‘And your father opened the door and I looked at him and he realised why I was there, and you came to the door, and he saw something in your eyes, and he shouted that there was no way in hell that someone like me was going to cross his threshold, then he raised his arm and knocked me to the ground with a single blow.
‘He chased me away, over the moat, brandishing an umbrella, and you were shouting that you loved me, I love him, Father, and I ran, I ran and I thought you were going to follow me, but when I turned around at the edge of the forest you were gone, the driveway was empty, the door wasn’t closed, but your mother, Bettina, was standing there, and I thought I could see her smiling.’
Images of herself turning away in the castle doorway. Running up the stairs. Lying on a bed. Standing close to her father. Adjusting her make-up in a mirror.
Shut up, she wants to shout at the voice, shut up, but it goes on: ‘I came to the party. You were there. Fredrik. He had drunk too much, was arrogant towards everyone and everything. It was as if I didn’t exist for you. You didn’t even look at me, and that made me mad. I drank, gulping it down, danced, fumbled with dozens of girls who all wanted me, I made myself unbeatable, I took Jasmin, who was in your class, just because it would upset you, I got behind the wheel of that car just to show the world who made the decisions, and that love really doesn’t matter. I was in charge, and not even love could take that power away.
‘And then, in the field, in the snow and the blood and the silence, I looked at Jonas Karlsson, begged him to say he was the one driving, promised him the world.
‘And do you know, he did what I said, I got him to do it, and I realised deep down at that moment that I could have almost anything I wanted in this world, as long as I was ruthless enough. That I could make the lawnmower blades shut up.
‘But not you, Katarina. I could never have you. Not the person you are.
‘So, sure, in a way I was both born and died on that New Year’s Eve.’
Images of a car wreck. Funerals, a wheelchair with a mute body, a man with his back to her in an office chair, a steady stream of images from a life she had never known.
‘And when I bought Skogså, I wanted to breathe life into what had died,’ the voice goes on.
‘That was the very worst vanity, worse than any alchemist’s.
‘Soon I was standing in the very same doorway that I had been refused entry to for all those years. I walked bare-chested through the rooms, feeling the cold, rough surface of the stone against my skin.’
The images are gone. All that is left is the mirror, her eyes, the tears she knows are there inside them somewhere.
59
Linköping, March and onwards
Jerry rubs against the walls of a room illuminated by the one hundred and three candles in the chandelier suspended five metres above his head. The stones are irregular and rough against his chest and back, like the surface of some as yet unexplored hostile planet.
The painting of the man and woman with the suncream is hanging in front of him.
The rooms of the castle. One after the other.
The telephones. She’s only a phone call away. He sits beneath his paintings and chants the number like a mantra.
It never occurs to him that she might be angry about what he has done, that she might think he has torn her family’s history from their hands.
But he never dials her number. Instead he throws himself into the practical business that comes with a property like this, sorting out the tenant farmers, and labourers of all different trades, visiting the whores he finds on the Internet, even in Linköping, often middle-aged women with an unnaturally high sex-drive who may as well make a bit of money from satisfying their lust. He considers calling the young solicitor he bedded when the contracts were signed, but thinks that things might get a bit too close to home if he did that.
Some evenings and mornings he heads out into the estate. Drives through the black landscape, past houses and trees and fields, the field that seems to encompass the three beings that he is: past, present, and whatever is to come tomorrow.
He imagines he can see green light streaming from the moat and has green lanterns installed along it, as a response to the optical phenomenon down in the water.
He stands on the other side of the door, resting inside himself, waiting for a call, for a car he wants to come and pull up in front of the castle, but which never arrives. He stands still, takes detours around the love he can never bring himself to open up to for a second time. That is the fear he can never conquer.
Instead he receives a letter through the post. Handwritten.
He reads the letter at the kitchen table, early one morning that autumn, when the skies have opened and seem to be raining corrosive acid onto the world of men.
He folds the letter, thinking that he needs to deal with this, cauterise it once and for all.
60
Saturday, 1, Sunday, 2 November
Push the bar up.
You’re alone in the gym, Malin, if you can’t manage it the bar will crush your throat and that’ll be an end to all your problems.
To all your breathing. To all love.
Seventy kilos on the bar, more than her own weight, and she pushes it up another ten times before letting it slip back into the supporting frame.
Janne. Now he’s telling me what I can and can’t do.
To hell with that.
But maybe he’s right.
Tove. I want to say I’m sorry. But you’re right to leave me alone for a while, aren’t you?
How could I?
Her body wet with sweat. As if she’s been running through the rain she can see through the little windows along the ceiling.
They’ve put up new wallpaper in the room. In place of the old vomit-green, there is now an even worse pink wallpaper with little purple flowers.
This is a gym, Malin thinks. Not a fucking girl’s bedroom.
She lies down on the bench again.
Ten more reps and she feels her muscles working, the effort suppressing every thought of drink. Rehab. Bollocks. I don’t need that.
