Autumn Killing (36 page)

Malin feels the last remnants of the day’s nausea leave her body. Rehab.

Over my dead body.

Got it, Sven?

Not a chance in hell. I was just a bit down. I’m dealing with it, you’ve got to believe me, Sven.

A hand on Sven’s shoulder, a cup of tea on the table in front of him.

‘Your tea, Earl Grey, extra strong, just the way you like it.’

The rain is tapping stubbornly at the car roof.

Her stale breath fills the car as she pulls out her mobile and brings up Jochen Goldman’s number, but there’s no ringing tone, just a bleep followed by a message in Spanish, presumably saying that the person cannot be reached, or that the number is no longer in use, or something equally bloody irritating. Malin clicks to end the call, puts the mobile phone on the passenger seat, and wonders if it’s her or the damp air making the car smell of mould.

She starts the car.

Won’t tell Dad. Or Mum.

She drives home to her empty flat, hoping that she’ll be able to sleep.

Malin can’t sleep. Instead she looks out of the window, at the rain drawing jerky lines on the night sky.

Her body is warm under the covers, calm, not screaming for alcohol or anything else. She dares to allow the extent of her longing for Janne and Tove into the room.

She pulls the covers over her head.

Janne is under there. And Tove as a five-, six-, seven-, eight-, nine-year-old, every age she has ever been.

I love the idea of our love. That’s what I love. Isn’t it?

A knock at the window.

Twelve metres above the ground.

Impossible.

Another knock, the familiar sound of glass vibrating slightly.

She stays where she is. Waits for the sound to stop. Is there something rustling out there? She pulls off the covers. Leaps the few metres to the window.

Rain and darkness. An invisible body drifting above the rooftops?

Drink. Drink.

The words throbbing in her temples now. And then the knocking at the window, three long, three short, like a cry for help from some distant planet.

Am I the one crying out? Malin wonders when she’s back under the covers a few seconds later, waiting for more knocking that never comes.

I’m a long way away from you now, Malin
.

But still close.

You know who was knocking, don’t you? Maybe it was me, unless it was just your alcohol-raddled brain playing tricks on you.

Drink, Malin.

Darkness is snapping at your throat and you’ve shown yourself to be weak.

If only for alcohol, money or love.

I myself gave up on love on that New Year’s Eve. After that, I focused all my attention on money. I knew even then, there in my student room in Lund where I can see myself huddled over my law books, that money was the only way I would ever find love. That’s why I so eagerly ran my fingers over the thin, soft paper of those law textbooks.

The young man taps his finger against the silken paper of the law textbook.

He’s got plugs in his ears to shut out all the noise of his corridor in the block for students from Östergötland in Lund. He uses his implacable blue eyes to photograph the pages of the book. Look, see, memorise. Law is the simplest of subjects for him, words to fix in his memory, and then use as required.

He is in Lund for three years. He doesn’t need any longer to accumulate the points and the marks he needs to serve at the district court in Stockholm. Three years of forgetfulness, to suppress the narrowness of a city like Linköping, of a school like the Cathedral School, of a life like his has been.

Of course they are here as well, people with surnames that are inscribed with quill pens in the House of Nobility, but less notice is taken of them here.

He scales the façade of the Academic Association’s handsome building one night. Down below the girls stand and scream. The boys scream as well. He travels to Copenhagen to buy amphetamines so he can stay awake and study. He smuggles the pills beneath his foreskin, smiling at the customs officials in Malmö.

He keeps to the edges of the carnival that takes place during his second year. He arrives late at pubs and bars, shows his face, fuelling the rumours about who’s the smartest of all the smart students, about who gets the prettiest girls.

He is merely a body in Lund. Yet also whispers and guesses. Who is he, where does he come from, and one evening he beats up a boy from Linköping in a car park behind one of the student union buildings. He had told anyone who wanted to know who Jerry Petersson really was: a nobody. A nobody from a nothing flat in a nothing area of a nothing city.

‘You know nothing about me,’ he screams as he stands over the prostrate boy, who is no more than a black shape in the light of a solitary street lamp. ‘So you won’t say anything. You let me be whoever I want to be. Otherwise I’ll kill you, you bastard.’ He leans over, picks up a piece of metal from the ground, holds it like a knife against the boy’s throat, screams: ‘Do you hear this, do you hear them? Do you hear the lawnmower, you bastard?’

He learns all about the female gender. Its softness, its warmth, and that they’re all different and can be transformed in different ways, and that they can act as his chrysalis and give birth to him time after time after time.

He learns what physical longing means as he lies in his student room and dreams about the woman who should have been his, the woman he still dreams will one day be his.

Those dreams are his secret.

The secret that makes him human.

It’s getting closer, Malin.

You can feel it in your black dream, spun of secrets.

People who can’t make sense of their lives, who never get to grips with their fear. Crying for help with mute snake voices.

Condemned to wander in misery.

They’re all in your dream, Malin. He’s there, the boy.

Malin.

Who is that, whispering your name?

The world, all human life, all feelings cremated, all snakes slithering around the bloated hairless rats in the overflowing gutters of the city.

Only the fear remains.

The most ashen grey of all feelings.

I want to wake up now.

Maria.

I fell asleep far too early.

Wide awake, Fredrik Fågelsjö thinks as he looks at the bracket clock on the mantelpiece, how its black marble pillars seem to melt into the black stone of the open hearth. The clock is about to strike half past eleven.

Raw weather outside, dry heat in here. Lake Roxen raging wildly just a few hundred metres away.

The fire is crackling, the logs shimmering in tones of orange and glowing grey, the whole room smells of burning wood, of calm and security.

