Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘We’re going to see Katarina now,’ Malin goes on. ‘Perhaps you’d like to call her first?’

  ‘You can tell her the news,’ Axel Fagelsjo says. ‘She stopped listening to me long ago.’

  Malin and Zeke take the stairs back down, their steps echoing in the stairwell. Halfway down they pass a black cleaner washing the steps with a damp mop.

  ‘He’s a cold bastard, that one,’ Zeke says as they approach the door.

  ‘He can shut off completely,’ Malin says. ‘Or rather, shut himself in.’

  ‘He didn’t even seem upset. Or the least bit curious about who might have killed his son.’

  ‘And he seemed even less concerned about Fredrik’s wife,’ Malin says.

  ‘And his grandchildren. He didn’t mention them at all,’ Zeke adds.

  ‘Presumably he’s too old for rage,’ Malin says.

  ‘Him? He’ll never be too old for that. No one gets that old.’

  Axel has sat down in the armchair in front of the open fire.

  He clenches his big, spade-like hands, feels his eyes well up and the tears run down his cheeks.

  Fredrik.

  Murdered.

  How could that happen?

  The police.

  No one to talk to, the fewer words spoken, the better.

  He sees his grandchildren running through the living room out at the Villa Italia, chased by Fredrik, then they run on through the pictures inside him, children’s feet running across the stone floors of the rooms of Skogsa. Who are the children? Fredrik, Katarina? Victoria? Leopold?

  I want my grandchildren here with me, but how can I approach her, Bettina? His wife, Christina, she’s never liked me, nor I her.

  And really, what would they want me for?

  The truth, Axel Fagelsjo thinks, is for people who don’t know any better. Action is for me.

  You’re a widow now.

  Your two children fatherless.

  Johan Jakobsson looks at the woman sitting in front of him on the sofa in the large living room of the Villa Italia, hunched up and tear-streaked, yet still radiating a sort of faith in the future. She must be financially secure, and Johan has seen this before in women with children when he arrives to break news of their husband’s death, the way they immediately seem to focus all their energy forward, onto the children, and the work of limiting the damage to them.

  Johan leans back on the sofa.

  Christina Fagelsjo looks past him, towards Waldemar Ekenberg, who is sitting on a stool by the grand piano, rubbing the bruise on his cheek.

  Christina has just explained that she decided to spend the night at her parents with the children after drinking wine at dinner. That she often ate dinner with the children at her parents without Fredrik, ‘they’ve never got on very well, Frederik and my parents’, and that her parents can confirm that she was there.

  ‘You didn’t call home?’ Waldemar asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he wasn’t here when you got home?’ Johan asks, and he is struck by the idea that Christina could have murdered her husband to get a share of the recent inheritance before it was spent trying to buy back Skogsa.

  A long shot, he thinks. The woman in front of him is no murderer. And the inheritance must have gone mainly to Axel. But she does appear to be right-handed. Along with practically everyone else.

  ‘I assumed he must be at the bank.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies?’ Waldemar asks, and it strikes Johan that it’s just the right moment for that question, phrased in that way, and reluctantly he has to admit that he and Waldemar work well together as police officers. He is convinced that Christina is telling the truth when she replies.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘His father? His sister?’

  ‘You mean because of the debacle?’

  Christina shrugs her shoulders.

  Waldemar Ekenberg strikes one of the keys of the piano gently. Light in Christina Fagelsjo’s eyes.

  ‘I know we’ve asked before,’ Johan says. ‘But do you know why he tried to escape from us? Could it have. .’

  ‘We talked about it the day he was released. He got scared, panicked. Anyone might have done in those circumstances.’

  ‘Do you think it occurred to him that driving under the influence of alcohol is illegal as well as dangerous?’

  ‘Sometimes he thought he was above that sort of thing. Sometimes rules were meant for other people.’

  ‘What was your marriage like?’ Johan goes on, and Christina answers without thinking.

  ‘It was a good marriage. Fredrik was a generous man. The Fagelsjo family are good at love.’

