AUTUMN KILLING

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘And now you want to meet up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The doors glide open and three uniformed officers walk past her with quick nods.

  ‘I don’t take much persuading. Can you come round in half an hour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She can already feel him inside her as she ends the call.

  And exactly thirty-five minutes later Malin is kneeling on all fours on his bed in his sparsely furnished flat on Linnégatan and holding onto the thin metal bedstead as he pumps hard and deep into her and she screams out loud and he is hot and hard and unknown and familiar all at the same time.

  He’s like a whip inside me, she thinks.

  His hands are sharp barbed wire on my back. She wants to shout: Faster, deeper, you bastard, further in, harder, and it’s as if he can hear her thoughts because he thrusts harder into her each time his body moves and he digs his nails into her neck and she can feel his sweat dripping like cold rain down through her skin and into her flesh and bones and soul.

  Don’t resist.

  Explode instead.

  Let consciousness disappear in pain and beauty, let the little snakes with their many and varied faces retreat to their darkness.

  He’s lying on his back beside her on the grey sheet and his toned body stands out against the closed venetian blind. He’s talking, his voice is calm and clear, with all its hardness and warmth intact and she tries to understand what it is he’s asking her.

  ‘So you’ve split up?’

  She’s lying beside him and hears herself reply, with breathless, drifting words.

  ‘It wasn’t working. I ended up hitting him.’

  ‘It never works. How could you believe it could?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What about the Petersson case? Are you getting anywhere? If I were you, I’d take a good look at Goldman.’

  ‘Sod the case, Daniel.’

  His hoarse laughter. And she wants to creep next to him, lay her arms around him, but it’s as if he’s not really there beside her, unless it’s her capacity for closeness that doesn’t really exist?

  ‘Shall we go another round?’ His hand on my thigh, but I can’t feel it, and his neutral words seem to contain a desire to express something else, as if he had actually been waiting for me, as if he thinks it might somehow be possible to discover something together.

  Wasn’t that what we were just doing? Malin thinks.

  Then she stands up, gets dressed, and he watches her silently.

  ‘You’re going?’

  Idiotic question.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You can stay. I can make some sandwiches if you’re hungry. You look tired, maybe you could do with someone making a fuss of you for a while.’

  ‘Don’t talk crap, Daniel. I can’t think of a worse suggestion.’

  ‘Go on, then. The Hamlet’s probably still open.’

  ‘Shut up, Daniel. Just shut up.’

  Zacharias Martinsson has pushed Karin Johannison’s skirt high up over her stomach, he’s pulled off her white nylon tights and carried her through the laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab and put her down on her back on a stainless steel workbench.

  She is writhing before him and he is eating her, absorbing her moisture and sweet scent and taste, and he hears her groaning, is that the tenth, the twentieth time now?

  Gunilla back at home. No doubt waiting with the evening meal when he called to say he had to work late, that he probably wouldn’t be home until eleven at the earliest.

  He tries to bat away the image of his wife alone in the kitchen at home, but it refuses to budge.

  He found a reason to pay Karin a visit once last autumn, and she made time for him, leading him down to the laboratory to show him something, and it just happened. They had both been longing for it, and she whispers: Now, come inside, come in Zacharias, and he lifts her down onto the floor, pulls down his trousers and he’s hard and she’s warm and soft and pliable and she looks at him, whispers, My neck’s sweaty, lick the sweat from my neck.

  Maria Murvall’s face in front of Malin.

  The photo of the bruised rape victim’s face is lying on the parquet floor of the living room, and she twists and turns the image of her own obsession.

  Maria.

  Your secret.

  Preserved within you.

  Within your silently screaming body in the white room of Vadstena Mental Hospital, tomorrow I’m going to another hospital, to another mute person.

  The bells of St Lars Church strike ten and Malin wonders if Maria is asleep now, and if she is asleep, what would she be dreaming of?

  Tove.

