Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7)

by Mons Kallentoft

  They’ve talked about going on a cycling holiday to Gotland, the whole family. Renting tandem bikes. But a few weeks ago they found a cheap last-minute trip to Bulgaria. Cheap because the weather at home has been so good up to now. He’s looking forward to playing with the children on a foreign beach. They’re going to be setting off in just a few days, the last week of the children’s summer holiday.

  But first they need to clear up this case.

  He and Elin Sand have checked out the banks. She’s very good at that sort of thing. Waldemar is being way too hard on her, and Malin ought to show her more respect as well. She probably sees Elin as competition.

  None of the people connected to the case has had a large sum of money paid into their account recently. That may not necessarily mean anything, because you can get a lottery win paid out in cash.

  The line crackles.

  Then a soft-voiced woman comes on the line.

  She introduces herself as Cornelia, and Johan gives her a brief explanation of why he’s calling.

  The woman taps at her keyboard, then says that there have been no scratch card wins worth more than ten thousand kronor claimed in Linköping in the past month.

  ‘Could a high-value scratch card have been sold here?’ Johan asks.

  ‘I’ve got no way of knowing that. If we knew in advance which outlets held the winning cards, and what amount they were for, there’s too high a risk of the system being corrupted.’

  ‘So there’s no way of checking if a high-value scratch card could have been sold in Linköping?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  The woman sounds genuinely apologetic.

  ‘Are you working on a particularly nasty case?’

  ‘You’ve probably read about it,’ Johan says. ‘The elderly man who was found murdered in a care home.’

  Silence on the line.

  ‘That’s awful,’ the woman finally says. ‘Bloody awful.’

  Johan hears her tap at her keyboard again.

  ‘A winning scratch card has been redeemed in Norrköping, at Tellus Tobacco, Holmengatan 31. Two hundred and fifty thousand. Two days ago.’

  Malin is holding the bundle of printouts of passport photographs in her hand. Grainy but sufficiently clear pictures of the people whose names have arisen in their investigation into the murder of Konrad Karlsson.

  The car is vibrating gently as Zeke drives it along the E4. He’s having to parry gusts of wind, and the world in front of the windscreen is obscured. Malin looks at the dark yellow fields of rape and the dense forest beyond them. The storm makes the fields move like miniature seas, the rape discoloured water you could drown in.

  Zeke has turned the stereo on, and the sound of an unusually melancholy piece by Wagner fills the car. The gloomy notes seem to match the day.

  Malin leafs through the pictures.

  Hans Morelia.

  Billionaire. If he had been in Konrad Karlsson’s room in the care home, would he have bothered to take a scratch card worth a pathetic two hundred and fifty thousand kronor? If he hired someone to do it, their photograph isn’t in the pile.

  Perhaps the scratch card that was redeemed wasn’t actually Konrad’s fourth card. This whole line of inquiry is a gamble, but even so it seems to make sense, and there’s a logic in the fact that the card was redeemed in Norrköping. Travelling to another city to claim the prize could be a way of concealing the crime.

  Hans Morelia’s thin face. Proud, but his eyes have a degree of warmth in them, as though he is actually capable of love, in spite of everything. Could he have wanted to talk to Konrad Karlsson, persuade him not to write any more letters for a while, then things got out of control and, when he saw the scratch card, he just took it with him?

  Unlikely, Malin thinks.

  Pictures of Konrad’s children, Margaretha and Yngve.

  It can’t have been Yngve, he was in custody when the scratch card was redeemed, but Elin Sand has printed out his photograph anyway.

  Margaretha. A neutral look on her face. She could have done with the money.

  Gabriella Karlsson.

  Just because.

  And Vincent Edlund.

  The crazy guy, the one Waldemar gave a hard time to. Could it have been him?

  Ronny Andersson.

  Desperate about his mother’s situation. She could certainly use two hundred and fifty thousand.

  And then pictures of the staff.

