Autumn Killing (14 page)

Over the radio Malin says quietly: ‘Get out and cover us when we follow him inside the barn.’

The gravel and mud outside the barn sticks to their shoes. Malin looks towards the building, feels the rain getting harder as they walk the few metres from the car to the barn door. Behind them is the villa, built in the Italian style, presumably Fågelsjö’s home. If he’s got a family, they don’t seem to be in. The two uniforms have taken out their Sig Sauers, taking cover behind the car doors, ready to open fire if anything goes wrong.

Zeke beside her, both of them holding their pistols in front of them as Malin kicks open the door of the barn and shouts: ‘Fredrik Fågelsjö. We know you’re in there. Come out. We just want to talk to you.’

Silence.

Not a sound from the manure-stinking building.

Trying to run, Malin thinks, would be the most stupid thing you could do. Where would you go? Goldman. He stayed on the run for ten years. So it is possible. But you’re hiding in there, aren’t you? Waiting for us. You might be armed. People like you always have at least a hunting rifle. Are you waiting for us with a gun?

Talking to herself like that helps her stay focused, and stops the fear from taking over. Into the darkness now, Malin. Whatever’s waiting inside.

‘I’ll go first,’ Zeke says, and Malin is grateful. Zeke never backs down when it comes to the crunch.

He steps inside the barn and Malin follows him. Black and dark, with a smell of fresh manure and some other indefinable animal waste. There’s light from one corner, opening onto a field, Zeke runs towards it and Malin follows.

‘Shit,’ Zeke yells. ‘He must have gone straight through.’

They rush over to the open door.

Some hundred metres away, down in the field, through the rain and fog, Fågelsjö is running, dressed in brown trousers and what must be a green oilskin. He stumbles and gets up, runs a bit further, past a tree that’s still got a few leaves.

‘Stop!’ Malin shouts. ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot.’

Which she wouldn’t do. They’ve got nothing on Fågelsjö, and running from the police isn’t sufficient justification for firing.

But it’s as if all the air goes out of him. He stops, turns around, raises his empty hands and looks at her and Zeke, who are slowly approaching him, weapons drawn.

He’s swaying back and forth.

You’re drunk, Malin thinks, then shouts: ‘Lie down. Lie down.’

And Fredrik Fågelsjö lies down on his stomach in the mud as Malin puts a pair of handcuffs on his wrists behind his back. A filthy, green, classic Barbour jacket.

He stinks of alcohol, but says nothing, maybe he can’t talk with his face on the ground.

‘What the hell was all that in aid of?’ Malin says, but Fågelsjö doesn’t reply.

‘What the hell happened?’

Zeke’s hands are shaking slightly on the steering wheel as they drive back towards Linköping, past the white-tiled block of flats in Skäggetorp and the big Arla dairy in Tornby. They pass one of the
Correspondent
’s reporters’ cars. Is that Daniel driving? They’re utterly tireless, those vultures.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Malin says. The adrenalin has dropped, her headache and angst are back, and a clearly intoxicated Fredrik Fågelsjö is safely installed in the back seat of the patrol car. Malin didn’t want him in the car with them, she and Zeke both needed time to calm down.

A van from the local television news.

‘But maybe,’ Malin goes on, ‘he’s involved in this somehow and he got it into his head that we know, and that’s why he tried to escape. And then realised how pointless it was out in the field, in all that rain.’

‘Or else he was just drunk and panicked when we tried to stop him,’ Zeke says.

‘Well, we’ll find out when we question him. But he could very well be our man,’ Malin replies, but she’s thinking that there’s something here that doesn’t add up, that the case can’t be that simple. Or can it?

Her mobile rings and she sees Sven Sjöman’s name on the display.

‘I’ve heard,’ Sven says. ‘Very odd. Could it be him? What do you think?’

‘Maybe. We’ll interview him when we get back to the station.’

‘Johan and Waldemar can do that,’ Sven says. ‘You two can try to get hold of Katarina Fågelsjö. Put her under pressure while her brother’s idiotic behaviour’s still fresh.’

Malin feels like protesting at first. Then she relaxes. If there’s anyone who can get anything out of Fredrik Fågelsjö, it’s Waldemar Ekenberg.

