AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  He is balancing on the narrow railing of the balcony, and the rose bed five metres below looks so soft with all the flowers, their red and pink glowing against the peeling façade of the 1950s blocks, against the unkempt lawns where the parks department staff usually lie when they have their morning beers and pass around the bottle of vodka from mouth to mouth.

  He isn’t scared.

  If you’re scared you fall.

  She calls to the boy from the kitchen, too tired to get up from the chair that she had dragged to the stove where the pea soup or mutton with dill sauce or stuffed cabbage is cooking, she shouts anxiously and angrily: ‘Get down from there! You’ll get yourself killed!’

  But the boy knows he isn’t going to get himself killed, he knows he’s not going to fall.

  ‘I’ll tell your dad, he’ll sort you out when he gets home.’

  But Dad never sorts the boy out, not even when he’s drunk, because he can always get away. Instead he takes him into the bedroom when he’s sober, and whispers to him to scream as if he were being beaten, and that’s their shared secret.

  Down in the sandpit in the yard there are two little kids, and Jojje’s big sister is sitting on the only intact swing hanging from the frame. All three of them are looking up at him, not worried, but convinced he’ll manage his balancing act.

  Then the phone inside the flat rings. He wants to go and answer it, like he usually does, and he forgets he’s up on the railing and his upper body sways, first one way, then the other, he wonders if it’s Grandma calling, to invite him out to the country that weekend because she forgot to ask, and the narrow iron railing disappears from under his feet. He hears Mum scream, he hears Jojje’s big sister scream, then he sees the buildings and the blue early summer sky, then the rose bushes cut into his body, he hits his leg hard and then there’s a burning pain and he tries to move, but nothing happens.

  He’ll have to accept the consequences.

  They put him in plaster up to his thigh to keep him from moving. They give Mum more cortisone so she can look after him. Dad gets the pushchair out of the cellar and he rides in that when they go to the supermarket in the shopping centre, and people stare at him as if he were a baby lying in it.

  When the plaster is removed he runs faster than he ever has before.

  He knows what the bags mean now. He keeps his distance whenever they appear, and Dad’s bitter words reach him less and less often. He, Jerry, is a hundred steps ahead in everything, yet he still seeks Dad’s embrace sometimes, even though he knows that it can close around him like a wolf’s jaws, and Dad’s strong fingers can become the blades of the lawnmower cutting into his body, and his words can be their honed edges: ‘You’re good for nothing, lad.’

  During the last weeks of summer, his last ever in nursery school, they have to do a test.

  Remember the things on a picture. Pair things together. Things like that, and he realises what it means to be clever, the admiration it occasions in people who don’t expect intelligence in anyone. But the look, those pebble-sized eyes, are still unbeatable when it comes to getting what he wants.

  His schoolteacher has seen the results of the tests from nursery school. She calls out his name with a note of expectation on his first day at school, then she sees his address on the report and feels disappointed, her shoulders slump, this could be a big problem, a kid from Berga with a brain.

  He’s quickest at counting.

  Best at writing.

  Can read the most words. Sticks up his hand when no one else knows the answer, and he can see that his teacher feels distaste towards him, but he doesn’t yet know why. He doesn’t see the dirt on his clothes. The filth in his ears. His long, greasy hair. The holes in his sweater. He gives her the eyes instead, and something happens during the third year. She becomes his protector, takes him on, sees who he is and what he might become.

  He stays out in the evenings. Creeping home, but sometimes Dad’s awake.

  And he does what Dad might have wanted to do in the evenings once he’s quenched his thirst with wine and cheap beer. What Dad would never dare do: he hits when he says he’s going to.

  He hits anyone who gets in his way. He hits the headteacher when Mum and Grandma have come to school for a meeting.

  But he is allowed to stay.

  An exceptional talent, his teacher says.

  After that he hits people when they’re not looking.

