AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Must call Tove.

  Malin tries to focus her gaze, but everything is floating in front of her eyes. The rear-view mirror. She doesn’t want to look in it, hates her swollen features, the reason why she looks like that, doesn’t want to see the shame etched in her forehead, in the tiniest corner of her face. The car seems to contract. She’s having trouble breathing. Wants to jump out. Tove. Janne. How are you ever going to forgive me?

  Damn.

  Just give me a fucking big drink. Now. I’m pouring with sweat. I know all the things I ought to do, but I can’t handle any of it.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Fine,’ she replies. Forces herself to think about their heaven-sent case.

  A black car in a dream? Lindman’s? Johansson’s? But why?

  Jochen Goldman.

  The entire Fågelsjö family.

  Avaricious bastards in general.

  I wonder which one it’s worth annoying most?

  15

  The very thought of going through all the files is making Johan Jakobsson annoyed. How many have they carried into the room now?

  Two hundred? Three hundred?

  His light blue shirt is flecked grey with dust from all the carrying.

  Johan surveys the meeting room in the heart of the police station. Burps and gets a taste of the mince he had for lunch.

  The windowless room, with its grey-white textured wallpaper and basic shelving, is going to be their strategy room for the duration of the investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.

  Two hard-drives.

  A successful working life gathered together in a corner of the police station. Grim, Johan thinks, but he is also rather glad that something’s actually happening today. They hadn’t even reached Nässjö and his parents-in-law when Sven Sjöman rang, told him what had happened and asked if he could come in.

  ‘I’m on my way. I’ll be there in an hour or two.’

  His wife had been furious, and he didn’t really blame her. She had reluctantly driven him to Skogså, then turned back towards Nässjö on her own with the children.

  Even all the impending paperwork is preferable to hobnobbing with the oldies in Nässjö. They have far too many opinions about things in general, and about Johan’s family in particular, for him to enjoy their company.

  Everyone should mind their own business.

  It is much better that way.

  The files of documents and the hard-drives full of more documents are all concerned with instances of people minding their own business, Johan is certain of that. Who knows what they might find here? And what might that lead to? Or else they’ll find nothing. It’s not against the law to have a dodgy reputation.

  The files are marked by year, and occasionally by name.

  So far they’ve only taken a quick glance at a couple of them, but Jerry Petersson seems to have been a meticulous record-keeper, and every document appears to be in exactly the right place. This won’t make his and Waldemar Ekenberg’s job any less wide-ranging, but it will make it a fraction easier.

  The names on the files.

  He doesn’t recognise them, apart from one: Goldman. A mocking shadow who almost seems to be a fictional character, even though he really does exist. Malin called and mentioned the connection to Goldman, and now the files with his name on are on the table in front of Johan. There must be at least thirty of them, full of the specific details of avarice.

  Malin’s voice. It sounded rough, in the way that only alcohol can make a voice rough. And she sounded tired and sad. She’s been looking more and more tired, and Johan has often felt like asking how she is, but Malin Fors isn’t the kind of person with whom you exchange small talk about feelings.

  The door of the room flies open with an angry bang.

  In the doorway stands Waldemar, weighed down by two boxes.

  Files, documents, computer disks.

  This is ideal for me, Johan thinks, but Waldemar sees the job as a punishment, and maybe it is on some level: Sven wants to keep their renowned loose cannon under control. His reputation is deserved, Johan has seen him use physical force to get information out of people. Once Waldemar shoved the barrel of his pistol deep into the throat of a suspect to make him tell the truth. But violence can work. In the short term. In the end it always ends up biting its own tail.

  Waldemar drops the boxes unceremoniously in a corner of the room.

  Stretches his back.

  Huffs and puffs, mutters something about needing a fag, then he sits down on one of the chairs around the table, and Johan sees the uncomfortable back of the chair bow under his colleague’s weight.

  ‘Christ, look at all this fucking work in here.’

