AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Skogså Castle. Constructed and altered over the years according to the eccentric whims of his ancestors.

  The copper roof seems to glow even when the sky is covered by low cloud, and the countless eyes of the building, the old castle’s loopholes and the more recent lead windows. He has always imagined that the loopholes were watching him from a distant moment in history, measuring him against his predecessors as master of the castle. The new windows are blind by comparison, as if looking for something lost.

  From this viewpoint in his memory he can’t see the chapel, but it’s there. Bettina isn’t there, however – she had wanted him to spread her ashes in the forest at the north of the estate.

  He can hear them.

  The fish splashing uneasily in the black water of the moat, maybe the dead Russian soldiers, the hungry, walled-in spirits, are nipping at their gills.

  Count Erik Fågelsjö.

  A robber baron during the Thirty Years War. A favourite of Gustav II Adolf, the most brutal warrior of all, said to have mutilated twenty men in one day during the skirmishes following the Battle of Lützen. Count Axel Fågelsjö thinks: I have always felt that man’s blood flowing through my veins.

  In his youth he wanted to serve with the UN. But his father said no. His father, the friend of Germany, the colonel who had gone around Prussia in the thirties fawning over the blackshirts, the castle-owner who believed in a German victory long into the early 1940s.

  And now?

  After what had happened.

  Count Erik Fågelsjö must be spinning with shame in the family vault in the chapel at Skogså, lying there naked and shrieking with utter fury.

  But there’s still a chance, if it weren’t for that useless dandy, that bastard who came slithering down from Stockholm like a legless lizard.

  Axel Fågelsjö looks out across the park again. Sometimes this autumn he has imagined he can see a man under the trees, a man who seemed to be peering up at his windows.

  Sometimes he’s thought it was Bettina.

  He talks to her every day, has done since she died three years ago. Sometimes he goes out to the forest where he scattered her ashes, hiking there no matter what time of year, most recently through mouldering fiery yellow leaves and swaying mushrooms, his dark voice like an echo between the trees, trees that seemed almost rootless, floating.

  Bettina.

  Are you there? I never thought you’d go first. I miss you, you know. I don’t think anyone knows, not even the children, how much I love you, loved you.

  And you answer. I can hear you telling me that I must be strong, not show what I feel, you see what happens if you give in. Axel, the wind whispers, and the wind is your voice, your breath against my neck.

  Bettina.

  My Danish beauty. Refined and unrefined at the same time. I first saw you in the summer of 1958, when I was working as a foreman at the Madsborg estate on Jutland, there to get some experience of farming.

  You were working in the kitchen that summer. A perfectly ordinary girl, and we would swim in the lake together. I’ve forgotten the name of the lake, but it was on the estate, and I brought you back home after that summer and I remember Father and Mother, how they were dubious at first, but gradually gave in to your charm, and Skogså succumbed to your cheerful temperament.

  And you, how could you, Bettina? How dare you give in to cancer? Were you sad that our income wasn’t enough to keep the castle in good condition? It would have eaten too much into our capital, all the millions that were needed.

  I don’t want to believe that. But I can feel guilty, the guilt you feel when you hurt the person you love most of all.

  Pain. You had to learn all about pain, and you told me there was nothing worth knowing in those lessons.

  The paintings on the walls here are your choices. Ancher, Kirkeby. And the portrait of my ancestor, Erik, and all the other wonderful fools and madmen who went before me.

  You died at the castle, Bettina. You would have hated having to leave it, and I’m ashamed for your spirit now. No matter how gentle you could be, you could be just as hard when it came to defending what was yours.

  Most of all you worried about the boy.

  Among your last words: ‘Look after Fredrik. Protect him. He can’t manage on his own.’

  Sometimes I wonder if he was listening at the door of your sickroom.

