Read Online The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) by Johan Theorin - Free Book Online

the meal Sven takes a pinch of snuff from his wooden box, the one Aron gave him, and stares gloomily at the bill for lunch. He shakes his head, but pays.
    ‘In the new country you can eat for free,’ he says when they are back on the street.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Absolutely. You pay only if you have money.’
    In the afternoon they leave the island, crossing the Sound on a steamship. Sven keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the mainland, but Aron turns around and watches as the island slowly shrinks to a greyish-brown strip on the horizon. He feels as if it is sinking into the sea, as if his whole world is disappearing behind him.

Jonas
    Over the past two years Jonas had forgotten how brilliant it was to wake up by the sea. It was a bit like being an astronaut, waking up on a strange planet where the sounds and the air were different.
    On Midsummer’s Day, he opened his eyes to the sound of the wind and the cries of the gulls, bumble bees buzzing around the house and bikes rattling by out on the coast road – and, beyond that, the faint rushing of the waves out in the Sound.
    Villa Kloss, he thought.
    The sounds were strange, yet familiar. Jonas was back in a summer world where his father had brought him ever since he was a little boy. But now he was grown up. Almost. He was nearly twelve years old and no longer slept in Uncle Kent’s big house with his dad but in a little chalet of his own twenty metres away. A guest chalet, consisting of nothing more than a narrow room with white walls and a white wooden floor. His older brother, Mats, and cousin Casper were staying in the other two chalets, but he had this one all to himself for the next four weeks.
    Aunt Veronica, his father’s sister, had helped him make up the bed, bringing a faint hint of perfume with her along with the sheets.
    Veronica had been wearing a white dress, and had the same bright-blue eyes as his father. Jonas was fond of his aunt, but he hadn’t seen her for almost two years. He hadn’t come over last year, and Veronica hadn’t had time to come and visit them in Huskvarna. Jonas had a feeling that Veronica and his mother didn’t particularly like each other.
    ‘This is your very own space,’ Veronica had said when they had finished making the bed. ‘Nobody to disturb you – that will be nice, won’t it?’
    It was lovely. Jonas had slept, and nobody had disturbed him.
    He sat up in bed and looked out of the window. He could see water – the pale-blue swimming pool was only ten metres away.
    On the other side of the coast road, the dark-blue Sound sparkled at the bottom of the steep cliffs.
    And up there on top of the cliffs, almost at the very end of the plateau, lay the old cairn. The big, rounded grave made of stones, which was haunted. But not now, not when the sun was shining.
    Jonas jumped out of bed.
    All he could hear were the faint sounds of summer. No voices. When he fell asleep last night, the rest of the family had still been awake, celebrating the shortest night of the year in various ways: Mats and his cousins had gone down to the jetty to see if there were any girls around, Jonas’s father had been working as a chef in the village restaurant, which was also owned by the Kloss family, and Aunt Veronica and Uncle Kent had been sitting on the decking together with Veronica’s husband, who was on a flying visit from Stockholm, and Kent’s new girlfriend, whose name Jonas didn’t know. Uncle Kent had had a new girlfriend every summer, ever since Jonas could remember. They didn’t say much, and they didn’t usually stay around for long.
    Jonas had been too tired to stay up. He had gone to bed at about ten, and fallen asleep to distant music, quiet voices and loud laughter.
    This morning he pulled on his shorts and a thin T-shirt, opened the glass door and went out into the sunshine. It was only eight o’clock, but it was already hot.
    The two plots that made up this part of Villa Kloss extended around him, covered in stones, the odd