Autumn Killing (17 page)

‘Which is black,’ Zeke adds.

The fish, Malin thinks. What’s happened to them? They can’t have anywhere to go if the moat’s been drained? I’m one of those fish. I’m drowning in the air, isn’t that what fish do?

‘Prada?’ Waldemar says.

‘Karin noted the label in her report,’ Sven says. ‘So it must be fairly smart.’

Then he turns to Malin, says: ‘Petersson was found by tenant farmers, Göte Lindman and Ingmar Johansson, who came to the castle to go deer hunting with Petersson. What did they have to say?’

Malin takes a deep breath.

Recalls the conversations from memory.

She can still taste the tequila in her mouth, and wants more, but instead she gives a short summary of the interviews.

‘Does anything point to them?’ Sven says once she’s finished.

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll have to keep the option open. After all, their livelihoods are probably dependent upon those tenancies. We’ll have to try to find out if the details of the contracts check out. One of them could have lost it if his whole income was threatened.’

Sven nods.

‘See what you can find in the files.’

‘They found the door open,’ Malin goes on. ‘And the alarm switched off.’

She lets Zeke continue: ‘Which could mean that Petersson just popped out for some reason, and assumed that he’d be back inside in no time.’

Waldemar snorts, says: ‘So you’re suggesting that could mean Petersson knew the killer? That he just went out to say hello? That he could even have been expecting the murderer?’

‘That’s all possible,’ Zeke says. ‘But we can’t draw any definite conclusions. Maybe he went out to get things ready for the hunt and forgot to lock up, or just didn’t bother? Maybe he likes leaving the door open. Maybe he finds it exciting to see what happens if he does that.’

‘What do we know about the victim?’ Sven says.

Petersson.

Jerry.

His face as he was lifted out of the moat, the fish in his mouth, one eye open, surprised, and Malin remembers his appearance now, sees it in a different way in her memory, how handsome he must have been, fairly formidable, no doubt, in the right setting, somewhere like lunch at Riche or Sturehof or Prinsen up in Stockholm: all the places she never went to when she was at the Police Academy, the dicks in the shiny suits that she saw on the few occasions when she lost her bearings and ended up on Biblioteksgatan or Strandvägen.

Maybe Petersson was a bastard, the sort of person who thought he was better than everyone else?

Maybe.

But how much of a bastard?

Her thoughts turn to violence. She’s seen people adopt it in the course of their actions. How occasionally, reluctantly, she has thought that certain people deserve the violence they suffer, as a consequence of their own actions.

But is that really true? That violence can be deserved? Of course not.

‘Johan.’

Sven’s voice calls her back and she listens to Johan’s account of what they know about Jerry Petersson: that he was a successful company lawyer in Stockholm, that he made a fortune from an IT business he invested in at the start as a venture capitalist, that he represented Jochen Goldman the conman, that he bought Skogså Castle from Axel Fågelsjö, that he grew up in Berga, was single, no children, at least none that were registered as his, and a father who had been told of his death the previous day. They hadn’t managed to find out much about Jerry Petersson the person. Johan and Waldemar had spent yesterday afternoon calling around people whose names appeared in the files, including amongst others Petersson’s accountant in Stockholm, but they all described him as impeccable, brilliant and, as one woman put it: ‘bloody good-looking’.

‘We’ve got thousands of files and documents to go through,’ Johan concludes. ‘We might be able to find some potential motives for his murder in there. So far we’ve been concentrating on Goldman, simply as a way of making a start.’

‘I can check the IT business and the tenancy agreements,’ Lovisa says. ‘That shouldn’t take long.’ The young woman says the words with a professional self-assurance that Malin knows will be needed if she’s going to be working with Waldemar.

‘We’ve found a phone number in Spain that probably belongs to Goldman,’ Johan says. ‘In Tenerife. We tried calling once, but there was no answer. We thought maybe you could try calling, Malin.’

Waldemar adds: ‘It seems to make sense for you to call. What with your connections to the island,’ and to start with Malin is annoyed, the fact that her parents happen to live on Tenerife is no good reason for her to be the one who calls Jochen Goldman. But the irritation fades and she thinks that Johan and Waldemar are right, they’re respecting her way of working, her intuition and belief and faith that things fit together in ways that are often invisible to us.

