Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  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 Malmo. With her new man, the one she met on that council course for social workers in Vaxjo.

  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 coming.

  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 Norrkoping, 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. Fagelsjo. 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 Linkoping.

  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 wha
t goes on behind the scenes?

  What a gang, Lovisa thinks. Waldemar. The idiot. Sexist. But not really dangerous. And Sven Sjoman. 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 Mjolby, 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 Sjoman 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 finally 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, Borje, Waldemar.

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

  It’s taking its toll on Borje. But Borje 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 Mjolby. 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 Fagelsjos, 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?

  The others look as tired as me, Malin thinks as she looks around at the detectives who have gathered for the first meeting of the week in the preliminary investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.

  The time is 8.30.

  Johan Jakobsson has dark rings under his eyes. Waldemar Ekenberg is ragged from smoking, Lovisa Segerberg looks as if she slept badly in her hotel; they probably have lousy beds in the Hotel du Nord down by the station. Sven Sjoman is the only one who looks alert. Karim Akbar is sitting listlessly at the end of the table, but his shiny grey wool suit is as well pressed as usual, and the pinkish-red tie has been chosen with care.

  Silence has descended on the room. The sort of silence that can occur in a room full of detectives searching their minds for a sense of where to go next, waiting for something that is hidden to reveal itself before their eyes.

  They’ve been through the Fagelsjos’ lies about their finances, that Fredrik Fagelsjo had lost money on bad investments and had to sell up. And that they had come into an inheritance and tried to buy the estate back, but that Petersson had turned down the offer, in spite of it being a g
ood deal. That Axel Fagelsjo had refused to let Malin and Zeke in, but that Katarina had spoken to them, and that Fredrik had spoken openly and admitted that he had gone out to see Petersson the evening before the murder, but claimed that nothing had happened apart from him confronting Petersson and demanding to be allowed to buy the castle back.

  ‘If he was there the previous evening, he can’t have killed Petersson then, Karin’s reports says he died in the early hours of the morning and that the blow to the head killed him outright,’ Sven said. ‘From what we know about Petersson’s last twenty-four hours, he doesn’t seem to have met anyone apart from Fredrik Fagelsjo. He only made one call on his mobile, and that turned out to be to his cleaner. A Filipino woman with a solid alibi, and who hadn’t been there for a week.’

  ‘If Fredrik did kill him,’ Malin said, ‘then he must have gone back the next morning. But his wife has given him an alibi. But we’ve got no way of knowing, that could just be a married couple’s alibi.’

  ‘And the Filipino cleaner?’ Waldemar asked. ‘Could she have any crazy relatives?’

  ‘Aronsson’s spoken to her,’ Sven said. ‘She’s clean as a whistle. Anyway, if that were the case, surely he’d have been robbed?’

  Then they went through the rest of the case, but there wasn’t much new to report.

  ‘We’ve checked Petersson’s emails,’ Johan said. ‘And we received the log of telephone calls from Telia late yesterday. Both his mobile and landline. But we haven’t found anything unusual there, apart from the two calls from a phone-box out at Ikea.’

  ‘Is that so unusual?’ Karim asked.

  ‘No, but they’re the only calls where we don’t know who made them, and of course pretty much everyone has a mobile these days.’

  ‘Which phone-box was it?’

  ‘One out in the car park,’ Johan replied.

  ‘Is it covered by any of the security cameras?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, I checked. There’s no camera there. And the calls were made several months ago, so there’s next to no chance of finding any witnesses.’

  Karim breaks the silence that has followed the run-through: ‘Any tip-offs from the public?’