Fredrik didn’t say a word when they pulled him to his feet and led him back over the field. He maintained his silence as they put him in the patrol car.

‘OK. That’s what we’ll do,’ Malin says. ‘Anything else?’

‘Not much. Johan and Waldemar have called a number of people and companies whose names crop up in Petersson’s files. But it hasn’t led to anything.’

‘Any signs of a lover?’

‘No love at all,’ Sven replies.

Katarina Fågelsjö answered her phone.

Was prepared to see them, and now Malin and Zeke are heading along Brokindsleden in silence through the dim afternoon light.

They’re both trying to catch their breath, to get back to their normal energy levels before they see her.

They drive past the development of detached houses in Hjulsbro.

In Malin’s social studies textbook the area was mentioned as an upper-class reserve alongside the Upper East Side in New York City, but the upper-class don’t live here. More like the moneyed middle-class.

In Hjulsbro the doctors’ villas huddle together, nondescript from the outside, but large and tastefully furnished when you get inside. One of the most expensive and prestigious residential areas of the city, but still a bit feeble somehow, compared to Djursholm in Stockholm or Örgryte in Gothenburg.

As they drive through the area Malin can understand everyone who grows up in a provincial city and moves to a larger one as soon as they possibly can, a world with greater depths and heights than an ordinary, godforsaken Swedish city can offer, no matter how jumped-up it is.

Stockholm.

She lived there with Tove while she was studying at the Police Academy. In a sublet one-room flat in Traneberg, and all she can remember is studying and trips to the nursery, babysitters found in the local papers, young girls who were expensive and unreliable, and the fact that Stockholm didn’t have a damn thing to offer an impoverished single mother. The whole city felt shut off, as if all its opportunities and secrets could never be hers, and which seemed to mock her relentlessly as a result.

The exact opposite must have been true for Jerry Petersson.

Malin had been offered a post in Stockholm several times, most recently last summer when there was a vacancy in the Violent Crime Unit and the boss, someone called Kornman, had tried to headhunt her. He called her in person, said he was familiar with her work, and asked if she felt like expanding her territory.

Malin had a feeling they needed more women.

She’d just got the life she dreamed of with Janne and Tove, before everything went to hell. So she had turned the offer down.

And now, in the car, she’s cursing herself. A fresh start might be just what I need? Or would the big city break me? Mind you, a small city seems to be able to do that well enough.

Almost, anyway.

The radio is on.

She persuaded Zeke that they shouldn’t listen to his choral music, and he agreed to listen to good old local radio.

The final notes of Grand Archives’ ‘Torn Blue Foam Couch’ have just faded away, and now Malin can hear the low voice of her friend, radio presenter Helen Aneman.

She’s talking about their victim.

About Jerry Petersson, for whom no one seems to feel sorry, about whom no one seems to care much. And no one seems particularly upset about what’s happened.

But somewhere there’s someone who misses you, Malin thinks as she listens to Helen, and I’m going to make sure that person knows what really happened. Maybe your father, we’ll deal with him in the fullness of time. You had no brothers or sisters, and your mother’s dead, we know that much. Maybe a woman, or maybe even a child, even if you didn’t have any of your own.

‘One of the city’s wealthiest sons has passed away,’ Helen says. ‘The IT millionaire, according to the rumours the criminals’ friend, an exciting character that we might not get to know much about. He bought Skogså a year or so ago, the famous seat of the aristocratic Fågelsjö dynasty . . . Petersson may not have been the best-behaved person in the world, but surely he didn’t deserve a fate like that? What do you think? Call in if you’ve got anything to say about Jerry Petersson.’

A Madonna song.

‘American Pie’.

Zeke sings along. Maybe the song makes him think about Martin in Vancouver? About his grandchild? Or maybe they sing it in that choir he belongs to?

They’re past Hjulsbro now.

The suffocating, petit bourgeois enclave left behind.

Zeke accelerates and the car responds. They turn off.

Ahead of them she can see Landeryd Golf Club. The huge balloon-like building, home to the city’s driving range.

A golfer’s paradise in this autumn hell.

Where golf balls rain through the air.

The golf balls are whining through the air under the metal roof of the hangar-like building, several hundred metres long, bouncing high as they land.