  You never know with him. Or maybe don’t want to know. Like everyone else, I love my daughter, and him, my son. But I’ve always been able to see his shortcomings, even if I didn’t want to. I’d rather have ignored them and seen his good qualities instead, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. I see my son, and I see almost nothing but his failings, and I hate myself for it. Sometimes he can’t even seem to control his drinking.

  The clock on the bureau strikes six and Axel stops by the sitting-room window. Something breaks out of the darkness below and someone walks through the park. A person dressed in black. The same man he thought he saw earlier?

  Axel pushes the thought aside.

  I knew it was a mistake, he thinks instead. But I still had to do it: letting Fredrik, my firstborn, the next Count Fågelsjö, look after our affairs, giving him access to our capital when my soul turned black after the cancer won. He never wanted to be at the castle, never wanted to manage the small estate and forest that were left, because it was now more profitable to take the EU subsidies for set-aside land than rent it out.

  Didn’t want to. Couldn’t. But he ought to have been able to handle the money.

  He’s got financial qualifications, and I practically gave him free rein.

  But everyone has their good and bad sides, their faults and shortcomings, he thinks.

  Not everyone has enough of the predator in them, enough of the merciless power that seems to be needed in this world. Father tried to get me to appreciate the responsibility that comes with privilege, how we have to assume a position of leadership in society. But in some ways he belonged to a bygone age. Certainly, I led the work out at Skogså, I was respected in the finer society of the region, but a leader? No. I tried to get Fredrik and Katarina at least to appreciate the value of privilege, not to take it for granted. I don’t know that I succeeded.

  Bettina, can you tell me what I can do to make Katarina happy? And don’t try that same old tune again. We had different opinions about that, as you know.

  Be quiet, Bettina.

  Be quiet.

  Let me put it like this: Was the bloodline diluted with you, Bettina?

  He has sometimes wondered this when looking at Fredrik, and Katarina too, occasionally.

  The green Barbour jacket sits tightly across Axel Fågelsjö’s stomach, but he’s had it for twenty-five years and doesn’t want to buy another one just because the kilos stick a bit more easily than they used to.

  Things must run their course, he thinks as he stands in the hall.

  We Fågelsjös have lived more or less the same way for almost five hundred years. We set the tone for the area, for this city.

  Sometimes he thinks that people around here are imitating the life he and his family have always had. The first water closet in Östergötland was at Skogså, his grandfather wore the first three-piece suit. They have always shown the way, and the business and political communities understood this, even if that’s all history now.

  There was no invitation to the county dinner this year.

  In all the years that the county governors held dinners for the most prominent people in the county, there has always been a Fågelsjö among the guests. But not this year.

  He saw the picture taken at Linköping Castle in the Östgöta Correspondent. Count Douglas was there. The historian Dick Harrison. The director of Saab’s aviation division. The head of information at Volvo. A parliamentary under-secretary with roots in the city. The editor-in-chief of the Correspondent. The Chair of the National Sports Association. Baron Adelstål.

  But no one from the Fågelsjö dynasty.

  He pull
s on his thick black rubber boots.

  I’m coming now, Bettina.

  The calfskin gloves. What leather!

  Axel thinks that things will probably sort themselves out anyway. Hears Bettina’s voice: ‘Protect the boy.’

  I did protect Fredrik. I did what was necessary, even if, in theory, the bank could have been held responsible.

  The memory of Bettina’s face fades.

  Maybe I should have let things go to hell with the boy, Axel thinks, as he presses the cold button of the lift to go downstairs and out into the lonely dawn.

  5

  No other engine sounds like that of the Range Rover: elegant yet powerful. And the vehicle responds nicely when Jerry Petersson presses the accelerator. Maybe that was how the horses of former centuries responded when long-dead counts pressed their spurs to the flanks of their sweating steeds.

  No horses here now.

  No counts.

  But he can always get a few horses if he meets a woman who likes them, they have a tendency to like horses, women. Something of a cliché, but this cliché was also a reality, like so many others.

