Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7)

by Mons Kallentoft

Johan can feel his lunch churning in his stomach. He belches. Turns the music up.

  Rust never sleeps.

  Konrad Karlsson. Sleeping now. The big sleep, as Raymond Carver put it.

  Let’s see what Konrad Karlsson had to say for himself.

  The hard-disk of his computer is laid open in front of Johan. He’s already looked through a number of folders. Downloaded articles, ebooks, novels, and non-fiction covering a number of subjects.

  One folder named ‘The ward’.

  Johan opens it.

  One solitary document of the same name.

  He starts reading.

  What is her face telling me? Malin wonders.

  Margaretha Karlsson is sitting on a bulging red sofa in front of a window that looks out onto a garden full of apple trees. Through the open terrace door comes the irregular tinkle of wind chimes.

  Malin and Zeke are sitting on armchairs opposite Margaretha.

  She was in her dressing gown when she opened the door, her face puffy and swollen, and Malin recognised herself in those ravaged features, and knows how profound that tiredness can be.

  Now Margaretha Karlsson is dressed. Jeans and a pink tennis shirt. Sitting there, she looks like an over-aged boarding-school pupil whose dreams have come to nothing. Only in a house that’s far too large, right on the river. A house full of Josef Frank and Bruno Mathsson.

  Straight to the point, Malin thinks.

  Pile on the pressure.

  Lure her into a trap.

  ‘Your business is on the brink of bankruptcy. Your father was rich. His death has come at a convenient time, wouldn’t you say?’

  Margaretha Karlsson’s expression doesn’t change.

  ‘I’ve been going through a bad patch, that’s all. You can see that if you look at the accounts. People postpone serious dental work when times are tough.’

  Malin nods.

  ‘But as I understand it, you spoke to your brother on one occasion about how much you’d like to get your hands on your father’s money.’

  Margaretha Karlsson leans forward. ‘According to whom? Gabriella? That kid really does think she’s something special.’

  ‘Had you ever thought that?’ Zeke asks, rubbing a hand over his shaved head. ‘That you’d like to get hold of his money?’

  ‘No. That’s a ridiculous idea.’

  ‘Did your father ever say that you’d inherit his fortune?’

  Margaretha Karlsson purses her lips, gets up and goes over to a sideboard to pour herself a whisky from a carafe, unless it’s tequila. Malin can smell the alcohol, and almost loses consciousness from desire and longing.

  Dear God.

  It never ends.

  Never.

  ‘Do you think I’m stupid or something? I can see that you’ve spoken to that pissed-up solicitor about my father’s plans to give his money to charity. And that he was about to sign the papers.’

  Shit, Malin thinks. She’s underestimated the woman.

  ‘Sure, our finances are a bit rocky. My husband lost his job and is only working part-time, we can’t afford the repayments on our loans, and we might have to sell this house, the car and our country cottage. But do you really think I’m stupid enough to kill my own father just as he’s about to give his money away? I’d be picked up at once.’

  Margaretha Karlsson downs the whisky in one gulp and pours herself another.

  Malin catches Zeke’s eye and knows he’s thinking the same as her: Margaretha Karlsson has contemplated killing her father, has toyed with the idea, but did she actually go through with it? Would she be talking openly with them if she had? Or is she trying to divert their suspicions away from her?

  He was your father, Malin thinks.

  I don’t know how badly he treated you, but he was your father, and I think he did his best. But that isn’t always enough. Far from it.

  And she sees her own father with a cocktail in his hand. Old and tired, but still radiating some sort of calm. A seriously fucking unfair calmness. And with money.

  Is that how you saw your father, Margaretha? As a potential source of money?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about the donation before?’ Malin asks.

  Margaretha Karlsson sighs.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘We’ve been trying to get hold of your brother,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Margaretha Karlsson is angry now. Drinks, then stares at them, seems on the brink of screaming, then she says: ‘And what sort of person do you think I am? The sort who’d kill her own father. Who on earth would do a thing like that?’

  I’m just as messed up as Margaretha and Yngve Karlsson, Malin thinks. I don’t feel capable of taking any emotional responsibility for my father either. Just as little as I do for Stefan, really.

  It’s tough, so who am I to blame the Karlsson siblings for anything?

  Assuming they had nothing to do with the murder.

  She and Zeke are sitting in the Conya Pizzeria. The forest-green woven wallpaper is adorned with new pictures, prints of paintings by the city’s great fin de siècle artist, Johan Krouthén.

  Cows in a field.

  A red barn bathed in summer light.

  Out in the street the cars go to and fro, and the sun seems to burn the pedestrians on to the pavement: no one has the energy to rush about in this heat.

  ‘I wish they’d hurry up,’ Malin says, and a moment later their pizzas arrive, and they eat, in silence at first, until Zeke says: ‘They wear me out. People like Margaretha Karlsson.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘What sort of father do you think Konrad was?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘The drink has taken its toll on her,’ Zeke says. ‘And the desire for more money. She’s grown hard.’

  He looks at Malin.

  The way you did, he seems to be thinking.