  And at the moment Christina says the word love, two small children run into the room, a little girl and an even younger boy. The children rush over to their mother, talking at the same time: ‘Mummy, Mummy, what’s happened? Mummy, tell us.’

  ‘Mum? Is that you? It’s a bad line.’

  Tove.

  It’s not yet half past two and it’s already starting to get dark over on the horizon beyond the jagged, shredded Ostgota plain. Malin is sitting in the Volvo with Zeke, on their way to Katarina Fagelsjo’s address.

  She wants Tove to say she’s coming round this evening, that she’ll stay the night in the flat in the city and not out at Janne’s.

  They drive past Ikea, the car park full at this time of day, and at the petrol station near Skaggetorp, people are filling their shiny, well-kept cars. She looks at the spot where she parked when she went to buy clothes and seems to see two men gesturing to each other beside a car.

  Malin blinks.

  When she opens her eyes again the men are gone.

  Down by the river and the Cloetta Center, the new high-rise block is going up, the tower, a miniature skyscraper, a pointless piece of showy architecture so that another of the city’s vain property developers can stamp his name on Linkoping’s history.

  ‘Mum? Is that you? I can’t really hear you.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Malin says. ‘Are you coming home this evening? We can do egg sandwiches.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow?’

  And mother and daughter talk, about how they are, what they’ve been doing, what they’re going to do.

  Malin hears her own voice, but it’s as if it doesn’t really exist. As if Tove’s voice doesn’t exist. And this absence of voices forms a loneliness, which forms itself into an inadequacy, which forms itself into grief.

  The car pulls up outside Katarina Fagelsjo’s modernist villa down by the river, fallen apples are still lying under the trees, and only now does Malin see the decay, that the house needs plastering and that the entire garden could do with being cleared out and maybe replanted.

  Malin and Tove hang up.

  The windscreen wipers are working frantically.

  Their movement makes the shape of a heart, Malin thinks. Painted hearts, rubbing suncream onto a woman’s skin.

  Signs of love that were never interpreted.

  And she knows which question to ask Katarina Fagelsjo.

  52

  As if she had been waiting for this to happen.

  Katarina is sitting in front of Malin and Zeke on the sofa from Svenskt Tenn. Her face betrays no dismay, no grief, no despair.

  She has just had news of a death.

  Your brother has been murdered.

  And Katarina seems to shrug her shoulders, brush herself off, and move on. He was still your brother, Malin thinks, in spite of his shortcomings.

  Malin looks at the Anna Ancher painting on the far wall, the woman at a window facing away from the viewer. She reminds me of your father, Katarina, by the window facing the Horticultural Society Park, as if they’re both trying to hide their faces at all costs, to avoid having to reveal what they feel.

  Is that what you’re supposed to do? Pretend the world outside, any feelings, don’t exist? Or is there something else you’re hiding?

  She hears Zeke asking questions, and Katarina answering.


  ‘Yes, Father was here. He went home. I went to bed. No one can verify that. Is that necessary?

  ‘I didn’t kill my own brother, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’re not behind either of the murders. Matter closed. Enemies? Fredrik was harmless. He didn’t have any enemies. Yes, the day my father dies I’ll inherit almost everything now, but I’ve had everything I need for a long time.’

  The irony sharp as a razor blade as Katarina says these last words.

  Zeke runs out of questions.

  Katarina folds her hands in her lap, letting her fingers rest on each other on the blue silk of her knee-length skirt, and Malin thinks that she has that gentle restlessness you only see in women who have no children, a mournful longing that finds expression in an edginess, a chronic nervousness, and sudden attempts at warmth.

  Katarina frowns, and Malin thinks that a single feeling can define a person’s life if it’s sufficiently strong, make that person want to live in that feeling, even though it will never return.

  Another painting on another wall. A woman on her own in blue, facing a misted window, Impressionistic. She’s longing for something, Malin thinks.

