Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7)

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘Couldn’t he have done that himself?’ Malin asks.

  ‘That was just a way of saying what he was like. We never talked about money.’

  ‘What did you think about what you heard your aunt and uncle saying?’

  ‘That they were vultures.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Margaretha’s interested in money and status, that much is obvious. She likes to think of herself as belonging to the smart set in Linköping.’

  ‘And does she?’

  Gabriella smiles.

  ‘No. She hasn’t got enough money for that. She’s only a dentist, nothing special.’

  ‘Do you think she or your uncle could have anything to do with your grandfather’s death?’

  ‘No, I don’t, actually. But money can make people a bit crazy. That’s pretty common knowledge.’

  ‘Anything else you think we should know?’

  ‘I think my uncle’s got gambling debts. He gambles a lot, I know that. He used to go to the races at Mantorp with Granddad when he was little. He’s mad about betting on the horses.’

  Malin sighs.

  Those betting slips out at Yngve Karlsson’s house. But he didn’t mention anything.

  There were far too many things he and Margaretha Karlsson hadn’t mentioned.

  And neither of them seems remotely sad about their father’s death.

  As if he’d never existed.

  Just like me. Dad might just as well be dead down there on the Canary Islands. It wouldn’t make any difference.

  ‘Is Yngve in trouble with debt collectors?’ Malin goes on. ‘Could he have borrowed money from the wrong people?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he got beaten up once, but I’m not sure.’

  Something else to ask him, Malin thinks.

  ‘What about your grandfather: do you know if he received any threats after he wrote those letters to the paper about the home?’

  Gabriella Karlsson leans back and rests her elbows on the towel.

  ‘He never said anything.’

  ‘Were you involved in those at all? Did you help him write them?’

  ‘No. That was all him. He wrote them himself. But I think it’s good that he did. Pointing out the shortcomings in the care system. He wasn’t frightened of anything or anyone.’

  ‘What did you do after you left the Cherub?’

  ‘I went home. Read a book. Then went to bed.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The Third Man. Graham Greene.’

  ‘Were you alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gabriella Karlsson says. ‘I’m always alone.’

  Gabriella Karlsson watches the police officers walk away, alien creatures among the bathers.

  It’s as if none of this is happening to her, as if none of it affects her at all.

  Death.

  Evil.

  She knows about that sort of thing in history. But in the here and now it seems to slip away from her. Could she have suppressed something? Something big, important? The mind can do that, suppressing things to help you cope.

  Granddad.

  You’re no longer here.

  She takes off her sunglasses. Looks up at the sun. Feels tears begin to flow.

  Money. Alibis. Dependencies, confidences, desires; words that remain unspoken, silences that could mean anything at all.

  Malin feels even hungrier as she and Zeke leave the swimming baths.

  Gabriella had her grandfather’s laptop and mobile with her, just as she’d promised. She made a point of saying she hadn’t even looked at them, and thought their contents were just as private as a diary.

  Malin turns around.

  Sees Gabriella Karlsson lying on her back, staring up at the sun without sunglasses. Her skin is unnaturally white: a person who usually shuns the light, and who has realised the potential of loneliness.

  ‘Let’s get some food,’ Zeke says.

  Malin nods.

  ‘Then we can go and give Johan the computer and mobile.’

  25

  I went down to the Tinnerbäck baths today.

  Didn’t go to the shooting range this morning, far too tired.

  I’m lying in the sun. On the concrete seating, and I’m wearing dark sunglasses so no one can see what I’m looking at.

  I like the sun.

  The way it somehow banishes the darkness inside you, if only for a short while.

  The pair who’ve just left the baths must have been police officers. They moved and looked the way only plain-clothed cops do.

  They didn’t look in my direction, but why would they? I’ve got nothing to do with them. Unless someone’s filed a complaint. Seen me watching. But who would recognise me? I’ve lived my whole life in Linköping, but I still feel as insubstantial as air here.

  Will I ever be noticed?

  The pistol will make sure I get noticed. But I’ve never been angry enough.

  I go to the ice-cream kiosk. Stand in the queue behind a group of girls. And there she is. His daughter. The girl.

  She turns around. Beautiful. In a green bikini.

  I smile.

  She smiles back.

  Then she turns back again.

  And I look at her bare, wet neck.

  26

  Börje Svärd has gone inside room number seven.

  It’s gloomy, the sun has made its way across the afternoon sky and is no longer shining any light on the confined world of the room.

  The bed that must have been standing against the wall has gone. Along with the rest of the furniture.

  The tap in the washbasin was dripping when he came into the room, but he gave it a sharp twist and now there’s nothing but silence.

  No children playing in the park today. No one playing volleyball.

  He saw the old folk on the terrace just now. They were drinking afternoon coffee in their wheelchairs. The ones who could lift a cup to their lips, anyway, and there had been a sense of calm in the scene, a worthiness. A few brief minutes of peace in lives that must be difficult to endure.

  Euthanasia.

  Assisted suicide.

  It does happen. Agreed upon among individuals when it’s time for the world to end.

  He thinks of Anna, and how she begged and pleaded with him to help her die. During the last year she would ask him several times each day, when everything was suffering and spasms, pain and breathlessness, panic and being shut inside her own body.

