Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘I don’t know. All the girls seemed to be crazy about him. That’s what he was like.’

  ‘Jerry’s gang?’ Waldemar says.

  ‘He just had a lot of friends,’ Karlsson says, rubbing his top lip with one hand. Strange, Waldemar thinks. We haven’t found a single person who describes themselves as Petersson’s friend.

  ‘But he wasn’t friends with the Fagelsjos?’

  ‘No, not as far as I know. There was a group of rich kids, no one else was let in except when they wanted to make up the numbers.’

  ‘Can you tell us about that evening?’

  Waldemar is making an effort to sound friendly, establish trust, and Johan is surprised at how genuine it actually sounds.

  Karlsson clears his throat and seems to gather his senses before he starts talking again.

  ‘Like I said, Fredrik Fagelsjo had organised a New Year’s Eve party. I got invited, and was allowed to borrow Dad’s car to get there, as long as I promised not to drink. After midnight I wanted to go home, piss-ups like that are no fun if you’re not drunk as well.’

  ‘No, they certainly aren’t,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘And as I was about to leave, Jerry Petersson came over with Jasmin Sandsten and Andreas Ekstrom and asked for a lift. Andreas squeezed in the back seat with the girl, and Jerry sat in the front, and the rest is history. I was driving sensibly, but we still slid in the darkness and snow and ended up rolling over into a field. We had seat belts in the front, but not in the back, and they got tossed about like they were in a centrifuge before being thrown out of the rear window. Andreas died of head injuries, and Jasmin. . well, she still isn’t right.’

  ‘The others had been drinking?’ Waldemar asks.

  ‘It was New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘Did anything particular happen at the party?’

  Karlsson shakes his head.

  ‘Do you think about the accident much?’

  Johan says the words slowly, and he sees Karlsson’s face tense and his pupils expand.

  ‘No. I’ve put it behind me. It was an accident. I was cleared of any responsibility and I didn’t feel that anyone blamed me for it. But sure, sometimes I think about Andreas and Jasmin.’

  ‘Were you friends with Andreas and Jasmin?’

  ‘Only superficially. We went to the same parties. Talked between classes.’

  ‘Did you have any contact with Petersson over the years?’ Waldemar asks.

  ‘Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t spoken to him once. But it looks like things went well for him. No doubt about that.’

  Waldemar rubs his knees, fiddling restlessly with his fingers.

  ‘Is it OK if I smoke?’

  Karlsson nods.

  ‘If you let me have one.’

  ‘Can I ask what your job is?’

  ‘I’m a nurse. I work nights in the X-ray department.’

  ‘You never married? No kids?’

  ‘No, that’s not my thing.’

  And the room fills with suffocating smoke, and Johan has to force himself not to cough before asking: ‘Do you feel guilty?’

  Karlsson looks surprised at first, then thinks before he says: ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘What about the parents? Were they angry with you?’

  ‘I think they all accepted it was an accident, that things like that happen. I don’t know. I think Andreas’s parents managed to move on. I got that impression at his funeral.’

  ‘Was Jerry at the funeral?’ Johan asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fredrik Fagelsjo?’

  ‘No, are you kidding?’

  ‘What about Jasmin’s parents?’

  ‘She was left a vegetable,’ Karlsson says. ‘I heard her dad took it hard. I think they got divorced.’

  Johan doesn’t reply, looks out of the window, thinks about the father who lost his daughter that New Year’s Eve, sees his own daughter running through the house out in Linghem.

  In a flowing white dress.

  A daughter whose soul vanishes in a snow-covered field one night. A daughter who doesn’t stop breathing, and instead faces decades of suffering. What sort of emotions might something like that bring to life?

  Zeke Martinsson puts his head in his hands, trying to shut out all the sounds of the police station. The noise and beeping that fills the open-plan office sometimes makes him so crazy he can’t think.

  Malin in Tenerife.

