Autumn Killing dimf-3

by Mons Kallentoft

  Our life together.

  Is that what I want?

  The look on the face of Viveka Crafoord the psychoanalyst, her words: ‘You’re welcome to a session on my couch whenever you want, Malin.’

  Then Police Constable Aronsson comes over to their desk. A sheet of paper in her hand.

  ‘I’ve just got this from the archive,’ she says. ‘It took a while, but they seem to have checked in all the corners now. The only thing they’ve found about the Fagelsjo family. Apparently Axel Fagelsjo attacked one of his workers some time back in the seventies. Blinded him in one eye.’

  57

  ‘He dragged me to the ground and whipped me. My back was stinging like it had been burned from the cracks of the whip, and when I turned round to get up the whip caught my eye.’

  Another voice in the investigation’s choir.

  Malin and Zeke are each sitting in an armchair in Sixten Eriksson’s flat in a block of sheltered housing, Serafen. From his living room he has a view of the Horticultural Society Park’s bald treetops moving gently in the wind. The rain has stopped temporarily.

  Sixten Eriksson. The man Axel Fagelsjo beat up in 1973. The circumstances were described in the file they had received from the archive. Sixten Eriksson had been employed as a farmhand out at Skogsa, and managed to drive one of the tractors into the chapel. Axel Fagelsjo lost his temper and beat him so badly that he was left blind in one eye. He was only given a fine, and had to pay minimal damages to Sixten Eriksson.

  Sixten Eriksson is sitting on the blue sofa in front of them with a patch over one eye, his other eye grey-green, almost transparent with cataracts. On the wall behind him hang reproductions of Bruno Liljefors paintings: foxes in the snow, grouse in a forest. The whole room smells of tobacco, and Malin gets the impression that smell is coming from Sixten Eriksson’s pores.

  ‘It felt like I was inside an egg that was breaking,’ Sixten Eriksson said. ‘I still dream of the pain to this day, I feel it sometimes.’

  The nurse who let them in told them Sixten Eriksson was completely blind now that his other eye was afflicted by inoperable cataracts.

  Malin looks at him, thinking that there is a directness about him, in spite of his darkness.

  ‘Of course I was bitter that Axel Fagelsjo didn’t get a harsher punishment, but isn’t that always the way? Those in power aren’t easily dislodged. They took one of my eyes, and fate took the other. That’s all there is to it.’

  The court had given Axel Fagelsjo no more than a fine, and showed understanding for his anger: according to the files, Sixten Eriksson had been negligent with the tractor and had caused severe damage to the door of the chapel.

  The old man couldn’t have taken revenge on Axel by murdering his son so much later, that much is clear, Malin thinks. But Axel Fagelsjo? He was guilty of extreme brutality then, so could he have done the same to his son?

  ‘What did you do after that?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘I worked for NAF, until they shut the factory down.’

  ‘Did the bitterness pass?’

  ‘What could I do about it?’

  ‘The pain?’ Malin said. ‘Did that fade?’

  ‘No, but you can learn to live with anything.’

  Sixten pauses before going on: ‘There’s no pain that you can’t learn to live with. You just have to transfer it onto something else, get it out of yourself.’

  Malin feels something change in the room.

  The warmth is replaced by a chill, and an inner voice encourages her to ask the next sentence: ‘Your wife. Is she still alive?’

  ‘We were never married. But we lived together from the age of eighteen. She died of cancer. In her liver.’

  ‘Did you have any children?’

  Before Sixten has a chance to answer, the door opens and a young blonde woman wearing the uniform of an enrolled nurse comes in.

  ‘Time for your medicine,’ she says, and as the nurse approaches the sofa Sixten answers Malin’s question.

  ‘A son.’

  ‘A son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  The nurse carefully closes the door behind her, and Eriksson smiles, waiting several long seconds before replying: ‘He took his mother’s name. His name’s Sven Evaldsson. He’s lived in Chicago for years now.’

  A bus struggles up Djurgardsgatan, and behind the windows pale passengers huddle in their seats, their faces indistinct grimaces through the rain that has once again started to fall.