  He hits his way out of all the feelings, the nameless feelings that have nowhere to go in the closed circle of the backyard in Berga, the flat’s two rooms, Ånestad Junior School, Grandma’s various homes, and his nimble feet drum restlessly on the ground, wondering what on earth this world is good for.

  14

  The ambulance with the perforated body.

  It’s heading purposefully off towards the forest, slowly, as if anxious not to wake or upset the dead man. The dog in the car barks after the ambulance, jumping up at the window.

  Standing in front of the castle, Malin can see the green lanterns swaying in the wind, and their forest-tinted light makes the grey daylight hazy. Mouldering heaps of leaves at the edge of the forest. Like crumpled paper painted in bright colours by the children at a closure-threatened nursery school. And the trees, their bare crowns watching the day’s peculiar performance from their elevated position above the leaves, waving goodbye when the wind helps the branches to move.

  The same questions as always at the start of an investigation. Malin poses them to herself, aware that all the others in the team will be asking the same things.

  How to make sense of this?

  What’s happened?

  Who was he, Jerry Petersson? The answer to the question of where the violence came from is always hidden in the victim’s life. And death. What prompted him to return to the city and surrounding area? He had been back for about a year, but sometimes evil moves slowly.

  Then the forest seems to open up before her eyes, the gaps in the trees seem to get wider, and the space is filled with a darkness teeming with shapeless figures.

  Malin imagines she can hear a voice, as if all the figures were speaking with one voice, saying the same thing: ‘I shall drift here for a thousand years. I shall be lord of this land.

  ‘Save me!’ the voice goes on. ‘I was guilty of many things, but save me, grant me forgiveness.’

  Then it calms down, whispering: ‘Why did I become the person I ended up as?’

  Young snakes, pale yellow, seem to be slithering around Malin’s boots. She stamps her feet but they don’t disappear.

  She blinks slowly.

  The snakes and the shapes are gone.

  An ordinary, depressing, grey, misty, autumn forest. Gravel beneath her feet.

  What was that all about? Am I going mad? But she isn’t worried, the drinking and all the rest of it has probably just got a bit much. Then she thinks about the fact that just a few hours ago someone was wielding a knife here.

  Murdering.

  Killing Jerry Petersson.

  She switches on her mobile again, she’s had it turned off since she arrived.

  Two missed calls. Both from Tove, but no messages. I ought to call her now, I really ought to.

  The dog is quiet, calm. Must have lain down on the back seat.

  ‘Malin! Malin!’

  She recognises Daniel Högfeldt’s voice. He’s calling to her from the driver’s seat of one of the Correspondent’s reporters’ cars.

  She feels like giving him the finger.

  Instead she waves at him.

  ‘What have you got for me?’

  His voice, eager.

  ‘Forget it, Daniel,’ she calls.

  ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? And it was Petersson.’

  ‘You’ll find out later. Karim’s bound to call a press conference.’

  ‘Come on, Malin.’

  She shakes her head, and he smiles a warm, gentle smile, exactly the sort of smile she needs.

  Is it that obvious?
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  Daniel wrote the article about Petersson. Might he know something? Can’t ask him now, that would be giving too much away.

  She had thought that her trysts with Daniel would come to an end when she moved back in with Janne. Then one evening, after she’d sweated everything out in the gym in the basement of the police station and still felt it wasn’t enough to calm her down, he had called when she was about to get in the car and go home.

  ‘Can you come over?’

  Ten minutes later she was lying in his bed in Linnégatan.

  They didn’t say a word to each other. Not then. Nor the next time, or the next, or the next.

  He simply took her as hard as he could, and she took him in return, and they yelled out together, looked at each other, seeming to ask, what the hell is this? What are we doing? What’s wrong with us?

  Daniel Högfeldt looks at Malin, and can’t help thinking that she looks terrible, almost so terrible that she isn’t sexy any more.

  He’s tried to get her to see him as more than just a body, but that hasn’t been possible. She can’t seem to shake her low opinion of him, assuming he only wants information about cases, when in actual fact it’s her that he wants to find out more about.

