Autumn Killing (42 page)

‘The rain’s making the truth slippery,’ Malin says.

‘What happened last night is history. I’ve spoken to Larsson and Alman. To them it’s as if it never happened. But there’s bound to be talk. And you need to keep quiet.’

‘Everyone here knows I drink sometimes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, I could tell from the way they reacted last night. That they were getting confirmation of something.’

Sven doesn’t answer, just takes a deep breath and says: ‘I need you on this case right now. You’re the best I’ve got, you know that. If we weren’t in such a bloody awful position, I’d suspend you, and you know that too. But right now I need you.’

‘Thank you,’ Malin says.

‘Don’t thank me. Pull yourself together.’

‘I will.’

‘No more false promises, Malin. Do you hear me? You only drive if you’re stone-cold sober. And once this case is solved I’m going to make sure that you get treatment. And you’re going to go along with it. Understood?’

Malin nods.

Looks around the room, a lost expression in her eyes.

When Malin is about to leave Sven’s office he calls her back.

‘That talk,’ he says, and she stops and turns around.

‘What talk?’

‘The one at Sturefors secondary school that you’re supposed to be giving on Monday. Nine o’clock. You hadn’t forgotten?’

Then she remembers. They discussed it several months ago and she said yes, feeling a peculiar urge to go back to her old school.

‘Haven’t I got more important things to be getting on with? Maybe we could postpone it?’

‘You’re going to give that talk, Malin.’

Sven looks down at a sheet of paper on his desk.

‘And you’re going to do it perfectly. Show the schoolkids a good example. They could do with it. So could you. Take the day off tomorrow. Take things easy. Get some rest. And don’t touch the bottle.’

Malin knocks on the door of paperwork Hades and hears a resigned: ‘Come in.’

Waldemar Ekenberg’s tobacco-hoarse voice, then two other voices like faint echoes, a lively young woman and a man of her own age.

Paper from floor to ceiling. Black files and folders.

Enough for any brain to get lost in, to wither away in, and the room smells of damp and sweat and aftershave and cheap perfume, of weariness in the face of an impossible task.

In spite of this, the three officers are working feverishly, hunting through hard-drives and files, and the calm but focused energy in the room cheers Malin up.

‘Nothing new,’ Johan Jakobsson says without looking up.

Lovisa Segerberg shakes her blonde head.

Waldemar looks up at her. What does his expression mean? Does he know, do they all know, about what happened last night?

No. Or do they?

Who cares?

‘Anything else you need help with?’ Waldemar asks.

‘You mean, can I rescue you from Hades?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Dream on.’

‘What about you two?’

‘Me and Zeke?’

‘No, you and the King.’

‘I’m about to talk to Zeke now. We’ll see. We’ll probably have a meeting this afternoon.’

‘If anything’s come up,’ Johan says.

‘Have fun,’ Malin says.

‘Close the door behind you,’ Johan says.

‘We don’t want to lose any of the sweaty smell in here,’ Lovisa says with a grin.

Waldemar’s nostrils flare, he seems to be trying to find a killer comment, and flashes a smile full of nicotine-yellow teeth before he says: ‘Drive carefully, Malin.’

Malin’s mobile rings as she’s walking back to her desk.

She answers, doesn’t bother to check the display.

‘Malin.’

‘Hello, it’s me.’

Ten days since she left the house, ten days since she spoke to him, and all she wants to do is hang up.

‘Janne, listen, I’m pretty busy, can you call . . .’

She stops, the anger in his voice makes her lose the ability to put one foot in front of the other.’

‘No, Malin. You need to listen. How the hell could you just let Tove leave like that last night? What the hell did you say to her? What did you do to her? She was in pieces. She came down to the station and she was a complete bloody wreck. Hitting me is one thing, but messing Tove up like that . . .’

Words. She doesn’t want to hear them. Doesn’t want to think about it. Has thrust it aside until now.

‘I—’

‘Shut up! This is how it is: Tove lives with me. You don’t come out here. If you want anything to do with her, you call, but be bloody careful about what you say. Those are the rules until you get yourself sorted out. Got it?’

Can he do that? Malin thinks. Yes, it wouldn’t be hard to convince the authorities that I’m an alcoholic mother.

