AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

What were you doing there?

  Who could hurt anyone the way he or she or it hurt you, where does that malice come from? Where do the sharp, living branches that ate their way into your genitals come from? The electrically charged spiders? The cockroaches with sharpened jaws that ate their way up your legs?

  Evil is like a torrent, Malin thinks. Like tons of clay sliding down a hillside in a merciless autumn storm. A flood of death and violence wiping out every living thing in its path, leaving a desolate landscape behind it, ash lying in heaps on the ground, and we, the survivors, are forced to eat each other to survive.

  Wrath summoned back. Set free.

  Malin gets up, leaving the files and things in the hall. She goes into Tove’s room, sees the unmade bed, wishes Tove were lying there again, and she starts to cry when she realises that that bed, in many ways, is empty for good now, that she may never pick Tove up from the sofa in front of the television and carry her to bed, that the child Tove was has vanished, replaced by the young woman who measures everything around her, who evaluates and tries to stay as far as possible from any obvious pain. A person who doesn’t sleep a sleep of innocence.

  In Malin’s dream, damp and darkness and cold become one and the same. They merge into a black light, and in the centre of that light is a secret, or possibly several secrets.

  I loved, says a voice. Search in love. I hit, says the same voice. Search in the blows, another voice says in the dream. Young snakes, chopped to pieces by lawnmower blades move before her eyes, crawling out of the sewers in streets whose names she doesn’t know.

  Then the voices fall silent, the mutilated young snakes vanish.

  29

  Malin.

  This house is associated with you, Janne thinks as he stands in his kitchen sipping a glass of cold milk and eating slices of salami. Outside, the night is its own master, full of all the demons he has encountered in his life.

  Malin, Janne thinks. It’s lonely out here in the forest without you, but these old wooden walls can’t contain the pair of us. The bed with my mother’s crocheted bedspread isn’t wide enough.

  The house smells of damp and nascent mould, spores sent out in the night like silent malaria mosquitoes.

  Muteness.

  Like a soundless animal, that’s what it’s like, our love. That’s what you’re like, Malin, and I can’t handle it any more.

  You’ve always accused me of running, and I certainly have, I’ve taken refuge in the care of others, people who needed me in Rwanda and Bosnia, and most recently in the borderlands of Ethiopia and Sudan. I was there last winter.

  They called me again last week, the Rescue Services Agency, but I turned them down, I’ve done my bit, I’m going to stay and deal with my life, the way it looks right here, right now.

  You’re the one who can’t deal with it, Malin, and as long as you aren’t prepared to look inside yourself, I can’t help you. Tove can’t help you. No one can help you.

  But that’s over now, Malin. It doesn’t matter that you hit me. Nor that you did it in front of Tove. She’ll survive. She’s stronger than us. Smarter. That’s not what this is about.

  I’m here in my house, and you’re welcome to visit, but not to move back in. It’s time for us to cut the chains of this love, and the still, soft desire that we’ve been tumbling around in for so long.

  What is there beyond that love?

  I don’t know, Malin. And that fills me with comfort and fear.

  Tove.

  It got confusing for Tove in the end.

  You want me to call you, don’t you? If only to shout at you. It would never occur to you to call me. You’re too proud for that, though I don’t think you realise it. But we’re beyond phone calls now. I promise to watch over you as best I can, but now that you seem to have made up your mind to follow the path straight down into the darkness, there isn’t much I can do, is there?

  Your boss, Sven, he called me today. I told him we’ve split up again, said that I was worried about you, just like him, and he said he might not have realised just how much you’d been drinking earlier this year, that he’s thinking of sending you on a short trip so that you can clear your thoughts. That’s a good idea, I told him. Because I can’t reach you, I said. You just get angry if I try. And he understood, and I told him our relationship is over, that it was easier to be straight with him than with you, that I probably couldn’t say it like that to you, to your face. That I should probably keep my distance.

  And do you know what he said, Malin?

  He said: ‘I promise to keep an eye on her. Trust me,’ he said, and he’s the sort of man you’re happy to entrust with the things you care about most.

  I can live with the fact that you raised your hand against me. With the pain and sorrow of that. But not Tove’s look of confusion. She needs security now, Malin, confidence that this world is good, and means us human beings well, because even if she can look after herself it’s our duty to spare her from evil, to give her faith in goodness. That’s what this is about.

  And I can hear you snort.

  But that’s how it is. You don’t have to have any faith yourself, you just have to convey the idea of faith.

  I don’t know how many nights I’ve lain awake and sweating in a soaking wet bed after dreams about people’s cruelty to one another. I’ve had thousands of nights like that, Malin, but I still haven’t lost my faith.

  But I know when it’s time to move on.

  I know when the darkness of night threatens to become the only thing that exists.

  That’s why I came over with your things today, Malin. I knew you wouldn’t be at home. I carried the boxes upstairs on my own, I took my jacket off and laid it over your things so they wouldn’t get wet in the rain on the way from the car.

  So that you would understand what I could never say.

  Dad! Dad!