  She’s moved back in with her ex-husband again. But how well can that really be going? When she still wants to fuck my brains out?

  It’s fairly obvious that she isn’t happy. But if I tried to say anything she’d turn on her heel, do anything to avoid the issue.

  Daniel leans back in his seat. Sees the bald detective that he knows is called Zeke go over to Malin.

  Daniel closes his eyes. Gets ready to play at being the tough reporter when he tries to get something out of the other officers.

  As Malin and Zeke approach the car the dog stands up on the back seat. Its cropped stump of a tail is wagging, and it’s staring greedily at the bowl of water in Zeke’s hand. But when they open the doors the dog backs away. It lies down on the floor behind the driver’s seat and seems to be waiting for something. Zeke gives him the water and they can hear it lapping at it.

  ‘Let’s get it to Börje,’ Malin says.

  ‘OK,’ Zeke replies.

  Malin goes for the passenger seat. Zeke can do the driving.

  The dog whimpers in the back seat.

  Daniel Högfeldt’s naked body.

  What’s wrong with me? Malin thinks.

  The red-painted cottage sits beside the road leading up towards Skogså, not far from the turning to Linköping. The forest around the cottage opens up to give space for a field that looks more like a large vegetable patch. They’ve stopped on their way back to the city, something inside Malin told her that they ought to talk to the person living there, that they shouldn’t leave it to the uniforms.

  ‘The dog will be OK.’

  Malin has one hand on the car door.

  But before she can open it the cottage door flies open.

  Malin jerks back. Zeke throws himself down, already outside. The barrel of a shotgun is pointing right at them, and behind it stands a short, grey-haired old woman.

  ‘So who are you?’ she croaks in a hoarse voice.

  Malin backs away a bit further, and from the corner of her eye she can see Zeke feeling for his pistol.

  ‘Easy, easy,’ Malin says. ‘We’re from the police. Let me show you my ID.’

  The old woman looks at Malin.

  Seems to recognise her.

  Lowers the gun.

  Says: ‘I recognise you from the local news. Come in. Sorry about the gun, but you never know what you’re going to get around here.’

  Inside the car the dog has started barking again.

  ‘Hang your coats in the hall. Coffee? It’s lunchtime, but I haven’t got anything to offer you.’

  The old woman, who’s just introduced herself as Linnea Sjöstedt, leads them into the kitchen.

  The way she walks makes me look like an invalid, Malin thinks, the thought of lunch making her feel sick.

  The old woman puts the shotgun down on a rustic table standing on a yellow and green, almost certainly home-woven, rag-rug. An old Husqvarna stove. Collectable plates on the walls.

  An old person’s smell, sour but not unpleasant, and a strong sense that time will have its due, no matter what anyone might want.

  ‘Sit yourselves down.’

  For the old woman the business with the shotgun is already long forgotten, but Malin can still feel the adrenalin pumping in her veins, and Zeke’s clothes are wet from the grass he landed on. They watch her put an old-fashioned coffeepot on the stove and take out some blue-flowered cups.

  ‘You can’t go around pointing guns at people like that,’ Zeke says as he sits down.

  ‘Like I said, you never know what you’re going to get around here.’

  Uncomfortable ladder-backed chairs, hard on the backside.

  ‘Do you mean anything in particular?’ Malin asks.

  ‘Who knows what evil might come up with. Something must have happened, seeing as you’re here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘Jerry Petersson, the new owner of Skogså, has been found dead.’

  Linnea Sjöstedt nods.

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘We believe so,’ Zeke replies.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ the old woman says, pouring out the coffee.‘I haven’t got any cake. It makes me fat.’

  ‘So we’re wondering if you saw anything unusual yesterday, or last night, or this morning. Or anything else you thought was odd recently?’

  ‘This morning,’ Linnea says, ‘I saw Johansson and Lindman heading towards the castle. It must have been about half past seven.’