There are scentless tracks to sniff out.

Invisible images.

Silent sounds.

Mum, Dad. Tenerife.

Goldman. Tenerife.

They don’t go together, but it might mean something.

‘I’ll call after the meeting,’ Malin says.

‘What about his will?’ Sven asks. ‘Do we know anything about that?’

‘No, not yet. But his father will inherit everything if there isn’t one,’ Johan says.

Then Zeke tells them what happened when they spoke to Axel and Katarina Fågelsjö. That Katarina has an alibi, that a stressed consultant at the University Hospital had confirmed she was with him. That Axel Fågelsjö has no alibi after ten o’clock.

That both of them claimed that the rumours going around that they sold the estate because of pressing financial difficulties weren’t true, that they didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of an upstart like Petersson, but that they didn’t appear to bear any particular malice towards him, or to have known him before the sale, even though Katarina went to the same high school as him.

‘And then there’s Fredrik Fågelsjö,’ Malin says. ‘The most dramatic thing that happened yesterday.’

Zeke describes the car chase. Johan the interview. That Fredrik Fågelsjö claims he panicked because he had been drinking.

‘We’ve got him in custody,’ Sven says. ‘We can hold him for a week for other charges related to his capture. We can talk to him again. Press him about the murder, even if he’s being held for something else. We’ll have to try to talk to him without his lawyer present. I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth. And I honestly don’t know if he’s lying about why he tried to run. He seems weak and strong at the same time. But it’s extremely suspicious that he tried to escape, isn’t it? For the time being, he’s our main suspect.

‘We need to check the Fågelsjös’ finances,’ Sven goes on. ‘Dig deeper into the circumstances surrounding the sale of Skogså, see if they really had hit hard times. Segerberg, can you look into that at the same time as everything else? And we need to run an archive check on the Fågelsjös. We’re already checking for Petersson.’

Lovisa smiles.

Nods.

‘I’m happy to work twenty hours a day until we solve this. I’ve got nothing else to do down here.’

She says this without irony, absolutely serious, and Malin sees herself in the young officer’s dedication. Admires it, but still feels like warning her that this job can consume your soul if you let it; it’s a thousand times easier to take refuge in other people’s misfortunes than it is to get to grips with your own, it’s a thousand times easier to hide in the dark than to see your own light.

‘What about their emails?’ Johan asks. ‘Their mobile phone records? Are we going to put in a request for those?’

‘It’s too soon for that,’ Sven says. ‘To get permission for that we need a more concrete connection to the murder. You’ll have to make do with checking Petersson’s records for now.’

‘What about his relatives?’ Sven goes on. ‘Is there really no one apart from the father?’

‘Looks like it,’ Johan says. ‘According to the population records.’

‘Girlfriends?’ Malin asks. ‘He can’t have lived out there all on his own, can he? Old girlfriends? Friends? Most perpetrators of this sort tend to belong to the victim’s closest circle of acquaintances. Any lovers?’

‘Not that we’ve found so far,’ Johan says.

‘And no one’s contacted us,’ Sven says. ‘You know how hard it is, trying to piece together someone’s life story.’

‘Maybe he was the sort who used to pay for his fucks?’ Waldemar says, and Malin’s first instinct is to tell him to show some respect, but something makes her think that Waldemar might be right, in which case no one from Jerry Petersson’s past would be coming forward. No prostitute would dare to identify herself, in the light of the sick legislation covering the subject in Sweden. A lot of men who pay for sex could actually get almost any woman they wanted. But they’re still drawn to undemanding, simple sex, free from any romantic entanglement.

‘The people we’ve spoken to only knew him professionally. He seems to have been careful to keep his private life private,’ Johan says.

A loner, Malin thinks. An eccentric loner in the biggest fucking castle in Östergötland. But no one, no one wants to be alone. Do they?

‘He wasn’t married,’ Sven says. ‘Could he have been homosexual?’

‘We don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘Have we spoken to Petersson’s father?’ she goes on. ‘He might know something. About Petersson’s sexuality, and a lot of other things besides.’

‘No,’ Sven says. ‘He’s only been informed of what’s happened so far. Malin, you and Zeke get on with that once you’ve tried calling Jochen Goldman.’

