AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Sven pulls in his stomach and reminds her that they have a case meeting in five minutes.

  ‘We really need to start making some progress here, Malin. The vultures in reception are demanding quick results.’

  Tired detectives around a conference table.

  Words flying through the air, summaries, new ideas. A criminal investigation that’s treading water, where every conversation and exchange risks leading their work in an emotional direction rather than a logical one.

  The playground of the nursery empty.

  Sven Sjöman summarises the state of the investigation.

  ‘We’re still going through Petersson’s files. Nothing unusual so far, no other relatives or significant figures in his life. We still haven’t found the murder weapon, probably a stone, or the knife that was used to inflict the post-mortem wounds.

  ‘We need to keep digging into Petersson’s relationship with the Fågelsjö family, especially Fredrik and Katarina. We also need to find out more about his dealings with Jochen Goldman. And we’re still looking into the circumstances surrounding the car crash.’

  Then Sven falls silent.

  Looks at Lovisa Segerberg.

  ‘Anything new?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Nothing so far.’

  ‘There’s so much fucking paperwork,’ Waldemar Ekenberg snarls. ‘It doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere.’

  ‘If you feel stuck, dig even deeper,’ Karim Akbar says, and Malin thinks it sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself rather than his detectives.

  ‘We need to start making some progress here,’ Karim goes on. ‘We haven’t got anywhere yet.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ Malin says.

  ‘The media are going crazy. We’ve got a press conference in two hours.’

  ‘Those pictures you received, of your parents. We’re assuming that Goldman’s behind them,’ Sven says, and Malin tries not to listen as he goes on about the photographs.

  Then he runs through the state of the investigation into the murder of Fredrik Fågelsjö, about Axel and Katarina Fågelsjö’s questionable alibis, and the fact that Fredrik Fågelsjö’s parents-in-law have confirmed his wife’s alibi.

  ‘Most murders occur within families,’ Waldemar says. ‘And Axel and Katarina have plenty of reasons for wanting to get rid of that black sheep of theirs after he fucked up their finances. Maybe they were worried poor little Fredrik would crack and give them away?’

  ‘Do you really believe they did it?’ Malin asks. ‘Murdered their own son and brother? No matter what the reason?’

  ‘Even if Axel and Katarina didn’t do it themselves,’ Waldemar says, ‘they could have arranged for it to happen. That goes for both murders.’

  ‘But why such a grandiose gesture?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘To divert attention away from themselves,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘We just need to do more work here, into every aspect, this feels like our main line of inquiry right now,’ Sven says. ‘Try to work out what they’ve been up to recently, what calls they’ve made, to start with.’

  ‘Email?’ Johan Jakobsson says.

  ‘We’d need to seize their computers for that,’ Sven says. ‘We’ll start with their mobiles. We’ve got enough grounds for that now.’

  ‘It’s too early for computers,’ Karim adds. ‘After all, we’ve got nothing concrete on them at all.’

  ‘We spent today checking the neighbours closest to the castle again,’ Sven says, ‘and around Fredrik Fågelsjö’s house. Chances are he was there on the evening he was murdered. But no one saw anything. Linnea Sjöstedt didn’t bother with her shotgun this time round.’

  The detectives laugh.

  ‘And Karin’s report?’ Zeke goes on.

  Sven nods.

  ‘She was quick. It’s just arrived, even though she said it would be tomorrow at the earliest. Fredrik Fågelsjö died of a blow to the back of the head. A blunt instrument, a rock, something like that. A hard blow, but not hard enough to rule out the perpetrator being a woman. And, as she said at the crime scene, it’s impossible to tell if the perpetrator is right- or left-handed. Not much blood-loss, but the blow caused severe internal bleeding in the brain that will have made him lose consciousness immediately. Time of death sometime between ten o’clock on Thursday evening and two o’clock Friday morning, which basically gives Axel and Katarina Fågelsjö alibis, unless they’re involved in this together. Axel’s supposed to have left his daughter’s at two o’clock that night.’