Every time she lifts the bar towards the blinding-white ceiling, she tries to get closer to the core of the investigation.
Lactic acid is burning through her body and she gets up, boxing the air, shaking life into mute, oxygen-starved tissue, and says as she punches: ‘I. Am. Missing. Something. But. What?’
In the sauna, after first a long cold shower, then a hot one, she reads Daniel Högfeldt’s latest article about the murders, the pages of the Correspondent hot on her fingers.
He goes through the connections between the murders and says that sources within the police are convinced they are linked, but that they don’t know for sure yet.
In a separate article he gives a well-informed account of Fredrik Fågelsjö’s failed financial investments, and how the family came to lose Skogså. He concludes: ‘Suspicion may now be focused on the Fågelsjö family, who some people claim would do anything to get the estate back.’
He doesn’t mention the family’s new money, the inheritance they’ve received. But there are pictures of the houses they currently live in. Probably new photographs. The vultures never leave the bereaved in peace.
Then a picture of Linnea Sjöstedt by her cottage tucked away near Skogså. Daniel reports her as saying: ‘Of course they might have wanted revenge on Fredrik for losing the estate. It means everything to them.’
Ninety degrees in here.
Ten minutes and her body is shrieking, the sweat streaming from every pore, but Malin is enjoying the pain.
Nor has Daniel found out about Axel Fågelsjö’s old conviction for actual bodily harm. Nor that Jerry Petersson was driving the car on that fateful New Year’s Eve. That’s good, maybe there are fewer leaks in the police station now. And Daniel is a decent person, really. He’s never pressed her for information when she’s been drunk, never tried to turn her into one of the leaks.
Malin stands nak
ed in the changing room.
One message on her phone.
Daniel Högfeldt’s number, by coincidence, and she assumes that he must want a session that evening. She calls the messaging service to hear what he had to say.
‘Daniel here. I was just going to say that I’ve had an anonymous tip-off about your investigation. Call me?’
Daniel.
He doesn’t usually give us anything. Keeps any tips he receives for himself. And these days people keen for money and media attention often call the papers with tip-offs and leads instead of calling us.
How did that happen?
‘Daniel.’
‘It’s me. I got your message.’
‘Yes, I just wanted to say that I got a tip-off about Fågelsjö over the phone. That it had to be the father and daughter who killed Fredrik. As revenge. That they’re responsible.’
‘I can’t deny that we’ve considered that.’
‘Of course, Malin. But this informant was particularly insistent. He sounded relieved when I said I was already thinking of writing about the connection.’
‘A nutter?’
‘No, but there was something about him. Something that didn’t fit.’
‘What was his name? Did you get his number?’
‘No, no number came up. No name. And that’s pretty unusual as well.’
He’s using this as an excuse to call me, Malin thinks.
He’s got nothing. They get loads of tip-offs.
Anonymous.
About all sorts of things.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Malin. But this one was different. The fact that he was so insistent scared me.’
‘Did he have anything new to say?’
‘No.’
‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘You can come around to mine at nine o’clock tonight, then you can have what you want.’
Daniel is silent.
Malin sees herself in the changing-room mirror, careful not to look at her tired face, looks instead at her toned body.
‘You really are something, Fors, aren’t you? I was thinking I could actually help you with your work for once.’
‘What, with that?’
‘With the fact that it was a man and not a woman who called, for instance.’
‘Are you coming?’
The line breaks and goes silent.
He’s coming.
Tell me you’re coming. Then everything will be all right, if only for half an hour or so. That’s enough.
Malin is lying on her bed in her dressing gown, waiting for Daniel to come, feeling the urge to have him inside her.
Nine o’clock comes.
Half past.
Ten o’clock. And she feels like calling him, but knows that such humiliation would be pointless, that he actually didn’t want her and really was only trying to help.
In his own awkward way, with a meaningless tip-off.
Someone who wants things to be a particular way. Who wants to direct them to look in one direction when they ought to be looking elsewhere. The thought pops up again.
On the way home from the gym she called her dad.
He evidently hadn’t noticed any Spanish police watching over him and Mum, but on the other hand he hadn’t noticed his picture being taken either.
He told her that he and her mother were thinking of coming home for Christmas. Malin replied that Tove would be happy, but that they should expect fairly strained family relationships.
‘Are you having a tough time?’ Dad asked.
‘No, there’s just an awful lot of autumn at the moment,’ she said, thinking: Dad, we’re fighting for our lives on my planet.
Are you Malin? Fighting for your life?
I think my father’s doing the same on his planet.
Axel Fågelsjö.
Father.
I can see both you and him clearly, you’re lying in your bed, and you’ve fallen asleep and are sleeping a dreamless sleep, a well-deserved rest after all that work trying to keep your impulses under control.
Axel is sitting at his kitchen table on Drottninggatan. He’s taken his beloved shotgun out of the gun cabinet in the bedroom.