  Hilda Jansson, Lisbeth Stark, Siv Kramer, Stina Bersén, Kent Sjöberg, Maj Gröndahl, Berit Andersson, and, last among the pictures, Tove. And Malin starts when she sees Tove’s photograph, at the notion that she could even be a suspect. But of course she was first inside the room after the killer. She could have taken the scratch card if it was in the room, if there was a winning card there at all.

  But she couldn’t have killed anyone. She knows the difference between right and wrong.

  Even if the boundary can be fairly fluid at times.

  Then it occurs to Malin that Tove was out of town with the car two days ago – what if she stopped in Norrköping on her way up to Hälsingland?

  Malin dismisses the thought and brushes her fringe aside.

  Your own daughter.

  Just stop it.

  There has to be some end to all the suspicion, and Zeke lowers the music, says: ‘Don’t worry. Elin only included that one for the sake of it. She asked me, said she felt awkward about it, but I told her you’d be angry if she didn’t include it. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  Then Malin’s phone rings. Daniel Högfeldt. What does the vulture want now? More information about the case?

  ‘Not him again,’ she mutters under her breath.

  ‘Who?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Daniel Högfeldt.’

  Malin takes a deep breath.

  Unless he’s calling for personal reasons. Maybe he wants to fuck.

  Make love.

  Meet up.

  But he rejected me, and I can’t handle this. Not again.

  And she rejects the call, even though she doesn’t want to, even though she wants to hear his voice.

  Zeke sighs.

  ‘Give it a chance, Malin. He’s OK.’

  Keep out of this, she feels like saying, but says nothing.

  Holmengatan 31 is a four-storey modernist building not far from the old factory that’s now a smart university and cultural centre. The tobacconist’s is squeezed in between a dry cleaner’s and a shop selling computer games. Behind the grimy window there’s a sign for Yellow Blend cigarettes.

  The owner, a Mustafa Sillén, has been forewarned, and when they walk into the shop a dark-haired man with sharp features is sitting behind an old-fashioned counter, its glass trays full of merchandise. He didn’t want to say over the phone if the scratch card had been redeemed by a man or a woman, even if he remembered the win very well. He said he was concerned for his customers’ privacy, and had had bad experiences with the police in Iraq.

  He spoke perfect Swedish over the phone, just a trace of an accent, and Malin guesses that his surname indicates that he’s married to a Swedish woman.

  ‘Welcome,’ Mustafa Sillén says. ‘You must be from the police. Can I offer you some chocolate?’ He holds out a basket full of chunks of plain chocolate. ‘Not many customers today.’

  ‘I don’t suppose even the urge to smoke can make people leave their homes on a day like today,’ Zeke says.

  Another man comes out through a plastic curtain, with tinted blond hair and a moustache, a round face with a receding chin.

  ‘My husband,’ Mustafa says. ‘Peter.’

  And Malin thinks momentarily of her Peter, who betrayed her, but forces his face from her mind, and this new Peter says: ‘I was here too. It was the first time anyone’s claimed such a big win here. We called the Swedish Lottery to make sure it checked out, then I ran to the bank and got the money out while the customer waited here. It was all rather exciting.’

  Malin puts the photographs on the
counter.

  ‘Would you mind taking a look at these?’ she says. ‘Was it one of these people who redeemed the scratch card?’

  Tove’s picture on top.

  ‘Not this pretty little thing,’ Peter says, and Mustafa shakes his head and moves the photograph aside.

  They work their way through the pile, evidently pleased to be playing a part in one of life’s dramas.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not you either.’

  And then they come to the last but one picture.

  ‘Bingo,’ Peter says.

  ‘Hardly the right game, under the circumstances,’ Mustafa chides.

  And Malin can’t help smiling. Even if the whole scenario is somehow deeply depressing, she can see how everything fits together now, or almost, anyway.

  Justice?

  Is that what we’re going to dispense now?

  The smile freezes on her face, and she feels angry.

  Her whole being is full of rage against the world.

  We’re close to the truth now, she thinks, as the shop door opens with the ring of the bell.