  Probably on the bus with her friend now.

  She won’t come here. And who can blame her, the way I’ve been behaving? I pleaded with her, and she’s probably like everyone else deep down. If they catch a glimpse of weakness, they take the chance to show their own power.

  Did I really just think that, about my own daughter?

  Malin stops mid-thought, feels shame take a sucking grasp of her body.

  Thrusts the thought away.

  Who was she going to the cinema with? A boy? How can I let go after what happened? The evil disappears, diminishes in memory over time. Only a hesitant electricity remains as a vague fear, doesn’t it? A fear that can excuse anything.

  I don’t understand all this. I don’t understand myself.

  And Janne. His warmth like a vanishing dream deep inside a memory. She doesn’t want to talk to him, doesn’t want to ask for forgiveness. What sort of person am I? she wonders. Capable of feeling such derision towards my own love?

  Malin goes out into the kitchen and gets the bottle of tequila from the cupboard above the fridge.

  Half left.

  She raises the bottle to her lips.

  What’s this autumn doing to you, Malin Fors? To all of you?

  Where is it going to take you?

  Look where it took me.

  Something you should know: sometimes I’ve felt Andreas close to me, I’ve been able to feel his breath, free from any heat or cold or scent. I haven’t been able to see or hear him, but I know he’s both near me and as far away as he can get.

  Jasmin’s here too, part of her.

  Should I be scared of them?

  Do they wish me harm now?

  My world is white. Theirs may be black or grey and cold as the night when the car rolled into the memory of both the living and the dead.

  You can’t find out my secret, Malin, and if you did, it probably wouldn’t help you. There’s power in secrets.

  My secret?

  Uncover it if you want to.

  Follow the trail all the way out into loneliness and fear.

  Maybe I can have forgiveness then.

  If there’s any reason for it.

  Forgiveness.

  The word zigzags through Janne’s head as he makes a sandwich for Tove, and he looks over at the kitchen worktop where Malin stood screaming just a week ago, where she raised her hand and hit him.

  Can you spread forgiveness over time?

  How can we approach forgiveness, Malin and me? Because somehow it’s as if we can only do one thing together: feel that we have some sort of debt to each other, that our lives are nothing but an insult, an inadequacy, an injustice that needs to be apologised for.

  Have we grown too old, Malin?

  How long must an apology be allowed to work between people like us? Twelve years. Thirteen?

  Tove likes liver pâté with pickled gherkins.

  She’s sitting watching television upstairs.

  Curled up in its glow.

  At home here.

  You’re going to want me to apologise for her making that choice, Malin. Aren’t you?

  She’s been to the cinema with her friend Frida.

  Seems to steer clear of boyfriends, hasn’t really had one since Markus. Since Finspång.
>
  ‘The sandwiches are ready, Tove. Do you want herbal or ginger tea?’

  No answer from upstairs.

  Maybe she’s fallen asleep.

  Tove leans back on the sofa and zaps through the channels.

  Desperate Housewives. Some reality show. A football match. She ends up watching a documentary about an artist who’s made a sculpture of one of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center, a woman falling to the ground. The sculpture was going to be placed where the towers stood, but people said it was degenerate. Unworthy.

  As if they refused to accept that there were people who were forced to jump from the buildings.

  She takes a bite of her sandwich.

  She couldn’t handle going to see Mum. Not tonight. Tonight she just wants to sit in the darkness and watch television, hear Dad doing whatever he’s doing downstairs.

  And the sculpture on television.

  A crouching bronze figure. Slight in the wind, just like in the real world. It looks like you, Mum, Tove thinks. And she wants to go down to Dad, ask him to take her home to Mum’s, see how she is, maybe stay there with her. But Dad probably wouldn’t want to do that. And maybe Mum would be cross if they just showed up like that.

  Her mobile buzzes.

  A text message from Sara. Tove taps a reply as the television shows a close-up of the sculpture’s frightened face, its shimmering bronze hair floating in the wind.

