Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  Jesper.

  A doctor’s kid from the villas of Wimanshall. His dad’s evidently the sort of doctor who cuts people up.

  The boy already knows that they treat the kids from the villas differently from him and the others from the blocks of flats in Berga.

  It happens in the little things they think nine-year-olds don’t notice: who gets to sing the solo at the end-of-year assembly, who is suspected of misbehaving on purpose, who gets most attention and praise in class.

  So a girl sings in the gymnasium, two boys play the flute, and he doesn’t recognise any of them from the place where he lives, and all of them apart from him are dressed in white and all of them apart from him have their parents there.

  But he doesn’t feel lonely, feels no shame, he’s worked out that shame, even if he doesn’t understand the word itself, is pointless. That he isn’t like Mum, or Dad.

  Unless he is, really? When he stands in the second row on the penalty-line of the handball court and is expected to sing songs decided by others for people he doesn’t care about, is he not like Mum and Dad then? Doesn’t everyone want him to be like his parents then?

  Maybe he did aim for the nose after all?

  Enjoyed watching the blood gush out from stupid Jesper’s nose, like it had been cut by the blades of a lawnmower?

  There, in the gym hall, he actually knows nothing about the world, except that he is going to make it his.

  He spends all summer drifting around the backyard on his own. He spends many summers doing this.

  Mum has long since given up.

  She developed an allergy to the cortisone they pumped into her to help the ache in her joints, and becomes stiffer and stiffer in a whimpering, corrosive pain that is gradually wearing away the woman she once was to the sum total of mute fury. Grandma has had a stroke, the cottage has been sold, Dad took redundancy from Saab and has drunk the last of the pay-off during the autumn. They had no need for his skills when they went over to production of the Viggen. He could have got work as a cleaner, or in the canteen, but wasn’t it better that he took the money, and looked ahead, to the future?

  Dad likes the company of the parks department workers. The lawnmower, with its comfortably sprung seat. The blokes in the parks team don’t judge him, they don’t judge their own.

  And the boy longs for the end of the summer holidays, for football training to start again. There are no differences out on the pitch. On the pitch he decides. On the pitch he can be a bit rougher, and what does it matter if the boy from Sturefors falls badly and breaks his arm?

  He has friends. Like Rasmus, who’s the son of a sales manager for Cloetta chocolate. They moved here from Stockholm, and one evening the boy is around at Rasmus’s when Rasmus’s dad has business colleagues there for dinner, and his dad asks Rasmus to show the guests that he can do forty press-ups in a row, and someone suggests a competition. And then they are lying there on the parquet floor of the living room, him and Rasmus, doing press-ups alongside each other, and he goes on and on, long after Rasmus is lying flat on the floor, and their audience are shouting: ‘Enough, enough, point taken, young man.’

  Rasmus’s dad says: ‘Rasmus, he’s not too good at school. But Jerry’s supposed to be pretty smart.’ Then he sends Rasmus to bed and the boy has to leave, and he is eleven years old and is left standing in the cold autumn evening outside the sales manager’s rented villa in Wimanshall looking up at the vibrant starry sky.

  He goes home. The windows of the blocks of flats are like closed eyes, their bodies black shapes against the dark sky.

  Mum is asleep in bed.

  Dad is asleep on the green sofa.

  Beside him a pizza box and half a bottle of Explorer vodka. The flat stinks of dirt.

  But this isn’t my crap, the boy thinks as he creeps into bed beside his mother, feeling the heat from her sleeping body.

  24

  At a quarter past eleven Waldemar Ekenberg pulls up outside a run-down workshop on the Tornby industrial estate.

  It has finally stopped raining, but the low, drifting clouds almost seem to be licking the shabby corrugated roof, where large flakes of red-brown plastic paint are flapping in the wind.

  There is no sign above the two large, black garage doors, but Waldemar knows what’s concealed inside: a car mechanic’s workshop where no cars are ever repaired. The entire thing is a front for laundering money from various criminal activities. But the man behind it, Brutus Karlsson, is a smart bastard that they’ve never managed to get for anything worse than actual bodily harm.

