AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Fredrik Fågelsjö.

  Is that you? Have you finished your Friday cognac?

  ‘I think Fågelsjö just left through the back door.’

  A black Volvo is parked right outside the other door, and before Malin and Zeke have time to react, the man they think is Fredrik has got in the car and driven off in the opposite direction to them.

  ‘Shit,’ Malin says. ‘Turn around.’

  And Zeke spins the wheel, but at that moment a lorry turns into the road from the other direction and stops.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I’ll try his mobile again.’

  The lorry reverses out of their way and Zeke pulls onto the other side of the road and accelerates hard, and they head down towards Hamngatan at high speed, overtaking a rusty white Volkswagen.

  ‘He’s not answering,’ Malin says as they turn into Hamngatan. ‘I can see him,’ she says. ‘He’s stuck at a red light by McDonald’s.’

  No flashing lights, Malin thinks, no sirens. Just pull up alongside and wave him over, all according to the rulebook. After all, we only want to talk to him.

  Zeke puts his foot down and they pull up alongside what they think is Fredrik Fågelsjö’s car before the lights change. Hungry teenagers inside McDonald’s. People defying the worsening rain and crossing the square in the background.

  Zeke blows the horn and Malin holds her police ID up to the window. Fredrik Fågelsjö, there’s no doubt that it’s him, looks at Malin, at her ID, and his face takes on a look of panic when Malin gestures that he should pull over and wait for them outside McDonald’s.

  Fågelsjö nods, then looks straight ahead, and seems to put his entire weight on the accelerator pedal, and his Volvo shoots away as the lights go amber, pulling in ahead of them and burning off along Drottninggatan.

  Shit, Malin manages to think. Yells: ‘He’s making a run for it. The bastard’s making a run for it!’

  And Zeke spins the wheel and heads off after Fågelsjö along Drottninggatan, while Malin winds down the window and sticks the flashing light on the roof of the car.

  ‘What the hell?’ Zeke shouts. ‘Let command know over the radio. Get them to send more cars if we’ve got any.’

  Malin stays quiet, wants to let Zeke concentrate on driving, as Fredrik flashes past the orange building that once housed the National Bank at what must be a hundred kilometres an hour, heading towards the Abis roundabout, past the old specialist food store.

  What the hell is this? Malin thinks. Are you a panic-stricken murderer? Why the hell are you running from us?

  A hundred metres ahead of them Malin sees some pedestrians throw themselves out of the way as Fågelsjö runs a red light. She feels the adrenalin pumping as she shouts instructions over the radio.

  ‘Driver refusing to stop. We’re following a black . . . out towards the Berg roundabout, all available cars . . .’

  Zeke swerves past a few cars that have ended up between them and Fågelsjö, and their speed, one hundred and twenty now, in the middle of the city, makes Malin feel that the world as she knows it is dissolving into crazy lines and colours, and she feels violently sick now, her headache throbbing, but soon the adrenalin takes over again and the present becomes clear and focused.

  ‘He’s turning off past Ikea, out towards Vreta Kloster,’ Malin yells, and the sound of the racing engine blends with the siren in a strangely exciting symphony.

  Fågelsjö drives past Ikea’s Tornby store, his car weaving as though he were drunk.

  Maybe he is drunk, Malin thinks. He came out of the Ekoxen. She feels her nausea take hold of her stomach again, she feels like throwing up, but the adrenalin forces her stomach back down.

  Zeke takes one hand off the wheel and presses the CD player, and German choral music, something from a Wagner opera, blasts through the car.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Malin yells.

  ‘It makes me drive better,’ Zeke grins.

  Fågelsjö is lucky with the lights as he heads across the roundabout on the E4. They pass the last blocks of flats in Skäggetorp and are out in the country, surrounded by empty fields and small farms huddled down against the wind.

  The message from control is scarcely audible over the voices of the choir.

  ‘Fredrik Fågelsjö lives out on the plain, off left from Ledberg. He could be heading home.’

