Autumn Killing (43 page)

‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks.

Anders Dalström closes his eyes with a sigh.

‘I was working last night. I’m too tired for this.’

‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks again, sounding firmer this time, and Malin notes that he’s taken her place, asking questions that match her intuition rather than his own, perhaps.

‘I don’t know. It just felt better. It’s so long ago now.’

‘So you didn’t have any sort of relationship with Jasmin?’

‘No. I didn’t know her. Not at all. But I still felt sorry for her. I can hardly remember it now. It was like her silence was my own somehow. I liked the silence.’

‘And you didn’t know that Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve?’

‘I told you I didn’t last time.’

A bag of books by Anders Dalström’s side, a few DVDs.

‘What have you bought?’

‘A new Springsteen biography. A couple of thrillers. Two films of Bob Dylan concerts. And
Lord of the Flies
.’

‘My daughter loves reading,’ Malin says. ‘But mostly literary novels. Ideally with a bit of romance. But
Lord of the Flies
is good, the book and the film.’

Anders Dalström looks at her, staring into her eyes for a few moments before saying: ‘Speaking of romance: you’ve probably heard it from other people, but there were rumours in high school around the time of the accident that Jerry Petersson was seeing Katarina Fågelsjö.’

I can sniff out an unhappy relationship from a thousand miles away, Malin thinks. And I can pick up the smell of it here, here in Katarina Fågelsjö’s living room, it’s seeping out of this bitter woman’s skin, and you want to tell us, don’t you? You’re the woman in the Anna Ancher painting on the wall, the woman who wants to turn around and tell her story.

‘I’ll go and see her on my own. I might be able to get her to talk.’

Zeke had nodded.

Let her go to see Katarina. It might be dangerous, but probably not. ‘Go. Find out what we need to know.’

White tights. Blue skirt, one leg crossed over the other. High heels, even at home.

Open up. Tell me. You want to, I saw your reaction when I told you what Anders Dalström had told us. About the rumours. The romance.

‘You’re mourning Jerry Petersson, aren’t you?’

The perfectly balanced upholstery from Svenskt Tenn behind her back, Josef Frank’s speckled, smiling snakes.

And Katarina’s mask falls. Shatters into a tormented grimace and she starts to cry.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Katarina sobs when Malin makes a move to put her arm around her.

‘Sit down again and I’ll tell you.’

And soon the words are pouring from the puffy, tear-streaked face.

‘I was in love with Jerry Petersson the autumn before the accident. I saw him in the corridors at school, I knew he was off limits for a girl like me, but you should have seen him, Malin, he was ridiculously handsome. Then we ended up at the same party, at the headquarters of the youth wing of the Moderate Party, by mistake, and I don’t remember why but we ended up sitting in the cemetery all night, and then we went down to the river. There used to be an abandoned pump house there, it’s been demolished now.’

Katarina gets up. Goes over to the window facing the river, and with her back to Malin she points, waiting for Malin to join her before she goes on.

‘Over there, on that little island, that’s where the pump house was. It was cold, but I still felt warmer than ever that autumn. Jerry and I used to meet without anyone else knowing. I was head-over-heels in love with him. But Father wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him. And that was that.’

Then Katarina falls silent, seems to be trying to keep the moment alive, by keeping her memories to herself.

Malin opens her mouth to say something, but Katarina hushes her, giving her a look that tells her to listen, to listen to her, and not to herself.

‘Then he disappeared off to Lund. But he didn’t leave me. I kept an eye on him all those years, through my failed marriage to that idiot Father loved. I never forgot Jerry, I wanted to get back in touch, but I never did, I devoted myself to art instead, buried myself in paintings. Why, why, why did he have to come home again, why did he want the castle? I never understood. If he wanted to get back into my life, surely he could have just called? Don’t you think? He could have just called, couldn’t he?’

You could have called him, Malin thinks.

‘And I should have rung him. Or gone out there. Ditched all my useless lovers. He was there, after all, maybe it was finally time to do something about our wretched, lingering love.’

