Autumn Killing (16 page)

Malin drops Zeke off outside his red-painted house.

‘Take the car,’ he says. ‘But try to drive carefully.’

He slams the door behind him, not in anger but exhaustion, and walks away.

The black tiles of the house are like a reluctant drum for the raindrops.

There’s a light on in the kitchen.

A Saturday at work tomorrow. No chance of getting any time off while they’ve got a completely fresh murder.

Sven Sjöman has called a meeting for eight o’clock. Police Constable Aronsson spoke to Fredrik Fågelsjö’s wife Christina immediately after Johan Jakobsson and Waldemar Ekenberg finished questioning him. His wife gave him an alibi for the night of the murder, said he probably panicked when they tried to pull him over, that he sometimes drank too much but that he wasn’t an alcoholic.

Malin lets the engine run in neutral, trying to summon the energy to drive off into the evening, but how, tell me how, she thinks, am I going to be able to face the hours that remain of today?

She doesn’t feel up to getting to grips with anything. What happened yesterday feels unreal, as if it took place a thousand years ago, if it actually happened at all.

She puts the car in first gear.

As she’s about to drive off she sees Zeke open the front door and run out into the rain, she can see the raindrops almost caressing his shaved head, but it’s not a good feeling, she can tell from the look on his face.

Malin winds the window down.

‘Gunilla’s wondering if you’d like to stay for dinner?’

‘But not you?’

‘Don’t be daft, Fors. Come in. Get some hot food. It’ll do you good.’

‘Another time, Zeke. Say hi to Gunilla, and thank her for the offer.’

Gunilla?

Wouldn’t you rather have Karin Johannison in there? Malin thinks.

‘Come in and have something to eat with us,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s an order. Do you really want to be on your own tonight?’

Malin gives him a tired smile.

‘You don’t give me orders.’

She drives off with the window open, in the rear-view mirror she sees Zeke standing in the rain, as some autumn leaves shimmer rust-red in the glow of the car’s rear lights.

It’s dark outside as she drives into the city. Damn this darkness.

What a day. A murder. A dirty great murder. A crazy car chase. An old woman with a shotgun. No time to think about all the other crap. Sometimes she loves all the human manure this city is capable of producing.

Clothes.

Must have clothes.

Maybe I could go out to the house and quickly pick up what I need. But maybe Janne would ask me to stay, Tove would watch me with that pleading look in her eyes, and then I’d want to as well.

Then Malin catches a glimpse of her face in the rear-view mirror and she turns away, and suddenly realises what she’s done: she’s left the man she loves, she’s hit him, she put their daughter in mortal danger, and instead of helping herself move on she’s flown straight into her own crap, given in to her worst instincts, given in to her love of intoxication, for the soft-edged cotton-wool world where nothing exists. No past, no here and now, and no future. But it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, and she feels so ashamed that it takes over her breathing, the whole of her body, and she wants to drive out to the house in Malmslätt, but instead she drives to Tornby, to the Ikea car park, parks in a distant corner and gets out.

She stands in the rain and looks at the darkness around her. The place is completely anonymous and deserted, and even though it’s wide open, the light from the retail units doesn’t reach this far.

She heads over to the shopping centre. Wants to call Tove, ask her for advice, but she can’t. After all, that’s why I’m here, because I’ve fucked everything up beyond hope of salvation.

She moves through the rows of clothes in H&M, grabbing underwear and socks and bras, tops, trousers and a cardigan. She pays without even trying on the clothes, they ought to fit, the last thing I want right now is to look at myself in a full-length mirror, my swollen body, red face, shame-filled eyes.

She sinks onto a bench in the main walkway of the shopping centre. Looks over at the bookshop on the other side, the window full of self-help books.
How to Get Rich on Happiness
,
Self-Love!
,
How to be the Dream Partner!

Fucking hell, get me out of here, she thinks, as nausea takes a grip on her again.

Outside the newsagent’s she sees the flysheets for both
Expressen
and
Aftonbladet
:

Businessman Murdered in Castle.

Billionaire Murdered in Moat.

Which one’s going to sell best? The second one?

Half an hour later she’s sitting at the bar in the Hamlet pub. Tucked away at the end, but still within earshot of the old closet alcoholics who make up the regular clientele.

Two quick tequilas have made her vision agreeably foggy, the edges of the world cotton-wool soft and friendly, and it feels as if her heart has found a new, more forgiving rhythm.