  She takes a bite of pizza. Chews, tastes the ham and prawns, feels the melted cheese run down her throat.

  ‘But things can’t have been easy for Konrad Karlsson,’ she says. ‘A single father with three kids. And in those days men didn’t really take that much responsibility for their children. You can imagine what people would have said.’

  ‘He was very demanding.’

  ‘Maybe too demanding.’

  Malin can see Zeke’s shifting emotions reflected in his face.

  ‘I try to be sensible,’ he says. ‘I take more of an interest in Tess than I ever did with Martin. The only problem is that I’m losing touch with Martin’s kids. It’s as if he and his wife don’t want me to see them. Gunilla’s taken over more or less completely. But I get to help raise Tess. There’s a huge difference.’

  ‘And what do you want?’

  ‘I want to concentrate on Tess. But that’s no good, obviously.’

  ‘You don’t really feel you want to see Martin’s children?

  ‘Am I allowed to feel that?’

  Malin raises her eyebrows in response.

  ‘It would be nice to be able to start over again, don’t you think?’

  She finds herself thinking of Daniel as she says this. She doesn’t know why, but his face comes into her mind, and she feels like calling him. And knows that she won’t.

  Not now.

  He can call me.

  Zeke looks away.

  ‘Sometimes. But only sometimes.’

  They sit in silence for a while.

  ‘But Margaretha Karlsson seems so cold. It doesn’t have to be like that, does it?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘People struggle. Try to get things, stuff they think they need. Then they fail and end up bitter, not caring about anyone but themselves.’

  ‘But still …’

  ‘Don’t think about it, Zeke. There’s no point.’

  In the car on the way back to the station Malin leans her head against the window.

  I know what I’ve got to do, she thinks. I need to listen to the voices o
f this investigation.

  All those thoughts and ideas that are circulating around me.

  Then, once I’ve caught the bastard who murdered a defenceless old man, I’m going to find someone to love.

  I’m going to dare.

  I have to dare.

  34

  A novel, Johan Jakobsson thinks. Or something like a novel. Life at the Cherub, in literary form.

  It’s all there.

  The humiliation of not being able to shower more than every third day. Of having to lie and wait for hours each morning before you can get up. Of being forgotten on a bedpan full of runny excrement, of being left on the toilet out of reach of the alarm.

  Staff struggling to get through their duties, stressed to the point of collapse by inadequate staffing levels and an ever-increasing workload.

  Management companies, the district council.

  The mania for cutting costs.

  The hunger for profit. The political madness of introducing the profit-motive into healthcare. The profound immorality of selling off publicly owned care homes.

  The doctors’ cynicism. The way elderly patients are denied treatment or are made to wait until it’s too late. The story of a man with gangrene in one leg, whose doctor thinks the operation can wait for a while, so that he can ‘get used to the idea’ of only having one leg.

  The patient dies on the operating table.

  Another dies of an untreated pressure sore that infected her whole body.

  Dressings that are used twice, each side, if the pus hasn’t soaked through. Sores that are neglected, stinking with pus, infections eating into bone.

  But also glimmers of light.

  Unexpected kindnesses.

  From anyone.

  One chapter is entitled ‘the stalwarts’, about the people who have devoted their lives to slaving away at the bottom of the heap.

  The cleaners.

  But mostly the nursing assistants, working day in and day out, night after night, year after year, doing all the heavy lifting, and with absolutely no power to influence their own situation.

  And this is where Konrad Karlsson sees the real miracle of humanity.

  People like Berit, Siv, and Kent, who retain their good humour and friendliness. Why don’t more of them end up incurably cynical?

  There seems to be an innate goodness in human beings.

  How far can that be stretched before it vanishes?

  If the book had been printed, it would surely have sparked a huge debate. The way Maja Ekelöf’s documentary novel Report from a Bucket did in the 1970s.

  Could someone at Merapi have known about Konrad’s book?

  It concludes with two simple sentences.

  Children, the disabled, and old people. How we treat them determines who we ourselves are.

  The stench is refusing to leave the flat, and Tove has cycled home during her afternoon break to let in the bloke from Anticimex, who hasn’t been able to come before now. She’s following the overweight fifty-year-old through the flat, thinking that his synthetic clothes must be unbearably hot.

  One of the residents died today at the University Hospital.

  Agda Berglund.

  She was ninety years old.

  She started to get weaker yesterday. Her breathing speeded up and there was no response when you spoke to her. Hilda called an ambulance even though it was obvious that life itself was draining out of Agda in an entirely natural way. But Hilda was paranoid, preferring to be cautious even though the outcome was in little doubt, so Agda wasn’t allowed to die in her home of the past seven years.

  Things at work have been unsettled. Hardly surprising. But the work has to go on, and she’s tried in vain not to think about Konrad Karlsson. His face follows her the whole time she’s at the Cherub. She remembers his fragility. His strength.

  It feels like the other staff have already forgotten him. No one wants to talk about him.

  So this is what death is like.

  Hilda said someone from head office had called, demanding that she reprimand the night staff for leaving the front door unlocked. She said she had no intention of doing so, because they were already upset enough. No one would be made a scapegoat.