  So this is the truth.

  I didn’t need the money, but it was mine. I wanted to distribute it as I saw fit.

  Anger.

  Poverty.

  Injustice.

  An entire lifetime of hard work and humiliation, frustration, and sorrow channelled into hands around my neck.

  No words.

  Just silence, and I heard myself gurgle, waiving the air with my one good hand, but what good did that do?

  The wind, the cold wind, had come to me. It was time for me to move on, and I looked into those eyes, tried to tell them: I understand you.

  Stop now.

  But there was nothing but action in those eyes. The conviction that this had to be done.

  Just like what you’re about to do now, Malin Fors. That has to be done too.

  Perhaps you were hoping that the truth would be different.

  I have a feeling that this doesn’t stop here and now. For me it all came to an end in an old people’s home next to the Horticultural Society Park in Linköping.

  If there was any emotion in that final room, in that moment, it was loneliness.

  But I’m not alone now. I reached the light, in spite of everything.

  Because all the things I did wrong were still done out of love.

  Love that meant well.

  My beloved wife is with me, and Josefina is here too.

  Perhaps all it took was clarity, both my own and that of the living, for us to see each other again?

  We are souls of air now.

  Sara and Josefina.

  My perception of love.

  Father has been here.

  Told me he hanged himself out of shame, because he was going to lose the farm. That Mother drove him to it.

  But everything is peace and love now.

  And we are waiting for you, for all those we love, Gabriella.

  There’s no rush.

  Don’t hurry.

  60

  Malin looks at the time as she shakes the rain from her hood.

  Quarter past two, and she feels hunger grab hold of her stomach, but they need to do this now, no time for food. The air in the stairwell in Johannelund is stagnant, as if nothing has happened here for decades.

  A flickering bulb.

  Malin wonders if the woman inside the flat is asleep, if she can sleep, and what her dreams are like.

  Is she dreaming of a house? A cottage?

  A renovated cottage that the bank can’t take away from her?

  Or is she dreaming about an aching back, a working week made up of thirty-five heavy hours?

  Perhaps she dreams about love?

  For herself. For her son.

  Malin turns towards Zeke. He looks impossibly tired, and the wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes are deep.

  Sadness.

  He runs one hand over his bald head, nods at her, and Malin rings the doorbell, once, twice, three times, four, but no one comes to the door.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ Malin asks.

  Zeke nods, and she takes out her key ring, the lock pick. Then they’re inside Berit Andersson’s flat, and Malin starts to worry, what if she’s hanging somewhere inside, in a noose, like Konrad Karlsson?

  But the flat feels abandoned. Some children are playing in the playground outside the window. Defying the storm, but it’s starting to die down now, isn’t it? There’s a fallen tree behind them, an ash that gave up the ghost.

  The kitchen is empty. The bathroom too. Zeke says: ‘Maybe she’s at her cottage, out near Hackefors. Have we got the address?’

  Malin shakes her head.

  She gets her phone out and calls Johan, and within thirty seconds he’s told them how to get there.

  ‘Be careful,’ he says. ‘Do you want me to send backup?’

  ‘No,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll take this nice and gently.’

  The forest seems to be closing in on itself. Barely visible through the side windows of the car.

  They’re heading away from the Landeryd road, before the turning to the golf club, and the gravel road is full of potholes. The car is lurching, as the windscreen wipers struggle to keep the screen clear.

  Visibility is practically zero, and Zeke drives slowly.

  Malin leans forward.

  Tries to see.

  But the world is shrouded in rain, and suddenly Zeke yells: ‘Shit!’

  He slams the brakes on, but the collision is unavoidable. The car hits a tree trunk blocking the road, an obstacle that was invisible until the very last moment.

  Malin is thrown towards the dashboard, then back in her seat.

  A shriek of metal.

  Then everything falls silent, apart from the rain hitting the car.

  They’re both panting for breath.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Fine,’ Malin says. ‘No blood, nothing broken. You?’

