Linda, As in the Linda Murder

35

The following morning the Småland Post ran a long article about a serious cultural argument that had broken out in town. Jan Lewin had immediately decided to cut it out and add it to his scrapbook.

The chief prosecutor and current member of parliament for the Christian Democrats, Ulf G. Grimtorp, had gone into battle against the populist and ultimately morally corrupting ideas that appeared to dominate the activities of the cultural department of Växjö Council.

One project in particular had incurred his wrath. It was designed to appeal to the town’s migrant women. It was called the cycle-swimming programme, and was basically intended to teach young immigrant women to ride bicycles and swim. A three-week residential summer school had been arranged, in relaxing rural surroundings, with a private lake, instructors, bicycles and swimming aids. All fourteen participants had learned to both ride a bike and swim, and had graduated with top marks.

Three of them had been interviewed by the paper, and declared unanimously that the physical accomplishments they had acquired would also help them to advance in life in a purely intellectual sense. Freeing themselves from the usual patriarchal chains that restricted their lives and those of their fellow women. Gaining strength, freedom and self-respect, and therefore being able to fulfil the most basic requirements for being able to apply themselves to more traditional cultural interests and values.

The official from the council’s cultural department, Bengt A. Månsson, who was responsible for this and other so-called special projects, described the cycle-swimming project as an almost unprecedented success.

‘If you assume that this has nothing to do with culture, you haven’t understood the first thing about what culture actually is,’ project leader Månsson declared. They were planning to follow up this initiative during the winter with a project to teach women to ski and skate, the ski-skating project.

According to Mr Grimtorp, MP, this was utter rubbish. A feeble and transparent excuse for various radical left-wing male cultural elitists to go sunbathing in the company of young women at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.

‘Two hundred thousand kronor,’ Grimtorp thundered. ‘And what does this have to do with culture?’

Money which in Grimtorp’s decided opinion ought to have been earmarked for the work of Växjö Town Theatre, the local chamber orchestra, the library, and associated activities. Not to mention the fact that the project was also threatening the number of grants given to the many promising young glass-blowers, artists and sculptors in and around Växjö.

That Grimtorp seems a miserable sort, Jan Lewin thought, and for some reason he started thinking about the summer almost fifty years before when he had been given his first proper bicycle. A red Crescent Valiant. Probably the same Valiant as in the cartoon about Prince Valiant. He had asked his dad, and his dad had told him all about the noble knight Prince Valiant.

Prince Valiant had lived a very long time ago, in the days when there weren’t any bicycles. So instead, Valiant had a horse. A powerful red stallion that seemed as obstinate and difficult to control as Jan’s first bicycle. The horse was called Arvak, Jan’s dad told him, and he was given that name in honour of another horse, Arvakr, from Norse mythology, the horse that pulled the sun across the sky, and must have had its work cut out during that summer almost fifty years ago when Jan learned to ride a bike.

He had read all about this and much more in the cartoon about Prince Valiant in Allers Weekly Journal. Jan and his dad had spent a whole evening going through a load of boxes and crates in the loft above the old cowshed at their place out in the country. They must have found a hundred old magazines, each containing a story about the noble knight Prince Valiant, and before Jan went to bed he and his dad would read one or sometimes two cartoons about his exciting adventures.

Mind you, it was all a bit odd, Jan thought. His dad had told him his bicycle was called a Crescent Valiant after Prince Valiant. But Prince Valiant had had a red horse called Arvak, seeing as there weren’t any bicycles in those days, so why wasn’t his bike called an Arvak Valiant instead of a Crescent Valiant? And who was Crescent?

Maybe Crescent was the prince’s first name, Jan thought. Prince Crescent Valiant. He’d ask his dad in the morning, because he knew a lot about most things, but then he had fallen asleep and as far as he could remember almost fifty years later he had never got round to asking the question.