Beer.

Warming spirits.

Happy people.

Malin looks around the bar. People enjoying each other’s company.

Mum and Dad. You only had one child, Malin thinks. Why? Dad, I’m sure you would have liked more. But you, Mum, I got in your way, didn’t I? That’s what you thought, isn’t it? You wanted to be more than just an increasingly peculiar secretary at Saab, didn’t you?

I’ve always wanted a brother. Damn you, Mum.

Tove, do you long for a brother?

Damn me.

‘I’ll have another,’ Malin says. ‘A double. And a beer to wash it down.’

‘Sure,’ the bartender says. ‘You can have whatever you want tonight, Malin.’

What do I want? Fredrik Fågelsjö thinks as he huddles on the bunk in his cell, absorbing the darkness around him, running his hand over the scratched wall.

Have I ever known?

He’s just spoken to his wife for the second time, just an hour ago.

She wasn’t angry this time either, demanded no explanation, and instead said just: ‘We miss you here. Come home soon.’

The children were asleep, she wanted to wake them but he said not to, let them sleep, I’d only have to lie to them about where I am.

Victoria, five years old.

Leopold, three.

He can feel the warmth of their bodies as he pulls the blanket around him to keep out the damp chill of the underground room.

He misses them, and Christina. He wants to know what he wants. This room doesn’t make him feel panicky. He doesn’t know why he didn’t answer the police’s questions, why he kept quiet and lied as Father had asked him to, as if that were somehow his natural role. But he was very vulgar, that aggressive policeman. And during the car chase earlier there had been a feeling of trying to direct his own life, an intoxicating rush of adrenalin and fear.

Fredrik breathes.

Who do I have to prove anything to, really? And Father, you could scarcely bring yourself to accept Christina and her well-educated parents. God knows what you’ve done to Katarina.

Fredrik closes his eyes.

Sees Christina lie with the children close to her in the double bed in the bedroom in the Villa Italia.

It won’t be easy, Fredrik thinks, but from now on nothing’s going to come between us.

What’s the bartender saying to me? Malin thinks, as she tries to keep her balance on the bar stool, not wanting to fall and lose sight of the bottles on the illuminated shelves along the wall.

There’s quite a crowd behind her. She’s almost drunk, but she hasn’t spoken to anyone.

Then someone taps her on the back.

She turns around. But there’s no one there, just her own reflection in the mirror above the bottles.

‘I thought I felt someone tap me on the back?’ she says, and the bartender grins.

‘You’re imagining things, Malin. There’s no one there,’ and then she feels it again, sees the empty mirror, but she doesn’t turn around, just says: ‘Stop doing that.’

In her intoxication she imagines she can hear a cacophony of voices gathering into one single one, just like out at the forest around Skogså.

‘I do what I want,’ the voice says.

‘How did I end up in the water, you have to find out,’ it goes on a moment later. ‘Who had I harmed that badly?’

‘Go to hell,’ Malin whispers. ‘Let me drink in peace.’

‘Do you miss Tove?’ the voice asks.

‘Tove could die,’ Malin yells, ‘do you hear? And it’s my fault.’ She doesn’t notice that the people in the pub have fallen silent, that they’re staring at her, wondering why she’s tossing words into thin air.

A new tap on the back.

She turns around.

‘Time to go home now, Malin,’ the bartender says, close to her face.

She shakes her head.

‘I’m OK. Give me a double. Please.’

Malin’s head rocks from a gentle blow.

Her body, if it’s where it ought to be, feels swollen, and every muscle and sinew aches, and what’s going on with her head?

Am I dreaming?

I’m still Malin, and the little round planets a metre or so above my eyes, why do they look like the drawer handles on the cupboard in the hall?

The bed feels hard beneath me, but I still just want to sleep, sleep, sleep.

Don’t want to wake up. And why’s the bed so hard?

The sheet is scratching my cheek, it’s blue, hard as an old rag-rug, and that circle way up there looks like the light in the hall. There’s a smell of newsprint, pain. Light flooding in from the left hurting my eyes, what is it that’s wrong?

Go back to sleep, Malin.

Forget about today.

Gradually her gaze clears and she realises that she’s lying on the floor of the hall, just behind the door. She must have fallen asleep there last night, so drunk that she couldn’t even get to bed.

But the blow to her head?

