Autumn Killing (47 page)

Malin and Zeke stop the car. Anders Dalström’s red Golf is still not there.

They get out, and Malin takes a deep breath, trying to work out if there’s anyone apart from them there.

‘He isn’t here,’ she says. ‘Where the hell could he be?’

They go up the steps, look through the window in the front door.

A computer is flickering on the table in the living room.

Malin checks the door handle. Unlocked.

‘We can’t go in,’ Zeke says. ‘We need a warrant.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Yes. I’m kidding, Fors. The door’s open. Obviously we suspect a break-in.’

They go inside.

The gun cabinet in the living room.

Malin goes over and finds it unlocked. A solitary shotgun inside. Rifle ammunition on the floor, but no rifle.

Has he got another gun? Malin wonders, then says: ‘Wherever he is right now, he could be armed.’

She goes into Anders Dalström’s bedroom. The blinds are closed and the room is dark and cold, damp.

A film projector has been set up on a bench, reels of film scattered across the floor, unrolled.

A film is sitting in the projector. Without thinking, Malin switches it on, and on the white wall she sees a boy moving across a grass lawn, running, screaming soundlessly as if he’s running from something, as if there’s a monster holding the camera, ready to catch him if he trips or runs too slowly.

Then the boy stops. Turns towards the camera, trying to look beyond its lens, cowering as if preparing to be hit, the black pupils of his eyes like little planets of fear.

The reel comes to an end.

Zeke has crept in behind Malin, put a hand on her shoulder and says: ‘I could have done without seeing the look in his eyes.’

They leave the room. In the living room, the computer screen is showing the online telephone directory, and Zeke reads out loud: ‘Axel Fågelsjö. 18 Drottninggatan. What the hell is he up to?’

‘Axel Fågelsjö,’ Malin says. ‘Do you think he’s going straight to what he thinks is the source of the evil? The man who beat up his father and turned him into an abusive parent?’

Zeke’s face is half illuminated by the glow of the screen, raindrops glistening on his head.

‘So you’re sure now?’

‘Yes, aren’t you?’

Zeke nods.

‘Should we call for back-up at Fågelsjö’s apartment?’

‘Yes, we’d better,’ Malin says.

‘I’ll call,’ Zeke says, and Malin hears him talking to the duty-desk, then he gets put through to Sven Sjöman.

‘We think it checks out,’ Zeke says, and Malin can hear him trying to sound urgent and factual. ‘Things have been moving quickly, we haven’t had a chance to call. Karin’s comparing the handwriting.’

Silence.

Probably a mixture of praise and cursing from Sven. They should have called earlier, once they found out that Sixten Eriksson was Anders Dalström’s father.

‘Who knows what he’s thinking,’ Zeke says. ‘He’s probably pretty desperate by now.’

Once they get outside again Malin heads over to the workshop.

The door is ajar. Zeke is right behind her.

Is he in there? She pulls out her pistol. Carefully kicks the door open with her foot.

An old, black Mercedes.

She peers inside. Silent, empty.

‘That could be the black car Linnea Sjöstedt saw,’ Zeke says.

Malin nods.

The next minute they’re back in the car again.

Their speed seems to blur the forest and the rain into one single element. Is Anders Dalström already inside Axel’s apartment with him? Or is he somewhere else entirely?

Jerry Petersson.

Fredrik Fågelsjö.

Was it your arrogance that finally caught up with you? Your actions? Your vanity? Your fear? Or something else?

Sven Sjöman and four uniformed officers are inside the apartment on Drottninggatan. They picked the lock. The apartment is empty, no sign of Axel Fågelsjö, and no signs of a struggle.

Malin and Zeke arrive fifteen minutes later.

‘Good work,’ Sven says to Malin as they stand in the middle of the sitting room looking at the portraits on the walls. ‘Bloody good work.’

‘Now we just have to find Anders Dalström,’ Malin says. ‘And some concrete, conclusive evidence.’

‘We’ll find it,’ Sven says. ‘Everything points towards him.’

‘But where the hell is he?’ Zeke says. ‘And where the hell is Axel Fågelsjö?’

