The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) Read Online Free Page A

the table where he was sitting working.
    The stench of blood came from his most recent booty: three large birds were suspended from hooks on the low ceiling. A partridge and two woodcocks. They were peppered with buckshot but had been plucked and drawn.
    ‘Shot them yesterday, out on the shore,’ Wall said. ‘Woodcocks are supposed to be protected at the moment because they’re breeding, but I couldn’t give a damn about that. A man should be able to catch fish and birds whenever he wants.’
    The old man was a hunter himself, and said nothing. He looked at the other two people in the cottage, a young man and a girl, both in their early twenties, who had just arrived in their own car and settled down on the shabby sofa.
    ‘What are your names?’
    ‘I’m Rita,’ said the skinny girl, who was curled up like a cat, one hand on the boy’s denim-clad knee.
    ‘Pecka,’ the boy said. He was tall; he leaned back with his shaven head resting against the wall, but his leg was twitching.
    The old man didn’t say any more. It was Wall who had found these two, not him.
    A puppy and a kitten, he thought.
    But he had also been young once, and had grown more capable as time went by.
    Pecka didn’t seem to like the silence. He stared at the old man, his eyes narrowed.
    ‘And what do we call you?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘But who the hell
are
you? You sound a bit foreign.’
    ‘My name is Aron,’ said the man. ‘I’ve come home.’
    ‘Home?’
    ‘I’ve come home to Sweden.’
    ‘From where?’ Pecka wanted to know.
    ‘From the New World.’
    Pecka continued to stare at him, but Rita nodded.
    ‘He means the States … don’t you?’
    The old man said nothing, so Rita tried again: ‘You mean America, don’t you?’
    The man didn’t respond.
    ‘OK, so we’ll call you Aron,’ Pecka said. ‘Or the man who’s come home. Whatever, as long as you’re in.’
    The man said nothing. He went over to the table and picked up one of the guns by its slender barrel.
    ‘A Walther,’ he said.
    Wall nodded with satisfaction, as if he were manning a market stall.
    ‘It’s a fine piece,’ he said. ‘The police used it as their service weapon for many years. Simple and solid … Swedish craftsmanship.’
    ‘It’s German,’ the old man said.
    ‘Mine are made under licence.’ Wall pointed to the rest of his display. ‘This is a Sig Sauer, and this one is a Swedish automatic assault rifle. That’s what’s on offer.’
    Pecka got up and came over to the table. The old man recognized the look in his eyes: the same curiosity that every young soldier felt when a new weapon appeared. Every young soldier who had never killed someone, at least.
    ‘So you like guns?’ Pecka said.
    The old man nodded curtly. ‘I’ve used them.’
    ‘So you’re an old squaddie?’
    The old man looked at him. ‘What?’
    ‘An old soldier,’ Pecka said. ‘Did you fight in a war?’
    A war, Aron thought. It was something young men might long for. A new country.
    ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
    Pecka shook his head gloomily.
    ‘I haven’t been in a war,’ he said, but then he lifted his chin proudly. ‘But I never back down … I was in court for GBH last summer.’
    Wall didn’t look quite so impressed.
    ‘That’s crap,’ he said. ‘It was just a tourist who got out of hand.’
    The old man realized that they were family, and that Wall was concerned about Pecka. He calmly pushed in the Walther’s magazine and put it down on the table.
    He looked out of the window. The sun was shining over the sea and the shore, but barely reached in through the grubby windows. Wall’s cottage was in an isolated spot, on a section of the shore where the grass ran all the way down to the water’s edge. There was a small enclosure housing a few geese by the shoreline, with a boathouse made of grey limestone beside it, looking every bit as neglected as the cottage itself.
    Wall heaved himself to his feet.
    ‘Here,’ he