Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘But you said you were friends?’

  ‘We were. I still had more confidence in him than most people.’

  Malin nods.

  She can see the drops of water slowly drying on Jochen Goldman’s skin, as he leans back, legs wide apart, shamelessly making the most of the day as though it were his last.

  ‘He wanted to sell books,’ he goes on. ‘His greed was amusing. He had just cashed in several hundred million from that IT company, but he still couldn’t help himself trying to increase the sales of the book.’

  Out at sea a large cruise ship had appeared on the horizon.

  The busty blondes had disappeared from the terrace now.

  All that was left were the watchful eyes of the heavies from inside the living room.

  ‘You have a good life here.’

  ‘I work hard. But I’d like to have a woman here.’

  ‘You’ve got several,’ Malin says.

  ‘But no one like you.’

  Malin smiles, feels Goldman’s eyes on her, and she wonders if she should adjust her dress, the wind has blown it up, but she leaves it where it is, she doesn’t usually take advantage like that, but this time she makes an exception. For herself, or to confuse Goldman?

  I don’t care, Malin thinks, looking down at her skin.

  Gomez is holding his mobile, and it buzzes as a text arrives.

  ‘So you’re saying you weren’t even angry with Petersson?’

  ‘No. If you don’t expect loyalty, you don’t get disappointed by betrayal. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malin says, and she sees Janne in the hall of his house the first time he was about to go to Bosnia, the evening before his departure, and how she tried in vain to stop him packing his camouflaged rucksack.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Did you carry on doing business with him?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Even though you didn’t trust him?’

  ‘He didn’t know that I knew. And one thing you need to understand, Malin, is that sometimes Jerry Petersson was exactly the sort of man you wanted on your side.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He had certain qualities. A ruthlessness that could be exploited.’

  ‘What do you mean by ruthlessness?’

  Jochen Goldman raises his eyebrows, to indicate that he isn’t going to answer.

  ‘How did you get to know each other?’ Malin asks instead.

  ‘It was when I got into trouble on one occasion. My usual lawyer at the same firm was on holiday. I liked him at once. And when he set up his own practice, I went with him.’

  ‘Do you know why he set up on his own?’

  ‘He scared the others.’

  ‘Scared them?’

  ‘Yes, he was much smarter than them, so they had to get rid of him.’

  Malin smiles. Goldman strokes his stomach and flares his nostrils like Tony Soprano.

  ‘Is there anything you think I should know? About your business dealings? About Jerry?’

  ‘No. Surely you should do some of the work for yourselves?’

  Goldman smiles.

  ‘So you didn’t decide to get your revenge in retrospect, you didn’t send a hitman?’

  Goldman grins at Malin as if she herself were a hired killer, but a welcome, anticipated one.

  He puts on his sunglasses and tilts his head so that the sharp sparkle of the jewels’ reflections hits Malin’s eyes and she has to squint.

  ‘Don’t bore me, Malin. You’re better than that. Anyway, if I did do that, I’m hardly likely to tell you.’

  Malin turns her face to the sea.

  Thinks about Tove.

  Wonders what she’s doing now.

  Thinks about Mum.

  About Dad.

  About the fact that he’s probably looking forward to her visit later that evening.

  ‘Take a walk with me,’ Goldman says. ‘Let me show you the grounds.’

  She follows him down a steep flight of steps that winds down towards the beach.

  He’s still wearing his swimming trunks, and his brown body shines in the sun as he tells her about the Spanish architect who designed the house, that he has also designed a house for Pedro Almodovar in the mountains outside Madrid.

  Malin says nothing.

  She lets Goldman talk, thinks that they’re out of sight of the gorillas now and that Gomez is probably still sitting up on the terrace talking into his mobile.

  Goldman asks if she’s read his books, and she says no, then realises that she probably should have.

  ‘You haven’t missed anything,’ he says.

  He jumps down onto the black sand of the beach, rushes down to the edge of the water so as not to burn his feet on the hot sand, and Malin sits down on the bottom step, takes off her canvas shoes, then runs down to the water as well.