  Must have landed by now. What are the chances of her seeing her parents? God knows.

  Zeke has just spoken to Axel and Katarina Fagelsjo about the accident. Sven Sjoman had already spoken to Fredrik Fagelsjo about it, in the presence of his lawyer. All the members of the Fagelsjo family say they can hardly remember the New Year’s Eve when the accident took place, it’s all in the past and none of them ever gave any thought to the fact that Jerry Petersson was the surviving passenger. Not when he popped up as a prospective buyer for the castle, and not when he was murdered.

  As Axel Fagelsjo expressed it over the phone: ‘The people in the car were a long way outside our closest, central circle of acquaintances. The children used to invite them sometimes to help fill the rooms.’

  Of course they remember. Of course they remember that Jerry was the passenger.

  As Katarina put it: ‘I don’t remember that party at all. I have no memory of it whatsoever, it’s all a blank.’

  There’s something that doesn’t fit here, Zeke thinks. He can feel that it’s important. But how?

  Too much.

  Too little.

  Skogsa.

  Always their castle, their estate.

  A car spins off the road one New Year’s Eve and one young person dies, another is terribly injured. One of the people in the car, one of the survivors, is found dead many years later in a moat on the land that now belongs to him.

  ‘It’s all a blank.’

  You’re lying, Zeke thinks. There’s nothing like death to make people remember things.

  34

  Jonas Karlsson, New Year’s Eve, 1984

  I’m crawling over the snow towards her, I think she’s dead, she’s not moving and I’m going to bring her back, I’m going to, I’m going to blow air into her lungs and bring her back to life. There’s blood trickling from her ears and the whole world, all the business of New Year’s Eve, is ringing inside me and I hear nothing, but I see, and the car’s headlights are flickering, pumping out their dead light that makes it look like Jerry is moving in slow motion, he’s running through screaming black and white images and the cold is here and a silence, a black silence that I know will follow me for the rest of my life.

  Jasmin, was that your name?

  Andreas? Where is he? Jerry is standing next to me as I crawl forward, he’s yelling something but I can’t make out what. I want to listen to him, show myself worthy of being his friend, there’s nothing I want more than to be his friend.

  I hold your head in my arms, Jasmin, and the snow around you is stained grey with grey blood, and why doesn’t this night have any sound, any colour? Not even the blood has the strength to be red.

  And what’s Jerry shouting? What is it he’s shouting?

  He wants something. And now I remember, how the words shot through the car, drive slower, slow down, and the world spun around, around, around, breaking into a thousand different sounds and the screams stopped and I was hanging upside down in the silence and looking at the steering wheel, at Jerry who was fiddling with a tape, and then I fell and started crawling.

  I thought I could see someone standing above Andreas’s body.

  A being with the colourless colour of fear.

  And Jasmin in my arms. She’s breathing. How do I know that? Jerry is standing beside me, screaming: ‘She’s breathing, she’s breathing’, and slowly, coldly, as if through cotton wool, his words reach me, he’s screaming, looking at me with his relentless blue eyes, he wants something, he really does want something.

  In a way that I will never want anything again. />
  I can drift back to that field now. It lies there still and pale in the rain and mist, in this raw cold that confuses even the voles that live there.

  I’m not about to tell anyone about that evening, that night. About love and decisiveness and death and the white snow and the delicate trickles of blood running from a girl’s deaf ears, the blood that spread out beneath her like a soft pillow of the finest velvet.

  I was angry.

  Disappointed, but determined to push ahead with the life that was mine. I would become the most ruthless of all ruthless people.

  I’m drifting higher now.

  Looking at Skogsa from above. I can see Linnea Sjostedt’s little cottage, she’s sitting inside waiting for a death that won’t come to her for a long time yet.

  The snow sails through the air in its perfect flakes, hardly bigger than motes of dust.

  I used, I use my blue eyes.