  44

  Thursday, 30 October

  Zeke Martinsson looks at the clock at the top corner of the screen.

  8.49. Still relatively calm in the station, everyone must be busy somewhere else. No morning meeting today, they went through everything in enough detail yesterday, everyone knows what they’ve got to do.

  Malin should have been here long ago. They ought to be well on their way to Söderköping by now.

  Where are you, Malin?

  Down in the gym? Hardly.

  Has something come up to keep you away? Doesn’t seem likely.

  Did you feel like giving in to the pain yesterday?

  To drink?

  Gunilla wondered why he got home so late, even though he’d called to say he’d be working. He stood in the kitchen and lied straight to her face without a moment’s hesitation, and without managing to feel any shame. Instead he felt sorry for her, for having a man who could betray her without hesitation after so many years of marriage. And he had fallen asleep quickly, imagining Karin Johannison’s thighs around him.

  Zeke looks around at his colleagues. Some in uniforms. Some without. Focused yet somehow aimless. What do you all want, really?

  Malin doesn’t know what she wants, yet she still does it every day. Here, in this open-plan office she gets straight down to the task of trying to make people believe that no harm can come to them.

  So where are you, Malin? Zeke’s phoned three times, twice on her mobile and once on her landline, but no answer. Maybe she’s at Janne’s?

  No answer at Janne’s either.

  Högfeldt?

  Too complicated. I don’t know anything about what they get up to.

  ‘Where’s Malin? Shouldn’t you be in Söderköping by now?’

  Sven Sjöman’s tired, somehow compressed voice as he calls from the lift door.

  Zeke gets up.

  Gives Sven a look, and Sven frowns and looks as if he’s thinking that she might have messed up badly, maybe we should have taken her problems even more seriously?

  The two detectives meet in the middle of the room.

  Look at each other.

  ‘I think she’s at home,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Sven says.

  Zeke rings Malin’s doorbell and hears the angry signal on the other side of the door.

  Sven standing silently beside him, wearing one of the force’s dark-blue padded raincoats.

  No talking in the car.

  What would they say?

  Zeke rings again.

  Again.

  Sven opens the letterbox and peers in, and the sound of heavy breathing, a sleeping person’s movements, seeps out to the stairwell.

  ‘Have you got a skeleton key?’

  ‘I keep one on my key ring,’ Zeke says.

  ‘She’s lying on the hall floor.’

  Zeke shakes his head, suppresses the instinctive anxiety gripping his stomach and focuses on action.

  She’s breathing.

  Asleep.

  Could be injured.

  ‘Give me the key,’ Sven says, and a few seconds later the door is open and they see Malin on the hall floor, a white T-shirt pulled up above her navel, little pink hearts on her underwear.

  No blood.

  No bruising, no wounds, just the sound of heavy, longed-for sleep, and a strong smell of alcohol.

  An empty tequila bottle.

  The Correspondent next to her head.

  They kneel at her side, look at each other, no need to ask the question that’s going through both their heads.

  What are we going to do now?

  Turn off the rain. It’s too cold. And it’s drumming on my skin in a bloody annoying way, and what on earth’s that, so cold against my legs?

  I don’t want anything to do with this, and who are those people talking?

  Janne.

  Yell: ‘Daniel, fucking stop doing that!’

  Fucking stop.

  And the drops keep drumming and they’re icy cold and what am I doing outside with no clothes on in this weather and what are they saying?

  Sven. Zeke.

  What the hell are you doing here?

  ‘Hold onto her.’

  ‘Sit still.’

  Fabric against my body. Zeke’s face, his shaved head, and he looks focused, Sven, are you there, and I see the bathroom now, the shower, I can feel it against my head and shit, shit, the water’s cold, and I see them now, both of them, I’m sitting in the bath and they’re showering me and my T-shirt’s clinging to my body and my knickers, the stupidest pair I’ve got, they hardly even cover the hair down there, and just stop . . .