  ‘Goldman,’ Zeke says. ‘He could have been there.’

  Sven pauses before going on: ‘Fredrik Fågelsjö was in all likelihood undressed in the chapel after his death. The body was free from soil and dirt, which suggests that he wasn’t undressed elsewhere. But we haven’t found any clothes. Karin found the same fibres on the body as on the floor of the chapel. These could have come from the perpetrator’s clothing, probably an ordinary pair of jeans.’

  ‘Can Karin say if he was killed there?’ Zeke says.

  ‘The blood found in the chapel is Fredrik Fågelsjö’s, but it’s impossible to tell if the blow was dealt there or somewhere else.’

  ‘So,’ Malin says, clearing her throat, ‘what you’re saying is that someone might have beaten Fredrik Fågelsjö to death at his home and driven the body to the chapel. Or that Fredrik Fågelsjö could have been murdered somewhere else and then taken to the chapel. Or that someone might have abducted him and taken him to the chapel, and killed him there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Unless he was in the chapel or out at the castle of his own free will,’ Malin says, ‘then got taken by surprise by someone there. Or he arranged to meet someone there. That gives us several thousand possible scenarios. I presume Forensics have checked the Villa Italia?’

  ‘Forensics found no evidence of violence either in the villa or in the surrounding area,’ Sven says. ‘But there are plenty of stones in the farmyard that could have been used to hit him over the head. Seeing as it’s been raining for ten hours solid, any traces of evidence have been washed away.’

  ‘What about at the castle, around the chapel?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘The door was unlocked,’ Malin says. ‘And the Fågelsjö family had access to the keys, of course. But the murderer could have used the victim’s keys, if he had them on him.’

  ‘We haven’t found any keys,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We’ll have to ask Christina Fågelsjö if she knows where her husband’s keys are.’

  ‘The crime scene may have been free of forensic evidence,’ Malin says, ‘but it’s still got a story to tell. He was laid on that vault like a sacrifice. A family sacrifice? Could it be some sort of ancient Nordic way of restoring family pride?’

  ‘Hence the focus on the surviving Fågelsjös,’ Karim says.

  ‘But what if someone’s trying to get us to concentrate on the Fågelsjö family?’ Malin says, to put into words the doubts she felt when at the crime scene.

  ‘You mean, to protect themselves?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘That’s stretching it,’ Waldemar says. ‘What if Fredrik Fågelsjö murdered Petersson, and someone wanted revenge for his murder? Who would have any interest in avenging Petersson’s death?’

  ‘His father,’ Johan says.

  ‘But he’s old and hardly capable of orchestrating something like that,’ Malin says.

  ‘So who actually liked Petersson?’ Sven says.

  ‘No one, as far as we can tell,’ Zeke says.

  ‘I think Katarina Fågelsjö liked him,’ Malin says.

  And the other detectives in the room fall silent, looking expectantly at Malin.

  She throws out her arms.

  ‘It’s just a hunch, OK? Let me think about it a bit more. I want to break out of the circles we seem to be stuck in.’

  ‘Try to uncover the facts, Malin,’ Karim says. ‘We haven’t got time for hunches.’

  Malin tries to focus on the whiteboard, on Sven’
s notes, make some sense of the words, pen-strokes, colours.

  But any sense of context eludes her, this entire investigation is like a palette full of mixed-up paint, a grey mess.

  ‘Neither of them seems to have been Mr Popular, exactly,’ Zeke says. ‘Fågelsjö was a failure. And if you ask some people, Petersson was a little piglet turned big swine.’

  There you sit in your depressing room, trying to uncover the truth.

  Me, a big swine?

  I might have been a big swine once upon a time, if you mean that I was ruthless in business.

  But where do you think my ruthlessness came from?

  Why did I scare the other partners of that smart law firm to the point where they kicked me out, even though I brought in more money than anyone else?

  Why did I lose the popularity contest?