  Malin and Zeke are standing in the rain, both of them thinking.

  ‘Shouldn’t those farmers have known about Fagelsjo’s conviction? People ought to be talking about it still,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Even if they knew, perhaps they didn’t realise that we’d want to know,’ Malin says. ‘Or else they didn’t want to talk about it. From their perspective, it’s probably never looked impossible that the Fagelsjo family would get the castle back, in which case it probably makes sense to keep quiet.’

  As they’re about to get into the car Malin’s mobile rings.

  Unknown number on the display. She answers in the rain.

  ‘Malin Fors.’

  ‘This is Jasmin’s mother.’

  Jasmin.

  Which one of Tove’s friends is that?

  Then she remembers the woman in the room of the rehabilitation centre in Soderkoping, beside her daughter’s wheelchair. The sense that her love for her daughter was boundless. If anything like that happened to Tove, could I handle it? The question was back again.

  Raindrops on her face, pattering against her coat, the impatient look on Zeke’s face inside the car.

  ‘Hello. Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘I had a dream last night,’ Jasmin Sandsten’s mother says.

  Not again, not another dreamer, Malin thinks, seeing Linnea Sjostedt’s face in front of her. We need something concrete now, not more bloody dreams.

  ‘You had a dream?’

  ‘I had a dream about a boy with long black hair. I don’t remember his name, but he used to visit Jasmin in the beginning, after the accident. He said they hardly knew each other but he’d been friends with Andreas, the boy who died in the crash. Jasmin’s friends didn’t know anything about him. I remember thinking it was strange that he kept coming, but he was friendly and most of them never came at all. I thought that the sound of people her own age might help her to come back.’

  ‘And you’ve just had a dream about him?’

  Malin doesn’t wait for Jasmin Sandsten’s mother to reply, instead she’s thinking that Anders Dalstrom, the folk singer from the forest, has got long black hair.

  So now he’s popped up in the investigation again. In a dream.

  ‘Long black hair. You don’t remember his name?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. But a very well-dressed young man without a face came to me in the dream. He showed me a film of the young man who used to visit Jasmin. A black-and-white film. Jerky and old.

  ‘Wait a moment. I think his name might have been Anders. His surname was something like Fahlstrom.’

  58

  Anders Dalstrom takes a sip of his coffee in the branch of Robert’s Coffee attached to the Academic Bookshop, not far from Stadium and Gyllentorget. One of the showy American coffee shops that have successfully seen off the traditional old cafes. Latte hell, Malin thinks.

  A lot of people, Saturday. Money burning a hole in their wallets.

  The bookshop must do well in this sort of weather, when people are huddled up at home.

  ‘I’m in the city,’ Anders Dalstrom had said when Malin called: they didn’t want to drive all the way out to the forests outside Bjorsater if he wasn’t home. ‘I’ve come in to get some books. We could meet now if you like.’

  And now he’s sitting opposite her and Zeke wearing a blue hooded top and a yellow T-shirt with a green Bruce Springsteen on the chest. He looks tired, has bags under his eyes, and his long black hair looks greasy and unw
ashed.

  You look ten years older than you did out at the cottage, Malin thinks. Is it right to disturb you again? But Malin wants to follow the threads of her conversation with Jasmin’s mother, asking Anders Dalstrom about Jasmin.

  ‘Why did you visit her? You didn’t really know her, did you?’

  ‘No. But it used to make me feel better.’

  ‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks.

  Anders Dalstrom closes his eyes with a sigh.

  ‘I was working last night. I’m too tired for this.’

  ‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks again, sounding firmer this time, and Malin notes that he’s taken her place, asking questions that match her intuition rather than his own, perhaps.

  ‘I don’t know. It just felt better. It’s so long ago now.’

  ‘So you didn’t have any sort of relationship with Jasmin?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know her. Not at all. But I still felt sorry for her. I can hardly remember it now. It was like her silence was my own somehow. I liked the silence.’

  ‘And you didn’t know that Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘I told you I didn’t last time.’