You always loved him. Like I’ve always loved Janne. Can our love ever end?

‘Did Jerry ever meet your father?’ Malin goes on.

Katarina doesn’t answer. Instead she walks away from the window and out of the room.

Katarina is standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Doesn’t recognise her own face.

Then she imagines that someone is holding pictures in front of her eyes, black-and-white pictures that were never taken by a camera but which somehow exist anyway.

Two young people walking beside a river.

A pump house.

Burning wood. And the voice is there, his voice, a voice she has been longing to hear.

‘Do you remember how beautiful you were then, Katarina? That autumn? When we would walk together along the Stångån, taking care that no one saw us, how we would have sex in the old pump house, warmed by the fire we made in an abandoned stove. I would stroke your back, caress it, and we pretended it was summer, and that I was rubbing suncream onto your skin to stop it burning.’

New pictures.

Snow falling. She in her room at the castle. A figure walking through the forest in the cold. The closed doors of the castle.

‘And then, against my will,’ the voice went on, ‘you wanted me to meet your father and mother. So I came out to the castle on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, like we’d agreed. I took the bus as far as I could, then walked through the cold, through the forest and past fields, until I saw the castle almost forcing the forest aside, on a small rise surrounded by its moat.

‘I walked across the bridge over the moat.

‘Saw the strange green light.

‘And your father opened the door and I looked at him and he realised why I was there, and you came to the door, and he saw something in your eyes, and he shouted that there was no way in hell that someone like me was going to cross his threshold, then he raised his arm and knocked me to the ground with a single blow.

‘He chased me away, over the moat, brandishing an umbrella, and you were shouting that you loved me, I love him, Father, and I ran, I ran and I thought you were going to follow me, but when I turned around at the edge of the forest you were gone, the driveway was empty, the door wasn’t closed, but your mother, Bettina, was standing there, and I thought I could see her smiling.’

Images of herself turning away in the castle doorway. Running up the stairs. Lying on a bed. Standing close to her father. Adjusting her make-up in a mirror.

Shut up, she wants to shout at the voice, shut up, but it goes on: ‘I came to the party. You were there. Fredrik. He had drunk too much, was arrogant towards everyone and everything. It was as if I didn’t exist for you. You didn’t even look at me, and that made me mad. I drank, gulping it down, danced, fumbled with dozens of girls who all wanted me, I made myself unbeatable, I took Jasmin, who was in your class, just because it would upset you, I got behind the wheel of that car just to show the world who made the decisions, and that love really doesn’t matter. I was in charge, and not even love could take that power away.

‘And then, in the field, in the snow and the blood and the silence, I looked at Jonas Karlsson, begged him to say he was the one driving, promised him the world.

‘And do you know, he did what I said, I got him to do it, and I realised deep down at that moment that I could have almost anything I wanted in this world, as long as I was ruthless enough. That I could make the lawnmower blades shut up.

‘But not you, Katarina. I could never have you. Not the person you are.

‘So, sure, in a way I was both born and died on that New Year’s Eve.’

Images of a car wreck. Funerals, a wheelchair with a mute body, a man with his back to her in an office chair, a steady stream of images from a life she had never known.

‘And when I bought Skogså, I wanted to breathe life into what had died,’ the voice goes on.

‘That was the very worst vanity, worse than any alchemist’s.

‘Soon I was standing in the very same doorway that I had been refused entry to for all those years. I walked bare-chested through the rooms, feeling the cold, rough surface of the stone against my skin.’

The images are gone. All that is left is the mirror, her eyes, the tears she knows are there inside them somewhere.

Jerry rubs against the walls of a room illuminated by the one hundred and three candles in the chandelier suspended five metres above his head. The stones are irregular and rough against his chest and back, like the surface of some as yet unexplored hostile planet.

The painting of the man and woman with the suncream is hanging in front of him.

The rooms of the castle. One after the other.