He smells the gun, I’ve seen him do that before, and I don’t know why he does it. Now he’s locking the gun away in the cabinet again.
I don’t actually know what happened to me, Malin. I don’t remember anything. That seems to be unusual, from what I’ve been able to gather from talking to other people up here where I am.
But that doesn’t matter.
Because I’ve got you.
You’ll be able to tell me what my fate was.
You talk of your fate, Fredrik, but what do you know, my silver-spoon boy, about fate?
There’s no such thing as fate, just events that are the result of conscious actions.
When I ended up in the moat it was my own fault, no one else’s.
In the most fundamental sense, I caused that event myself.
You imagine, Malin, that you’re going to give me some sort of justice, reparation after death. As if I could have any use for that?
I don’t need anything from any of you.
I am already everything.
On Sunday a hard rain is lashing the ground, the people.
Malin stands in the window of her flat looking at the church tower, the way even the crows seem to be suffering in this wind.
She wants to hear Tove’s voice, meet her, they could have spent the whole day together now that Sven has forced her to take the day off.
But she doesn’t call her daughter, she does what Janne said, or at least what she thought he meant. She keeps her distance. Avoids her own reflection. If she were fourteen years old, she’d be slashing her wrists.
Instead she puts on her jogging clothes and runs twenty kilometres on various routes through Linköping. She sweats under the tight fabric, the city disappears before her eyes and she feels her heart, feels that she can still trust its power.
Back home again, she calls the station. Waldemar Ekenberg tells her that nothing new has happened in the case.
She leafs through her papers about Maria Murvall. She prepares her talk at the kitchen table. The evening darkness settles outside the window.
Malin looks around the kitchen, thinking: I have nothing, I can’t even handle Tove. And will I ever get the chance again?
61
Monday, 3 November
There must be four hundred eyes, Malin thinks. And they’re all staring at me. I hope the collar of my beige blouse is sitting as it should under this pale blue lambswool sweater, and why the hell am I bothered what this lot think of the way I look?
The hall of Sturefors School is full, pupils tapping at their mobile phones. Malin is standing behind a lectern looking out over them, out at the hall she once sat in.
The headteacher, Birgitta Svensson, a woman in her fifties, wrinkled by smoking, and dressed in grey, is standing beside Malin, takes a deep breath and taps gently on a little black microphone with the fingers of one hand.
‘OK, let’s turn off our mobiles now.’
And to Malin’s surprise they listen to her.
With a chorus of bleeps the phones are switched off, and the voices fall to a murmur until there is silence in the hall.
The smell of damp cloth. Of teenagers’ sweet breath, of flaking plaster.
‘Standing beside me up here is Malin Fors, a detective inspector with the police. She’s going to talk to us about what the police do. Let’s make her very welcome.’
Wolf whistles. They all applaud and when silence settles once more Malin loses her train of thought and isn’t sure where to start, feeling a wave of withdrawal sickness course through her body, and she tries to focus on the clock on the wall.
09.09.
She’s supposed to talk for an hour, but about what?
The adolescents in front of her seem to know everything about the world, yet nothing at the same time. Calling them innocent would be a serious exaggeration, y
et what do they know of violence? About human excess? Though a fair number must have seen more adult frustrations than they should have in their own homes.
Like Tove. My hand hitting Janne’s mouth. How could I?
Silence.
No words seem willing to cross Malin’s lips. A minute passes, then two.
The students are starting to squirm on their chairs.
‘Violence,’ Malin says. ‘I work with what we usually call violent crimes. Rapes, and abuse.’
She pauses again.
Sits it out.
‘And murder. And as I’m sure you’re aware, things like that do still happen in a peaceful city like Linköping.’
Then the words flow by themselves, and she explains how a typical abuse case might be dealt with, about a few real cases, but none of the worst ones.
‘We do our best,’ Malin says. ‘Let’s just hope it’s enough.’
Her nausea remains subdued while she is talking, the adrenalin and concentration making her feel OK, but once the students start asking about the murders they are currently investigating, all the air goes out of her.
‘Well, I think that’s enough from me. Thank you,’ she says, stepping down from the stage before anyone has a chance to ask another question.
The whistling and applause start up again.
There’s something ritualistic about the whole situation.
They would have applauded and whistled even if I’d been talking about the Holocaust, Malin thinks.
Outside the hall the headteacher comes up to Malin.
‘That went well,’ she says. ‘You even got a few questions. That never usually happens. But I suppose they’re excited about what’s going on at the moment.’
‘It felt like they were listening,’ Malin says. ‘But as to whether they learned anything, what do I know?’
The headteacher takes Malin’s arm.
‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.’
Malin wants to pull away, but the look in the woman’s eyes is strangely intense as she looks into Malin’s eyes and says: ‘I’m sure they learned a good deal, and we’re very grateful to you. Would you like a cup of coffee in the staffroom?’
AUTUMN KILLING Page 35