  ‘No worries. But this car isn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘We’ll get a patrol,’ Malin says, and they get out of the car and realise just how hard the collision between car and oak tree was, brought together by the storm. The car’s wheels have been pushed into the chassis.

  But the rain seems to be diminishing in strength slightly.

  And they walk towards Berit Andersson’s cottage, getting wetter and wetter.

  The house stands on an isolated site, on a slope leading up to a patch of woodland. A white fence surrounds a garden with neatly trimmed grass and flowerbeds with tall roses, red and white geraniums bursting out of the dark, fertile soil.

  Everything seems peaceful beneath the grey sky.

  The little wooden house is painted yellow, but Malin can see how badly the paint is peeling. Beside it stands a large oak tree whose branches are resting on the felted roof.

  A small veranda.

  Water gushing from cracked drainpipes.

  There’s a sunlounger tucked out of the rain on the veranda. A table with a rose-patterned wax cloth.

  Berit Andersson is sitting on the sunlounger, asleep. Once again, Malin wonders what she’s dreaming. But she dismisses the thought, walks closer, and hears the whistling of the wind merge with Berit Andersson’s snoring. She’s sleeping with her mouth open, sleeping deeply, possibly beyond dreams, but she’s going to have to wake up now, wake up to an afternoon unlike any other.

  Zeke pats her on one cheek.

  Says: ‘Wake up. Wake up, Berit.’

  And slowly the woman on the sunlounger comes round. She shakes her head, seems to remember where she is, seems to see the figures standing there, unexpected yet expected, on the sheltered veranda of the summer house she inherited from her father, where she must have played as a child. The house that the bank was going to take from her.

  ‘You two,’ she says, trying to sit up. Malin helps her raise the back of the chair, and Berit Andersson pulls herself together and giv
es her a look that seems to say: I know why you’re here.

  ‘I need coffee. Sit yourselves down,’ Berit Andersson says, then stands up and walks into the house, her back bent. Through the window they see her make coffee, and Malin wonders if they ought to be keeping a closer eye on her, what if she comes out with a knife? Tries to run, maybe? But Malin has a feeling that Berit Andersson isn’t going to do anything like that. And she comes out with a tray in her hands, three coffee cups, a coffee pot, sugar bowl, and a small jug of milk.

  From the veranda they have a view across the fields down towards the Åtvidaberg road.

  It’s a beautiful place, Malin thinks, as Berit Andersson pours coffee and sits down opposite her and Zeke, with her back to the view.

  She looks at them for a long time without saying anything.

  Then she says: ‘It’s nice here, don’t you think?’

  Malin and Zeke agree.

  They let Berit Andersson take her time, find her own words, the words that Malin knows are coming.

  ‘And they wanted to take this away from me.’

  They let the sounds of the storm be the only noise for a while, filling the silence, until Malin breaks it.

  ‘We know you redeemed the fourth scratch card in Norrköping.’

  Berit Andersson nods.

  Gathers her breath, and her face tenses into a thousand wrinkles. She puts her hand in her pocket, fumbles with a packet of cigarettes, lights one. Takes several deep drags.

  ‘I told him about the cottage. About the bank. Asked if I could borrow some money from him. The scratch card was worth two hundred and fifty thousand. But he refused.’

  And everything falls silent.

  Malin can hear the three of them breathing, at this particular point on the planet.

  ‘I thought: I’ll steal the scratch card. And then of course I had to kill him. Or sedate him. But if I didn’t kill him, he’d figure out that it was me who took the card. It would be easier to kill him if he was asleep. So I tricked him into taking the sedative. I got it from the nurses’ office. Hilda isn’t great at keeping track of things, although she’d never admit it.’

  Malin closes her eyes, then opens them again.

  ‘And when he was drifting off to sleep, I asked him again, “Can I borrow some money?” I figured that I’d been kind to him all those years, and he had money, he was in a position to help me, but he wouldn’t. You know, he just shook his head. Kept on shaking his head, no, no, no.