  ‘Take your clothes off. Have a swim. I can get a swimming costume for you. You have no idea how wonderful it is to lie on this beach and feel the salt crystallise on your skin.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Malin says, and against her will she wants to lie on this sand with him beside her, looking at him, at the misdirected energy that forms him.

  Goldman throws a stone into the water. It bounces across the surface.

  ‘That stone,’ he says, ‘that’s what I felt like for ten years.’

  ‘Self-inflicted,’ Malin says. ‘And you were richly rewarded for it.’

  ‘You’re harsh,’ Goldman says.

  ‘A realist,’ Malin replies. ‘Did Jerry Petersson ever mention a car accident he was in once?’ she goes on.

  Warm water between her toes, a little bubbling, frothing wave rolling over the black sand.

  ‘It was when he was in his late teens, people died.’

  Goldman stops.

  Looks at her, and she can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but she realises that he is about to tell her what they came down to the beach for him to say, what she has unconsciously been expecting him to say if she treated him like an ordinary person.

  ‘He bragged about it once. One New Year’s Eve in Punta del Este. That he was the one driving the car, that he was drunk, but managed to persuade someone else who was sober to say he had been driving. Jerry was proud as punch about it.’

  37

  You’re babbling, Jochen.

  What you told her about the accident, I have no memory of any New Year’s Eve in Punta del Este. Do I?

  I see you standing on the terrace of your newly built castle looking out across the sea.

  Of course I wanted to give you up.

  Like a cowboy film, John Wayne on the run, escaping from the Apaches through a canyon on the border between Texas and Mexico.

  I’m drifting away from you now, Jochen, leaving you there with your restlessness; you haven’t managed to escape that yet.

  Swim a few more lengths of your shimmering black moat.

  You should know that where I am now there’s no restlessness, only curiosity and fear and a thousand other feelings that I don’t know the names of. I don’t have to keep other people at a distance, I don’t need a moat.

  I’m finally free from angst and shame.

  But you aren’t, are you, Malin?

  Malin looks at the hotel room.

  It’s hot now, the air conditioning shut off automatically when she left, and the smell of mould is more noticeable. She’s taken all her clothes off and is lying on the bed wishing she’d been booked into a hotel with a pool, would love to feel cold water embrace her body.

  Instead she looks at the grey-green patches of damp on the ceiling and waits for Zeke to answer his mobile.

  It’s four o’clock, he ought to answer now.

  And there comes Zeke’s hoarse voice in her ear.

  ‘Malin. What are you up to? How are you?’

  ‘I’m lying in the shabbiest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.’

  ‘How’s the weather?’

  ‘Sun. Hot.’

  �
�Have you seen Goldman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  Suddenly there’s agitated shouting from one of the bars, then disco music pumping out at full volume.

  ‘A disco?’

  ‘A bar full of prostitutes,’ Malin says.

  ‘Exotic,’ Zeke says.

  ‘I was about to say that Goldman claims Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve, not Jonas Karlsson. According to Goldman, Jerry Petersson was drunk and persuaded Jonas Karlsson to say he was driving to avoid prosecution.’

  Silence over the line.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke finally says. ‘Do you believe him? Or is he playing with us?’

  ‘Impossible to say. But we can use it. Put Jonas Karlsson under a bit of pressure.’

  More screaming from the prostitutes.

  ‘Have you spoken to him yet?’

  ‘Yes. Jakobsson and Ekenberg went to see him. Now they can go and do it all over again.’

  ‘The Fagelsjo family?’

  ‘They claim they hardly remember the accident.’

  ‘They remember,’ Malin says. ‘No doubt about that.’

  Zeke is silent for a moment, and Malin thinks about Gomez’s offer of a beer just now, and how she said no even though her body was shrieking for a cold beer, or preferably something even stronger.

  But she resisted.