  Waldemar gets out of the car.

  Walks calmly towards the workshop and knocks on one of the doors, hears steps approaching within.

  It makes sense to use someone like Brutus, use him to get information. Several times he’s actually pointed Waldemar in the right direction, when they’ve had a case involving one of his competitors. Brutus Karlsson’s honour among thieves goes no further than people on the same side as him.

  ‘Open up!’ Waldemar shouts. ‘Open up!’

  Brutus will recognise my voice, he thinks, and there’s a mechanical sound as the door slides up.

  ‘You?’ Brutus Karlsson says. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  The man in front of him, in jeans and a leather jacket, is short but broad-shouldered, and Waldemar knows perfectly well that there’s violence in that body. There are rumours that Brutus Karlsson was behind several severe beatings in the underworld. Amongst other things, he’s supposed to have crushed the spine of some bloke from Poland.

  Brutus Karlsson’s face is broad, and there’s a scar across his nose that doesn’t sit well with his blond hair.

  ‘Can I come in.’

  A question, yet not a question.

  Behind Brutus Karlsson in the shabby garage stand three men of Slavic appearance. They’re all wearing Adidas tracksuits and seem to have very little to offer society.

  Waldemar steps inside.

  The garage door closes behind him.

  In the centre of the workshop stands a table surrounded by six chairs. There are a few tools on a workbench, but there’s no smell of oil or petrol, just damp.

  Waldemar thinks it’s best to get straight to the point.

  ‘Jerry Petersson,’ he says. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

  Karlsson looks at him.

  ‘And who the hell is that?’

  ‘You know who,’ Waldemar says, taking a step closer to him.

  The three Slavs move closer, their eyes darkening, and Waldemar sees one of them clench his fists.

  ‘So you come waltzing in here with your arrogant pig’s attitude, asking about some fucking bastard?’ Karlsson says.

  ‘Jerry Petersson.’

  ‘I know who he is. Don’t you think I read the papers?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  Waldemar takes a quick step forward and takes a firm grip of Karlsson’s jaw with one hand.

  ‘Stop playing so fucking tough, you little shit. Do you know if Jerry Petersson had any dealings with anyone on your side of the law?’

  The Slavs hesitate, waiting for a signal from Karlsson, and with his free hand Waldemar pulls his pistol from the holster beneath his jacket.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Karlsson says in a slurred voice. ‘I can assure you of one thing. Petersson had nothing to do with anyone on this side anywhere around here. If someone like him had been involved, I’d have known about it. Let go, for fuck’s sake.’

  And Waldemar lets go, takes a step back and puts his pistol back in the holster, and as he is snapping it shut he realises his mistake. One of the Slavs flies at him and Waldemar feels a fist hit him over one eye, and he falls to the filthy grey-painted floor of the workshop. The three Slavs hold him down, their breath smells sourly of garlic and all he can see is their unshaven cheeks.

  Karlsson’s scarred face above Waldemar.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? Coming here like this. Throwing your weight ab
out. Do your colleagues even know you’re here?’

  And Waldemar feels fear grip his stomach, no one knows where he is, anything could happen now.

  ‘They know where I was going. They’ll be here if I’m not back within an hour.’

  Karlsson gestures with his head, and the Slavs let go of Waldemar.

  ‘Get up,’ he says.

  Then Waldemar is standing facing him, the Slavs in a circle around them.

  An arm flies out and Waldemar ducks instinctively, but the blow hits him on the cheek. Then another, to his left eye.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, beating up a cop?’ Waldemar shouts.

  ‘Listen,’ Karlsson says. ‘I’ve got enough shit on you to get you put away. I can dig out a dozen men you’ve beaten up in the course of your duties.’

  Two quick punches.

  A burning pain and Waldemar spits, realises he has to get out of there, have a cigarette.