  I am standing in a field, a few square metres of the boundless, outstretched world that is mine, of the vastness of space that is now mine.

  A boy ceases to be a boy, as the snow and rain come to rest on the ground.

  Who was I, as I stood on the steps in front of a school building just a few months before, feeling the muted rays of the late-summer sun stroke my cheek?

  35

  Linkoping, 1984 and onwards

  The boy, as he still is, stands on the steps of the Cathedral School in the late-summer sun, warm as the memory of his mother’s cold hand.

  The boy doesn’t smoke like so many of the other students of Linkoping’s most prestigious high school. But he still stands on the steps, holding court, sees his people around him, learning each day how to manipulate them into doing what he wants, thinks that there’s nothing wrong with that, because the others don’t know what they want.

  Then come the boys and girls from the large farms, the estates and castles throughout Ostergotland, and it doesn’t matter what he says or does, or how much the others look up at him, those people treat him as if he were air. They might talk to him and about him, but there’s always a sense of amusement, of distance, in what they say and do, the fact that they let him exist, yet somehow not.

  He wants to be able not to give a damn about them, not to want their favour, but he can’t help himself, he tries to be amusing on the steps, in class, in the refectory, but it doesn’t get him anywhere.

  There are closed societies in that school.

  For the castle and estate boys, for doctors’ kids with family trees, but not for kids from Berga with a mother dead from rheumatism and a pointless father studying in adult education, of all fucking things.

  He, the most handsome and smart of all, ought to be an obvious member of the Natural Science Society, or Belles-Lettres and Tradition, which, even though it’s where the poetic nerds hang out, is still full of status and validation.

  Fuck you.

  And the parties. The ones they hold and where they invite everyone except him. His brilliance threatens them, frightens them.

  But Jerry merely sees a closed door.

  A door that will be opened.

  At all costs. And if the boys, with all their silly names and houses and cars, are ridiculous, it’s a different matter with the girls. The castle and estate girls with their fine-limbed bodies and soft blonde hair framing their narrow faces and even narrower lips.

  There’s something beautiful, irresistible, in the way they move, and they all move towards the boy, like almost all girls do, but while the others allow themselves to be moved by his blue eyes, the nice girls look away at the last moment. The well-bred girls know who the boy is, where he comes from, they know he’s a sight worth seeing, a source of amusement rather than a person to be taken seriously.

  But there is one girl, the most beautiful of the well-bred girls, who sees who he is beyond the person that he is, who sees the formidable boy he really is, the man he will become, and the life he will be able to offer.

  She dares.

  And so one evening, after an annual school competition and the party that followed, they make their way down to the Stangan as it winds through Linkoping, and they lie down together on a mattress in an abandoned pump house, and she is naked beneath him and her body is white and he fills her with his warm hard fleshy soul and they both know they will never get past this moment, the feeling of this instinctive love, how their unconscious can let go of all doubts and simply relax in the sweat, pain, explosion, and a space free from fear.

  Then a New Year’s Eve.

  White snow falling from a black sky on a blood-stained field.

  A boy screaming the words that make him a man.

  36

  The sea is shimmering in shades of blue that Malin has never seen before, and the sun appears to see its task today as erasing the boundaries between the elements. Malin can feel her dress sticking fast to her lower back, as the warm wind wraps itself around her body in a soft, undemanding embrace.

  She looks at her showy surroundings.

  The pool terrace has been built on a cliff some hundred metres above a deserted beach of black sand.

  The pool.

  Lined with black mosaic, and Malin thinks a swim would be nice as she looks at the man in the water, swimming length after length without paying any attention to the visitors who have just arrived.

  The terrace must be at least four hundred square metres, and Malin and Inspector Jorge Gomez, wearing a crumpled beige linen suit, are sitting under a parasol at a teak table towards the edge of the terrace. On the other side of the pool, in front of the enormous cube-like house, two big-chested blondes are lying on sunloungers, tapping at their mobile phones and adjusting their outsized sunglasses, while three gorillas in jeans peer out of a living room whose large glass doors have been opened onto the terrace.