  He’s pulling away, Malin thinks. ‘Step on it!’ she yells. Could we really be getting somewhere? Did Fredrik Fågelsjö kill Jerry Petersson? Is that why he’s running?

  A patrol car drives up alongside, but Zeke gestures to it to pull back, and when they reach the Ledberg junction Fågelsjö lurches left but manages to straighten the car out and continue at an ever-increasing speed out towards a small cluster of houses surrounded by thin trees, maybe two kilometres further out on the plain in the direction of Lake Roxen.

  Zeke’s forehead is sweating. Malin can feel him taking shallow, stressed breaths, and she pulls her pistol from its holster as the road curves towards the group of houses. A large brick villa, painted yellow, in a clump of trees. A proper upper-class mansion, and, a hundred metres further on, Fågelsjö swings off again, down a driveway.

  They follow him, and, seventy metres in front of them he has stopped in front of a crooked red-painted barn surrounded by bare bushes and maples. He leaps out of the car and runs over into the barn.

  Zeke pulls up behind Fågelsjö’s car and the patrol car stops just behind them. Malin turns off the CD and the siren, and everything is suddenly strangely quiet.

  Over the radio Malin says quietly: ‘Get out and cover us when we follow him inside the barn.’

  The gravel and mud outside the barn sticks to their shoes. Malin looks towards the building, feels the rain getting harder as they walk the few metres from the car to the barn door. Behind them is the villa, built in the Italian style, presumably Fågelsjö’s home. If he’s got a family, they don’t seem to be in. The two uniforms have taken out their Sig Sauers, taking cover behind the car doors, ready to open fire if anything goes wrong.

  Zeke beside her, both of them holding their pistols in front of them as Malin kicks open the door of the barn and shouts: ‘Fredrik Fågelsjö. We know you’re in there. Come out. We just want to talk to you.’

  Silence.

  Not a sound from the manure-stinking building.

  Trying to run, Malin thinks, would be the most stupid thing you could do. Where would you go? Goldman. He stayed on the run for ten years. So it is possible. But you’re hiding in there, aren’t you? Waiting for us. You might be armed. People like you always have at least a hunting rifle. Are you waiting for us with a gun?

  Talking to herself like that helps her stay focused, and stops the fear from taking over. Into the darkness now, Malin. Whatever’s waiting inside.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Zeke says, and Malin is grateful. Zeke never backs down when it comes to the crunch.

  He steps inside the barn and Malin follows him. Black and dark, with a smell of fresh manure and some other indefinable animal waste. There’s light from one corner, opening onto a field, Zeke runs towards it and Malin follows.

  ‘Shit,’ Zeke yells. ‘He must have gone straight through.’

  They rush over to the open door.

  Some hundred metres away, down in the field, through the rain and fog, Fågelsjö is running, dressed in brown trousers and what must be a green oilskin. He stumbles and gets up, runs a bit further, past a tree that’s still got a few leaves.

  ‘Stop!’ Malin shouts. ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot.’

  Which she wouldn’t do. They’ve got nothing on Fågelsjö, and running from the police isn’t sufficient justification for firing.

  But it’s as if all the air goes out of him. He stops, turns around, raises his empty hands and looks at her and Zeke, who are slowly approaching him, weapons drawn.

  He’s swaying back and forth.

  You’re drunk, Malin thinks, then shouts: ‘Lie down. Lie down.’

  And Fredrik F�
�gelsjö lies down on his stomach in the mud as Malin puts a pair of handcuffs on his wrists behind his back. A filthy, green, classic Barbour jacket.

  He stinks of alcohol, but says nothing, maybe he can’t talk with his face on the ground.

  ‘What the hell was all that in aid of?’ Malin says, but Fågelsjö doesn’t reply.

  18

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  Zeke’s hands are shaking slightly on the steering wheel as they drive back towards Linköping, past the white-tiled block of flats in Skäggetorp and the big Arla dairy in Tornby. They pass one of the Correspondent’s reporters’ cars. Is that Daniel driving? They’re utterly tireless, those vultures.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Malin says. The adrenalin has dropped, her headache and angst are back, and a clearly intoxicated Fredrik Fågelsjö is safely installed in the back seat of the patrol car. Malin didn’t want him in the car with them, she and Zeke both needed time to calm down.