  ‘If we’re lucky, something will come up to save us going through most of it,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

  He remembers clearing out his parents’ flat four years ago, when Dad died just months after Mum. The way he had hunted through all their papers, looking for something that he reluctantly had to admit was probably money, a banker’s draft for a large sum of money, a lottery win, the only way his parents would ever have managed to get a large amount of money.

  But there was no money. And he was ashamed.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Waldemar says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s to say that this Petersson wasn’t a fucking crook? He could have had contacts in the underworld. We ought to check. I could head out and make a few inquiries.’

  ‘We need to concentrate on the paperwork,’ Johan says wearily.

  Waldemar pulls out a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and holds it towards Johan.

  ‘Want one? You don’t mind me smoking in here, do you?’

  The room is full of retch-inducing cigarette smoke.

  Smoking isn’t permitted anywhere in the police station, but Johan couldn’t say no. Didn’t want to look like an asthmatic weakling in front of the tough guy.

  Why, Johan wonders, do I give a shit what he thinks?

  But I do.

  They leaf through a few files at random. They’ve ordered extra screens from the techs so they can go through the contents of Petersson’s hard-drives here in the room.

  Where to begin?

  No idea, and Waldemar seems to think the same, saying: ‘There’s so fucking much of it. We need help. And it’s all going to be financial stuff that I honestly won’t have a clue about. Do you know about stuff like that?’

  Johan shakes his head. ‘Only a little.’

  ‘We need someone from Economic Crime.’

  ‘And it would make sense to do a serious search online first. See if we can find something that looks dodgy. Not least considering his dealings with Goldman.’

  Then Waldemar drops a black folder on the floor. He swears as he picks it up and puts it on its own on the top shelf.

  Paper, paper, paper, Johan thinks.

  A life as a commercial lawyer, a solicitor.

  A paper-producer.

  As a surreptitious criminal? You don’t have friends like Goldman without being a bit suspect. Do you?

  Jerry Petersson’s name produces 1,278,989 hits on Google. Maybe a thousand of them might be their Jerry Petersson. The name of his company in Stockholm appears in a few places. Petersson Legal Services Ltd.

  Johan has checked the latest company results. Petersson seemed to have worked alone, not one single employee, not even a secretary. His accountants were named, but he needn’t necessarily even have had to meet them in person. No financial results for the company since Petersson bought Skogså, just a declaration that the company was dormant. But at the same time he had started a new business, Rom Productions, to manage Skogså. Nothing unusual anywhere, from what Johan could see at a quick glance, with his limited grasp of accounting.

  There are still a fair number of hits, Johan thinks, trying to ignore the sour blast of coffee and smoke that hits him in the ear every time Waldemar breathes.

  They’re sitting at Johan’s desk
in the open-plan office, at his computer, keen to get out of the cell.

  A lot of the hits seem to be about a seventeen-year-old golfer from Arboga.

  Several of them link Petersson to Goldman. Articles in the main business dailies and magazines. It looks as if Petersson represented Goldman while he was on the run, acting as his intermediary in Goldman’s dealings with the authorities and media.

  A few other hits concerned with business. But no juicy stories, only boring and apparently perfectly normal business dealings.

  Then Jerry Petersson’s name pops up in connection with an IT company that was sold to Microsoft early in 2002. Petersson was said to be one of the main backers, and as a result of the sale he made a profit of almost two hundred and fifty million kronor.

  Johan lets out a whistle.

  Waldemar sighs, says: ‘Fuck off.’

  Working as a lawyer may have made you well-off, Johan thinks, but Christ, this deal made you absurdly rich.

  They read about the deal.

  Nothing about any disagreements. Everything seems to have been done by the book. Nothing odd at all, only a number of happy new multi-millionaires.

  And then Goldman again.

