Autumn Killing (8 page)

‘So, what do we think?’

‘Well, he didn’t jump in of his own volition,’ Malin says. ‘Or fall in. Grown men don’t often fall into water, unless they’re seriously drunk or have a heart attack or something like that.’

‘If it is Petersson, he’s somewhere around forty-five. Not many heart attacks at that age.’

‘No. He probably had some help.’

‘That seems most likely. We’ll know for sure when Karin’s got the body up.’

Malin nods.

‘If it is Petersson, and if he has been murdered, it’s every journalist’s wet dream.’

‘Careful!’ Karin calls as the rotating body is lifted clear of the water and is left hanging, feet down, the water dripping from its yellow raincoat, brown trousers and a pair of black leather boots.

The dripping water is coloured red. The yellow raincoat has been perforated by masses of holes and Malin can see a number of deep injuries to the body, and a mixture of blood and water is streaming from what must be dozens of stab wounds. The blood mixes with the rain. It’s raining blood, Malin thinks. So you didn’t exactly fall into the moat drunk, did you?

Little silver fish are falling from the victim’s mouth, wriggling like abandoned babies on their way down to the safety of the water.

Snake fish, Malin thinks.

A black eye staring right out into the rain and the thin fog that has drifted down into the moat. The corpse’s other eye is closed.

You look surprised, Malin thinks. But are you really?

Am I surprised
?

Hardly.

The water is no longer embracing me.

I am leaving your memory, Mum, and instead I’m hanging here staring down at the water, and off towards the castle, at these strangers.

I can hear and see Howie, he’s barking even more fiercely now. Can he see the holes in my body? I know there are a lot of them, but I can’t feel any pain, just the wind blowing through me.

Who are they, these people?

What do they want with me?

Are they the Russian soldiers from the old stories?

I’m moving slowly upwards, towards a whirring noise, and I’m spinning around and around, but it’s not making me dizzy, and now I’m heading towards the bridge, held by a pair of firm arms, and gradually I sink lower, my stiffening, bloody body.

A slapping sound as I touch the ground again.

I am lying on my back.

Black plastic under me. How can I know that I’m lying on my back when I can’t see or feel anything?

But I suppose that’s what it’s like now.

All those people standing by the edge of the moat looking at me. Who are they?

I’ve got my suspicions, but I don’t want to believe it’s true, that this has finally happened. I refuse to accept it. But there’s probably no point trying to resist. And if it has happened, there are plenty of riddles to solve.

And the buzz of the lawnmower isn’t here.

A woman’s face in my field of vision. She’s beautiful.

Then another woman.

She could have been beautiful, but right now it looks like she could do with six months’ sleep, her eyes seem completely devoid of any joie de vivre.

And the way they’re talking, I don’t actually want to hear what they’re saying, not yet.

‘It’s Petersson,’ Karin says as she and Malin crouch over the body lying on the bridge spanning the moat. ‘I recognise him from pictures in the
Correspondent
and Kalle’s business magazines.’

‘We can ask one of the tenant farmers to identify him,’ Malin says. ‘But I recognise him too, so there’s hardly any point.’

Johansson and Lindman are waiting inside a patrol car. They’re planning to interview them properly once they’re done out here.

‘Apart from the wounds, he’s got a large bruise on the back of his neck,’ Karin says. ‘In all likelihood, the injuries to his torso are knife wounds. Everything suggests the sort of extreme violence that you almost only see when someone loses control. You can take it for granted that he didn’t inflict these wounds on himself. But I can’t say much more than that out here, we need to get him back to the city to see if I can get anything else from the body. It’s impossible to examine the ground out here. The rain has swept away any evidence. I might be able to find some traces of blood in the gravel, but it’s far from certain.’

The ambulance arrived a short while ago.

Driven by Stenlund, one of Janne’s former colleagues. He waved a cheery hello and asked how Janne was, and Malin replied that he was fine.

She looks at the corpse.

The open, almost magically blue eye looks as if it’s trying to escape its socket, and she feels sick, wants to get up, but looks up at Zeke instead.