  Then Tove hears the man from Anticimex say: ‘Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the pipes. I can tell you that much.’

  Agda.

  I knew nothing about her. One of the residents I hadn’t got to know at all.

  Who was she?

  An ordinary person. Just like me, like Mum.

  She didn’t die alone. Her family, children, and grandchildren got there in time.

  The man from Anticimex is holding a cable in his hand, with a camera lens on the end. He says: ‘I’ll film the bathroom as well.’

  ‘The last man who came did that too. He didn’t find anything.’

  ‘I’ll give it another try.’

  ‘What do you think it could be?’

  ‘No idea. This sort of stench can travel a long way. The worst-case scenario is that it’s coming from a different part of the building altogether.’

  ‘Could there be a dead rat under the floor?’

  ‘Not impossible. But we’d have to take the floor up to find out.’

  The man is standing in front of her in the hall, seems to be expecting her to say something else. Tove studies him, thinks he looks trustworthy.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to work,’ Tove says. ‘Do you mind locking up when you leave?’

  The fat man nods, and Tove notices him staring at her breasts. Dirty old sod.

  Soon she’s on her bicycle, waiting for a bus to go past on Drottninggatan, and feels the wind tug at her hair, and she pedals and pedals, faster and faster, further and further into the summer. Unwilling to think about what’s going to happen after that.

  Elin Sand is sitting in a room in Merapi’s headquarters, towards the top of the skyscraper out in Tornby. Behind her lies Lake Roxen, shimmering sharp and silver in the afternoon light.

  Börje and Waldemar are sitting in other rooms. The PR woman, Rebecka Koss, found space for them, and they’ve been sitting there for hours questioning any employees who stand to gain from the forthcoming sale of the business.

  Most of the people Elin has spoken to seem to find the police’s reasoning incredible. Would anyone here – me? – have anything to do with the murder of an old man, just to make sure we got our share of the profit? But now Rebecka Koss herself is sitting in front of her, a short woman in her mid-thirties, with a blond bob and snub nose, impeccably dressed in a grey suit, and she says: ‘I think it’s good that you’ve talked to us. Now we’ll be able to say with confidence that you don’t think Merapi had anything to do with this. Nor any of our employees.’

  ‘Because none of them did?’

  ‘I can’t imagine that they did,’ Rebecka Koss says. ‘I stand to make at least ten million if this deal goes through, and I have to admit that the old man’s letters and their consequences were problematic. But murder? That feels extremely far-fetched.’

  ‘We have to look into everything,’ Elin Sand says. ‘Did you know he was writing a book about life at the Cherub?’

  Johan called a short while ago to tell them about the manuscript he’d found.

  Rebecka Koss shakes her head, but is unable to conceal her surprise. And her curiosity.

  ‘We came clean after his letters,’ she says. ‘Admitted our shortcomings, and things are much better now. So I’d welcome his book.’

  Elin Sand murmurs in response, thinking that the deal will be done long before the book could ever be published, and that’s why Rebecka Koss ‘welcomes’ it.

  She tries to find a comfortable position on the minuscule office chair, but it’s impossible.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ Rebecka Koss asks. ‘We’ve got a press conference at five o’clock. We’re going to issue a statement about the ongoing investigation. Make it very clear how horrified we are that there’s a ruthless killer on the loose in Linköping,
but that we at Merapi can’t be held responsible for what’s happened, even if we breached our own regulations by leaving the front door unlocked. I really ought to go and get ready.’

  Ten million, Elin Sand thinks.

  And feels jealous.

  What have you done to deserve that money? What about all the people in the organisation who work a hell of a lot harder than you?

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘What have I got to be ashamed about? You’re the one who ought to be ashamed, seeing as you’ve completely failed to make society safe.’

  35

  I let her carry on down the road. I never got the chance to lure her into the car. Didn’t dare stop and pull her into the car.

  So I’m sitting here alone on my bed. I’ve got my gun out.

  She’s his daughter, so she isn’t innocent. Or is she?

  I can’t make sense of my thoughts. Things feel incredibly urgent one minute, only to seem meaningless and empty the next.

  I’ve lived in this city all my life. Even so, I’m almost entirely alone.

  Perhaps I should take her just to have some company.

  I stand up. Put my jacket on, tuck the pistol into my waistband, and then drive to his house. Stand in his garden and look in through the big windows.

  He’s not there.

  Just his beautiful wife.

  His daughter isn’t there either.

  Where are they?

  I know where they might be.

  36

  Malin is pouring coffee in the kitchen of the police station. There’s a chocolate cake on the table.

  Must be someone’s birthday.

  Whose?

  Who cares?

  They still haven’t found Yngve Karlsson. He’s not answering his phone, so she and Zeke will have to go out there again.

  She goes over to the table. Thinks of all the things she denies herself, and helps herself to a large slice of cake. She eats it quickly standing in the kitchen, rinsing its cloying taste down with large gulps of coffee.

  Johan has shown her Konrad Karlsson’s manuscript. She’ll find the time to read it; it may just contain some useful information.