  A bag of books by Anders Dalstrom’s side, a few DVDs.

  ‘What have you bought?’

  ‘A new Springsteen biography. A couple of thrillers. Two films of Bob Dylan concerts. And Lord of the Flies.’

  ‘My daughter loves reading,’ Malin says. ‘But mostly literary novels. Ideally with a bit of romance. But Lord of the Flies is good, the book and the film.’

  Anders Dalstrom looks at her, staring into her eyes for a few moments before saying: ‘Speaking of romance: you’ve probably heard it from other people, but there were rumours in high school around the time of the accident that Jerry Petersson was seeing Katarina Fagelsjo.’

  I can sniff out an unhappy relationship from a thousand miles away, Malin thinks. And I can pick up the smell of it here, here in Katarina Fagelsjo’s living room, it’s seeping out of this bitter woman’s skin, and you want to tell us, don’t you? You’re the woman in the Anna Ancher painting on the wall, the woman who wants to turn around and tell her story.

  ‘I’ll go and see her on my own. I might be able to get her to talk.’

  Zeke had nodded.

  Let her go to see Katarina. It might be dangerous, but probably not. ‘Go. Find out what we need to know.’

  White tights. Blue skirt, one leg crossed over the other. High heels, even at home.

  Open up. Tell me. You want to, I saw your reaction when I told you what Anders Dalstrom had told us. About the rumours. The romance.

  ‘You’re mourning Jerry Petersson, aren’t you?’

  The perfectly balanced upholstery from Svenskt Tenn behind her back, Josef Frank’s speckled, smiling snakes.

  And Katarina’s mask falls. Shatters into a tormented grimace and she starts to cry.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Katarina sobs when Malin makes a move to put her arm around her.

  ‘Sit down again and I’ll tell you.’

  And soon the words are pouring from the puffy, tear-streaked face.

  ‘I was in love with Jerry Petersson the autumn before the accident. I saw him in the corridors at school, I knew he was off limits for a girl like me, but you should have seen him, Malin, he was ridiculously handsome. Then we ended up at the same party, at the headquarters of the youth wing of the Moderate Party, by mistake, and I don’t remember why but we ended up sitting in the cemetery all night, and then we went down to the river. There used to be an abandoned pump house there, it’s been demolished now.’

  Katarina gets up. Goes over to the window facing the river, and with her back to Malin she points, waiting for Malin to join her before she goes on.

  ‘Over there, on that little island, that’s where the pump house was. It was cold, but I still felt warmer than ever that autumn. Jerry and I used to meet without anyone else knowing. I was head-over-heels in love with him. But Father wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him. And that was that.’

  Then Katarina falls silent, seems to be trying to keep the moment alive, by keeping her memories to herself.

  Malin opens her mouth to say something, but Katarina hushes her, giving her a look that tells her to listen, to listen to her, and not to herself.

  ‘Then he disappeared off to Lund. But he didn’t leave me. I kept an eye on him all those years, through my failed marriage to that idiot Father loved. I never forgot Jerry, I wanted to get back in touch, but I never did, I devoted myself to art instead, buried myself in paintings. Why, why, why did he have to come home again, why did he want the castle? I never understood. If he wanted to get back into my life, surely he could have just called? Don’t you think? He could have just called, couldn’t he?’

  You could have called him, Malin thinks.

  ‘And I should have rung him. Or gone out there. Ditched all my useless lovers. He was there, after all, maybe it was finally time to do something about our wretched, lingering love.’

  You always loved him. Like I’ve always loved Janne. Can our love ever end?

  ‘Did Jerry ever meet your father?’ Malin goes on.

  Katarina doesn’t answer. Instead she walks away from the window and out of the room.

  Katarina is standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Doesn’t recognise her own face.

  Then she imagines that someone is holding pictures in front of her eyes, black-and-white pictures that were never taken by a camera but which somehow exist anyway.

  Two young people walking beside a river.

  A pump house.

  Burning wood. And the voice is there, his voice, a voice she has been longing to hear.