  ‘Fuck off now, pig,’ Karlsson says, and behind him Waldemar hears the door rattle, and thinks, fucking hell, how long before I can retire?

  Malin and Zeke have picked up the car from outside Hamlet, and now they’re waiting outside a room in Aleryd Care Home while the nurses change Ake Petersson’s incontinence pad.

  Zeke didn’t ask about the car and Malin was glad he didn’t, the last thing she wants is a stern lecture.

  From inside the room they hear groaning, but no whining, no cross words. The walls of the corridor are painted white, stencilled with pink flowers. A clock with a white face and black hands sticks out from the wall. It says 2.20, and Malin can feel the pizza she’s just eaten at the Conya pizzeria churning in her stomach. But the fat has soothed her hangover and she can’t feel any grimier than she already does. Must go to the gym, she thinks. Sweat all the crap out.

  Thank God Zeke hasn’t mentioned what she told him yesterday, about leaving Janne again.

  The smell here.

  Ammonia and disinfectant, cheap perfume and excrement, and the odour that slowly dying old people give off.

  A man in a wheelchair is staring out at the rain through a window at the end of the corridor. It stopped a while ago, but not for long. How much can it actually rain?

  Then the door opens. A young blonde nurse shows them in. In the bed, its top end propped up, sits a thin man with a chiselled face, and Malin thinks that he looks like his son, his dead son, and what would have happened if Tove died, if she had died in the flat in Finspang more than a year ago?

  Everything would be over.

  But in the man’s watery, grey, alcoholic’s eyes there is no grief, just loneliness. He has one hand clenched into a stroke-victim’s claw, his right hand, so maybe he can still talk, but what if he’s mute, what if he has trouble distinguishing dreams from reality? What do they do with the conversation then?

  One of his eyes, on his lame side, seems blind, fixed in its socket, a broken, rigid camera, only capable of filming black.

  ‘Come in,’ Ake Petersson says as the other nurse leaves the room. One corner of his mouth droops when he talks, but it doesn’t seem to affect his speech.

  ‘You can sit over there.’

  By the wall is a worn green sofa. Brown curtains cover the window, shutting out the season.

  It’s uncomfortable, and Malin looks at the framed photographs on the table beside Ake Petersson, the woman, young and beautiful, then older with eyes weary from life.

  ‘Eva. Taken by rheumatism. She died of an allergic reaction to the cortisone when she was forty-five. She took all that she had in the house, must have hoped her allergy to the medicine had gone.’

  Jerry.

  Your mum. So she died. How old would you have been then? Ten? Fifteen?

  ‘That’s when I stopped drinking,’ Ake Petersson says, and it’s as if he wants to tell them his whole life story, relieved that somebody finally might want to hear it. ‘I pulled myself together. Stopped working for the parks, got some training in computers. Got a job doing data-entry.’

  ‘Sorry for your loss,’ Zeke says.

  ‘We would have preferred to wait,’ Malin says. ‘But. .’

  ‘He was my son,’ Ake Petersson says. ‘But we didn’t have much contact over the last twenty-five years.’

  ‘You had a falling-out?’ Malin asks.

  ‘No, not even that. He just didn’t want anything to do with me. I never understood why. After all, I stopped drinking when he was sixteen.’

  Did you hurt him? Malin wonders. Was that why?

  ‘Maybe I wasn’t the best father in the world. But I never hit the lad. Nothing like that. I think he just wanted to get away from everything I stood for. I think he felt that way even when he was a child. He was better than me, to put it bluntly.’

  ‘What was he like as a child?’ Malin asks.

  ‘Impossible to handle. Did crazy things, got into fights, but he was good at school. We lived in a rented flat in Berga, but he went to the Anestad School with all the doctors’ kids. And he was better than them.’

  ‘What was he like towards you? And you to him?’

  The words literally pour from Ake Petersson.

  ‘I worked a lot when he was a kid. A hell of a lot. That was when things were going well in the aviation industry.’

