‘What should I say, then?’ Hilda Jansson wonders. ‘What am I allowed to say?’
‘Tell them the truth,’ Malin says. ‘Say it looks like he committed suicide, but that the police are investigating for the sake of formality.’
Then she looks at Zeke. Knows he’s waiting for Karin to arrive. He’s bound to feel like hugging her, kissing her when she arrives, but they’re managing their relationship well. Almost exaggeratedly professional, and Malin can’t help feeling relieved. A police station, still less a crime scene, isn’t the right place for whispering sweet nothings of any description.
But what did I just do with Tove?
On duty.
She needed someone, I needed someone.
‘I’ll go and do that then,’ Hilda Jansson says. ‘And I’ll keep an eye on your daughter.’
‘Thanks,’ Malin says, and then she and Zeke are alone in the room.
‘Karin ought to be here soon,’ Zeke says, and his voice is hoarse and neutral. ‘We should probably wait until then before we do anything. In here or outside?’
‘We’ll wait in here,’ Malin says, and looks at Konrad Karlsson again. He looks both at peace and tormented, as if he has got what he wanted, but in the wrong way.
12
The gun is clean now.
I’ve thrown the newspaper and kitchen roll I used in the bin, don’t want it hanging about indoors.
I’ve cleaned the tube brush as well. Greased the pistol, then put both it and the ammunition in the little hiding place under the sink.
I’ve scrubbed and filed the powder stains from my nails.
Looking out of the window at the clear sky, I did wonder if I should go for a swim down at the Tinnerbäck pool today. But I’m going to stay at home, and now the water of the shower is coursing over me.
The tepid drops hit my head, shoulders, and chest, and run down over my body. I can stand here like this for ages. Often for an hour or so. Enclosed by water and the mouldy shower curtain.
There’s nothing better than loneliness for someone wanting to justify hatred.
Hang on, though.
Did I really just think that?
The water is tepid.
I can take from him, the man who’s stolen from all of us.
I can steal his soul.
13
Hans Morelia parks in front of the Cherub. The nurse, the one who runs the place, Hilda something, called him.
‘I thought you’d want to know,’ she said over the phone.
This couldn’t have happened at a worse time, Hans Morelia thinks as he gets out of his black BMW 760. We don’t want more scandals, articles, and letters about the poor conditions in any of our establishments. We need peace and quiet now, on all fronts, nothing that could unnerve the Americans’ willingness to cough up the money.
He hesitated at first and wondered about sending his PR manager, Rebecka Koss, but decided to come himself. In reception he walks towards the lifts: now where’s the nurses’ office again?
First floor.
The short, dumpy receptionist says without his having to ask: ‘You’ll find Hilda on the first floor.’
Soon he’s standing in a cramped, windowless office, being told what’s happened. Hilda Jansson tells him that the police are in the room now, they’re waiting for the medical officer, who needs to confirm formally that they’re dealing with a suicide.
‘Good, good.’
‘I thought you should probably know first. We don’t want any more articles. That sort of thing makes some of the old folk anxious.’
‘The Swedish press don’t often bother to write about suicides.’
Hilda Jansson looks up at him.
‘He was a tough old boy,’ she says. ‘Intelligent and articulate, and what he wrote needed to be said, even if it was challenging.’
Hans Morelia can remember some of the letters word for word. What they all had in common was that they attacked him personally, accusing the company of causing suffering with its desperation to cut costs, and its ‘crazy, unethical and utterly mercenary ambitions to increase the profits of the company in advance of an eventual sell off.’
Did the old man know he was playing with fire?
And this Hilda Jansson, an employee of Merapi, has the stomach to call the old man’s scribbles necessary?
Hans Morelia says: ‘Strange that someone who’s receiving such good care as you provide here at the Cherub should want to commit suicide.’
Hilda Jansson snorts. Gives him a dark look.
‘You won’t get anywhere flattering me like that. I’m sure you understand that I only called you for the good of the residents.’
Shortly after that Hans Morelia walks into room seven without knocking on the door first. Inside two police officers are standing with their backs to the window, quietly, as if they are waiting for someone.
No cordon.
Good.
The police officers turn towards him.
Stare at him.
‘And who might you be?’ the female officer says in a cold voice, and he explains who he is and why he’s there.
‘You’re in charge of the whole thing, then,’ the male officer says. There’s a coolness in his voice as well, and Hans Morelia realises that they know who he is, they’ve read about his business dealings in the papers, and they despise him.
He looks at the body on the bed. Pulls a grimace, then wonders if it looked genuine.
A grimace in the face of death.
Silence.
No more letters, no more fuss.
And the female police officer says: ‘We’ll have to ask you to wait outside, our forensics expert will be here shortly, and we need the room to remain as untouched as possible.’
‘Will you want to talk to me?’
‘Have you got anything you want to tell us?’
‘I’m here more often than you might think. I take a degree of pride in visiting the factory floor. Our care facilities.’
And now she gives him a mocking smile.