  ‘You and Jerry Petersson,’ Malin says. ‘You went out together, didn’t you?’

  And Malin can hear how hard, inadequate and clumsy her words sound, and she sees Katarina’s face contort before she says: ‘Surely now’s not a time for fantasies, is it, Inspector?’

  I see you leave Katarina’s house, Malin, then I see you enter the police station.

  You’re trying to validate your own shortcomings in those of other people, aren’t you? You want so badly to believe that your own pain can be eased simply because other people feel a similar pain.

  That’s arrogant, Malin.

  But you’re good at dragging things out into the open, I have to admit that. You dare to follow your instincts, the traces of feelings lingering in the air, the way in which we human beings breathe each other’s love.

  We are parasites on each other’s love, Malin. Trying to shift it to where we want it to be, trying desperately to understand what it wants with us. What are we to do with all the love, friendship, fear and despair?

  Did you expect Katarina to answer your question?

  Or that I would whisper the answer as I drift, my mouth just a few centimetres from your ear?

  I don’t think so.

  No victories are won so cheaply.

  You can do better than that, Malin.

  Now you’ve gone to see your boss, Karim Akbar.

  He doesn’t mention it to you, but he’s just turned down a job he was offered at the Immigration Authority. Nor will he say that he feels good, standing there looking out over the innards of the police station, and the detectives he realised he appreciated more than he could possibly have imagined while he was thinking about the job offer.

  Karim is also thinking about a book he’s in the middle of writing, about immigration issues, work on which has been very slow for too long.

  And then there’s you, Malin.

  What are we going to do with you?

  What are we going to do with all these lives that are stuck inside themselves?

  The paperwork Hell in the police station feels more claustrophobic than ever.

  Lovisa Segerberg, Waldemar Ekenberg, and Johan Jakobsson have been over at the Ostgota Bank to fetch files and computers from Fredrik Fagelsjo’s office, as well as his personal computer, and other documents from out at the Villa Italia.

  It’s half past three.

  Outside in reception the vultures are waiting for some sort of statement, but apart from a press release confirming the name of the victim they haven’t been given a thing. Karim is refusing to hold a press conference, wants to let the investigation proceed in peace, as he just said in the staffroom.

  Johan rubs his eyes, thinking about his wife, who’s probably at home playing with the kids now.

  Fredrik Fagelsjo’s father.

  Jerry Petersson’s files. They haven’t even got through a tenth of Petersson’s papers yet, and now there’s a whole new set from a new murder.

  In spite of their silence, television and radio news are featuring the murder heavily. There are profiles of both Jerry Petersson and Fredrik Fagelsjo. Naturally the Correspondent has the murder as the lead item on its website, a lengthy article written by that journalist that Johan is convinced Malin is having a relationship with, or at any rate fucks sometimes. He’s written that the second murder might perhaps have been avoided if the police had been more efficient in solving the first. Was he even out there at the castle?

  Waldemar is sitting at the end of the table sipping a cup of coffee. Strong and black, and he looks bored out of his mind. Huffing and puffing, he doesn’t seem to want to get down to work. Lovisa, on the other hand, is concentrating on Fredrik Fagelsjo’s computer, clicking from one document to the next. Maybe she’s hoping to find a connection between Jochen Goldman and Fredrik Fagelsjo?

  Then Waldemar gets up and goes over to stand behind Lovisa, and starts massaging her shoulders, saying: ‘You like this, don’t you?’

  Lovisa stands up.

  Turns towards Waldemar.

  Says in an ice-cold voice: ‘Don’t fucking touch me. I don’t give a damn how many young female officers you’ve sexually harassed in your time, but you don’t fucking touch me. Understood?’

  Waldemar backs away.

  Throws out his arms with a grin.

  ‘Calm down, love. No sense of humour?’

  ‘I’ve had an email from Interpol in Stockholm,’ Sven Sjoman says as he heads towards Malin’s desk.

  The beginnings of a headache. Withdrawal, Malin thinks. But no hangover at least.