  A van from the local television news.

  ‘But maybe,’ Malin goes on, ‘he’s involved in this somehow and he got it into his head that we know, and that’s why he tried to escape. And then realised how pointless it was out in the field, in all that rain.’

  ‘Or else he was just drunk and panicked when we tried to stop him,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Well, we’ll find out when we question him. But he could very well be our man,’ Malin replies, but she’s thinking that there’s something here that doesn’t add up, that the case can’t be that simple. Or can it?

  Her mobile rings and she sees Sven Sjöman’s name on the display.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ Sven says. ‘Very odd. Could it be him? What do you think?’

  ‘Maybe. We’ll interview him when we get back to the station.’

  ‘Johan and Waldemar can do that,’ Sven says. ‘You two can try to get hold of Katarina Fågelsjö. Put her under pressure while her brother’s idiotic behaviour’s still fresh.’

  Malin feels like protesting at first. Then she relaxes. If there’s anyone who can get anything out of Fredrik Fågelsjö, it’s Waldemar Ekenberg.

  Fredrik didn’t say a word when they pulled him to his feet and led him back over the field. He maintained his silence as they put him in the patrol car.

  ‘OK. That’s what we’ll do,’ Malin says. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not much. Johan and Waldemar have called a number of people and companies whose names crop up in Petersson’s files. But it hasn’t led to anything.’

  ‘Any signs of a lover?’

  ‘No love at all,’ Sven replies.

  Katarina Fågelsjö answered her phone.

  Was prepared to see them, and now Malin and Zeke are heading along Brokindsleden in silence through the dim afternoon light.

  They’re both trying to catch their breath, to get back to their normal energy levels before they see her.

  They drive past the development of detached houses in Hjulsbro.

  In Malin’s social studies textbook the area was mentioned as an upper-class reserve alongside the Upper East Side in New York City, but the upper-class don’t live here. More like the moneyed middle-class.

  In Hjulsbro the doctors’ villas huddle together, nondescript from the outside, but large and tastefully furnished when you get inside. One of the most expensive and prestigious residential areas of the city, but still a bit feeble somehow, compared to Djursholm in Stockholm or Örgryte in Gothenburg.

  As they drive through the area Malin can understand everyone who grows up in a provincial city and moves to a larger one as soon as they possibly can, a world with greater depths and heights than an ordinary, godforsaken Swedish city can offer, no matter how jumped-up it is.

  Stockholm.

  She lived there with Tove while she was studying at the Police Academy. In a sublet one-room flat in Traneberg, and all she can remember is studying and trips to the nursery, babysitters found in the local papers, young girls who were expensive and unreliable, and the fact that Stockholm didn’t have a damn thing to offer an impoverished single mother. The whole city felt shut off, as if all its opportunities and secrets could never be hers, and which seemed to mock her relentlessly as a result.

  The exact opposite must have been true for Jerry Petersson.

  Malin had been offered a post in Stockholm several times, most recently last summer when there was a vacancy in the Violent Crime Unit and the boss, someone called Kornman, had tried to headhunt her. He called her in person, said he was familiar with her work, and asked if she felt like expanding her territory.

  Malin had a feeling they needed more women.

  She’d just got the life she dreamed of with Janne and Tove, before everything went to hell. So she had turned the offer down.

  And now, in the car, she’s cursing herself. A fresh start might be just what I need? Or would the big city break me? Mind you, a small city seems to be able to do that well enough.

  Almost, anyway.

  The radio is on.

  She persuaded Zeke that they shouldn’t listen to his choral music, and he agreed to listen to good old local radio.

  The final notes of Grand Archives’ ‘Torn Blue Foam Couch’ have just faded away, and now Malin can hear the low voice of her friend, radio presenter Helen Aneman.

  She’s talking about their victim.

  About Jerry Petersson, for whom no one seems to feel sorry, about whom no one seems to care much. And no one seems particularly upset about what’s happened.