‘What do you think?’

‘Someone stabbed him in a fit of rage, whacked him on the neck and dumped him in the water. Or the other way round.’

‘OK, from now on this is officially a murder investigation,’ Sven says.

Rage, Malin thinks. My hand raised against Janne, bloody hell, I was so angry, imagine if I’d had a knife in my hand, but don’t think, don’t think, say instead: ‘We need to examine the car and the surrounding area, the whole castle and the other buildings, just to see if we can find anything. Anything that suggests a struggle, or any other evidence, come to that. Anything that looks like the murder weapon. Chances are we’re looking for a knife, and a rock or something similar.’

‘OK,’ Sven says. ‘We have to marshal our forces, have an initial meeting before we get going. And we need to interview the two men who found him. Call in the rest of the team. Karin, can you give the OK for us to use one of the rooms inside the castle?’

Karin nods.

A car appears at the edge of the forest.

Another of the
Correspondent
’s blue and white staff cars.

Everything in due course, Malin thinks, feeling her stomach contract and wanting to throw up.

Malin walks over the gravel towards the doors of the castle, thinking about the hundreds of people who must have walked that path over the years. In fear or pride, tired, or with the elation that only owning considerable property can bring.

These people are like spirits anchored to the landscape, ghosts that don’t want to leave the ground and fly.

She had just closed Jerry Petersson’s open eye.

Wanted him to find peace, to stop having to stare at the world with a cold, dead gaze. It’s quite enough for those of us who are alive to have to see the world like that, she thought. Then she looked at him. His blank face, the exposed wounds on his reasonably toned body. Who were you? she wondered. What sort of person do you have to be to end up where you did? How did all this come to be yours? Who got so angry with you that he or she stabbed you over and over again?

Then she walked around the castle, finding a small chapel at the rear, but the door was locked. She peered in, and in the middle of the octagonal space was a raised dais that she assumed must mark the Fågelsjö family vault. Dozens of icons stared down from the walls at her, the gold surrounding the figures of Christ defying the darkness of the season, saying: ‘Beauty is possible’.

On the other side of the castle stood two big red Stiga tractors, equipped for cutting grass, silent, as if they’d been used for the last time, their blades removed.

Malin climbs the steps up to the castle, breathing in the morning air.

In spite of the nausea, she feels excited.

And that makes her ashamed. Thinks: you can feel ashamed of any emotion. Was it shame that killed you, Jerry? What were you ashamed of? If you were ashamed of anything at all. Maybe you have to be free from shame to own and live in a castle?

In the castle’s entrance hall a huge chandelier hangs oddly alone up above. As if it’s waiting to spread light, Malin thinks. And that painting on the wall. A man, a woman. A bit of suncream on her back. Love? Suppressed violence. Definitely.

That picture probably cost a fortune, Malin thinks.

Muttering
.

Questions.

Don’t imagine I’m going to answer.

Surely you have to do something to justify your salary?

A camera clicking.

My eternity is made eternal.

I can’t move. Yet I could still see Malin Fors looking at my collection of icons just now.

Maybe I can have some fun with this. Play with justice, the way I have so many times in the past.

But how can I do that? My body’s full of holes. This doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense.

Help.

Help me.

Malin Fors.

I don’t recognise this fear, it’s completely new.

Only you can get me out of here, Malin. That’s right, isn’t it?

Only you can silence this fear that I’ve been so desperately trying to evade. The fear that you’re trying to escape too. That’s right, isn’t it?

A large black-and-white photograph of silhouetted figures in a hammock hangs on the long wall of the library. It’s as if the people have stepped out of the picture and just left their shadows behind.

Malin has no idea who the artist is, but it looks expensive, it has the reek of fine art about it.

The ceiling must be ten metres high.

Karin Johannison and two recently arrived colleagues have been through it and found nothing of interest, and now it’s their meeting room.

The walls are clad in dark wood panelling and empty custom-made bookcases that probably once housed a collection of leather-bound volumes. Which authors? Rousseau? Hardly. Shakespeare? Definitely. Sven Sjöman has settled into one of the bowed, white, upholstered armchairs in the middle of the room. He looks tired and thin, Malin thinks, but if Sven looks tired, what must I look like?

