A typical bachelor pad, Johan thinks, and if their files are accurate, Jonas Karlsson ought to be forty-three years old, but he looks considerably older, tired and worn out. In one corner sits a drinks cabinet, its door ajar, an ashtray with a few cigarette butts on the table, but no pervasive smell of smoke.
‘Do you think he drinks?’ Johan asks.
Before Waldemar can answer they hear Karlsson’s voice: ‘I drink far too much when I’m on a binge. But I hold it together.’ Then he sits down in front of them on an armchair by the window looking out onto the inner courtyard, the black and apparently dead branches of some birch trees swaying crazily in the wind and the intermittent rain. There’s a bookshelf full of DVDs, VHS tapes and boxes of Super 8 films with illegible handwritten labels.
‘Do you live here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘No family?’ Waldemar asks.
‘No, thank God. So you want to talk about the accident?’
‘Yes,’ Waldemar says. ‘But first: do you wank with your right hand or your left?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘I’m right-handed, if that’s what you want to know.’
‘You’ve heard what happened to Jerry Petersson?’ Waldemar asks.
‘I read about it in the paper.’
‘We’re working on a fairly broad front at the moment,’ Johan says. ‘So we’re checking most people who’ve ever had anything to do with Jerry Petersson.’
‘I didn’t know Petersson,’ Karlsson says. ‘Not then, and not afterwards either.’
‘So how come you were in the same car that New Year’s Eve?’
‘We were heading back into the city. I’d borrowed Dad’s car, and Jerry asked if he could have a lift. That’s how I remember it. And I had space in the car. So why not? He offered me a hundred kronor, seemed desperate to get away from there.’
Exactly the same as in the file about the accident. Jonas Karlsson says the same things today as he did twenty-four years ago.
‘The party took place on the Fågelsjö estate, in some sort of parish house?’ Johan asks.
‘Yes, in a parish house that they built as a gift to the church, I think.’
‘And Petersson wanted to leave the party? Why do you think that was?’
‘I’ve got no idea. Like I said: I didn’t really know him. It was cold and late. I suppose he just wanted to go home?’
‘Did you know the Fågelsjö kids, do you still know them?’ Waldemar asks.
Karlsson shakes his head.
‘God, no. They were really stuck-up. I was in the parallel class to Fredrik Fågelsjö, and he was the one organising the New Year party. Sometimes he used to invite me and some of the others to make up the numbers.’
Johan nods.
‘And Petersson, was he friends with either of the Fågelsjö kids?’
‘No, I don’t think so. In some ways he was more like me. An ordinary working-class kid who was allowed to join in sometimes.’
‘And you weren’t friends, you and Jerry?’
‘No, I said that.’
‘And the others in the car? Were they friends with Jerry?’
‘Andreas Ekström was in Jerry’s gang. Jasmin Sandsten probably had a crush on Jerry, that’s probably why she wanted to come. I think most of the girls had a crush on him.’
‘So you think Jasmin Sandsten had a crush on Jerry Petersson?’ Johan asks.
‘I don’t know. All the girls seemed to be crazy about him. That’s what he was like.’
‘Jerry’s gang?’ Waldemar says.
‘He just had a lot of friends,’ Karlsson says, rubbing his top lip with one hand. Strange, Waldemar thinks. We haven’t found a single person who describes themselves as Petersson’s friend.
‘But he wasn’t friends with the Fågelsjös?’
‘No, not as far as I know. There was a group of rich kids, no one else was let in except when they wanted to make up the numbers.’
‘Can you tell us about that evening?’
Waldemar is making an effort to sound friendly, establish trust, and Johan is surprised at how genuine it actually sounds.
Karlsson clears his throat and seems to gather his senses before he starts talking again.
‘Like I said, Fredrik Fågelsjö had organised a New Year’s Eve party. I got invited, and was allowed to borrow Dad’s car to get there, as long as I promised not to drink. After midnight I wanted to go home, piss-ups like that are no fun if you’re not drunk as well.’
‘No, they certainly aren’t,’ Waldemar says.
‘And as I was about to leave, Jerry Petersson came over with Jasmin Sandsten and Andreas Ekström and asked for a lift. Andreas squeezed in the back seat with the girl, and Jerry sat in the front, and the rest is history. I was driving sensibly, but we still slid in the darkness and snow and ended up rolling over into a field. We had seat belts in the front, but not in the back, and they got tossed about like they were in a centrifuge before being thrown out of the rear window. Andreas died of head injuries, and Jasmin . . . well, she still isn’t right.’
‘The others had been drinking?’ Waldemar asks.
‘It was New Year’s Eve.’
‘Did anything particular happen at the party?’
Karlsson shakes his head.
‘Do you think about the accident much?’
Johan says the words slowly, and he sees Karlsson’s face tense and his pupils expand.
‘No. I’ve put it behind me. It was an accident. I was cleared of any responsibility and I didn’t feel that anyone blamed me for it. But sure, sometimes I think about Andreas and Jasmin.’
‘Were you friends with Andreas and Jasmin?’
‘Only superficially. We went to the same parties. Talked between classes.’
