Åke Edwardson: Frozen Tracks

Jerner’s features had stiffened just like the rest of them. He was on his way down from heaven in a frozen movement.

His arms and legs were attached to wires that he must have carried with him through the ventilation shafts.

He’d tied the last of the wires around his neck.

Then he’d jumped.

Winter was able to work all that out in a flash.

Winter closed his eyes and looked again. Jerner was hanging there, frozen in his death leap. He was flying, just like he’d told his brother he would, flying in his own way. Winter looked around, and he could see that he was the only one who had seen. Bertil had disappeared in the sea of humanity. Winter looked up again, he couldn’t help it. Next to Jerner’s left shoulder he could see the reflection of H &M’s display window. The mirror was curved in a strange way that made it possible for him to see the bottom part of some clothes racks inside the shop. He saw a small, shiny wheel and something that could be a stay, or a stand of some sort. Winter turned around and forced his way through the crowd and ripped the clothes off the racks, and there was the stroller and Micke’s head was leaning to one side, and a little arm hung down and he could feel a faint pulse.

On the plane he kept his leather jacket on, and his sunglasses. Somebody started singing as they rose up through the black, friendly skies. Somebody laughed. He put on the earphones and turned on his portable CD player and closed his eyes. A cart arrived eventually and he asked for four of the ridiculously small bottles of whiskey. He put the earphones back on and drank and tried to think of nothing, but failed. The woman next to him looked away. He turned up the sound, and the trumpet of Miles Davis blew everything else out of his mind.

Åke Edwardson is a Swedish author of detective fiction, and a professor at Gothenburg University, the city where many of his Inspector Winter novels are set. Edwardson has had many jobs, including a journalist and press officer for the United Nations, and his crime novels have made him a three-time winner of the Swedish Crime Writers' Award for best crime novel. His first novel to be translated into English, in 2005, was Sun and Shadow. The second, Never End, followed in 2006.