  According to one article from earlier this year, when his crime fell under the statute of limitations, he was living in Tenerife at the time. The article was illustrated with several pictures of a rather fat toad-like man with dark hair and sunglasses. The man was shown seated behind the wheel of a large motor yacht in a sun-drenched harbour.

  ‘This is where we start,’ Johan says.

  ‘OK,’ Waldemar says. ‘But I still think we should ask out on the street as well.’

  Sven Sjöman is walking up and down in his office, he almost misses his bulging stomach at times like this, the solid, thought-inspiring mound beneath his clasped hands. Instead there’s now practically nothing beneath his beige shirt and brown jacket.

  Karim Akbar is standing by his desk. He’s just called Stockholm and asked for support from Economic Crime.

  Press conference in twenty minutes.

  They’ve just received Karin’s preliminary report.

  The post-mortem on Jerry Petersson showed that he died of a blow to the back of the neck from a blunt instrument, possibly a rock. The knife wounds to his torso, forty in total, were in all likelihood inflicted after Petersson’s death, or after he lost consciousness from the blow to the head.

  There was no water in his lungs, so he was definitely dead by the time his body was dumped in the moat. To judge by the condition of the body, death occurred some time between four and half past six that morning. He hadn’t been in the water for longer than four hours at the most. Murder was the only possible explanation for the cause of death. The perpetrator could be male or female, the knife wounds were deep, but not so deep that a woman couldn’t have inflicted them. The perpetrator was, to judge by the distribution and direction of the wounds, probably right-handed.

  The forensic examination of Petersson’s car wasn’t yet complete, but the search of the gravel courtyard in front of the castle hadn’t produced anything. The rain had destroyed any evidence that might have been there.

  The search of the castle had yielded thousands of different fingerprints. A lot of them could be decades old, and there were no signs of obvious criminal activity anywhere. The victim’s possessions appeared to be untouched. In other words, no indications that robbery was the motive. The castle chapel and other buildings were also clean.

  They were in the process of draining the moat in the search for the murder weapon, because the divers hadn’t been able to find anything in the sludge at the bottom. Sven was worried about the fish at first, until he accepted that they were a necessary sacrifice.

  ‘How are you going to play this?’

  Sven looks over at Karim.

  ‘Tell it like it is. Without any details.’

  ‘The connection to Goldman?’

  ‘They’ve already found that. It’s on the Correspondent’s website. TV4 are running with it. And doubtless more to come. They’re making a bloody big deal out of it.’

  Then Sven sees Malin’s face before him. She looked worse than ever out at the castle. Red and puffy, almost old. She might well have been drinking all night. Had something happened? With Tove? She blames herself for what happened in Finspång last summer. Or is this about her and Janne? It doesn’t seem to be going very well.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Sven says finally. ‘Why do I have a feeling that we’re only at the start of a whole load of misery?’

  16

  Börje Svärd is standing in the rain in his garden in Tornhagen wearing a light blue raincoat. From the car Malin sees him raise his hand and throw a stick between the apple trees down towards the red-painted kennel block. The two beautiful Alsatians’ coats are glistening with damp as they chase the stick, playfully fighting over it with sharp, bared teeth.

  Börje is a thickset man, and his waxed moustache is drooping towards the grass.

  Zeke stops in front of the gate, parking behind the blue car of a district nurse. In the back seat Jerry Petersson’s beagle has leaped up, not barking, just staring expectantly out at the dogs in the garden.

  Börje looks over towards them. Waves them over to him, stays where he is in the middle of the garden.

  The little single-storey house is painted white, well maintained. Börje’s wife Anna would never tolerate anything else, even though she’s so weak now that she can’t even breathe without help. The illness has destroyed the nerves around her lungs and she’s living on overtime, at the age of fifty.

  They leave Jerry Petersson’s dog in the car, and the Alsatians rush over to them as they open the gate.

  Not wary, but welcoming, sniffing and licking, before they set off down the garden again without paying any attention to the beagle in the back seat.

  Zeke and Malin go over to Börje. Shake his wet hand.