  Malin nods.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Malin takes a sip of the coffee.

  Boiled coffee.

  So strong it makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

  ‘Sometimes, when you’re as old as I am,’ Linnea Sjöstedt says, ‘you don’t always know if you’re dreaming or if what you see or think you see has really happened. I’m sure about Johansson and Lindman, because I’d already had my first cup of coffee by then, but could I have seen something before that? I’m not sure.’

  ‘So you did see something before that, Linnea?’

  Malin is making an effort to sound serious. As if dreams really did exist.

  ‘Well, I think I saw a black car driving towards the castle at the crack of dawn. But I’m not sure. Sometimes I dream that I’ve got up, and this could have been one of those dreams.’

  ‘A black car?’

  Linnea Sjöstedt nods.

  ‘Any particular make or model?’

  ‘Maybe an estate car. It was big. I’ve never paid any attention to makes of cars.’

  ‘Do you rent this cottage from the estate?’ Malin asks.

  ‘No, thank heavens, my father bought it from the Fågelsjös in the fifties. I moved in twenty years ago when my father passed away.’

  ‘What about Petersson, what do you know about him?’

  ‘He called and introduced himself. Nice young man, even if he probably wasn’t always as nice as that. All that business with Goldman and so on.’

  ‘Goldman?’

  ‘Yes, Jochen Goldman. The one who conned all that money out of that financial firm up in Stockholm, several hundred million, then fled abroad. They’re supposed to have worked together. I read about it on the Net. Don’t you know anything, officers? That Goldman’s supposed to be a really nasty piece of work.’

  ‘Nasty?’ Malin asks.

  Linnea Sjöstedt doesn’t answer, just shakes her head slowly.

  Embarrassing, Malin thinks. Put to rights by an eighty-year-old woman. But she was right, Goldman did feature in the article in the Correspondent, even if the focus was more on Petersson here and now, his plans for the castle and how he was supposed to have all but driven out the Fågelsjös.

  But she remembers Jochen Goldman. How he emptied a listed company of money with the help of some Fren
ch count, how he’s spent ten years on the run, getting loads of media attention, publishing books about his life evading the law, until now; for the past year or so, his crimes can no longer be tried thanks to the statute of limitations.

  And none of them remembered the connection between the financial crook and their victim during their meeting in the castle?

  Strange. But presumably their detective brains hadn’t woken up properly by then. Just as foggy as this autumn weather.

  Irritated, Malin asks: ‘What were you doing last night and this morning?’

  ‘Inspector, do you really think I had anything to do with Petersson’s demise?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘Just answer the question, please.’

  ‘I got home at about four o’clock this morning. With Linköping Taxis, so you can check that. I spent last night with my lover, Anton, he lives in Valla. You can have his number as well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Zeke says, ‘but I don’t think that will be necessary. Is there anything else you think we ought to know?’

  The old woman’s eyes sparkle.

  She opens her mouth to say something, but changes her mind before any words pass her lips.

  Zeke is about to start the car. He’s just patted the dog’s head, talking to it, calming it down, settling it back down on the floor again. It doesn’t seem to want to look at the forest and fields.

  My brain isn’t working properly, Malin thinks.

  It wants more drink.

  Goldman.

  One of the biggest fraud cases in Swedish history, and he managed to stay hidden until the time limit for charges being pressed had elapsed.

  And Petersson had dealings with someone like that. They’ve got a lot to look into, there are masses of files in several rooms of the castle, and when there’s been a murder they can seize whatever they want, without the permission of the victim’s solicitor. If Jerry Petersson was in business with Goldman, how many others like him are there?

  Malin looks out over the mist-shrouded field and forest and road. Thousands of different shades of grey blurring together. The wind is strong enough to send the leaves flying like flakes of copper across the green-black ground, swirling to and fro like metallic stars hanging in an absurdly low sky. In a clearing there are several ridges of deep-red leaves, like the blood pouring from Jerry Petersson’s body.