  Then Zeke goes on: ‘Waldemar and Johan will have to talk to Jonas Karlsson again in the light of this new information. And we need to talk to the relatives of the others in the car. That’s still a possibility. Jonas Karlsson may have been trying to get money out of Petersson. One of the relatives might have found out the truth, and God knows what that could have stirred up. Stabbed forty bloody times.’

  ‘Talk to the Fagelsjos,’ Malin says.

  ‘Will do,’ Zeke says. ‘Fuck knows where this shit’s going to take us. Have you called home, to Tove?’

  None of your business, Malin thinks. I haven’t wanted to call because Tove’s at school, isn’t she?

  ‘Never mind that now,’ Malin says. And hears how it sounds. ‘Sorry,’ she adds.

  ‘No problem, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘But you have to realise that this case isn’t more important than your own daughter.’

  Shut up, Zeke.

  ‘Someone’s knocking at the door,’ Malin says. ‘Probably housekeeping. I’ve got to go.’

  Zeke hangs up.

  No knock at the door, she just wanted to end the call.

  Jerry, Malin thinks. Jerry. If it was you driving that night, you locked it away in a little black safe and threw away the key, didn’t you? Only took it out when you were having a pissing contest with Jochen.

  I never take my secrets out, Malin thinks, because I don’t know what they are. And you, Jochen, you don’t want to know what your real secret is, do you? You think everything can be controlled, that you can make the world do whatever you want.

  She closes her eyes.

  Feels anxiety coursing through her body.

  I’m tired of feeling so miserable, she thinks. Angry and scared. Why have I got the same look in my eyes as Katarina Fagelsjo?

  Mum and Dad in a little while.

  Golf clubs swinging against a blue sky. The worst non-activity of all.

  This case, Malin thinks. It’s dragging me back to the growth-ring right at the centre of my trunk.

  Malin’s fallen asleep. Lying defenceless with her arms above her head, like a child who knows instinctively that her mum will never leave her.

  She’s dreaming about a man in a suit sitting in a futuristic office chair behind a mahogany desk in a room with large windows facing onto a busy street. The man is wearing a grey suit and he has no face.

  He is talking to her. She wants to put a stop to it, but doesn’t know how.

  ‘You’re lying quietly on the bed,’ he says. ‘In your shabby room, and deep down you wish you could lie there all evening, all night, but you know you have to wake up, you have to go out, and soon you’ll get in the shower, try to shake off all your emotions before heading right into the middle of them.

  ‘You’ve come down here to this over-developed island to discover my secret, how I ended up with all those stab wounds in my body. And I’m grateful for that,’ the man says.

  ‘But you’re more interested in your own secret than mine.

  ‘Do you imagine you’re going to find it at your parents’ this evening? Don’t hope too much, Malin. Wouldn’t it be better to go home? Stop drinking and look after your daughter? But you can’t even manage that. That’s how weak you are.

  ‘It’s much easier to concentrate on me.

  ‘With me, you can glimpse truths and completely avoid having to deal with yourself.

  ‘Have a drink, Malin.

  ‘Drink, Malin.

  ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

  Then the man and the room disappear. Only his voice remains.

  Malin can hear his voice inside her, whispering: ‘Drink, drink, drink.’

  And in her sleep she wonders where the voice comes from. Is it a gentle plea from her own body for calm, for release from the sadness, longing and fear?

  She wakes up and the voice disappears, but the feeling of it lingers in the room.

  She gets in the shower.

  Fifteen minutes later she’s sitting in a shabby bar looking at her reflection in a chipped mirror.

  The glass of tequila half full, the cold beer glass alongside misted up.

  Mum.

  Dad.

  Here I come. But I should have brought Tove with me. So you could see her. The most beautiful of all beautiful things.

  ‘He’s not home this time either,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says as they try ringing on the door of Jonas Karlsson’s flat for the third time in a day.

  ‘And he hasn’t got a fucking mobile.’

  ‘Where could he be?’ Johan Jakobsson says.