‘They’re together,’ Malin says. ‘I think they’ve been together much longer than either of them realises,’ she goes on. Thinks: if Axel Fågelsjö is in Anders Dalström’s hands, it’s my job to rescue him. But is it really worth me worrying about him? How can I have any sympathy for someone I find revolting in so many ways?

Then her mobile rings. Karin Johannison’s calm, assured voice at the other end: ‘The handwriting on the sign on the door and the blackmail letter are the same. The same person wrote the letter.’

There are no explanations.

They’re pointless, and no one can be bothered to listen to them.

But this is my story, listen to it if you want to.

Father.

Your one working eye behind the lens of the camera, you say the pictures will resemble the way you see the world, with no depth of perception, and without any real hope. Did I inherit your hopelessness, your diffidence about life?

You must have been the most bitter and frustrated person on the planet, and you took that anger out on me, and I learned to creep out of the way, to disappear from the flat in Linghem and stay away until you calmed down.

People would see me, and there was talk about how you beat me and Mum because of your bitterness about your lost eye, your agony.

I saw you, Father, behind the camera, and I would run to you in spite of your anger, but I hesitated, instinctively, and I took that hesitancy with me in my dealings with other people.

At school I was alone at first, then they started getting at me, and none of the teachers could be bothered to care. They hunted me, hit me, mocked me, and I would shrink into the corners. One day, in year 4, they pulled my clothes off and I ran across the playground naked through the snow, and they chased me in front of a thousand eyes, and they kicked me when I fell.

They pulled me into the school building.

They forced my head into a toilet full of excrement and urine.

They did this over and over again and in the end I didn’t even try to escape. They could do what they liked, and my subordination made them even angrier, wilder, more bloodthirsty.

What had I done? Why me?

Because of the slouched shoulders you gave me, Father? The ones we have in common?

Stop, someone shouted one day, and then a muscular, confident frame was attacking the hunters, hitting them, giving them nosebleeds, shouting: ‘You’re not going to attack him again. Ever.’

And they didn’t.

I had finally gained an ally.

Andreas. Recently moved in from Vreta Kloster.

On his very first day at school he made me his. I’ve never understood why he wanted to be my friend, but maybe that’s just what friendship is like; just like evil, it suddenly shows up where you least expect it.

I lived through Andreas during those years, and his family would sometimes open their home to me, I remember the smell of fresh-baked buns and raspberry syrup, and his mother who used to leave us alone. What we got up to? The things boys do. We turned our little world into a big one, and I never really came home any more. You couldn’t reach me, Father, thanks to Andreas.

Your bitterness didn’t get hold of me, unless it actually did after all? Yes, it had probably already taken root.

You hit me, and I tried to make my way to whatever I thought was beyond the beatings, to what had to exist beyond the beatings.

Music. I found music, don’t ask me how, but it was inside me. Deep inside, and Andreas pushed me on, bought me a guitar with the money he earned picking strawberries one summer.

But then when we started high school something happened. Andreas pulled away, he wanted other people besides me, he dropped me as the world grew, but I never stopped hoping, because he was my friend, and I never managed to get close to anyone else in the same way.

He used to trail after Jerry Petersson, the coolest of the cool. And he used to fawn over the posh kids as well.

They weren’t even on my radar, not in my dreams. I knew I could never be like them.

And then Andreas died one New Year’s Eve.

Maybe I gave up then, Father?

I escaped into music.

And I sang at that last day of school, a song about what it’s like being born in Linköping and growing up in the shadow of all manner of dreams, how we tried to drink the anxiety away in the Horticultural Society Park on those last evenings of high school, and I must have struck a chord, because the applause in the hall seemed to go on for ever. I was asked to sing it twice more, then that evening everyone wanted me to sing it on the grass in the park, even the posh girls.

You weren’t there in the audience in that hall with your camera, Father.

I started working in the health service, I rented a cottage in the forest to have space to write, and ended up staying there. I must have sent a hundred demo tapes to Stockholm, but I didn’t even get any replies to my letters to Sonet, Polar, Metronome, and the others.