  Jerry Petersson sees banks of fog drifting in across the fields, coming to rest beside the pine forest over to the east. The dog is sitting beside him in the passenger seat, letting its perfectly balanced body move in time with the vehicle’s suspension, its eyes searching the landscape for something living to chase after, stand over, help to bring down. Jerry Petersson runs a hand through its coarse, damp fur. It smells, the dog, but it’s a smell that suits the countryside, with its raw, penetrating authenticity. A beagle, a male, that he has named Howie after Howard Hughes, the Hollywood madman of the thirties who is said to have founded the modern aviation industry, and who, according to legend, ended up a recluse in a castle outside Las Vegas, dependent on blood transfusions.

  Jerry once read a biography of him and thought: if I ever buy a dog, I’m going to name him after an even bigger madman than me.

  The dog’s nostrils contract, open again, and its big black pupils seem to want to devour the land around Skogså.

  The estate is never more beautiful than in the morning, when the approaching day seems to soften the earth and rocks. Rain is falling against the windscreen and roof and he stops the car at the side of the road, watching some birds hopping about on the oyster-shell coloured soil, pecking for worms in the rotting vegetation and the pools that are growing larger with each passing day. The leaves are lying in drifts here, and he thinks they look like a ragged cover in a beautiful, forgotten sketch for an oil painting. And under the cover life goes on. Grubs pupating. Beetles fighting each other. Mice swimming in streams of rain towards goals so distant that they can’t even dream they exist.

  The dog is starting to get anxious, whimpering, wanting to get out, but Jerry soothes it.

  ‘There now, calm down, you can get out soon.’

  A landscape.

  Can that be a person’s fate?

  Sometimes, when Jerry drives around the estate, he imagines he can see all the characters that have come and gone in his life. They drift around the trees, the rocks and buildings.

  It was inevitable that he would end up here.

  Wasn’t it?

  Snow falling one New Year’s Eve, falling so thickly it makes this morning’s fog look as transparent as newly polished glass.

  He grew up not far from here.

  In a rented flat in Berga with his parents.

  Jerry looks at himself in the rear-view mirror. Starts the engine and drives on.

  He drives around two bends before stopping the car again. The dog is even more restless now, and Jerry opens the door, letting the dog out first before getting out himself. The dog races off across the open field, presumably chasing the scent of a deer or elk, or a hare or fox.

  He looks out over the field for a while before stepping down onto the soft ground. He trudges about, watching the dog running back and forth along the line of the forest, leaping into a deep ditch before reappearing only to vanish into a pile of leaves where the faded ochre-colours compete for attention with others that seem to be powdered matt bronze or dull gold.

  Apart from the dog, Petersson is completely alone out in the field, yet he still feels quite at ease here, in a place where everything can die yet also be born, a breaking point in people’s lives, a sequence of possibilities.

  He runs his hand through his bleached hair, thinking how well it suits his sharp nose and hard blue eyes. The wrinkles in his brow. Business wrinkles. Well-earned.

  The forest over there.

  Fir trees and pines, undergrowth. A lot of game this year. His tenant farmers are coming later today, they’re going to try to get a young elk or a couple of deer. Something needs be killed.

  The Fågelsjö family.

  What wouldn’t they give for the chance to hunt in these forests again?

  He looks at his arms, at the bright yellow Prada raincoat, the raindrops drumming on his head and the yellow GORE-TEX fabric.

  ‘Howie,’ Petersson calls. ‘Howie. Time to go now.’

  Hard. Tough. An ice-cold machine. A man prepared to step over dead bodies.

  That was how people talked about him in the business circles he moved in up in Stockholm. A shadow to most people. A rumour. A topic of conversation, something that was often the cause of admiration in a world where it was deemed desirable to be so successful that you could lie low instead of maintaining a high profile, instead of appearing on television talk shows to get more clients.

  Jerry Petersson?

