Autumn Killing (31 page)

You see, Malin, I’m keeping an eye on what you’re all doing.

It hasn’t been such a great morning for your colleagues. The prosecutor has ordered that Fredrik Fågelsjö be released from custody, he’s received a request from the lawyer, Ehrenstierna, which convinced him that Fågelsjö was unlikely to commit any further offences, and that he would remain at your disposal. ‘We can’t hold such a prominent member of the local community for a whole week on relatively minor offences.’

But you police still suspect him.

New Year’s Eve. When will that snow stop falling? When will those lawnmower blades fall silent?

Was I the one driving?

What was I doing at Fredrik Fågelsjö’s New Year party? I don’t want to remember, but it was one of those things people do, Malin, when we both want something yet somehow don’t, when we want to demonstrate our sovereignty, yet have to let go of it in order to get something.

Jonas is scared now.

I can feel it when I position myself just a few centimetres away from him. He knows that time has caught up with itself.

Jonas was on his way to work when the police came back. He tells them he spent the whole of the previous day at the trotting-track out in Mantorp.

Maybe he was the one driving after all?

Jochen is capable of playing with anyone just for the fun of it. Without all those games his life is pointless.

Now the door to Jonas Karlsson’s block of flats closes.

Waldemar’s hand on his shoulder as they disappear inside the building. And I am with you, Malin,
beside your sleeping head ten thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine metres up in the air.

Secrets, Malin. You used to love secrets when you were a little girl, and now you’re obsessed with them.

The plane is moving through the atmosphere. You’re sleeping a dreamless sleep and you could do with it, you had to stop the taxi on the way to the airport so you could leap out and empty the previous day from your stomach.

Are you incorrigible, Malin?

You look so exhausted as you sit there leaning against the cold concave window, deaf to the roar of the engines. I actually feel like stroking your cheek, Malin, and that’s probably all you want, isn’t it?

Sinking into human warmth.

Sensing that it exists somewhere beyond the cold stones of the moat.

Jonas Karlsson has sat down on the sofa in his living room. Johan Jakobsson is sitting opposite him in an armchair, while Waldemar Ekenberg walks restlessly up and down the room. The coffee table is full of empty bottles and a squashed wine box, and the sour smell of drying alcohol stings their nostrils. But apart from the mess on the table, Jonas Karlsson’s flat is clean.

Waldemar’s long frame is shaking, his voice deep and coloured by a hundred thousand cigarettes.

‘You lied to us,’ he says, and Johan feels his voice make him shiver: the catch at the end of the words in spite of his local drawl, in spite of the smoker’s hoarseness.

Jonas Karlsson seems to have capitulated already, ready for the storm that’s coming his way now.

‘I didn’t . . .’

‘Shut up, you soppy git,’ Waldemar shouts. ‘Of course you fucking lied. Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve. Not you.’

‘I . . .’

And Johan wants to tell Waldemar to take it easy, to show a bit of consideration, but he stays silent. There’s something about the atmosphere in the room that he finds irresistible, against his will.

‘If you tell us the truth, there won’t necessarily be any consequences for you,’ Johan says. ‘It was so long ago . . .’

‘I wasn’t the one . . .’

And Johan looks into Jonas’s scared eyes, sees that he realises that everyone around here, either by media or rumour, will find out his story and whisper it behind his back.

Then Waldemar raises one hand, tenses his open palm, and lets it fall hard across Jonas Karlsson’s mouth, and Jonas Karlsson screams and blood trickles from a cracked lip.

Waldemar leans over him.

‘Do you want more? Do you?’

‘I . . .’

Another blow whines through the air, hits the back of Jonas Karlsson’s head, throwing him forward into the coffee table.

‘Well?’

‘I wasn’t the one driving,’ Jonas Karlsson yells. ‘It wasn’t me. Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.’

Malin’s woken up.

Her brain somehow shut off by the buzz of the plane, the constant rumble of the engines and the noise of the young children two rows in front. She has a retired couple next to her, suntanned, they’ve evidently spent a long time in the sun and could have been her parents. They smiled at her when she woke up, opening her hungover, bloodshot eyes.