  Tove knows she’s screaming in the dream. This is the dream she most often has, and in the chat rooms the others have tried to persuade her not to be scared of the dream but to welcome it as a chance to learn to live with what happened last summer.

  The masked figure above her.

  She herself immobile.

  Dad’s and Mum’s voices close, yet still too far away, as the woman approached her with darkness and violence and a desire that everything should end so that everything could begin.

  Together with the others she had tried to understand the woman who wanted to kill her. Tried to understand where her anger and evil had come from, and when Tove felt she understood, the fear had vanished and she learned to accept the dream.

  Dad! Dad!

  And he comes, saves her from deep inside the darkness together with Mum. Light streams into the room, and if her screams were to reach her lips in this dream he would rush the ten metres from his bed to hers. He’d wake me up, save me from the fear.

  Mum.

  You’re in the dream too.

  You’re standing back.

  It looks like you’re in pain.

  How can I help you? I see your torment, maybe I even understand it. Is it because you think you’ve lost me? Is that why you’ve turned away?

  Because you have become your own pain.

  Your own fear.

  Karim Akbar has got out of bed, taking deep breaths in the empty, dark room, and all he can smell is himself. The house lacks other smells these days. It feels inadequate, with its sensible, early eighties architecture, like a wine that has matured poorly, and its bad sides have taken over. Edginess, rawness.

  He’s thought of selling the house. Getting a flat in the city, but he hasn’t been able to summon up the energy.

  His wife gone.

  His son gone.

  In Malmö. With her new man, the one she met on that council course for social workers in Växjö.

  Karim had thought he was about to kill her when she told him, but she was sensible, took him out for lunch, and even then, when she had asked him to have lunch with her, he had known what was co
ming.

  It was two years since his wife had met him, the pure-blood Swede, in the same line of work as her.

  Karim’s own career is in the balance.

  Today he had a call from a head-hunter in Gothenburg.

  A job at the Immigration Authority in Norrköping, just one down from the very top of the tree, but he’s not sure.

  Do I want to be responsible for sending people back to the hellholes of the world? They want me as a figurehead. An immigrant face to appear in the media. To unsettle them.

  But something new has to happen.

  The case they’re working on at the moment.

  Jerry Petersson. Fågelsjö. Goldman.

  All these privileged people who can’t get along, can’t live alongside each other with their tasteless wealth. But maybe, Karim thinks, the violence comes from somewhere else? The tenant farmers? Who knew what resentments they might harbour towards their landlord? Differences in wealth always lead to violence sooner or later. As history demonstrates.

  Someone mentioned in the will, if we ever find one? Anything is possible.

  Shame.

  Shame is always involved.

  According to a lot of people with his background, his wife had committed the ultimate sin and he should have had her killed.

  And that’s what his instinct told him.

  At first.

  He can admit that to himself. But is there anything more loathsome than that father and brother they picked up in that latest so-called honour killing, who killed their own daughter and sister?

  I’m not that primitive, Karim thinks.

  He took a step back, gave up there and then in the restaurant, let her go, taking the boy with her, never discussed any other possibility, and gave her what she wanted for her share of the house. He convinced himself that was what he wanted, to be broad-minded and magnanimous in the midst of betrayal.

  Karim goes over to the window and sees that the rain has stopped. But for how long?

  He shouts out in the house.

  His wife’s name. His son’s.

  His former wife’s name.

  Any love is better than loneliness, he thinks.

  Lovisa Segerberg is lying awake in her room at the Hotel du Nord. The walls are so thin that she can feel the damp and cold outside trying to find their way into the room, and she hears a goods train rumbling through the station just a couple of hundred metres away.

  Gloomy. But not dark enough to sleep.

  The linoleum floor, a thin mattress from Ikea, nothing but a shower in the shabby bathroom. But I don’t need anything else, Lovisa thinks. She spoke to Patrik at eleven o’clock. He was still awake, up working, and he asked about the case she was working on, but she couldn’t be bothered to explain, just told him she missed him, and that she didn’t know how long she’d be staying in Linköping.

  Kiss, kiss.

  Goodnight, darling, and she can feel him in the room in the same way that she felt him during their first night together. Warm and present and real. They’re getting married next summer. Will have a wonderful life together. Not mess it all up like all the other poor bastards seem to. Like Malin Fors seems to have done, according to the talk at the station. She stank of alcohol today, stale drink, but no one seemed to care, or at least no one said or did anything if they did. But what do I know about what goes on behind the scenes?

  What a gang, Lovisa thinks. Waldemar. The idiot. Sexist. But not really dangerous. And Sven Sjöman. The commanding officer every policeman dreams of having.

  She looks up at the ceiling. Thinks: Patrik, where’s your body now, where is whatever it is you are when we’re not together?

  Zeke has got up on his own.

  It’s still dark outside the windows of his detached house, and in the garden the trees and bushes resemble burned-out, prehistoric skeletons.

  He sips his coffee.

  Thinks about Malin.

  This past year has taken its toll on her.

  He thinks that he’s going to have to keep an eye on her, that he probably can’t do much more than that. Give her chewing-gum so the others don’t notice the smell. Stop her from driving. He can see her alone in her flat with a bottle of tequila.