  The old man twists in the bed, reaching for a glass from the bedside table and drinking the transparent liquid through a straw.

  ‘Do you know if he had any enemies?’

  Zeke’s voice is soft, hopeful.

  ‘I knew no more about his life than I read in the papers.’

  ‘Do you know why he bought Skogsa? Why he wanted to move back here?’

  ‘No. I called him, but he hung up every time he heard it was me.’

  ‘Anything that might have happened when you were still in touch?’

  The old man seems to consider this, his pupils contracting, then he says: ‘No. Of course he was an unusual person, the sort people used to notice, but nothing special ever happened. I really didn’t know much about his life even back then. When he was at high school. Before he moved to Lund. He never used to tell me anything.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’ Malin asks. ‘Try to remember.’

  The old man closes his eyes and sits in silence.

  ‘Could he have been homosexual?’

  Ake Petersson remains calm when he replies: ‘I can’t imagine that he was. I seem to remember him liking girls. When he was at high school there were several girls who used to phone the flat in the evenings.’

  ‘What was Jerry like in high school, generally?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’d pretty much turned his back on us by then.’

  ‘So Jerry moved to Lund?’

  ‘Yes. But by then he’d broken off all contact.’

  ‘What about before that?’

  But Ake Petersson doesn’t answer her question, and says instead: ‘I did my grieving for Jerry a long time ago. I knew he’d never come back to me, so I got all the sadness out of the way in advance, and now he’s gone all I’ve got is confirmation of what I already felt. Strange, isn’t it? My son is dead, murdered, and all I can do is revisit feelings I’ve already had.’

  Malin can feel that her marinated brain isn’t keeping her thoughts in order, and they wander off to Tenerife, to Mum and Dad on the balcony in the sun, the balcony she’s only seen in pictures.

  And pictures, black and white, emerge from her memory, she’s very young and wandering around the room asking for her mum, but Mum isn’t there, and she doesn’t come home either, and she asks Dad where Mum’s gone, but Dad doesn’t answer, or does he?

  Strange, Malin thinks. I always remember Mum as being there, yet somehow not. Maybe she wasn’t even there?

  Tove.

  I’m not there. And she feels acutely sick, but manages to control the gag reflex.

  Then she forces herself back to the present, and stares at the wall of the room. A shelf full of books. Literary fiction, by famous difficult authors: the sort Tove devours
and that she can’t stand.

  ‘I started reading late in life,’ Ake Petersson says. ‘When I needed something to believe in.’

  Dad!

  Dad, Dad, Dad!

  What would I need you for? To raise my hand against?

  You know why Mum took the cortisone, the pain in her body ended up as pain in her soul.

  You dragged yourself up from that green sofa for your own sake, not mine, and what did you get up for? Sitting and programming the simplest sort of code, the only thing your pickled brain could handle.

  I see you there in bed, your cramping stroke-paralysed half-body is like a physical embodiment of the muteness that always characterised your side of the family, those taciturn, useless men.

  You tried to contact me, Dad. But I wouldn’t take your calls. What would we have said to each other?

  Would we have spent Christmases in Berga eating cheap sausages? Meatballs, Jansson’s Temptation, pickled herring ad nauseam?

  You stopped trying to contact me.

  Certain doors have to be closed for others to open. That’s just the way it is. But at the same time: is there anything more exciting than a locked door?

  I had been hoping you’d get in touch when I moved back to the city. When I bought the castle. I could have had you driven out there, I could have shown you my home.

  Someone else could have come too.

  There’s something tragic about you now, as you tell the nurse to angle the blinds so you can look out at the rain. You speak to her nicely, with a meekness you’ve learned to express perfectly.

  You look out into the room.

  One eye blind after the stroke.

  You blink.

  As if you can see something you could never see before.

  Is it me you can see, Dad?

  25

  The phone in her hand shaking. The living room of the flat dark, as if darkness could subdue her nerves.

  I’m scared, nervous about calling my own daughter. I’ve spent two days being scared to talk to her. Is that really true?