  But somewhere there’s someone who misses you, Malin thinks as she listens to Helen, and I’m going to make sure that person knows what really happened. Maybe your father, we’ll deal with him in the fullness of time. You had no brothers or sisters, and your mother’s dead, we know that much. Maybe a woman, or maybe even a child, even if you didn’t have any of your own.

  ‘One of the city’s wealthiest sons has passed away,’ Helen says. ‘The IT millionaire, according to the rumours the criminals’ friend, an exciting character that we might not get to know much about. He bought Skogså a year or so ago, the famous seat of the aristocratic Fågelsjö dynasty . . . Petersson may not have been the best-behaved person in the world, but surely he didn’t deserve a fate like that? What do you think? Call in if you’ve got anything to say about Jerry Petersson.’

  A Madonna song.

  ‘American Pie’.

  Zeke sings along. Maybe the song makes him think about Martin in Vancouver? About his grandchild? Or maybe they sing it in that choir he belongs to?

  They’re past Hjulsbro now.

  The suffocating, petit bourgeois enclave left behind.

  Zeke accelerates and the car responds. They turn off.

  Ahead of them she can see Landeryd Golf Club. The huge balloon-like building, home to the city’s driving range.

  A golfer’s paradise in this autumn hell.

  Where golf balls rain through the air.

  19

  The golf balls are whining through the air under the metal roof of the hangar-like building, several hundred metres long, bouncing high as they land.

  Thirteen places.

  The sound the clubs make when they strike the balls is like being hit over the ear.

  A bucket of fifty balls costs two hundred kronor. An insignificant sum to anyone who belongs to any of the city’s golf clubs.

  Putters.

  Wooden clubs.

  Jerry Petersson was struck on the back of the head with a blunt object, but hardly a golf club, Malin thinks as they approach the slender, tall figure of Katarina Fågelsjö.

  ‘I’m in thirteen. At the far end, next to the wall.’

  No surprise when they called to say they wanted to talk to her, she knew what had happened, but could hardly be aware of what her brother has just done.

  Aggressive swings, curses, balls hitting the walls and ceiling, and the noise is like the inside of a swimming pool, and there’s a similarly stale, damp smell, just without the chlorine.

  People volunt
arily spend the whole afternoon here, Malin thinks as she studies Katarina as she takes an apparently light and elegant swing. Her body is strong, and it’s clear that she possesses the self-confidence about herself and her life that everyone with her background has, imprinted on them from the day they open their eyes and see the world for the first time.

  Katarina raises a metal club, takes aim and drops her shoulder, and the club makes a fine arc down towards the ball on the tee in the astroturf.

  She must have a low handicap, Malin thinks. And she’s right-handed.

  Katarina must have seen them from the corner of her eye.

  She stops, turns around, looks at them, and steps down from the low platform she’s standing on. She holds out her hand, and Malin thinks that she must have been beautiful once, that she almost is now, with the same sharp nose as her brother, fine cheekbones, but there are too many wrinkles in her forehead, too much grey in her shoulder-length blonde hair.

  Bitter wrinkles. Evidence of discontent around her mouth. Sad eyes, full of a peculiar longing.

  She says hello to Malin first, then Zeke.

  They show their ID.

  Katarina runs a hand over her forehead and Malin thinks that she’s probably only five years older than me, she could have been in the same school as me, ahead of me, the same school as Jerry Petersson. If she didn’t go to a private school like Sigtuna or Lundsberg.

  ‘Can we do this here?’ Katarina asks, leaning her club on the ground. ‘Or shall we go to the restaurant?’

  ‘We can do it here,’ Malin says. ‘You know why we want to talk to you? We didn’t have time to say over the phone.’

  ‘Jerry Petersson. I can put two and two together.’

  ‘And the fact that your brother tried to drive away from us today.’

  Katarina’s mouth drops open, her eyebrows rise briefly, but just a few seconds later she’s collected herself again.

  ‘My brother did what?’

  Malin tells her about the car chase, how he tried to escape when they attempted to talk to him, and that he is now being questioned at the police station.