The tin of Heineken in front of her is half empty. It’s calmed her body down, stifled the nausea.

An excursion to the heat.

But only physically. I want to get away, she thinks. She sees Jerry Petersson in the moat, his body drifting this way and that from the regular yet uneven movement of the water.

Looks like you were a bastard, Malin thinks. A real bastard. So why on earth do I care?

And then she hears a voice in the depths of her throbbing skull.

What else would you care about instead, Malin? Everything you ought to but can’t quite get to grips with?

‘OK, you’re going to tell us what happened.’

Waldemar Ekenberg’s voice is calm but commanding, and the words conceal the threat of further violence.

Waldemar has sat down beside Jonas Karlsson on the sofa, handing him a roll of toilet paper he’s just got from the bathroom, and Johan leans forward in his armchair and says: ‘Tell us the truth now. Jerry’s dead. He can’t do anything to you now.’

And Jonas Karlsson clears his throat, looks up, and starts to talk, with a piece of toilet paper stuck to the cut in his lip.

‘Jerry was at the party when I got there. I think he got a lift with someone else. At half past one Jerry wanted to go back into the city and I offered to drive him and the others. We went out to the car park where I’d left the car. Fredrik Fågelsjö had gone up to the castle with the people he wanted to carry on the party with, and we weren’t among them.’

‘So you were friends, you and Jerry?’

‘I was one of a lot of people in his gang. Friends? He didn’t have any friends. He could make you think you were his friend, sure. And I wanted to be his friend. I admired him, he was the sort of person you wanted to be, the sort you wanted to like you, at any price.’

‘So you admired him. Then what?’

‘The four of us, me, Jerry, Andreas and Jasmin were going to drive back to the city. When we got to the car Jerry announced that he wanted to drive. He was wound up about something, he’d been in a bad mood all evening. He got really aggressive when I refused at first. Shouting and screaming. So I threw him the keys, said: “You drive then, if it’s so fucking important,” and I got in the passenger seat and put my seat belt on, and Andreas and Jasmin got in the back, but they must have been too drunk to remember their belts.’

‘What was Jerry upset about?’

‘No idea. He always had loads of secrets.’

‘So you set off.’

Waldemar puts his arm around Jonas Karlsson’s shoulders.

‘Jerry really put his foot down.’

‘You didn’t get very far.’

‘We must have been doing sixty or seventy when we hit the bend. The wheels lost their grip and I remember thinking we were fucked, then the car was rolling over and over into that snow-covered field and it was like being inside a washing machine full of brilliant light, then everything stopped and it all went quiet. After a bit I saw Jerry hanging upside down beside me, he was struggling to get free, and he undid my belt, and if he was drunk before, the adrenalin must have cleared his head completely.’

Johan can see the scene in front of him.

The two young men staggering around in the snow, trying to protect themselves from the wind and the driving snow, then seeing the bodies further off in the field.

‘We saw them. Andreas and Jasmin. They were lying in the field.’

‘Did you go over to them?’

‘Yes. Blood was trickling from Jasmin’s ears, but she was still breathing.’

‘But you realised Andreas was dead?’

‘I think so.’

‘What next?’ Waldemar asks.

‘Jerry grabbed me by the arms and said: “I’m going to get done for this, I was drunk, but if we say you were driving I might get away with it.” He looked at me with his big blue eyes and I realised I’d never be able to say no to him. And I thought: What’s the point of Jerry’s life being ruined? He said: “If we say you were driving, the police will write it off as just an accident caused by ice, because you’re sober.”’

‘So you agreed?’ Johan asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Just like that? That sounds too straightforward to me.’

‘Jerry could be extremely persuasive. And he promised me all sorts of things before the police and the ambulance arrived. He promised to be my friend, and there was nothing I wanted more, it was like a dream come true. And he promised to give me money if he ever got rich.’

‘Did he become your friend?’

‘No, he moved to Lund, didn’t he?’

‘Did you ever get any money?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ever ask?’

‘No. It was so long afterwards when articles about his businesses started to appear in the papers.’

Waldemar snarls his words: ‘You never tried to blackmail him when things started to go well for him? Or when he moved back here? You never threatened to tell the truth?’