  ‘No idea.’

  Johan looks at the door.

  Solid and closed, in a way that suggests it wants to keep its secrets. They were here two hours ago, after Malin’s call to Zeke, and Jonas Karlsson wasn’t at home then either. Nor was he at work at the hospital.

  Back at the station they’ve had police constables looking for the parents of the girl and boy involved in the car crash. Both couples are divorced now, but still live in the city.

  Evening now. We can’t disturb them this late for something this flimsy, Johan thinks. But tomorrow we’ll have to.

  I’m not looking forward to tomorrow, he thinks, as he turns on his heel and heads down the stairs, away from Waldemar, away from Jonas Karlsson’s flat.

  38

  Reluctant loss has an address.

  Number 3, Calle Amerigo.

  The two quick tequilas and beers have done their job.

  Malin’s hands rest easily on her bare legs. She’s wearing a short white skirt and a pink blouse, not too creased even though they’ve been packed away in her case.

  The clock on the dashboard of the taxi says twenty-five past seven. Dad’s words over the phone: ‘Come at half past seven, we’re sure to be back from our round by then.’

  The taxi feels its way out of Playa de las Americas along a road that follows the sea, the worst of the noise and commotion is left behind, replaced by a residential calm. Hastily constructed hotels no longer line the shore, just equally quickly built blocks of flats where the careful decor of the balconies indicates pensioners.

  Mum.

  They spent a long time looking for a flat by the sea, but they were too expensive.

  In Los Cristianos the taxi swings off towards the mountains, where increasingly tall white-plastered blocks scramble up ochre-coloured cliffs.

  I haven’t seen my parents for three years.

  Have I missed them?

  Sometimes, maybe, when I hear Dad’s voice over the phone and he asks me to come down and visit, or when he’s been going on about the plants.

  Mum.

/>   I might have spoken to you ten times, and even then we only asked each other about the weather.

  Have I missed you in Tove’s life? You, Dad, you’ve asked after her, of course you have. But you haven’t really cared, not properly.

  That’s why I was able to move to Stockholm on my own with her and attend Police Academy, because I felt that you weren’t there, not for me, and not really for her.

  Has Tove missed you?

  Malin tried to call her a short while ago, but there was some problem with the line.

  Of course Tove has missed her grandparents. Janne’s mother and father are long since dead, hardened smokers that they were.

  Malin is tipsy from the tequila. She feels she can be honest with herself in the taxi.

  The buildings here. Storage space for people.

  What’s this scorched bastard volcano island got, apart from heat and a flight from responsibility?

  ‘Come at half past seven.’

  Malin shuts her eyes.

  ‘We’ll be back from the golf course by then.’

  The lift stops on the fourth floor and the chipped metal doors glide apart and Malin wants to close them again, run from the house and get a taxi back to the airport and get the first plane back up to the darkness and rain and cold.

  She heads towards the door in the stairwell that must lead to her parents’ flat.

  Warmer back home than here. The white, marble-like stone on the walls and floor of the landing seem to create a peculiar chill, a sort of cold she’s never experienced before, and she’s eight years old and standing outside the house in Sturefors, it’s cold and it’s raining and she’s lost her key and she can hear Mum inside the house. Mum knows she’s standing out on the steps and is freezing and crying and wants to get indoors, but she doesn’t open up, angry that Malin has lost her key.

  Malin standing outside the door.

  The door in Tenerife.

  I’m going to turn back.

  Maybe they aren’t home.

  But she can hear the familiar voices through the door, first talking to each other in a normal conversational tone, then shouting at each other, and she’s lying in her bed in the room she lived in as a girl listening to them shouting in the bedroom at the other end of the house, and there are cold autumn nights, winter nights, spring nights and summer nights, and she doesn’t understand what they’re saying and she’s seven eight nine years old and doesn’t understand the words, but she knows Mum and Dad are shouting things that change everything for ever, the sort of things that change the direction of life, whether or not anyone realises it.