Sun and Shadow Read Online Free

that terrified him.
    On one occasion he’d come face-to-face with death in the Gnistäng Tunnel when a young couple drove straight into the wall. He’d been in the following car and seen everything. Like in a film. Real, but somehow unreal. The Mazda in front of him had swerved left and crashed into the wall with a noise of shattering glass and twisting metal. He wasn’t even on duty he’d just been driving around for fun, as he sometimes did when he was off duty. He’d managed to pull off an emergency stop, then leaped from his car and raced over to the wreck where the girl was hanging with ... with ... He’d gotten violently sick, right in front of her, like your ordinary ... and then he’d tried to phone, but even as he was punching in the number he could hear sirens as his colleagues and an ambulance converged on the scene.
    He thought about that now, as they passed the park for the second time. Beautiful people glittered on the other side of the windows, in bars, in restaurants. Women. Bartram turned to admire the sights to the left.
    “Watch out for that stiff neck.”
    “Ha, ha.”
    “Maybe it would be worth it.”
    “The trick is to compensate by looking in the other direction as well.”
    Morelius looked in the other direction, over the Avenue. A gang of kids was approaching from Götaplatsen. One of twenty or so that were tempted to gather in the center of town on a Friday night. The Avenue became an odd mixture of middle-aged elegance, desperate thirty-year-old crises, and desperate fifteen-year-old crises.
    Those who were most drunk tried to make contact, to provoke. The gang pushed their smallest member to the front, waited, then attacked. Bartram looked to his right now too.
    “I recognize her.”
    “Eh?”
    “That blonde girl over there, in the gang. Nearest to us. She’s the vicar’s daughter.”
    “Yes. Maria Östergaard.”
    “She recovered pretty quickly.”
    “That was a week ago. And I said at the time that it wasn’t all that serious.”
    “But she’s out on the town, even so. What does our vicar have to say about that?”
    “Why not ask her? Here she comes.”
    It was true. Hanne Ostergaard was hurrying toward them, practically running, crossing over the Avenue from the theater, and the two police officers watched her march up to the gang of youths. She grabbed hold of her fair-haired daughter.
    “Come home with me this minute!”
    “You can’t tell me what to do.”
    “I asked you to stay at home tonight.”
    “You always want me to stay at home.” She tried to pull her arm away. “Let go of me!” She looked at her friends.
    “I just want you to come home with me,” Hanne said. She had let go of her daughter’s sleeve. “I’m worried stiff by all this. What if it happens again?”
    “Nothing’s going to happen,” the girl said. “I haven’t even had a beer.” She breathed in her mother’s face. “Can you smell beer? Well, can you?”
    Hanne had started crying. “Please, Maria, I just want you to come home with me now. I get so ... so terribly worried.”
    “There’s nothing to be worried about, Mom. I’m with my friends. I’ll be home by one, as I said.”
    Hanne looked at the girl, at the group of teenagers, then over the street at the two police officers. She made a move as if she were about to run over to them, ask them to arrest the girl and take her home to the house in Orgryte.
    Please don’t come over here, Morelius thought. Though if it gets much worse we’ll have to go and sort it out. He heard a shout. “NO!” He watched the girl turn on her heel and start running down the Avenue. The gang hesitated. One youth suddenly started running after her. It looked like the kid who’d been lurking in the background at the ER. The group moved off, seeming to be pulled along the wide pavement, away from the woman who was left standing there on her own.
     
    “Do you often think about what it’ll be like, being a father?”
    The question took him by