‘So soon?’ Zeke says. ‘His son only died yesterday.’

‘We can’t afford to wait.’

Malin nods in agreement.

Thinks with distaste about the coming visit. If there’s anything that’s hard to stomach when you’ve got a hangover, it’s the smell of incontinence pads and catheters.

Åleryd Care Home.

The last stop on the line. Maybe he’s even in one of the dementia wards?

‘What else?’

Sven’s voice, alert.

‘Malin, anything?’

He’s looking at her with an expression that says he knows how hungover she is, but that he’s not going to let it affect her work.

She shakes her head.

‘We spoke to a Linnea Sjöstedt,’ Zeke goes on. ‘An old lady who lives in a cottage on the Skogså estate. She threatened us with a shotgun when we stopped to talk to her.’

‘She did what?’ Sven says, and Malin sees Waldemar grinning.

‘Yes, she seemed scared,’ Zeke says. ‘She said you never know what you’re going to get out there. Well, she’s right about that.’

‘She soon calmed down,’ Malin says. ‘She saw a dark vehicle leave the estate sometime late at night. Well, she thinks she did. She wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or not.’

‘Dreaming?’

‘Yes, she says she has a bit of trouble distinguishing between dream and reality.’

Sven shakes his head.

‘What sort?’

‘She didn’t know.’

‘We’ll have to make a note of it. What does Axel Fågelsjö drive?’

‘A black Mercedes,’ Malin replies.

A dark car.

She could have seen Axel Fågelsjö. Or Johansson and Lindman as they arrived, Malin thinks. Or someone else. One of the children? Maybe Katarina Fågelsjö has another car? Someone from Petersson’s past? Goldman?

‘Have we had any tip-offs from the public?’

Waldemar sounds hopeful.

But Sven shakes his head.

‘We’ll have to keep working on what we’ve got for now. And hope the general public comes up with something now it’s out in the media and Karim has put out an appeal.’

‘The
Correspondent
’s gone big on this today,’ Johan says. ‘The national media too. Murder, car chase, Fredrik Fågelsjö in custody.’

‘Anything we don’t already know?’ Sven asks.

Johan shakes his head.

‘We’re bound to get something about his business dealings,’ Lovisa says. ‘Even if it’s anonymous. That’s if there’s anything there.’

‘If he was a bit shady, then he could have had contacts in the underworld here in the city,’ Waldemar says. ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to ask around among my contacts?’

‘You just want to avoid the paperwork,’ Sven says with a laugh. Then he’s serious again. ‘For the time being, you prioritise the paperwork, understood?’

Waldemar nods in response.

‘Malin,’ Sven goes on. ‘Call Goldman. See what he has to say, if that really is his number.’

Malin closes her eyes.

Fredrik Fågelsjö trying to run.

A body dumped in a moat. By Fredrik? Maybe, maybe not.

In some ways Petersson’s going to be left in the black water for ever.

Together with the dozens, maybe hundreds of other ancient souls, shackled in stone and time, Malin thinks. Caught in their own misfortune, their fate impossible to escape or come to terms with.

Loneliness runs like a red thread through human history, Malin thinks. It’s the underlying note of our stories.

Tenerife.

Like a poem, a sketch within Malin.

Scorched mountains, slumbering volcanoes, an eternally shining sun above a muddle of houses. Swaying palm trees, sunloungers in long rows along the beaches, pools casting glittering reflections on mutated liverspots, cancer forcing its way through the skin and on into the bloodstream, and in a few months the dreams are over, those dreams of eternal life in the sun.

Fraying pictures from her parents’ paradise.

The flat she knows her mother thinks is far too small, maybe that’s why she and Tove have only ever been invited out of politeness, because Mum thinks the place she’s found for herself in the sun is too meagre?

Maybe Mum just wants to be left in peace. Ever since I first learned the word I’ve had the feeling that you’re avoiding me, that you’re pulling away. Are you ashamed of something, Mum, but don’t want to admit it? Are you trying to avoid me so you don’t have to see yourself in the mirror? Maybe it’s OK to do that with grown-up children, but not the way you did with me when I was four, when I somehow worked out that that was what was going on.

And what would we say to each other, Mum? Malin thinks as she sits at her desk, surfing between various articles about Jochen Goldman.