  ‘Help me. I can’t bear it any longer.’

  She was clear, lucid, when she managed to summon up all her strength to get the words out.

  He wanted to help her, but couldn’t, daren’t.

  He didn’t want to be alone.

  Couldn’t kill his love, not even for the sake of love.

  But I sat with you at the end, Anna. I know how your last breath sounded.

  Did anyone help Konrad Karlsson?

  No.

  They’ve talked to the cleaners now. And the night staff. The two who managed to come into work early.

  Siv Kramer. Maj Gröndahl.

  Berit Andersson was still at home, asleep. Or just wasn’t answering the phone. He and Elin Sand will have to go and see her.

  Neither Siv nor Maj had noticed anything unusual, nothing odd had happened, according to them. The log said that Berit had been in to see Konrad Karlsson at about one o’clock, and everything had been normal then. Then they had agreed to let Konrad Karlsson sleep undisturbed until the day shift took over. They knew what the others had been doing the whole time, all three of them. Right through the night. Maybe they just didn’t have time to look in on him?

  There’s no record of the bed having been broken, so perhaps it broke when Karin went to raise it.

  It must be so quiet at night here, Börje thinks.

  Apart from the occasional alarm buzzer and worried cry, and the sound of people partying down in the Horticultural Society Park from time to time.

  It’s possible to get in unnoticed at night. The Che
rub’s front door is unlocked twenty-four hours a day, even though the reception desk isn’t staffed at night.

  But wouldn’t the night staff have seen an intruder?

  Konrad Karlsson wasn’t usually given anything to help him sleep.

  The senior doctor has confirmed that. Apparently all the staff are authorised to give residents a sleeping pill when necessary, which means that anyone who requests it has access to the drug.

  But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Nothing at all.

  Sleeping pills are easy to get hold of. You can order them online, and there are doctors who are prepared to prescribe anything in exchange for money.

  He looked into it once, and it would have been easy to get hold of an overdose for Anna.

  But you had to breathe your last breath as nature decreed.

  I hate myself for being so weak, Börje Svärd thinks.

  Elin Sand looks at the woman in front of her in the cramped nurses’ office.

  Her worn features.

  Her energy, resilience.

  ‘We should have kept the door locked,’ she says, leaning back on her battered office chair. ‘The post of night receptionist was only withdrawn a month or so back, and I have to admit that it never even occurred to me that the doors were open all night. And this is Linköping. Not exactly a nest of gangsters, unlike, say, Landskrona. And the doors to the residents’ rooms don’t have locks. They need a lot of care, and sometimes get very confused, so it would be impossible if they could lock themselves in.’

  You’ve got no idea of the things that go on in your hometown, Elin thinks.

  ‘Are there any security cameras in here?’

  ‘Not at the Cherub. Why would there be?’

  ‘What about nearby?’

  ‘None, as far as I’m aware. Doesn’t the council have some in the Horticultural Society Park?’

  Elin Sand doesn’t know.

  They’ll have to check with the local council, find out the locations of any cameras.

  ‘Nothing strange had happened recently? Nothing at all?’

  Hilda Jansson thinks for a moment, then says: ‘I know that the officers who are here are being as careful as they can be, but the residents are still getting anxious. Couldn’t they wear civilian clothing?’

  ‘I’ll arrange that,’ Elin Sand says. Thinks: We should have thought of that.

  ‘You’ve already spoken to everyone who can answer questions.’

  ‘Sorry. Sometimes we can be rather insensitive. Anything else?’

  Hilda Jansson shakes her head.

  ‘No, nothing. It’s not unusual for patients to die in hot weather, but this year we’ve been OK.’

  ‘Have you got through much Xanor recently?’

  ‘I checked before you came,’ Hilda Jansson says. ‘No more than usual.’

  Hilda Jansson gets up from her chair and wipes a few beads of sweat from her brow.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to help bring the residents in from the terrace. It’ll soon be dinner time.’

  Elin backs out of the office. Thinks that Hilda Jansson doesn’t seem to appreciate the implications of what’s happened.

  ‘Be gentle when you talk to Berit,’ Hilda goes on. ‘She’s a real stalwart. The old folks love her, and she loves them.’

  The little rented two-room apartment on the ground floor in Johannelund is pedantically tidy, with designer, lacquered-wood furniture and hand-woven rugs. Small crystal figurines stand on crocheted doilies.

  It would be very pleasant if it weren’t for the smell of ingrained cigarette smoke.

  They’re sitting around the kitchen table. Elin, Börje, and Berit Andersson.

  The coffee in the black porcelain mugs is lukewarm, and the woman on the other side of the table has evidently only just woken up. Her fifty-eight years are clearly visible in her face.

  ‘I heard on the radio,’ Berit Andersson says. ‘Before you arrived. That he might have been murdered. I can’t get my head around it. I was having enough trouble believing that he’d killed himself.’

  Berit Andersson reaches for a packet of cigarettes with one hand, takes one out, and looks questioningly at the detectives.

  ‘No problem,’ Elin says.