‘Go to hell,’ she says. ‘All the fucking way to hell.’

Tell me you love me, she thinks.

‘Malin,’ Janne says, no anger in his voice now. ‘Pull yourself together. Tove needs her mum. Get some help.’

Zeke isn’t at his desk when she gets back.

Her hands are shaking and she bangs them on the desk a few times to stop them, and to get rid of the anger.

How low have I sunk? I let Tove vanish into the night. Into everything that might be out there. And then I got drunk.

She looks out across the open-plan office. Forces her thoughts and feelings aside. Reboots herself.

‘Toilet,’ Zeke says when he comes back and Malin is sitting and waiting for him at her place at their desk. Waiting for them to get going with the practical business of the day, waiting to let work take over her mind and her feelings.

He looks at Malin, in the same way he did when she arrived at the station.

Amiably. Benevolently. But also anxiously. No irritation. Not a trace of it. Just sympathy. And she had turned away.

Zeke knows.

And he probably thinks the same as Sven. Let her finish this case, then she has to get help.

The look in his eyes is even more anxious now.

‘Has something happened?’ he asks. ‘You look—’

‘Shut up. Let’s get to work.’

I don’t want any help, Malin thinks. I just want Janne. Tove. Don’t I?

Our life together.

Is that what I want?

The look on the face of Viveka Crafoord the psychoanalyst, her words: ‘You’re welcome to a session on my couch whenever you want, Malin.’

Then Police Constable Aronsson comes over to their desk. A sheet of paper in her hand.

‘I’ve just got this from the archive,’ she says. ‘It took a while, but they seem to have checked in all the corners now. The only thing they’ve found about the Fågelsjö family. Apparently Axel Fågelsjö attacked one of his workers some time back in the seventies. Blinded him in one eye.’

‘He dragged me to the ground and whipped me. My back was stinging like it had been burned from the cracks of the whip, and when I turned round to get up the whip caught my eye.’

Another voice in the investigation’s choir.

Malin and Zeke are each sitting in an armchair in Sixten Eriksson’s flat in a block of sheltered housing, Serafen. From his living room he has a view of the Horticultural Society Park’s bald treetops moving gently in the wind. The rain has stopped temporarily.

Sixten Eriksson. The man Axel Fågelsjö beat up in 1973. The circumstances were described in the file they had received from the archive. Sixten Eriksson had been employed as a farmhand out at Skogså, and managed to drive one of the tractors into the chapel. Axel Fågelsjö lost his temper and beat him so badly that he was left blind in one eye. He was only given a fine, and had to pay minimal damages to Sixten Eriksson.

Sixten Eriksson is sitting on the blue sofa in front of them with a patch over one eye, his other eye grey-green, almost transparent with cataracts. On the wall behind him hang reproductions of Bruno Liljefors paintings: foxes in the snow, grouse in a forest. The whole room smells of tobacco, and Malin gets the impression that smell is coming from Sixten Eriksson’s pores.

‘It felt like I was inside an egg that was breaking,’ Sixten Eriksson said. ‘I still dream of the pain to this day, I feel it sometimes.’

The nurse who let them in told them Sixten Eriksson was completely blind now that his other eye was afflicted by inoperable cataracts.

Malin looks at him, thinking that there is a directness about him, in spite of his darkness.

‘Of course I was bitter that Axel Fågelsjö didn’t get a harsher punishment, but isn’t that always the way? Those in power aren’t easily dislodged. They took one of my eyes, and fate took the other. That’s all there is to it.’

The court had given Axel Fågelsjö no more than a fine, and showed understanding for his anger: according to the files, Sixten Eriksson had been negligent with the tractor and had caused severe damage to the door of the chapel.

The old man couldn’t have taken revenge on Axel by murdering his son so much later, that much is clear, Malin thinks. But Axel Fågelsjö? He was guilty of extreme brutality then, so could he have done the same to his son?

‘What did you do after that?’ Zeke asks.

‘I worked for NAF, until they shut the factory down.’

‘Did the bitterness pass?’

‘What could I do about it?’

‘The pain?’ Malin said. ‘Did that fade?’

‘No, but you can learn to live with anything.’

Sixten pauses before going on: ‘There’s no pain that you can’t learn to live with. You just have to transfer it onto something else, get it out of yourself.’