  ‘How are you both doing?’ Zeke asks.

  Börje shakes his head, turns away from the house.

  ‘I wouldn’t wish what she’s going through on anyone.’

  ‘That bad?’ Malin says.

  ‘The nurses are with her now. They come four times a day. Otherwise we manage by ourselves.’

  ‘Would she like to see us, do you think?’

  ‘No,’ Börje says. ‘She hardly wants to see me. I see you’ve got a dog in the car? I can’t imagine it’s yours, Fors?’

  Malin explains what’s happened, who the dog belonged to, and would he mind looking after it for a while, until they know if there’s a relative or someone else who wants it?

  Börje smiles. A smile that gradually breaks through layer upon layer of exhaustion, of grief experienced in advance.

  ‘A bitch?’

  ‘No. Male,’ Zeke says.

  ‘That might be OK,’ Börje replies, then he goes over to the car and the dog bounces about in the back seat, and a couple of minutes later it’s standing to attention beside Börje while the Alsatians sniff all around it.

  ‘Looks like he feels at home here,’ Malin says. ‘Nice and easy.’

  ‘Get back to work, I’ll look after the dog. What’s his name?’

  ‘No idea,’ Malin replies. ‘Maybe you could call him Jerry?’

  ‘That would just confuse him,’ Börje replies.

  ‘We’d better get going,’ Zeke says.

  Börje nods.

  ‘I appreciate you dropping by.’

  ‘Look after yourselves,’ Malin says, then turns away.

  The call comes at exactly a quarter past two, as Malin and Zeke are parking the car at the old bus station. There’s not much left of the buildings that stood on the square years ago. Now there’s a car park surrounded by buildings from different eras. Ugly grey-panelled blocks from the sixties, well-maintained buildings from the turn of the last century, with the skeletal black trees of the Horticultural Society Park in the background.

  Close to Mum and Dad’s flat now. The damp, dar
k rooms that no one has lived in for years. The flat is pretentiously large, but it still isn’t a proper apartment. Why have they still got it? So Mum can tell her friends in Tenerife that they’ve got an apartment in the city? Their faces are starting to fade from my memory, Malin thinks as her mobile rings again. Mum’s thin cheeks and pointed nose, Dad’s laughter lines and oddly smooth forehead.

  A silent love, theirs. An agreement. Like mine and Janne’s? A lingering love, clinging to the back of our memories, in a room to which we haven’t yet managed to close the door.

  The plants they think are still alive.

  Dried out.

  Not a single damn plant alive any more, but what do they expect when they haven’t been home for more than two years?

  She pulls her mobile from the pocket of the GORE-TEX jacket.

  Hears the rain drumming on the roof of the car. Zeke wary beside her.

  Tove’s number on the screen.

  What can I say to her? Is she going to be sad, scared?

  How can I talk to her without Zeke realising?

  He’ll realise. He knows me too well.

  ‘Tove, hi. I saw you rang earlier.’

  Silence at the other end.

  ‘I know it all ended weirdly yesterday and I should have called back, but something’s happened and I’ve been busy at work. Is Dad there?’

  I hit him, Malin thinks. I hit him.

  ‘I’m at school,’ she finally hears Tove’s voice say. She’s not sad, not scared, almost sounds angry. ‘If you need to talk to Dad, call him.’

  ‘Of course, you’re at school. I’ll give him a call if I need to talk to him. Why don’t you come into the city this evening and we’ll have something to eat, OK?’

  Tove sighs.

  ‘I’m going to go back to the house, to Dad.’

  ‘You’re going back to Dad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another silence. It’s as if Tove wants to ask something, but what?

  ‘Well, you do whatever you want, Tove,’ Malin says, and she knows it’s exactly what she shouldn’t say, she ought to say things like: It’s all going to be OK, I’ll pick you up from school, I want to give you a big hug, I’ll make an effort, how are you, my darling daughter?