by all means come and stand inside the door if you’re cold.”
    “Hell no, we can stand outside, I just wondered, that’s all,” Fred Olsson assured them.
    “No problem.” Tommy Rantakyrö grinned with blue lips. “We’re men after all. Men don’t feel the cold.”
    Sven-Erik went into the church right behind Anna-Maria and pulled the heavy door shut behind them. They walked slowly through the cloakroom, slumbering in the twilight. Long ranks of empty coat hangers rattled like an out-of-tune glockenspiel, set in motion by the draught as the cold air outside met the warmth inside. Two swing doors led into the main body of the church. Sven-Erik instinctively lowered his voice as they went in.
    “It was Viktor Strandgård’s sister who rang the main office around three. She’d found him dead and she used the phone in the pastor’s office.”
    “Where is she? At the station?”
    “Well, no. We don’t know where she is. I left instructions to get somebody out there looking for her. There was nobody in the church when Tommy and Freddy got here.”
    “What did the technicians say?”
    “Look but don’t touch.”
    The body was lying in the middle of the central aisle. Anna-Maria stopped a little way from it.
    “Fucking hell,” she burst out.
    “I did tell you,” said Sven-Erik, who was standing just behind her.
    Anna-Maria pulled a little tape recorder from the inside pocket of her jacket. She hesitated for a moment. She usually spoke into it rather than making notes. But this wasn’t really her case. Maybe she ought to keep quiet and just sort of go along with Sven-Erik?
    Don’t go making everything so complicated, she told herself, and switched on the tape recorder without even looking at her colleague.
    “The time is five thirty-five,” she said into the microphone. “It’s the sixteenth, no seventeenth, of February. I’m standing in The Source of All Our Strength church and looking at someone who, as far as we know at the moment, is Viktor Strandgård, generally known as the Paradise Boy. The dead man is lying in the middle of the aisle. He appears to have been well and truly slit open, because he absolutely stinks and the carpet beneath the body is wet. This wetness is presumably blood, but it’s a little difficult to tell because he is lying on a red carpet. His clothes are also covered in blood and it isn’t possible to see very much of the wound in his stomach; it does seem, however, that some of his intestines are protruding, but the doctor can confirm that later. He’s wearing jeans and a jumper. The soles of his shoes are dry and the carpet under his shoes is not wet. His eyes have been gouged out . . . .”
    Anna-Maria broke off and switched off the tape recorder. She moved round the body and bent over the face. She had been about to say that he made a beautiful corpse, but there were limits to what she could think aloud in front of Sven-Erik. The dead man’s face made her think of King Oedipus. She had seen the play on video at school. At the time she hadn’t been particularly affected by the scene where he put out his own eyes, but now the image came back to her with remarkable clarity. She needed to pee again. And she mustn’t forget about the car. Best get going. She switched on the tape recorder again.
    “The