Year followed year. I got a job in the old people’s home in Björsäter. Often there were just two of us at night, we took turns sleeping, and nights suited me fine, they let me avoid other people. And you still hit me when you got the chance, even though you were almost blind from the cataracts in your eye.

I could have hit back, but I didn’t.

Why not? Because then I would have been like you. Violence and bitterness would have turned me into you.

Then Mum died, and you ended up in a home, completely blind now and your camera fallen silent for ever. Your fury a calm fury, your bitterness a gentle tone, your life a wait for death.

Sometimes I would read articles about Petersson, about how successful he was.

And it was as if something grew inside me, an invisible egg that grew bigger and bigger, until it cracked and out poured millions of tiny yellow snakes into my blood. They wore all my tormentors’ faces. Yours, Father, those of the boys in the school playground, even Axel Fågelsjö’s. I knew very well who he was, what he had done to you.

I wanted to get rid of the snakes. But they slithered wherever they wanted.

Then Jerry Petersson moved back. Bought the castle and the estate from Fågelsjö, and I got a letter, God knows who from, telling me the truth about that New Year’s Eve. It had never occurred to me that Jerry Petersson might have been driving. There were black-and-white photographs in with the letter, of him standing in the field, standing still with his eyes closed, as if he was meditating.

So I wrote my own letter, but my nerves let me down in the car park. He who had everything and who had taken everything from me, he stamped on me like I was an insect again.

But I crawled back up.

I swore to stand up for myself, he wasn’t going to break me and Andreas again, I’d demand money from him, even though I had no idea what I would do with it.

So early one morning I got in the car and drove out there.

The snakes were hissing, I could almost see them crawling inside me, see their leering faces mocking me.

I waited for him in front of the castle, with a heavy stone in my hand to protect myself, and one of Father’s knives in my pocket. Violence imprinted in the wooden handle he had held so often, with the Skogså coat of arms branded on it – he must have stolen the knife when he worked there.

I had a piece of paper in my hand.

The snakes were seething.

Slithering within me. And they were fury and fear rolled into one.

I knew that something had reached its conclusion. And that something else was about to begin.

I look down on the earth, all the different worlds that history has given this city and the land around it. I see the rain lashing the trees, the grass, the moss, and the ancient rocks, and I know that there’s a lot left to come. I see a car approaching a castle at dawn one day, a black figure waiting beyond a moat
.

That’s me I can see, heading towards my imminent death, but I don’t know that, and by the time I do know, obviously it’s too late. But now, in this moment that can encompass all of time, I can feel the steering wheel tremble in my hands.

Jerry looks ahead through the fog, gripping the shaking steering wheel. The Range Rover carries him over the ground.

Who’s that waiting up ahead? Is that you, Katarina, finally come back to me?

Or is it someone else? Some obstinate bastard? Tell me it’s you, Katarina. It’s you, isn’t it?

It isn’t you, Katarina.

It’s never you.

I get out of the car and see Anders Dalström in front of me, his face desperate, his black hair wet, he’s holding a stone in one hand. He refuses to give up and I fix my gaze on him, but nothing happens, he doesn’t back down.

‘I want five million,’ Anders Dalström yells, and I laugh and say: ‘You’re not getting anything. I’ll crush you like a little rat if you don’t leave now. It’ll be worse than in the car park.’

Anders Dalström holds out a note with his free hand.

‘My account number,’ he yells, and the rain makes the ink on the note illegible and I laugh again.

He gives me the note.

‘Five million, within a week.’

An amused grin crosses my lips, but then I get bored, crumple the note and toss it onto the gravel, not giving a damn about Anders Dalström and his damn stone.

Anders Dalström picks up the note with his free hand and puts it in the pocket of his jacket.

I turn to walk away, then hear a howl from the depths.

I see something black coming towards me, feel a sudden pain and I fall. Then decades of cumulative fury are sitting on top of me and it burns and burns and burns in my stomach and Anders Dalström crawls away from me and I feel my brain, my thoughts vanish into pain.