‘Did you have any contact with Petersson over the years?’ Waldemar asks.
‘Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t spoken to him once. But it looks like things went well for him. No doubt about that.’
Waldemar rubs his knees, fiddling restlessly with his fingers.
‘Is it OK if I smoke?’
Karlsson nods.
‘If you let me have one.’
‘Can I ask what your job is?’
‘I’m a nurse. I work nights in the X-ray department.’
‘You never married? No kids?’
‘No, that’s not my thing.’
And the room fills with suffocating smoke, and Johan has to force himself not to cough before asking: ‘Do you feel guilty?’
Karlsson looks surprised at first, then thinks before he says: ‘Sometimes.’
‘What about the parents? Were they angry with you?’
‘I think they all accepted it was an accident, that things like that happen. I don’t know. I think Andreas’s parents managed to move on. I got that impression at his funeral.’
‘Was Jerry at the funeral?’ Johan asks.
‘No.’
‘Fredrik Fågelsjö?’
‘No, are you kidding?’
‘What about Jasmin’s parents?’
‘She was left a vegetable,’ Karlsson says. ‘I heard her dad took it hard. I think they got divorced.’
Johan doesn’t reply, looks out of the window, thinks about the father who lost his daughter that New Year’s Eve, sees his own daughter running through the house out in Linghem.
In a flowing white dress.
A daughter whose soul vanishes in a snow-covered field one night. A daughter who doesn’t stop breathing, and instead faces decades of suffering. What sort of emotions might something like that bring to life?
Zeke Martinsson puts his head in his hands, trying to shut out all the sounds of the police station. The noise and beeping that fills the open-plan office sometimes makes him so crazy he can’t think.
Malin in Tenerife.
Must have landed by now. What are the chances of her seeing her parents? God knows.
Zeke has just spoken to Axel and Katarin
a Fågelsjö about the accident. Sven Sjöman had already spoken to Fredrik Fågelsjö about it, in the presence of his lawyer. All the members of the Fågelsjö family say they can hardly remember the New Year’s Eve when the accident took place, it’s all in the past and none of them ever gave any thought to the fact that Jerry Petersson was the surviving passenger. Not when he popped up as a prospective buyer for the castle, and not when he was murdered.
As Axel Fågelsjö expressed it over the phone: ‘The people in the car were a long way outside our closest, central circle of acquaintances. The children used to invite them sometimes to help fill the rooms.’
Of course they remember. Of course they remember that Jerry was the passenger.
As Katarina put it: ‘I don’t remember that party at all. I have no memory of it whatsoever, it’s all a blank.’
There’s something that doesn’t fit here, Zeke thinks. He can feel that it’s important. But how?
Too much.
Too little.
Skogså.
Always their castle, their estate.
A car spins off the road one New Year’s Eve and one young person dies, another is terribly injured. One of the people in the car, one of the survivors, is found dead many years later in a moat on the land that now belongs to him.
‘It’s all a blank.’
You’re lying, Zeke thinks. There’s nothing like death to make people remember things.
34
Jonas Karlsson, New Year’s Eve, 1984
I’m crawling over the snow towards her, I think she’s dead, she’s not moving and I’m going to bring her back, I’m going to, I’m going to blow air into her lungs and bring her back to life. There’s blood trickling from her ears and the whole world, all the business of New Year’s Eve, is ringing inside me and I hear nothing, but I see, and the car’s headlights are flickering, pumping out their dead light that makes it look like Jerry is moving in slow motion, he’s running through screaming black and white images and the cold is here and a silence, a black silence that I know will follow me for the rest of my life.
Jasmin, was that your name?
Andreas? Where is he? Jerry is standing next to me as I crawl forward, he’s yelling something but I can’t make out what. I want to listen to him, show myself worthy of being his friend, there’s nothing I want more than to be his friend.
I hold your head in my arms, Jasmin, and the snow around you is stained grey with grey blood, and why doesn’t this night have any sound, any colour? Not even the blood has the strength to be red.
And what’s Jerry shouting? What is it he’s shouting?
He wants something. And now I remember, how the words shot through the car, drive slower, slow down, and the world spun around, around, around, breaking into a thousand different sounds and the screams stopped and I was hanging upside down in the silence and looking at the steering wheel, at Jerry who was fiddling with a tape, and then I fell and started crawling.
I thought I could see someone standing above Andreas’s body.
A being with the colourless colour of fear.
And Jasmin in my arms. She’s breathing. How do I know that? Jerry is standing beside me, screaming: ‘She’s breathing, she’s breathing’, and slowly, coldly, as if through cotton wool, his words reach me, he’s screaming, looking at me with his relentless blue eyes, he wants something, he really does want something.
In a way that I will never want anything again.
I can drift back to that field now. It lies there still and pale in the rain and mist, in this raw cold that confuses even the voles that live there.
I’m not about to tell anyone about that evening, that night. About love and decisiveness and death and the white snow and the delicate trickles of blood running from a girl’s deaf ears, the blood that spread out beneath her like a soft pillow of the finest velvet.
I was angry.