‘No. What did I stand to gain from that? If the truth came out then everyone in the city would know I’d lied, and I’d just look pathetic. I could even have been charged.’

‘So aren’t you?’ Waldemar says. ‘Pathetic, I mean?’

Jonas Karlsson laughs nervously.

‘That’s exactly what I am,’ he says.

‘It never occurred to you that the parents had a right to know what really happened?’

Jonas Karlsson gestures towards the bottles on the table.

‘It occurs to me every day.’

‘So you never tried to get any money from Jerry? You didn’t go out to see him that night? And then it all went wrong?’

‘That night I was around at a couple of friends’, we were drinking till the early hours. You can call them.’

‘You bet we’re going to call them,’ Waldemar says.

Jonas Karlsson wriggles out of Waldemar’s grasp. Gets up and stands in the middle of the room.

‘Jerry Petersson wasn’t like other people. And everything he promised me that night, he didn’t do any of it. But to this day I still think I did the right thing. Andreas was dead. Jasmin handicapped for life. They knew what they were doing when they got in the car, even if they were drunk. They were mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions. No one blamed me, it was written off as an accident, and accidents happen. So why ruin Jerry’s life? In other people’s eyes, you never escape something like that.’

‘You mean driving while drunk and causing the deaths of other people?’ Johan asks.

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Jonas Karlsson says, pulling the piece of toilet paper from his lip, which starts bleeding again.

The windscreen wipers are working frantically to keep the rain off, to keep the view clear. The clock on the dashboard says 13.35.

Through the windscreen Malin can see fields and clumps of woodland, red-painted houses, and the whole world up here seems to be covered with a dull ash.

Not so much as a single swim on Tenerife. No water for her burning body.

But she does feel a bit better now. The alcohol has cleared her blood enough for her to be able to drive from Norrköping to Linköping. She feels like going straight to the Folkunga School and storming into whatever lesson Tove is having and just hugging her. It’s almost a week since she fled the house after hitting Janne while she was drunk. Almost a week since the body was found in the moat.

The heat of Tenerife. The rain and cold. She’s put on the thick sweater with the Norwegian pattern that she took with her for when she got back.

But Tove will have to wait.

She’s spoken to Zeke. Got the latest updates about the case: that Fredrik Fågelsjö has been released, that Jonas Karlsson has admitted Jerry Petersson was driving, but that he had an alibi for the night and morning of the murder.

Malin has got the address of one of the parents of the boy who died that New Year’s Eve, a woman called Stina Ekström living in Linghem.

‘I can stop off on my way back,’ she told Zeke.

‘We could meet up there.’

‘I’ll do it on my own. Don’t worry.’

‘How was Tenerife?’

‘Hot.’

‘Your parents?’

‘Let’s talk again once I’ve spoken to Stina Ekström, if she’s home.’

Malin puts the radio on. As she gets closer to Linköping she manages to find the local station.

She recognises Helen Aneman’s soft, sensual voice. It’s been years since they last met, even though they live in the same city. They talk on the phone sometimes, agree that they should meet, but nothing ever comes of it.

Acquaintances rather than friends, Malin thinks as she listens to Helen talking about a dog show taking place in the Cloetta Center at the weekend, then, as Helen’s voice disappears, music spreads through the car and Malin feels her stomach clench. Why this song, why now?

‘Soon the angels will land . . . Dare I say that we have each other . . .?’

Ulf Lundell’s voice.

Janne’s body close to hers. Ridiculously romantic, the way they used to dance to this song in the living room of the house after sharing a bottle of wine, with Tove sleeping on the sofa, untroubled by the music.

Linghem.

The sign scarcely visible through the rain-sodden air.

Of all human nightmares, losing a child is the worst.

I was allowed to keep you, Tove, Malin thinks.

A car rolling into a deserted, frozen winter field.

The knock on the door.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you . . .’

Malin turns off towards Linghem, driving past a football pitch and a church. A solitary man in a hooded jacket is standing beside a headstone in the small, walled churchyard with a bunch of flowers in his hand, it looks as if he’s talking to himself.