Thirteen places.

The sound the clubs make when they strike the balls is like being hit over the ear.

A bucket of fifty balls costs two hundred kronor. An insignificant sum to anyone who belongs to any of the city’s golf clubs.

Putters.

Wooden clubs.

Jerry Petersson was struck on the back of the head with a blunt object, but hardly a golf club, Malin thinks as they approach the slender, tall figure of Katarina Fågelsjö.

‘I’m in thirteen. At the far end, next to the wall.’

No surprise when they called to say they wanted to talk to her, she knew what had happened, but could hardly be aware of what her brother has just done.

Aggressive swings, curses, balls hitting the walls and ceiling, and the noise is like the inside of a swimming pool, and there’s a similarly stale, damp smell, just without the chlorine.

People voluntarily spend the whole afternoon here, Malin thinks as she studies Katarina as she takes an apparently light and elegant swing. Her body is strong, and it’s clear that she possesses the self-confidence about herself and her life that everyone with her background has, imprinted on them from the day they open their eyes and see the world for the first time.

Katarina raises a metal club, takes aim and drops her shoulder, and the club makes a fine arc down towards the ball on the tee in the astroturf.

She must have a low handicap, Malin thinks. And she’s right-handed.

Katarina must have seen them from the corner of her eye.

She stops, turns around, looks at them, and steps down from the low platform she’s standing on. She holds out her hand, and Malin thinks that she must have been beautiful once, that she almost is now, with the same sharp nose as her brother, fine cheekbones, but there are too many wrinkles in her forehead, too much grey in her shoulder-length blonde hair.

Bitter wrinkles. Evidence of discontent around her mouth. Sad eyes, full of a peculiar longing.

She says hello to Malin first, then Zeke.

They show their ID.

Katarina runs a hand over her forehead and Malin thinks that she’s probably only five years older than me, she could have been in the same school as me, ahead of me, the same school as Jerry Petersson. If she didn’t go to a private school like Sigtuna or Lundsberg.

‘Can we do this here?’ Katarina asks, leaning her club on the ground. ‘Or shall we go to the restaurant?’

‘We can do it here,’ Malin says. ‘You know why we want to talk to you? We didn’t have time to say over the phone.’

‘Jerry Petersson. I can put two and two together.’

‘And the fact that your brother tried to drive away from us today.’

Katarina’s mouth drops open, her eyebrows rise briefly, but just a few seconds later she’s collected herself again.

‘My brother did what?’

Malin tells her about the car chase, how he tried to escape when they attempted to talk to him, and that he is now being questioned at the police station.

‘So he was leaving the Ekoxen?’ Katarina said. ‘He was probably worried you were going to get him for drink-driving. He’s been caught before, after a friend’s party three years ago, so this time he’d have ended up in prison.’

Drink-driving. Driving under the influence of alcohol. I did that yesterday, Malin thinks, batting the thought aside like a golf ball.

‘We caught him,’ Zeke says. ‘And he was drunk.’

‘Maybe he tried to escape because he had something to do with Jerry Petersson’s murder?’ Malin asks, hoping the direct question will provoke a reaction.

‘What, my brother kill someone? Hardly.’ Katarina’s face is completely blank as she waits for the next question, and Malin feels tired just looking at it. It’s almost five o’clock already, and even though Malin knows they need to get further with the investigation, all she wants is to be at home, having a shower, and then what?

Feel sorry for myself.

Fucking sorry.

Liquidly sorry.

Her headache has faded, but her body is screaming for more, her anxiety is like a fist around her heart. Have to get a grip on a hell of a lot of different things. Can I handle that?

And now this woman in front of me, stuck-up and stroppy, yet still somehow open and pleasant. Is that what they call social competence?

‘So you don’t believe that?’ Zeke asks.

‘My brother’s harmless. Maybe not entirely, but he’s certainly not violent.’

‘Can you tell us anything about him?’ Zeke asks.

‘He can do that better himself.’

Katarina pulls another club from her bag. Looks it up and down.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Malin says, thinking: focus on Katarina herself instead.

‘What were you doing last night and this morning?’

‘My father was with me yesterday evening. We were drinking tea.’