A copy of
Svenska Dagbladet
on the floor beside her. Must be the academics’ weekend subscription, and the evangelical bastards forgot to change the address when they moved. Unless it’s been delivered to the wrong address.

Malin crawls up into a sitting position. She pushes away the bag of clothes that she must have managed to bring home from the pub in spite of everything.

IT Millionaire Murdered.

The newspaper’s type is restrained.

She slithers to the kitchen, looks at the Ikea clock. Half past seven. A working weekend.

If I concentrate I can still make it to the morning meeting, she thinks, but I’ll have to hurry.

She gets up, comes close to falling, fainting, and there’s only one solution. The bottle of tequila is still on the floor of the living room where she left it the day before yesterday. She gets the bottle, takes seven deep swigs, and by the second she can feel the aches and pains and nausea leaving her body.

A shower. Teeth-brushing, mouthwash and I’m ready for the morning meeting.

She pulls on the jeans and long-sleeved red cotton top she bought yesterday, the damn trousers are hard to fasten, her stomach is swollen with alcohol and the red top makes her face look even more like a tomato than it already does.

She calls a taxi, they’ll have to use another car for work today, she left yesterday’s outside the Hamlet.

In the taxi on the way to the police station she reads the paper that the churchy students were probably missing by now.

About their case.

About lawyer Jerry Petersson, the fact that he had been murdered, a bit about his dealings with Goldman, his dubious reputation. Money, figures. Nothing they don’t already know.

The taxi blows its horn. The rain is clinging to its chassis.

Her body seems to be working.

She tosses the newspaper on the back seat.

When they reach the turning into the old barracks building where the police and other authorities are based, she asks the taxi-driver to stop.

‘I can drive all the way to the police station,’ he says. ‘That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? I recognise you from the paper.’

‘I’ll get out here.’

Evidently I still care a bit about what my colleagues think, Malin thinks as she slams the door of the taxi.

Outside the police station a group of reporters is standing in the rain, Daniel Högfeldt among them. Even in shitty weather like this he manages to look alert.

She goes into the station the back way, through the premises of the district court. As she walks down the corridor past the pale wooden doors of the courtrooms she imagines she can hear rifle shots. She hears them, but realises the sounds are only inside her, and she can’t even be bothered to wonder why.

‘This is Lovisa Segerberg,’ Sven Sjöman says, putting one hand on the shoulder of the attractive, blonde, plain-clothed woman, maybe thirty years old. ‘She’s from Economic Crime in Stockholm. She’s here to help us with Petersson’s files. A qualified civil economist. And a police officer. Maybe we should introduce ourselves?’

Zeke, Johan Jakobsson, Waldemar Ekenberg and Malin all say hello and welcome Lovisa to the investigative team.

‘Take a seat,’ Sven says, and Lovisa sits down on an empty chair next to Malin, smiling a polite woman-to-woman smile that Malin doesn’t return. Instead she looks at her clothes, how her black knitted sweater with a rosette below her chest looks fashionable, that her black wool trousers are neatly pressed, and that there’s something unmistakably Stockholm about her whole appearance, and it makes Malin feel hopelessly unfashionable and obsolete in her jeans and cheap red cotton top.

‘Let’s start by summing up the state of the case so far,’ Sven says. ‘Day two. You know we have a suspect in custody, Fredrik Fågelsjö, but let’s start from the beginning. What else have we managed to find out about the murder of Jerry Petersson?’

The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 08.15.

The formalities and pleasantries took five minutes. It’s a good thing Lovisa’s here, Malin thinks. The rest of us can barely make sense of a simple tax declaration.

Sven begins by taking it upon himself to put together a timetable of Jerry Petersson’s last twenty-four hours alive. Then he goes on: ‘Unfortunately the examination of the crime scene hasn’t given us anything definite. The rain took care of that. No bloodstains on the gravel. We’ve had divers searching the bottom of the moat, but they haven’t found a knife or anything else that could be the murder weapon. We’ve drained the moat, but that didn’t give us anything either. And I’ve just received the forensic report on Petersson’s car. Nothing. At least we can rule out robbery as a motive, as we suspected yesterday. Nothing seems to be missing from the castle, and there are no signs that anyone searched through the building. And Petersson’s wallet was in the inside pocket of the Prada coat he was wearing, with more than three thousand in cash. We’re still checking Fredrik Fågelsjö’s Volvo.’