  Maybe I ought to talk to Sven, Zeke thinks, he’s thought about doing that before, but Malin would regard any conversation like that as a serious betrayal. She’d think he had gone behind her back if she ever found out about it, and maybe the trust between them would be gone for good.

  But she’s drinking way too damn much.

  Her demons are snapping at her heels.

  Your heels are bleeding, Malin, Zeke thinks, noting that it’s started to rain again.

  It’s a long time since he gave up smoking. But this morning he really feels like having a cigarette.

  He closes his eyes, Karin Johannison’s body, her soft hard warm body is there. What the hell are we playing at really? And in the bedroom Gunilla lies sleeping. I love her, Zeke thinks. So much. Yet I’m still capable of lying to her face.

  I have to go to the toilet and throw up afterwards. But I can do it. And I do.

  Waldemar Ekenberg is standing on his terrace in the garden smoking.

  The rain is pattering on the corrugated plastic roof, and dawn is slowly breaking over Mjölby, and the sky looks almost the same colour as the bruise on his cheek.

  He told his wife what had happened. As usual when he talked about the rough side of the job she didn’t get worried, just said: ‘You never learn.’

  In his thoughts he curses all the paperwork. He’s still shocked at the amount of paper and documents one single person can produce in the course of a short lifetime. And he’s just as fed up with the amounts of money all that paper-shuffling can produce.

  Smoke thick in his lungs.

  Where’s the justice in a paper-shuffler like Petersson living in a castle, when ordinary, decent workers end up practically on the street when factories and workshops close down? Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in Swedish industry. What happens to the blues’ false promises of solidarity then?

  What’s going to happen to them, the workers?

  The less intelligent.

  He stubs his cigarette out in the coffee tin half-filled of sand.

  Thinks: What about me, what would I be doing if I wasn’t a cop? Maybe I’d be a security guard at some supermarket, accused of using excessive force on a difficult customer.

  ‘Walle! Walle!’

  His old woman shouting indoors. Best see what she wants. Without her, I’d be nothing but my own stupid self.

  Johan Jakobsson is lying stretched out in bed, his children on either side of him, having got home from their grandparents early yesterday evening.

  His wife asleep alongside.

  A blessed harvest, he thinks, listening to his wife’s breathing. That’s what his family is. He thinks of her, and the way they apologised to each other, the way they always do.

  They’re best friends, through thick and thin.

  What’s a good friend worth? he thinks.

  As much as a family? As much as a father?

  No. But almost.

  30

  Monday, 27 October

  Early morning.

  The world grey-blue like a newborn infant outside the windows of the open-plan office.

  Sven Sjöman looks out over the empty chairs and desks, breathes in the smell of paper and lingering sweat. The light from the fluorescent tubes overhead merges with the grey light from outside. Sven thinks about how many detectives he has seen come and go through the course of his career. Malin is one of the best, possibly the best of them all. She understands about listening to the silent voices of an investigation, weaving together the choir of hunches and words into a clear truth.

  But it’s taking its toll on her.

  The conversation with her husband, or ex-husband, yesterday. Janne. A decent fellow. He called again, worrying about her.

  I’m worried as well, Sven thinks. But now I’ve fin
ally had an idea about what I can do without her realising that I’m trying to help her. If she suspected, she’d be furious. Maybe refuse to go. But at least Janne thought it was an excellent idea.

  Everything seems to affect Malin badly right now. Everything’s on the surface, and gets scorched by the slightest touch.

  Johan, Zeke, Börje, Waldemar.

  Börje at home with his wife, the next attack of her MS will in all likelihood mean death.

  It’s taking its toll on Börje. But Börje doesn’t seem to be affected by everything the way that Malin is. He seems to have an ability to take pleasure in what he has with his wife, in what he has had.

  Waldemar. He’s going to go mad in that room full of paper. But I can probably use his questionable talents. I’m not in favour of the way he conducts police business, his brutality, but not so stupid that I can’t see the value of it at times. That’s why I didn’t veto his transfer from Mjölby. God knows where he got those latest bruises, but he doesn’t complain, and if you work the way that Waldemar does, you have to take the knocks.

  Petersson. Who knows what might be lurking under his unturned stones? Give people a whiff of money and they’re capable of almost anything.

  Sven pulls in his stomach, sighs, thinks about his brother, self-employed, when he was about to start another business, and how he guaranteed the loan himself and had to sell his house in Karlstad to repay the bank when the business went bankrupt.

  Several years later his brother got rich when he sold his next company. Sven asked for his money back, and they were standing on the terrace of his brother’s house, and his brother replied, with a blank look on his face: ‘That was business, Sven. You took a gamble and you lost. Let’s not get apples and pears mixed up now.’

  Sven stayed to dinner, that evening.

  But he hasn’t spoken to his brother since then.

  He opens the Correspondent on his desk. The speculation in the paper points in the same direction as their own. The Fågelsjös, Goldman. Business.

  Money, fraternity.

  Who could have got so angry, or upset, or disappointed with Jerry Petersson that he ended up in the castle moat, beaten to death and stabbed, among the walled-in prisoners-of-war?