  The man standing alone in an office on Kungsgatan, close to the smart social hub of Stureplan, feeling the breeze from the newly installed air conditioning against his face, doesn’t care about that. In all respects except one, he’s looking to the future.

  53

  Stockholm, 1997 and onwards

  Jerry feels the cool air stroke his cheeks. Below him, on the other side of the polished office windows, Kungsgatan snakes down towards Stureplan in the late-summer sun. In Humlegården, red lawnmowers are moving over tired grass, their blades in his dreams like bearers of all he thinks he has left behind. The blades force him onward, give him no time to rest, but he knows that at some point he will have to stand up to them.

  He is standing here for the sake of money, at least that’s what he thinks, unless it’s because having an office here makes a good impression when he’s standing at the upstairs bar of the Sturehof. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.

  The boxes from the move haven’t been unpacked yet, and he has just had a call from his first client at Petersson Legal Services Ltd. Jochen Goldman wanted help setting up an endowment insurance in Liechtenstein.

  This room. Its fine lines, free from dirt, the opportunity it gives him to create his reality himself. The sofa in the corner upholstered in shiny white fabric.

  Clients come and go through the room. People and buses and cars hurry past in all seasons along Kungsgatan, a young man, little more than twenty years old, sits before him and explains an idea, an opportunity, an advanced piece of technology that might come in useful in the new economy.

  Jerry is amused by the young man and gives him and his idea two million kronor, and three years later, a year after foreign minister Anna Lindh was murdered, the company is sold, and the man in the room on Kungsgatan is several hundred million kronor richer.

  A bigger flat at the top of a turn-of-the-century building at Tegnérlunden, where the art comes into its own, is all he treats himself to. He could have bought it long before, but never actually got around to it until now.

  A balcony railing to balance on in his memory, the park like a mirage of the life that was once his, swallows that fly close yet so far from their shadows.

  Sometimes he thinks he sees her in other people. Her hair, way of moving, a smell in the NK department store one Saturday. He keeps himself up to date about her life, there are ways, but he never approaches her. He thinks that what he feels will disappear as the years pass, but it doesn’t. It gets deeper and deeper.

  Instead he gets to know all of them.

  The superannuated gold-diggers of the Sturehof, their tragic, slack genitals, the Russian whores out in Bandhagen, the casual fucks that seem to pop up all over the place, body to body, hard and quick, arms tied to a bedstead, maybe. Sometimes he pretends that they are her, gives them her face, but he no longer knows what she looks like, she’s become a hazy memory.

  Then an acquaintance phones, the estate agent who helped him with the flat in Tegnérlunden, to tell him that a castle south-west of Linköping is for sale – wasn’t that where you’re from? – thought he might be interested.

  The memory becomes clear again.

  Sweeps through his body.

  He stands in all the rooms that have been his and feels all the cold hands that have ever caressed his cheeks or chest. He feels that he has always been on his way there: that is where I shall go, maybe one black autumn night full of fluid darkness. But I shall get there.

  54

  Axel Fågelsjö has dug out a photograph album from the old oak cupboard in the dining room and now he is sitting in his leather armchair going through the plastic sleeves with their black-and-white pictures.

  Bettina with the children in her arms in front of the chapel, before they went to school.

  Katarina with a beach ball down by the lake.

  Fredrik looking anxious beside one of the strawberry fields.

  A staff photograph. Men and women who worked for me. And that great oaf of a man, the one who drove the tractor into the chapel door, and we had to have a new one put in.

  Fredrik and Katarina running over a meadow towards the forest in one picture. You took that picture, didn’t you, Bettina?

  Is he with you now, Bettina? Is Fredrik with you?

  He shuts his eyes. Feels more tired than he has ever done before. Wishes Fredrik were here with him. Talk to him. Say something nice.

  Then his head empties, all his thoughts stop, and for a moment Axel Fågelsjö believes he’s about to die, that his heart or some blood vessel in his brain has given up, but he can feel himself breathing. He wants to open his eyes, but they stay shut.