  ‘Stop it, I know what your fucking game is!’

  She flails with her arms.

  Tries to force the shower-head away.

  Drops.

  But the liquid ice, the small sharp needles batter her, forcing her back.

  ‘Let me sleep, you bastards!’

  The dressing gown is warm against her skin and the coffee slipping down her throat is hot. Her head is throbbing, and Malin wonders if she’s seeing double, with two Svens and two Zekes and she wants to scream out loud, or drink more, but the look in their eyes holds her back.

  Sven on a chair by the window. Zeke standing by the sink, looking first at the broken Ikea clock and then at a pigeon that settles on the windowsill for a few seconds before flying off towards the church tower.

  Say something.

  Tell me off.

  Tell me I’m a bloody awful person.

  A weak-willed drunk, just someone else who can’t resist the slightest internal demon.

  Call me a shit. An arsehole.

  But neither of her two colleagues says anything.

  They’ve forced her to take two aspirins and two hydration tablets, and now she knows they’re expecting her to finish the coffee.

  They go out into the hall, she can hear them talking. Hears Sven say: ‘I’ll keep an eye out, keep her on her feet, we can’t manage without . . .’

  Zeke: ‘She needs a detox clinic.’

  Is that really what he says? I must have heard wrong. He’d never say something like that.

  They come back. They stand beside her in the kitchen without speaking.

  And when the coffee is finished Sven says: ‘Get some clothes on, then you and Zeke get over to Söderköping. You’ve got a job to do.’

  Somehow Malin has survived the drive, she has no idea how, and now, just before lunchtime, she and Zeke are standing in a room with flowery wallpaper in Söderköping’s rehabilitation home. In fron
t of them sits Ingeborg Sandsten in a deep-red armchair. Beside her lies Jasmin Sandsten in a blue wheelchair, and under a leaf-green blanket they can see her spastic body, twisted by years of involuntary muscle spasms. One of her brown eyes is open, the other closed, and her gaze betrays no sign of conscious life. Jasmin Sandsten breathes in heavy rattles and sometimes lets out a growling sound, and every time the sound escapes from her mouth her mother reaches over and wipes the saliva from the corner of her lips with her right hand.

  A window in the background. A bare, wind-tormented tree, a desolate canal path that seems to be waiting for summer visitors on bikes and the canal company’s old white-painted passenger boats full of American tourists.

  A mother who has never strayed from her daughter’s side, Malin thinks, feeling a deep respect for the two strangers in the room. Even if Jasmin doesn’t know what’s going on around her, she must know that she hasn’t been abandoned. Do you know, Malin thinks as she looks at the girl in the wheelchair, that you’ve got pure love on your side? Your mother is what people ought to be like. Isn’t she?

  If Tove had ended up like this.

  What would I have done? I can’t even bear to think about it.

  ‘We should have been in Tenerife,’ Ingeborg Sandsten said, laying her thin hands on her equally thin thighs. ‘At the Vintersol rehabilitation centre, but they turned us down at the last minute when they found out how badly handicapped Jasmin is. So we came here instead. This is very nice too.’

  Malin’s first thought is: ‘What a coincidence. I’m just back from there,’ but that would have been an insult to the mother and daughter who never made it.

  Ingeborg Sandsten’s face is thin and lined, showing signs of never-ending exhaustion, and the woman’s tiredness makes Malin feel more alert.

  ‘I’ve looked after Jasmin since the accident. I get money from the council to be her carer.’

  ‘Can she hear us?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘The doctors say she can’t. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think she can.’

  ‘Our colleagues spoke to your former husband yesterday,’ Malin says.

  ‘He’s still angry.’

  ‘Has he spoken to you? Have you heard what we suspect happened on the night of the accident?’

  ‘Yes, he called me.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘It might be true, but it doesn’t make any difference, does it?’