He turns the cognac glass with an easy hand, raising it to his nose and inhaling the aroma, the sweet fruit, and he thinks that he will never drink anything but Delamain. That the last thing he will drink in his life here on earth will be a glass of Delamain cognac.

It was good that Ehrenstierna could use his contacts. Those nights in the cell were terrible. Lonely, with far too much time to think. And he realised something, it came to him as that stuffy old superintendent was going on about his family, about Christina and the children. He realised that the money and Skogså and all that crap really didn’t matter at all. He’s got all that matters here, and Christina, their socially unequal love, and the children, are everything. What they have works, even if Christina has never got on with Father, even though she’s become one of them as the years have passed.

The children. He’s neglected them to get what he thought he wanted, what Father wanted.

I’ll have to cope with a month in Skänninge Prison next summer. I can do it. I know that now.

Christina and the children are staying with his parents-in-law. It was arranged long ago, and no time in custody would change that, they had agreed on that. But he would stay at home. Enjoy the Villa Italia in the autumn darkness.

They ought to be home soon.

Fredrik Fågelsjö loves the peace and quiet of the villa on an evening like this, but he’d quite like to hear the sound of the car pulling up now.

Hear the children rush up the steps in the rain.

Their footsteps.

Fredrik pours himself another cognac.

They’re still not back, and he wants to call his wife, but holds back the urge. They’ve probably just stayed to watch a film or they’re playing a game, one of those common parlour games that his mother-in-law, terrible woman, loves.

The castle.

It’s part of a dead man’s estate now, belongs to Petersson’s father. The police haven’t tracked down any other rightful heirs, but they’ve still got the money, thanks to some old bag in a branch of the family that they’ve never had anything to do with. Money that’s leaped out of their history.

Father’s going to make an offer.

The natural order restored.

Because who should live at Skogså if not us? Even if it isn’t really that important, it’s ours. And we need to pass it on.

Jerry Petersson.

Someone who moved out of his class. Who didn’t know his place, who never knew his place. That’s the simple way of looking at it, Fredrik thinks.

He was drowned in his own ambitions.

A solicitor named Stekänger is in charge of his estate. A good, quick offer and the matter will be dealt with, if Petersson’s father accepts it. If he refuses, we’ll raise the offer a little. The land is ours, and no kids except mine will get to play there, I feel that very strongly, against my own inclinations.

Then I’ll get to grips with the farming. Grow crops for biofuel and make the family a new fortune. I’ll show Father I know how it works, that I can create things and make them happen.

That I can be ruthless. Just like him.

That I’m not just a bank official who’s only good at losing money, that I can carry the family into the future.

Fredrik feels his cheeks burn as he thinks of the stock options, the losses, and how incredibly stupid he has been.

But now there’s money again.

I’ll show Father I’m good enough to have my portrait on the wall at Skogså. And once I’ve shown him, I’ll tell him that his opinion of me doesn’t mean anything, that he can take his portrait and go to hell.

He gets up.

Feels the parquet floor sway beneath his feet as the cognac goes to his head.

He sits down again. Looks at the picture of his mother, Bettina, beside the clock. Her gentle face enclosed by a heavy gold frame. How Father has never been the same since she went. How he seems almost lost, left behind.

Fredrik was eavesdropping outside his mother’s sickroom at the castle during her last night of life. Heard how she made Father promise to look after him, their weak son.

His mother wasn’t at all like that female detective who arrested him out in the field after he tried to get away from the police in the city, yet Fredrik finds himself thinking about her for some reason.

Malin Fors.

Quite good-looking.

But trashy. Bad taste in clothes and far too worn-out for her age. She’s got that cheap look that all country girls from poor families have. What distinguished her from others like her was that she seemed completely aware of who she was. And that it bothered her. Maybe she’s intelligent, but she could hardly be properly smart.

Are you going to be back soon?

The old villa seems to have secrets in every corner, and the damp and rain are making the house creak, as if it’s trying to send him a message in Morse code.

Then Fredrik hears something.

Is that the car pulling up, his wife’s black Volvo? The clock strikes. Of course, it must be them. The children are probably asleep in the car now, if they were going to be spending the night with her parents Christina would have called.

He gets up.

Walks unsteadily out into the hall where he opens the double doors.

The rain is driving against him, but he can’t see any sign of a car in the drive.

Solid darkness outside.

And the rain.

Then a pair of car headlights come on over by the barn.

Then they go off again.

And on again, and he can’t see the car well enough to see what model it is, but it looks like it’s black, it is, and he wonders why his wife doesn’t drive right up to the house in weather like this, maybe the damp has caused engine trouble, and he steps out onto the porch and waves, and the headlights flash again, over and over again. His wife and children. Do they want him to run over with an umbrella? Or is it his father? His sister?

Flash.

Flash.

Fredrik pulls on his oilskin.

Opens the umbrella.

Flash.

Then darkness.

He heads through the rain towards the car, which now has its lights off, maybe fifty metres away.

Darkness.

He can almost feel his pupils expand, his eyes working feverishly to help his brain make sense of the world, as if the world disappears without the right signals.

He should have switched on the garden lights. Should he go back?

No, carry on towards his wife and kids.

He’s approaching the car.

His wife’s car.

No.

Tinted glass, impossible to see through.

Something moving inside the car.

An animal?

A fox, a wolf?

A quick sound from whatever it is that’s moving.

And Fredrik goes cold, his body paralysed, and he wants to run like he has never run before.

It’s only a dream, Malin thinks. But it never seems to end.

Fear only exists in the dream.

Something knocking deep inside me.

The fire, the fire I shall one day go into, is nothing to be afraid of.

I’ve given in. And that frightens me.

What I am, is my fear. Isn’t that right?

The film doesn’t stop just because I want it to.

It’s endless, and the images become more and more blurred, indistinct, grey, as their edges smoulder.