Zeke is sitting on a jagged modern chair on the other side of the rickety metal table. He’s taken off his raincoat, but there are still drops of rain on his shaven head. Waldemar Ekenberg has arrived as well, sitting on the sofa where Malin is evidently expected to join him. Waldemar smells of smoke, his eyes dark in the gloom of the library, and his long, skinny legs almost seem to disappear in the fabric of his loose gabardine trousers.

‘Sit down, Malin,’ Sven says, gesturing to the place beside Waldemar. ‘But take off that wet coat first.’

Take my coat off. Does he think I’m five years old or something?

‘Of course I’m going to take my bloody coat off,’ Malin says, and Sven looks surprised at her anger and says: ‘Malin, I didn’t mean it like that.’

She takes off her coat, sits down beside Waldemar and the smell of smoke from his clothes lifts her nausea to new heights.

‘Jerry Petersson,’ Sven says. ‘Murdered with extreme force. We can assume that for now until we get a more precise cause of death in Karin’s report. This is the first meeting, albeit rather hastily convened, of the preliminary investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.’

The group of detectives sits in silence.

The concentration and seriousness, the focus that’s always there at the start of each murder investigation, the feeling of urgency, that they have to get somewhere fast, because they know that for each day that passes, their chances of solving the case diminish.

Sven goes on: ‘I got the station to do a quick check. Jerry Petersson was born in 1965, and, as far as we’ve been able to see, he only has one close relative, his father, who lives in Åleryd Care Home. A priest and a social worker are on their way to break the news to him. We’ll have to wait before we interview him. He’s an old man.’

Göte Lindman and Ingmar Johansson had identified Petersson a short while before, out on the bridge over the moat. They weren’t in any doubt, and they’d both been strangely calm.

‘Any ideas about where to start?’ Sven says.

The tone of Sven’s voice is interested, honestly questioning, but Malin knows that he’s about to carry on talking again.

‘OK,’ Sven says. ‘What do we know about Jerry Petersson?’

‘A lawyer, originally from these parts,’ Zeke says. ‘Studied in Lund, but worked in Stockholm. Made a fortune and moved back here when he got the chance to buy Skogså from the Fågelsjö family. The article in the
Correspondent
suggested that they’d fallen on hard times and had to sell. The reporter also hinted that Jerry Petersson had been involved in some dodgy dealings.’

‘I read that as well,’ Malin says, remembering that it was Daniel Högfeldt who had written the article. ‘He must have had some serious capital to be able to buy this place. And I can imagine how bitter the Fågelsjös must have been at having to sell the estate. It had been in the family for, what, almost five hundred years?’

Fågelsjö, she thinks. One of the most famous noble families in the area. The sort of family that everyone knows something about. Without ever really knowing why.

‘We’ll have to question the Fågelsjös about the circumstances surrounding the sale,’ Sven says. ‘Find out which members of the family were involved.’

‘The family consists of a father and two children. A son and a daughter, I think,’ Zeke says.

‘How do you know that?’ Malin asks.

‘That was in the
Correspondent
as well. In one of those birthday profiles of the old man when he hit seventy.’

‘Children’s names?’

‘No idea.’

‘That should be fairly easy to find out,’ Waldemar says.

‘You’ll have to share out the interviews between you,’ Sven says. ‘Get them done as soon as possible. I’ll arrange for checks at the houses around here, and we’ll put out a message in the local media that we want to hear from anyone who may have seen anything unusual in the area over the past twenty-four hours.’

‘If he was really rich,’ Malin says, ‘then this could have been a robbery. Someone who heard about the new millionaire in the castle and decided to have a go.’

‘Maybe,’ Sven says. ‘The doors were open, after all. But from what we’ve seen so far, nothing seems to be missing in here. And Karin found his wallet in that yellow raincoat. The knife wounds to his torso suggest the sort of violent rage you don’t often see in robberies.’