  Berit lights the cigarette. Takes a deep drag on it and rubs her back.

  Elin looks at the row of framed photographs on the windowsill. A small boy as he grows up to be a man. A man with very long hair.

  ‘That’s Ronny,’ Berit Andersson says. ‘My son. We were left on our own when he was very young. His dad buggered off when Ronny was three.’

  ‘That’s rough,’ Elin says, then feels foolish.

  ‘It was him and me against the world.’

  I know that feeling, Elin thinks.

  ‘Did you see anything unusual on Monday evening, or later that night?’ Börje asks. ‘Did anything out of the ordinary happen?’

  Berit Andersson shakes her head.

  ‘It was a quiet evening. I’m the one who usually looks after Konrad, or looked after him, and it was a perfectly ordinary evening for him. His granddaughter Gabriella left at eleven o’clock. She’s very nice, have I said that? I got him ready for the night, put his nightshirt on and helped him with the bedpan, then I didn’t look in on him again until one o’clock.’

  ‘Was he asleep then?’

  ‘No, he was wide awake. But he usually managed to get to sleep later on.’

  ‘Did he take anything that night? Tea, tablets, a sandwich?’

  ‘A cheese sandwich.’

  ‘And you left him alone for the rest of the night?’ Börje asks.

  ‘Yes, he didn’t call for us.’

  ‘And there’s nothing in particular that you can tell us about Konrad?’

  Berit Andersson thinks for a while.

  ‘No. I don’t know what I could say. He wrote those letters to the paper, of course, and there was a big fuss about that. But that wasn’t really all that odd.’

  Elin wonders how the sleeping medication got into Konrad Karlsson’s system.

  An injection? But Karin didn’t see any puncture wound during the post-mortem.

  It must have been in something he drank. And whoever he got it from, it must have been someone he knew. Because otherwise surely he would have wondered what the person was doing there.

  ‘So he didn’t have anything to drink?’

  ‘He always had a glass of water by his bed.’

  ‘Was it empty in the morning?’ Elin Sand asks.

  ‘You’ll have to ask the day staff about that. It was Tove who found him, wasn’t it? She seems like a nice girl. She’ll probably remember.’

  Karin’s report from the scene.

  The glass must have been included. Karin’s very thorough.

  Second-hand smoke fills Elin’s lungs, and she coughs. And hopes her dress isn’t going to stink for the rest of the day.

  When they stand up to leave Berit Andersson says, quite calmly and without any warning: ‘It’s a bloody disgrace, what Morelia and his mob are doing to us. Tormenting us and the old folk into an early grave. All for a bit of profit.’

  She says it without moving a muscle, and Elin can’t help longing to feel the sun outside, the heat from a distant, brighter galaxy.

  27

  All the lights in the open-plan office at the station have been switched off, yet it still feels oddly illuminated. The evening sky outside the windows feels like it’s being lit up from below.

  Johan Jakobsson’s elbow aches.

  He’s taken some painkillers, but his mouse-arm is still troubling him, as if the wretched joint has decided to stay inflamed for good.

  A few reporters and cameramen have gathered outside the station. But they’ll be waiting in vain. Karim Akbar has deviated from his usual habit of calling a press conference. Maybe he’s fed up with all the fuss, wants to keep things low key. Not fuel a load of pointless speculation at this stage.

  Johan cal
led home a couple of hours ago. Told his wife he was going to have to work late.

  Elin has told him that Karin had definitely taken the water glass from room seven to the laboratory on Tuesday. The glass had been empty. She’d also taken samples from it, and there was no trace of Xanor, so Konrad Karlsson must have taken the drug some other way.

  She’d also been through the wastepaper basket in the room.

  Just ordinary rubbish, but she took the contents away with her anyway. She also took the wrapper of the Dime bar and lottery scratch cards from the table, and logged them in the archive seeing as there could be fingerprints on the paper.

  They’re still running the prints Karin found in the room against the database, as well as matching them with the staff and Konrad Karlsson’s relatives: the uniforms had been to take their prints.

  So even if Karin should have sealed the room until the cause of death was beyond question, there’s not much they could have missed.

  Johan feels his elbow.

  He knows that everyone in the team needs time to think, to work through all the facts and suspicions. To rest, sleep, look for answers to their questions, and try to find some way to move on with the case.

  He still hasn’t looked through Konrad Karlsson’s computer and emails. His mobile is also lying there untouched, but they’ve requested a register of calls from the operator.

  But Johan has found out the details of Konrad Karlsson’s finances. He’s got shares worth three million kronor deposited with a branch of Avanza.

  Definitely worth trying to get your hands on, Johan thinks.

  People have killed for far less.

  He’s looked into Morelia and his company as well. It’s hugely profitable: in the last financial year alone the business made a profit of sixty-two million kronor. The conglomerate’s old people’s homes are particularly profitable, with profit margins of over 20 per cent.

  What were the points raised in Konrad Karlsson’s letters to the paper? The ones Merapi appeared not to have addressed?

  Johan Jakobsson clicks to bring them up online.

  1. Exhausted staff. Creative timetabling with an obligatory ‘siesta’ for the staff, which means that their working day is de facto extended to twelve hours.