‘Well, you can toddle off away from this particular floor. I’m sure we’ll be able to find you if we need to.’
The healthcare magnate has left the room and Malin feels like giving him the finger behind his back. A childish gesture, she knows that, but it can’t be helped: people who are parasites on other people, particularly those who are ill, rouse her anger, almost her hatred.
Blue or red. You can’t trust any of them. The whole fucking lot of them seem to think it’s OK to make a profit from welfare.
And the weakest end up paying the price.
Just look at Stefan. He never gets to go out any more, and they’ve stopped putting butter on his rusks, so now he’s stopped eating them. Do the residents here get butter on their rusks?
She saw some of the employees just now. Rushing from room to room. They seem to care about the old people, they work hard in spite of the scant resources and everything that has been written about the Cherub.
If Stefan lived here, at least she would have confidence in the staff.
A man like Morelia has no compassion.
I really am properly angry with him.
Because he’s pissing on those of us who pay tax.
Greedily hollowing out the morality of the tax system.
Even worse, hollowing out so much more than that.
He’s unbalancing society.
If he earns so much from being inconsiderate, why should I be considerate? In a world without morals, there’s no need for empathy.
Men like Hans Morelia reduce every interaction between people to business opportunities.
And in the long run he’s ruining things for our children, for Tove, but even more for her children.
If she has any.
My grandchildren.
Who the hell would want to live in Hans Morelia’s world? You’d need to be as rich as him just so you could afford to buy whatever healthcare you need.
I’m being naïve, she thinks.
Stupid. Anachronistic. Old-fashioned.
But fuck him, and fuck the world he’s creating for himself. For us.
Malin sticks her middle finger out to tell him to fuck off, but she doesn’t raise her hand.
14
Hilda Jansson is sitting in the nurses’ office with the phone in her hand. She looks at the clutter around her, wonders when she’s ever going to have time to tidy it up. It’s actually hard to reach the medicine cabinet because of all the paperwork.
She’s tried to get hold of both of Konrad Karlsson’s children, but hasn’t managed to reach either of them.
She’s only seen them a few times over the years, and has worked out that there were clearly issues of some sort, but never wanted to stick her nose in by asking.
You simply didn’t ask Konrad Karlsson about things like that.
Gabriella, his granddaughter. Kind, and shy.
Green eyes.
Sad, lonely eyes. And Hilda feels no inclination to make that call, even though she knows she must.
It was a mistake to ask Hans Morelia to come. What good could he do? She misjudged him last time he was here, thought he genuinely cared about conditions for the residents. But when he burst in a short while ago in his fancy suit, she realised that had been nothing but a sham, that he really didn’t care at all.
She wonders if she might be being a little too hard on him. Surely you couldn’t be successful in the healthcare industry without having a degree of compassion?
What strange paths compassion takes, she thinks.
The phone feels horribly heavy in her hand. Her fingers don’t want to dial Gabriella Karlsson’s number. She doesn’t know how she’s going to ask her to come to the home, doesn’t know how to tell her how her beloved grandfather died.
That it should have to end like that …
Hilda holds the receiver to her ear. Dials the number. Slowly. One digit after the other.
Gabriella Karlsson is slumped on a chair in her flat on Vasagatan, close to the Abisko roundabout. She is staring straight ahead of her, at the colourful painting of Shiva she bought in India.
What am I going to do now?
She feels like crying, ought to feel some sort of grief, but there’s something unreal about the moment.
Grandfather. I only saw him yesterday evening, she thinks, and he was in a pretty good mood. He seemed pleased with the newspapers, the chocolate, and the scratch cards I took with me. Usually he just thanked me politely and then launched into a conversation about whatever book he happened to be reading.
She presses something new and alien and black down into her stomach, she can’t let it into her throat, because it might suffocate her. Her mobile slips out of her hand as all the strength seems to go out of her muscles, and she even finds herself having to concentrate just to keep breathing.
She looks at her fingers against the thin fabric of her blue dress.
Hilda wants me to go to the home. I was only there yesterday.
He’s gone.
The only member of my family that I had any contact with.
She has a photograph album in the bureau in the living room. Grandfather’s life in pictures, with Grandma, Mum, and then her, with Dad, in the little house in Jägarvallen.
No pictures of her uncle or aunt.
Granddad with a cable tied around his neck.
Get up.
Go to work.
Work, work, eat lunch, work, go home, same thing tomorrow.
He had an electrician’s worn-out shoulders, from working with his hands high above his head.
Bang.
Then a blood vessel bursts in your brain just a few years into retirement.
I was twenty years old at the time, about to go to Lund to study, but I stayed here for your sake. Because I’d promised Mum I would, I said I’d look after you, that was the last promise I made to her before she lost consciousness, before the bacteria finally consumed her lungs.
You looked after me then.
And I was happy to stay when you needed me.
Wanted to do it.
Granddad, you always said: ‘If we don’t take care of each other, who else is going to?’