  He seems to hear Fredrik’s voice: ‘I can see you in the armchair in the sitting room, Father.

  ‘See myself in the pictures in the album. And I can say that I miss those days, when I was little and didn’t yet know what burden history lays upon people like me.

  ‘I was little then, but I remember the staff in the photograph.

  ‘That you called them – farmhands and maids.

  ‘And how violent you could be towards them.

  ‘You’re alone now, Dad, but you don’t realise it.

  ‘Buy back Skogså. Install yourself there once again.

  ‘Sit here in your apartment for now and look around, look at Mum and me and Katarina in the photographs.

  ‘You’ll never understand that the only three things that matter are birth and love, Dad.

  ‘The third?

  ‘Death, Dad. Death.

  ‘That’s where I am now. Do you want to come with me?’

  And with that the voice is gone, and Axel Fågelsjö’s thoughts fill his mind once more, and he wants to call the voice back, but knows it’s gone, never to return. What remains are the pictures. Like a broken film, they stretch out through the album.

  You can’t hear me, can you, Father? You can’t see me, Fredrik, you can only see me as a photograph. Are you even sad? Or are you just mourning your own inadequacies, your inability to understand yourself?

  It’s not too late yet, Father. You’ve got Katarina. You’ve got the grandchildren, and Christina would be happy to let you into her and their lives, if only you take the first step and let her know that she really is good enough.

  You won’t get any invitations with your elbows.

  You have to be bigger than your own instincts. You have to be adult about it, otherwise you’re on your own. You have to realise that we, your creations, are the people we are, and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

  And Father.

  There’s one thing you should know: I always tried to do my best.

  I’m drifting behind you, Fredrik, you’re just as confused and basically alone in death as in life.

  The mist is closing in around the forests, the city and the castle.

  What is it that’s happening in that obscurity? In the gaps between what we see and hear?

  In the police station, Lovisa Segerberg and Waldemar Ekenberg are threshing on through the files and digital documents, trying to find out who we were, what might be hiding in the remnants of our lives.

  Zeke Martinsson is talking to his
son Martin over the phone.

  They don’t have much to say to each other, but he asks about his grandchild.

  Johan Jakobsson has gone home to his children and his tired wife.

  Karim Akbar has just had an argument with his ex-wife on the phone.

  Sven Sjöman is eating the last of the year’s pickled gherkins from the garden, looking at the woman he has spent his life with and still loves.

  Börje Svärd is trying to pull a stick from Howie’s mouth out in his garden, while in the large bedroom inside the house his wife Anna clings to life as hard as she can, the tubes of oxygen hissing beside her bed.

  I am so close to you now, Fredrik, drifting. Has it ever occurred to you that you could have taken my side that afternoon, that evening, that night?

  You can see Malin Fors down there.

  She’s happy.

  Tove is with her in the flat. She’s finally made it, at last. They’re about to eat dinner, pizza. She’s staying over.

  Mother and daughter. Together. The way it should be.

  55

  Tove came in the end.

  She’s sitting opposite Malin at the kitchen table. Malin’s tired from work, from thinking, from drinking and not drinking, tired of all this damn rain. Can you make me feel a bit brighter again, Tove?

  You’re more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you before. You are the only thing in my life that’s pure, clear, unsullied. When you called to say you could come for dinner I yelped with joy down the phone and you shut me up, seemed to think I was embarrassing.

  Tick tock.

  The Ikea clock still marks the seconds with a sound, even though the second hand has fallen off, and the faulty lamp above the worktop flickers every twenty seconds.

  How can Tove look older, more grown-up, in just a week?

  The skin stretched over her cheekbones, her features sharper, but her eyes are the same, yet somehow unfamiliar. Age, her relative age, suits her.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Malin says, and Tove looks down at her pizza, takes a sip from her glass of water.

  Takeaway pizza.

  Didn’t have the energy to go shopping, had nothing in the flat, and Tove likes pizza, she really does.