Disappointed, but determined to push ahead with the life that was mine. I would become the most ruthless of all ruthless people.
I’m drifting higher now.
Looking at Skogså from above. I can see Linnea Sjöstedt’s little cottage, she’s sitting inside waiting for a death that won’t come to her for a long time yet.
The snow sails through the air in its perfect flakes, hardly bigger than motes of dust.
I used, I use my blue eyes.
I am standing in a field, a few square metres of the boundless, outstretched world that is mine, of the vastness of space that is now mine.
A boy ceases to be a boy, as the snow and rain come to rest on the ground.
Who was I, as I stood on the steps in front of a school building just a few months before, feeling the muted rays of the late-summer sun stroke my cheek?
35
Linköping, 1984 and onwards
The boy, as he still is, stands on the steps of the Cathedral School in the late-summer sun, warm as the memory of his mother’s cold hand.
The boy doesn’t smoke like so many of the other students of Linköping’s most prestigious high school. But he still stands on the steps, holding court, sees his people around him, learning each day how to manipulate them into doing what he wants, thinks that there’s nothing wrong with that, because the others don’t know what they want.
Then come the boys and girls from the large farms, the estates and castles throughout Östergötland, and it doesn’t matter what he says or does, or how much the others look up at him, those people treat him as if he were air. They might talk to him and about him, but there’s always a sense of amusement, of distance, in what they say and do, the fact that they let him exist, yet somehow not.
He wants to be able not to give a damn about them, not to want their favour, but he can’t help himself, he tries to be amusing on the steps, in class, in the refectory, but it doesn’t get him anywhere.
There are closed societies in that school.
For the castle and estate boys, for doctors’ kids with family trees, but not for kids from Berga with a mother dead from rheumatism and a pointless father studying in adult education, of all fucking things.
He, the most handsome and smart of all, ought to be an obvious member of the Natural Science Society, or Belles-Lettres and Tradition, which, even though it’s where the poetic nerds hang out, is still full of status and validation.
Fuck you.
And the parties. The ones they hold and where they invite everyone except him. His brilliance threatens them, frightens them.
But Jerry merely sees a closed door.
A door that will be opened.
At all costs. And if the boys, with all their silly names and houses and cars, are ridiculous, it’s a different matter with the girls. The castle and estate girls with their fine-limbed bodies and soft blonde hair framing their narrow faces and even narrower lips.
There’s something beautiful, irresistible, in the way they move, and they all move towards the boy, like almost all girls do, but while the others allow themselves to be moved by his blue eyes, the nice girls look away at the last moment. The well-bred girls know who the boy is, where he comes from, they know he’s a sight worth seeing, a source of amusement rather than a person to be taken seriously.
But there is one girl, the most beautiful of the well-bred girls, who sees who he is beyond the person that he is, who sees the formidable boy he really is, the man he will become, and the life he will be able to offer.
She dares.
And so one evening, after an annual school competition and the party that followed, they make their way down to the Stångån as it winds through Linköping, and they lie down together on a mattress in an abandoned pump house, and she is naked beneath him and her body is white and he fills her with his warm hard fleshy soul and they both know they will never get past this moment, the feeling of this instinctive love, how their unconscious can let go of all doubts and simply relax in the sweat, pain, explosion, and a space free from fear.
Then a New Year’s Eve.
White snow falling from a black sky on a blood-stained field.
A boy screaming the words that make him a man.
36
The sea is shimmering in shades of blue that Malin has never seen before, and the sun appears to see its task today as erasing the boundaries between the elements. Malin can feel her dress sticking fast to her lower back, as the warm wind wraps itself around her body in a soft, undemanding embrace.
She looks at her showy surroundings.
The pool terrace has been built on a cliff some hundred metres above a deserted beach of black sand.
The pool.
Lined with black mosaic, and Malin thinks a swim would be nice as she looks at the man in the water, swimming length after length without paying any attention to the visitors who have just arrived.
The terrace must be at least four hundred square metres, and Malin and Inspector Jorge Gomez, wearing a crumpled beige linen suit, are sitting under a parasol at a teak table towards the edge of the terrace. On the other side of the pool, in front of the enormous cube-like house, two big-chested blondes are lying on sunloungers, tapping at their mobile phones and adjusting their outsized sunglasses, while three gorillas in jeans peer out of a living room whose large glass doors have been opened onto the terrace.
A modern castle, Malin thinks. A secluded setting, but only ten kilometres or so from the clamour of Playa de las Américas.
A modernist dream.
White and steel, with the sun to heat it. This must have been the sort of thing you were dreaming about, Mum?
The man in the pool carries on swimming, and small waves spread out to the black edges of the pool, running over, and one of the big-chested blondes gets up and waves across to them, and Gomez waves back.
He drove Malin out here, not saying much, only that they were aware of Jochen Goldman’s questionable past but that there were a lot of far worse crooks on the island, people who really had been convicted of murder and didn’t just have a dodgy reputation, and that they naturally left him alone seeing as there was no current warrant for his arrest.
‘He’s not one of the noisy ones,’ Gomez said in broken English. ‘Not like the Russians. We keep them on a short chain.’
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