  ‘Do you remember how beautiful you were then, Katarina? That autumn? When we would walk together along the Stangan, taking care that no one saw us, how we would have sex in the old pump house, warmed by the fire we made in an abandoned stove. I would stroke your back, caress it, and we pretended it was summer, and that I was rubbing suncream onto your skin to stop it burning.’

  New pictures.

  Snow falling. She in her room at the castle. A figure walking through the forest in the cold. The closed doors of the castle.

  ‘And then, against my will,’ the voice went on, ‘you wanted me to meet your father and mother. So I came out to the castle on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, like we’d agreed. I took the bus as far as I could, then walked through the cold, through the forest and past fields, until I saw the castle almost forcing the forest aside, on a small rise surrounded by its moat.

  ‘I walked across the bridge over the moat.

  ‘Saw the strange green light.

  ‘And your father opened the door and I looked at him and he realised why I was there, and you came to the door, and he saw something in your eyes, and he shouted that there was no way in hell that someone like me was going to cross his threshold, then he raised his arm and knocked me to the ground with a single blow.

  ‘He chased me away, over the moat, brandishing an umbrella, and you were shouting that you loved me, I love him, Father, and I ran, I ran and I thought you were going to follow me, but when I turned around at the edge of the forest you were gone, the driveway was empty, the door wasn’t closed, but your mother, Bettina, was standing there, and I thought I could see her smiling.’

  Images of herself turning away in the castle doorway. Running up the stairs. Lying on a bed. Standing close to her father. Adjusting her make-up in a mirror.

  Shut up, she wants to shout at the voice, shut up, but it goes on: ‘I came to the party. You were there. Fredrik. He had drunk too much, was arrogant towards everyone and everything. It was as if I didn’t exist for you. You didn’t even look at me, and that made me mad. I drank, gulping it down, danced, fumbled with dozens of girls who all wanted me, I made myself unbeatable, I took Jasmin, who was in your class, just because it would upset you, I got behind the wheel of that car just to show the world who made
the decisions, and that love really doesn’t matter. I was in charge, and not even love could take that power away.

  ‘And then, in the field, in the snow and the blood and the silence, I looked at Jonas Karlsson, begged him to say he was the one driving, promised him the world.

  ‘And do you know, he did what I said, I got him to do it, and I realised deep down at that moment that I could have almost anything I wanted in this world, as long as I was ruthless enough. That I could make the lawnmower blades shut up.

  ‘But not you, Katarina. I could never have you. Not the person you are.

  ‘So, sure, in a way I was both born and died on that New Year’s Eve.’

  Images of a car wreck. Funerals, a wheelchair with a mute body, a man with his back to her in an office chair, a steady stream of images from a life she had never known.

  ‘And when I bought Skogsa, I wanted to breathe life into what had died,’ the voice goes on.

  ‘That was the very worst vanity, worse than any alchemist’s.

  ‘Soon I was standing in the very same doorway that I had been refused entry to for all those years. I walked bare-chested through the rooms, feeling the cold, rough surface of the stone against my skin.’

  The images are gone. All that is left is the mirror, her eyes, the tears she knows are there inside them somewhere.

  59

  Linkoping, March and onwards

  Jerry rubs against the walls of a room illuminated by the one hundred and three candles in the chandelier suspended five metres above his head. The stones are irregular and rough against his chest and back, like the surface of some as yet unexplored hostile planet.

  The painting of the man and woman with the suncream is hanging in front of him.

  The rooms of the castle. One after the other.

  The telephones. She’s only a phone call away. He sits beneath his paintings and chants the number like a mantra.

  It never occurs to him that she might be angry about what he has done, that she might think he has torn her family’s history from their hands.

  But he never dials her number. Instead he throws himself into the practical business that comes with a property like this, sorting out the tenant farmers, and labourers of all different trades, visiting the whores he finds on the Internet, even in Linkoping, often middle-aged women with an unnaturally high sex-drive who may as well make a bit of money from satisfying their lust. He considers calling the young solicitor he bedded when the contracts were signed, but thinks that things might get a bit too close to home if he did that.