The telephones. She’s only a phone call away. He sits beneath his paintings and chants the number like a mantra.

It never occurs to him that she might be angry about what he has done, that she might think he has torn her family’s history from their hands.

But he never dials her number. Instead he throws himself into the practical business that comes with a property like this, sorting out the tenant farmers, and labourers of all different trades, visiting the whores he finds on the Internet, even in Linköping, often middle-aged women with an unnaturally high sex-drive who may as well make a bit of money from satisfying their lust. He considers calling the young solicitor he bedded when the contracts were signed, but thinks that things might get a bit too close to home if he did that.

Some evenings and mornings he heads out into the estate. Drives through the black landscape, past houses and trees and fields, the field that seems to encompass the three beings that he is: past, present, and whatever is to come tomorrow.

He imagines he can see green light streaming from the moat and has green lanterns installed along it, as a response to the optical phenomenon down in the water.

He stands on the other side of the door, resting inside himself, waiting for a call, for a car he wants to come and pull up in front of the castle, but which never arrives. He stands still, takes detours around the love he can never bring himself to open up to for a second time. That is the fear he can never conquer.

Instead he receives a letter through the post. Handwritten.

He reads the letter at the kitchen table, early one morning that autumn, when the skies have opened and seem to be raining corrosive acid onto the world of men.

He folds the letter, thinking that he needs to deal with this, cauterise it once and for all.

Push the bar up.

You’re alone in the gym, Malin, if you can’t manage it the bar will crush your throat and that’ll be an end to all your problems.

To all your breathing. To all love.

Seventy kilos on the bar, more than her own weight, and she pushes it up another ten times before letting it slip back into the supporting frame.

Janne. Now he’s telling me what I can and can’t do.

To hell with that.

But maybe he’s right.

Tove. I want to say I’m sorry. But you’re right to leave me alone for a while, aren’t you?

How could I?

Her body wet with sweat. As if she’s been running through the rain she can see through the little windows along the ceiling.

They’ve put up new wallpaper in the room. In place of the old vomit-green, there is now an even worse pink wallpaper with little purple flowers.

This is a gym, Malin thinks. Not a fucking girl’s bedroom.

She lies down on the bench again.

Ten more reps and she feels her muscles working, the effort suppressing every thought of drink. Rehab. Bollocks. I don’t need that.

Every time she lifts the bar towards the blinding-white ceiling, she tries to get closer to the core of the investigation.

Lactic acid is burning through her body and she gets up, boxing the air, shaking life into mute, oxygen-starved tissue, and says as she punches: ‘I. Am. Missing. Something. But. What?’

In the sauna, after first a long cold shower, then a hot one, she reads Daniel Högfeldt’s latest article about the murders, the pages of the
Correspondent
hot on her fingers.

He goes through the connections between the murders and says that sources within the police are convinced they are linked, but that they don’t know for sure yet.

In a separate article he gives a well-informed account of Fredrik Fågelsjö’s failed financial investments, and how the family came to lose Skogså. He concludes: ‘Suspicion may now be focused on the Fågelsjö family, who some people claim would do anything to get the estate back.’

He doesn’t mention the family’s new money, the inheritance they’ve received. But there are pictures of the houses they currently live in. Probably new photographs. The vultures never leave the bereaved in peace.

Then a picture of Linnea Sjöstedt by her cottage tucked away near Skogså. Daniel reports her as saying: ‘Of course they might have wanted revenge on Fredrik for losing the estate. It means everything to them.’

Ninety degrees in here.

Ten minutes and her body is shrieking, the sweat streaming from every pore, but Malin is enjoying the pain.

Nor has Daniel found out about Axel Fågelsjö’s old conviction for actual bodily harm. Nor that Jerry Petersson was driving the car on that fateful New Year’s Eve. That’s good, maybe there are fewer leaks in the police station now. And Daniel is a decent person, really. He’s never pressed her for information when she’s been drunk, never tried to turn her into one of the leaks.