Karin Johannison has arrived at room number seven inside the Cherub old people’s home.
She can’t see anything odd, anything strange about the scene. She’s photographed the old man, taken fingerprints from all the strategic surfaces in the room, and now she walks up to him and brushes the cable around his neck, but it’s impossible to get anything from the narrow, shiny surface.
She’s thinking that this is one way for everything to end.
Every young person’s nightmare. But in a home.
Suicide.
No signs of a struggle. Of any resistance.
Carried out some time after midnight, probably between two and three, to judge by the extent of the rigor mortis.
Time to get him down. There’s a relative who wants to see him. On her way here soon.
Best to let the staff make him look a bit better.
They won’t be able to do anything about the blue colour of his face.
Karin picks up the remote control for the bed. If I’m going to do this on my own, I need to raise the bed, pull the noose over his head, then let the bed down again. She presses the button to raise the top end of the bed. Nothing happens. The bed’s motor merely stutters, and she gives up, looks at the old man, and thinks that he’s fairly thin, can’t weigh much. She takes hold of him around his back, and with her free hand tries to loosen the noose, but it turns out to be difficult, and she wonders: Could he really have tied the noose with his single working hand?
Was that really possible?
She lets go of him, and manages to untie the noose using the fingers of both hands. The knot comes undone before she has time to put her hand behind his back again, and Konrad Karlsson falls onto the bed with a thud. At that moment a grey sparrow settles on the windowsill, peers inquisitively into the room for a few seconds, then flies off.
Done here.
Once his relative has seen the body, it will be taken by ambulance to the pathology unit and I’ll do the post-mortem.
She studies the marks around his neck, thinking that they aren’t particularly deep.
Blue, yellow, and red.
They seem to have been made by the cord. But something else could have made them, a pair of hands, for instance. Impossible to say.
Air forced out.
A final breath.
She wishes she could go out into the corridor, to Zeke. And just hold him tight.
Malin hears what Karin says in the corridor. Feels the beads of sweat make her dress stick to her back.
She brushes her fringe aside. They’re almost done here, and she hasn’t seen Tove again. A psychologist is supposed to be on the way, someone for the staff to talk to.
It’s going to be the hottest day of the year so far. No doubt about that.
August fulfilling the promise of July.
Karin is standing next to Zeke, and they’re touching now, aren’t they, their hands brushing against each other?
Malin hears Karin say with almost complete certainty that they’re dealing with a suicide. She’s taken the body down, covered up the marks on his neck, and fixed his jaw, so the relatives can take their leave of him in peace.
‘I tried to raise the bed to get him down, but it seems to be broken.’
‘Really?’ Zeke says.
‘Could he have got himself up there?’ Malin walks over to them.
‘It’s not impossible,’ Karin replies. ‘Depends how strong his good side was. It can’t have been easy, but we shouldn’t underestimate human willpower.’
‘Time of death?’
Malin looks along the corridor, and sees Tove go into a room together with a male member of staff wearing a similar tunic, and Malin can see assurance in Tove’s movements, as though she knows exactly how to behave.
‘I’d guess somewhere between two and thre
e o’clock this morning.’
‘OK,’ Malin says, thinking how odd the business of the bed is, but perhaps it broke just as Karin was about to raise it. Neither Hilda Jansson nor Tove said anything about a broken bed.
Tove comes out of the room again.
Malin calls her over.
‘Was Konrad’s bed broken yesterday?’
‘No,’ Tove says, and hurries on.
The lift door opens in front of them, and out steps a beautiful copper-haired woman, around thirty years old. Her eyes are red from crying, and Malin realises who she is.
Malin stops her and asks: ‘Have you spoken to Hilda Jansson? She’s explained what’s happened?’
The woman looks into Malin’s eyes. Seems to understand instinctively who she is.
‘I know Granddad’s dead. I want to go in and see him. But she didn’t really tell me how he died. What are the police doing here?’
‘Let’s go and sit down over there,’ Malin says, gesturing towards a sofa over by the window.
Gabriella Karlsson looks like she’s about to protest, then goes with her.
‘That can’t be right,’ Gabriella Karlsson says, shrinking deeper into the sofa next to Malin. ‘He wasn’t remotely depressed. He loved life. It might be hard to believe, but he had a rich life. Richer than most of the drones out there in the city. I mean, Granddad appreciated all that life has to offer more than most people …’
Gabriella Karlsson leans slowly towards Malin.
The air goes out of her lungs, taking the end of her sentence with it.
‘Maybe he just put on a brave face to you?’ Malin says, aware of how wrong the words sound.
‘He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He was the most honest person you can imagine.’
Malin sits in silence, doesn’t want to say any more, and anyway, what could she say?
‘He wasn’t physically strong.’
Gabriella straightens up again, and Malin suddenly misses her weight, the proximity of another human being, regardless of the circumstances.
‘You were here yesterday?’ Malin asks.
‘Yes. I left at about eleven o’clock last night.’
‘And he was the same as usual?’
Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7) Page 5