Malin feels something change in the room.

The warmth is replaced by a chill, and an inner voice encourages her to ask the next sentence: ‘Your wife. Is she still alive?’

‘We were never married. But we lived together from the age of eighteen. She died of cancer. In her liver.’

‘Did you have any children?’

Before Sixten has a chance to answer, the door opens and a young blonde woman wearing the uniform of an enrolled nurse comes in.

‘Time for your medicine,’ she says, and as the nurse approaches the sofa Sixten answers Malin’s question.

‘A son.’

‘A son?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his name?’

The nurse carefully closes the door behind her, and Eriksson smiles, waiting several long seconds before replying: ‘He took his mother’s name. His name’s Sven Evaldsson. He’s lived in Chicago for years now.’

A bus struggles up Djurgårdsgatan, and behind the windows pale passengers huddle in their seats, their faces indistinct grimaces through the rain that has once again started to fall.

Malin and Zeke are standing in the rain, both of them thinking.

‘Shouldn’t those farmers have known about Fågelsjö’s conviction? People ought to be talking about it still,’ Zeke says.

‘Even if they knew, perhaps they didn’t realise that we’d want to know,’ Malin says. ‘Or else they didn’t want to talk about it. From their perspective, it’s probably never looked impossible that the Fågelsjö family would get the castle back, in which case it probably makes sense to keep quiet.’

As they’re about to get into the car Malin’s mobile rings.

Unknown number on the display. She answers in the rain.

‘Malin Fors.’

‘This is Jasmin’s mother.’

Jasmin.

Which one of Tove’s friends is that?

Then she remembers the woman in the room of the rehabilitation centre in Söderköping, beside her daughter’s wheelchair. The sense that her love for her daughter was boundless. If anything like that happened to Tove, could I handle it? The question was back again.

Raindrops on her face, pattering against her coat, the impatient look on Zeke’s face inside the car.

‘Hello. Is there something I can help you with?’

‘I had a dream last night,’ Jasmin Sandsten’s mother says.

Not again, not another dreamer, Malin thinks, seeing Linnea Sjöstedt’s face in front of her. We need something concrete now, not more bloody dreams.

‘You had a dream?’

‘I had a dream about a boy with long black hair. I don’t remember his name, but he used to visit Jasmin in the beginning, after the accident. He said they hardly knew each other but he’d been friends with Andreas, the boy who died in the crash. Jasmin’s friends didn’t know anything about him. I remember thinking it was strange that he kept coming, but he was friendly and most of them never came at all. I thought that the sound of people her own age might help her to come back.’

‘And you’ve just had a dream about him?’

Malin doesn’t wait for Jasmin Sandsten’s mother to reply, instead she’s thinking that Anders Dalström, the folk singer from the forest, has got long black hair.

So now he’s popped up in the investigation again. In a dream.

‘Long black hair. You don’t remember his name?’

‘No, I’m sorry. But a very well-dressed young man without a face came to me in the dream. He showed me a film of the young man who used to visit Jasmin. A black-and-white film. Jerky and old.

‘Wait a moment. I think his name might have been Anders. His surname was something like Fahlström.’

Anders Dalström takes a sip of his coffee in the branch of Robert’s Coffee attached to the Academic Bookshop, not far from Stadium and Gyllentorget. One of the showy American coffee shops that have successfully seen off the traditional old cafés. Latte hell, Malin thinks.

A lot of people, Saturday. Money burning a hole in their wallets.

The bookshop must do well in this sort of weather, when people are huddled up at home.

‘I’m in the city,’ Anders Dalström had said when Malin called: they didn’t want to drive all the way out to the forests outside Björsäter if he wasn’t home. ‘I’ve come in to get some books. We could meet now if you like.’

And now he’s sitting opposite her and Zeke wearing a blue hooded top and a yellow T-shirt with a green Bruce Springsteen on the chest. He looks tired, has bags under his eyes, and his long black hair looks greasy and unwashed.

You look ten years older than you did out at the cottage, Malin thinks. Is it right to disturb you again? But Malin wants to follow the threads of her conversation with Jasmin’s mother, asking Anders Dalström about Jasmin.

‘Why did you visit her? You didn’t really know her, did you?’

‘No. But it used to make me feel better.’