  Brilliant, or so I’ve heard. A good lawyer. Didn’t he get rich from that IT business, because he got out in time? Supposed to be a real cunt-magnet.

  But also: Watch out for him.

  Isn’t he involved with Jochen Goldman? Don’t they own some company together?

  ‘Howie.’

  But the dog doesn’t come, doesn’t want to come. And Jerry knows he can leave it be, let the dog find its own way home to the castle through the forest in its own good time. It always comes home after a few hours. But for some reason he wants to call the dog back to him now, come to some sort of arrangement before they part.

  ‘Howie!’

  And the dog must have heard the urgency in his voice, because it comes racing over the whole damn field, and is soon back with Jerry.

  It leaps around his legs, and he crouches down beside it, feeling the damp soak through the fabric of his trousers, and he pats the dog’s back hard in the way he knows it likes.

  ‘So what do you to want to do, eh, boy? Run home on your own, or drive back with me? Your choice. Maybe run back on your own, you never know, I might drive off the road.’

  The dog licks his face before turning and running back across the field and hiding under a pile of leaves, before disappearing through the dark, open doors of the forest.

  Jerry Petersson gets back in the Range Rover, turns the key in the ignition, listens to the sound of the engine, then lets the vehicle nose its way along the road again, into the dense, fog-shrouded forest.

  He hadn’t locked the castle doors when he set off on his spontaneous morning drive around the estate after waking early and being unable to get back to sleep. Who was likely to come? Who would dare to come? A hint of excitement: I bet they’d like to come.

  Fredrik Fågelsjö. Old man Axel.

  Katarina.

  She’s stayed away.

  The daughter of the house.

  My house now.

  He moved in their orbit a long time ago.

  A crow flies in front of the windscreen, flapping its wings, one wing looks injured somehow, maybe broken.

  The castle is large. He could do with a woman to share it with. I’ll find one soon enough, he thinks. He’s always thought, in his increasingly large homes, that he could do with a woman to share it with. But it was merely a mental exercise that he enjoyed playing, and whenever he really needed a woman it was easy enough for someone like him: go to a bar, or call one
of the numbers, and love would arrive, home delivery. Or a randy housewife in the city for a conference. Whatever. Women to share the present moment, women without any connections either backwards or forwards in time, women as desire-fulfilling creatures. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just the way it is.

  He’d heard a rumour that Skogså was for sale.

  Sixty-five million kronor.

  The Wrede estate agency in Stockholm was handling the sale. No adverts, just a rumour that a castle with a vast estate was for sale in the Linköping area, and perhaps he might be interested?

  Skogså.

  Interested?

  Sixty-five million stung. But not much. And he got more than the castle for his money. Seventy-five hectares of prime forest, and almost as much arable land. And the abandoned parish house that he could always pull down and replace with something else.

  And now, here, on this beautiful black autumn morning, when the fog and the relentless rain and the feeling of lightness and of being at home fill his body, he knows it was money well spent, because what is money for if not to create feelings?

  He wanted to meet Fågelsjö when the deal was concluded in the office on Karlavägen. Didn’t exactly want to smirk at him, but rather give him a measured look, force the old man to realise how wrong he had been, and let him know that a new age had dawned.

  But Axel never showed up at the meeting in Stockholm.

  In his place he sent a young solicitor from Linköping. A young brunette with plump cheeks and a pout. After the contract was signed he asked her to lunch at Prinsen. Then he fucked her upstairs in his office, pushing her against the window, pulling her skirt high up her stomach, tearing a hole in her black tights and pumping away, bored, as he watched the buses and taxis and people moving in a seemingly predetermined stream down Kungsgatan, and he imagined he could hear the sound of the great lawnmowers in Kungsträdgården.

  The castle is supposed to be haunted.

  The unquiet spirit of a Count Erik who is said to have beaten his son to death when the son turned out to be feeble-minded. And the Russian soldiers who were supposed to have been walled up in the moat.