  A modern castle, Malin thinks. A secluded setting, but only ten kilometres or so from the clamour of Playa de las Americas.

  A modernist dream.

  White and steel, with the sun to heat it. This must have been the sort of thing you were dreaming about, Mum?

  The man in the pool carries on swimming, and small waves spread out to the black edges of the pool, running over, and one of the big-chested blondes gets up and waves across to them, and Gomez waves back.

  He drove Malin out here, not saying much, only that they were aware of Jochen Goldman’s questionable past but that there were a lot of far worse crooks on the island, people who really had been convicted of murder and didn’t just have a dodgy reputation, and that they naturally left him alone seeing as there was no current warrant for his arrest.

  ‘He’s not one of the noisy ones,’ Gomez said in broken English. ‘Not like the Russians. We keep them on a short chain.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll let us in?’

  ‘If he’s home, I expect he will.’

  Ten minutes later they were standing outside the gates, the black Seat in neutral, as a male voice said over the loudspeaker: ‘Drive up to the house and someone will meet you there.’

  They were met by a young woman wearing a dress, and she showed them to the table on the terrace, and said before disappearing inside the house: ‘Mr Goldman will be with you shortly.’

  Doing the crawl.

  Water.

  Goldman in the pool.

  One arm in front of the other. And Malin sees the muscles in his arms working, feels how much she wants to get in the pool, feel her own body fight against the water, forcing back the pleasant, soft barrier it constitutes.

  The muscular yet still fat body is full of energy as the suntanned Jochen Goldman heaves himself out of the pool, accepts a towel from one of the gorillas, then heads towards them with a smile, and wet, bleached hair.

  The towel around his neck. A heavy watch on one wrist, skin the colour of bronze, and a thick gold chain around his neck. His teeth whitened, unnaturally bright for a man of forty-five who, in all likelihood, hasn’t led the most sedate of lives. A murderer? The sort of man who gets
rid of people? Impossible to tell.

  Malin feels no fear of him. She feels something else.

  Jochen Goldman stops ten metres away from them, puffing out his bulging stomach, drying his hair with his right hand before fastening the towel around his waist.

  He holds out his hand to Malin.

  She takes it, and the handshake is as firm as his smile feels untrustworthy, and Malin sees that he must have had several bouts of plastic surgery during his years on the run, he has just a few wrinkles around his eyes, and cleaner features and a more pointed nose than in the old pictures from the papers. Jochen Goldman sits down in a chair beside them and one of the gorillas comes over with a pair of sunglasses with diamond-studded frames, and Malin smiles, saying: ‘Nice sunglasses’, then she introduces herself: ‘Malin Fors, detective inspector with the Linkoping Police. We spoke on the phone. This is my Spanish colleague Jorge Gomez,’ and Gomez nods towards Goldman, who raises his head slightly in return.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you could take off the sunglasses. So I can see your eyes when we talk.’

  ‘They’re from Tom Ford. You’ve got taste,’ Goldman says, taking off the glasses. ‘So you were the one who called about Jerry?’

  You know I was, Malin thinks, and Goldman smiles in amusement.

  ‘And now you’ve come all this way just to have a chat with me.’

  Malin realises that nothing in the world will make Goldman tell her more than he’s already decided to say, so she gets straight to the point.

  ‘We have reason to believe that you knew that Jerry Petersson once tried to give you up when you were on the run.’

  Another smile, and his brown eyes sparkle against the sun as he says: ‘Of course, I knew that. I found out through my source in Interpol. I only just got away that time.’

  ‘Did you want revenge?’

  ‘No, I got away, didn’t I? And why would I want revenge now, several years later? I’ve never trusted Jerry completely. He wasn’t the type who inspired total confidence, and in a situation like mine it made sense to take precautions.’