The Spring Tide Read Free

filledwith homeless sellers who were buying their copies of the new issue. They could buy them for twenty kronor each, half the retail price on the street, and keep the difference when they sold them.
    A simple deal.
    And it made all the difference for many of them. The money they got from selling magazines kept them afloat. Some of them spent it on their addictions, others to pay back money they owed. Most of them quite simply used the money to buy food for that day.
    And to have some self-esteem.
    It was, after all, a job they were doing, and they got paid for it. They weren’t nicking things, or shoplifting, or mugging pensioners. They only did that if everything got fucked up. Some of them. But the majority were actually proud of the way they performed their sales job.
    And it was quite hard work.
    Some days, you could stand at your pitch for ten or twelve hours and hardly manage to flog a single copy. In rotten weather and icy cold winds. Then it wasn’t much fun creeping into an outhouse somewhere with no food in your stomach and trying to get to sleep before the nightmares seized you.
    But today there was a new issue coming out. That was usually a cause for celebration for all those in the room. With a bit of luck they’d manage to flog a whole bundle on the first day. But there was no sign of merriment in the office.
    On the contrary.
    A crisis meeting was taking place.
    Yet another of their mates had been badly beaten up the previous evening. Benseman, the northerner, the guy who had read a hell of a lot of books. He had broken bones all over his body. His spleen had ruptured and the doctors had struggled all night to stop the internal bleeding. The guy in charge of reception had been to the hospital earlier in the morning.
    ‘He’s going to survive… but we won’t be seeing him here for quite a while.’
    People nodded a little. In sympathy. Tense. This wasn’t the first attack of recent times, in fact it was the fourth, and the victims had all been homeless people. Rough sleepers, as they had been called in the papers. And it had been the same each time. Some youths had sought out one of them at a well-known meeting place, and beaten them up. A really nasty beating. And they also filmed the whole bloody thing and then posted it on the Net.
    That was almost the worst part of it.
    So fucking humiliating. As if they were nothing more than punchbags in a ‘reality’ documentary about violence as entertainment .
    And almost as hard to deal with was the fact that all four had been sellers of
Situation Sthlm
. Was that just a coincidence ? There were about 5,000 homeless people in Stockholm, and only a tiny proportion of them were sellers.
    ‘Are they just picking on us?’
    ‘Why the fuck would they do that!’
    Of course there was no answer to that. Yet. But it was unpleasant enough anyway to frighten the group in the room – and they were already shaken.
    ‘I’ve got hold of some teargas spray.’
    That came from Bo Fast. They all looked at him. Everybody knew Bo, his name sounds pretty stupid and when pronounced as one word it meant something completely different,
bofast
means ‘permanent resident’. They had given up teasing him about that years ago. Now Bo held up his powerful spray for all to see.
    ‘You know it’s illegal,’ said Jelle.
    ‘How d’you mean?’
    ‘A spray like that.’
    ‘So what? How legal is it to beat people up?’
    Jelle didn’t have a good answer to that. He was standing by a wall with Arvo Pärt next to him. Vera stood a bit to one side. For once, she had kept her mouth shut. She had taken it really badly when Pärt phoned and told her what had happened to Benseman just a few minutes after she and Jelle had left the park. She had been convinced that she could have prevented the assault if only she had stayed behind. But Jelle didn’t think so.
    ‘What the hell would you’ve done?’
    ‘Fought them! You know how I floored those guys who tried to grab our mobiles out