  ‘Jochen Goldman left Tenerife,’ Sven says. ‘Three days ago.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Malin asks.

  ‘Stockholm, via Madrid. But no one knows where he went after he landed at Arlanda.’

  ‘So it could have been him who put the pictures through my letterbox?’

  ‘Unlikely. But he might have got someone else to do it. Maybe simpler for him to arrange direct from Stockholm.’

  ‘So he was in the country when Fredrik Fagelsjo was murdered,’ Malin says.

  ‘We haven’t got any connection at all between them so far, but we’ll see what the files throw up,’ Sven says.

  ‘We haven’t got anything on him at all,’ Malin says. ‘He’s got every right to do whatever he likes. Maybe those photographs are just part of a warped game.’

  ‘I still don’t get it, though,’ Sven says. ‘Why would Goldman want to come to Sweden right now?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Malin says. ‘But I’m convinced Jochen Goldman is behind those pictures. It can’t be anyone else. Aronsson just gave me the results of her search: no one I’ve put away who might want revenge has been released recently.’

  Sven pulls in his stomach and reminds her that they have a case meeting in five minutes.

  ‘We really need to start making some progress here, Malin. The vultures in reception are demanding quick results.’

  Tired detectives around a conference table.

  Words flying through the air, summaries, new ideas. A criminal investigation that’s treading water, where every conversation and exchange risks leading their work in an emotional direction rather than a logical one.

  The playground of the nursery empty.

  Sven Sjoman summarises the state of the investigation.

  ‘We’re still going through Petersson’s files. Nothing unusual so far, no other relatives or significant figures in his life. We still haven’t found the murder weapon, probably a stone, or the knife that was used to inflict the post-mortem wounds.

  ‘We need to keep digging into Petersson’s relationship with the Fagelsjo family, especially Fredrik and Katarina. We also need to find out more about his dealings with Jochen Goldman. And we’re still looking into the circumstances surrounding the car crash.’

  Then Sven falls
silent.

  Looks at Lovisa Segerberg.

  ‘Anything new?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Nothing so far.’

  ‘There’s so much fucking paperwork,’ Waldemar Ekenberg snarls. ‘It doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere.’

  ‘If you feel stuck, dig even deeper,’ Karim Akbar says, and Malin thinks it sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself rather than his detectives.

  ‘We need to start making some progress here,’ Karim goes on. ‘We haven’t got anywhere yet.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ Malin says.

  ‘The media are going crazy. We’ve got a press conference in two hours.’

  ‘Those pictures you received, of your parents. We’re assuming that Goldman’s behind them,’ Sven says, and Malin tries not to listen as he goes on about the photographs.

  Then he runs through the state of the investigation into the murder of Fredrik Fagelsjo, about Axel and Katarina Fagelsjo’s questionable alibis, and the fact that Fredrik Fagelsjo’s parents-in-law have confirmed his wife’s alibi.

  ‘Most murders occur within families,’ Waldemar says. ‘And Axel and Katarina have plenty of reasons for wanting to get rid of that black sheep of theirs after he fucked up their finances. Maybe they were worried poor little Fredrik would crack and give them away?’

  ‘Do you really believe they did it?’ Malin asks. ‘Murdered their own son and brother? No matter what the reason?’

  ‘Even if Axel and Katarina didn’t do it themselves,’ Waldemar says, ‘they could have arranged for it to happen. That goes for both murders.’

  ‘But why such a grandiose gesture?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘To divert attention away from themselves,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘We just need to do more work here, into every aspect, this feels like our main line of inquiry right now,’ Sven says. ‘Try to work out what they’ve been up to recently, what calls they’ve made, to start with.’

  ‘Email?’ Johan Jakobsson says.

  ‘We’d need to seize their computers for that,’ Sven says. ‘We’ll start with their mobiles. We’ve got enough grounds for that now.’

  ‘It’s too early for computers,’ Karim adds. ‘After all, we’ve got nothing concrete on them at all.’