Autumn Killing (9 page)

‘No, I don’t get the feeling that this was a robbery or a break-in either. This is something else,’ Malin says.

‘What about Petersson’s business affairs?’ Zeke says. ‘If he was a bit sleazy, as the rumours seem to suggest, then there could be hundreds of people wishing him harm. People who were pissed off with him.’

‘That’s our most important line of inquiry right now,’ Sven says. ‘We need to try to find files and business records here in the house that might indicate how to proceed. What sort of dodgy dealings was he involved in? Any former colleagues? What about his business? Did he have anything going on at the moment that might have gone wrong? We need to do a serious background check on him. There must be loads of documented evidence. Waldemar, you and Jakobsson take that. Start by searching the castle for documentation once Forensics have cleared the rooms. We also need to find out if he had any sort of will. Who stands to inherit all this? That would be very interesting to know.’

‘Jakobsson’s not on today,’ Waldemar says.

‘Call him in,’ Sven says. ‘And you two, Malin and Zeke, start by questioning the two men who found him.’

They talk to Ingmar Johansson first.

The tenant farmer is slurping coffee on the other side of the table in the castle kitchen, running one hand through his blond hair at regular intervals, telling them how he was uneasy at first when he heard that the castle had a new owner, but that everything had seemed ‘fine’ once he’d had the chance to talk to Petersson.

‘He wasn’t planning to change the terms of our lease.’

‘No changes at all?’ Zeke says.

‘No, not really.’

‘Not really?’ Zeke wonders.

‘Well, he wanted me to go hunting with him whenever he felt like it.’

‘And you didn’t object?’

‘No, why should I? It does me no good if there’s too much game running around on the land I lease.’

‘How often were you supposed to do that?’ Malin asks.

‘Whenever he called.’

‘But how often?’

‘He never said. When he called yesterday it was the first time in a long while.’

‘You didn’t see anything odd when you got here?’ Malin says, even though she had asked the same thing when they had first arrived at the castle. Wants to twist the truth out of Ingmar Johansson with the force of repetition.

‘No. I came with Lindman, and the Range Rover was parked in front of the castle. I assumed Petersson was inside the castle and would be out shortly, and when he didn’t come out we went inside to look for him.’

‘You didn’t see any other cars?’

‘No.’

‘Were the doors to the castle open?’

‘You’ve already asked me that. Yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to get in, would we? Those doors wouldn’t be too easy to force.’

‘You weren’t here earlier today?’ Zeke asks. ‘Or last night?’

‘No, why on earth would I have been?’

Ingmar Johansson’s face seems to crumple, his lips tighten and he looks at them suspiciously.

‘Ask my wife at home if you don’t believe me. We spent all evening watching television before we went to bed. She made me breakfast this morning.’

‘Do you know anything else about Jerry Petersson that you think might be of interest to us?’ Malin asks.

‘No, not a damn thing.’

‘Nothing about his business affairs?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did he live here alone?’

‘I think so. He didn’t have any staff. They say he just called people when he needed them.’

Johansson pulls a face that says: That’s enough questions. I’ve said my piece.

‘You can go now,’ Malin says tiredly. ‘But we might need to talk to you again.’

‘You’ve got my mobile number,’ Johansson says, standing up.

Göte Lindman is a lonely man, Malin thinks as she sees his face against the white tiles of the kitchen.

A lonely farmer who’s probably at his happiest when he’s working a thresher or looking after his livestock, if he has any. The woman he’s mentioned, Svetlana, sounded more like a piece of furniture than a life partner.

Lindman has just told them the same things they heard from Johansson. That they were summoned to go hunting, that they’d entered into an informal agreement with the castle’s new owner, and that it didn’t bother Lindman, because hunting was what you did in the autumn and that was when there was least work to do on the farm anyway.

‘Petersson seemed like an honest man.’

Lindman says the words with emphasis before going on: ‘It’s a bugger that we had to find him in the moat like that, things could have gone all right. I’m sure of that. Fågelsjö was an unpleasant bastard.’

‘Which one?’ Zeke asks.

‘I used to deal with the old man, Axel.’

‘Unpleasant, how?’ Malin asks.

‘His manner, well, it was . . . he really let you know who was in charge, let’s put it that way.’

Lindman falls silent, shakes his head, then a sudden rush of fear crosses his face.

‘How did he let you know?’ Malin asks.

‘By raising the rent all of a sudden, for instance,’ Lindman said quickly.

Malin nods.

Modern castle owners. The same power relationships as always, the same oppressed tenant farmers as always, the same inferiority as always. But at the same time some people are predisposed to dislike any figure of authority.

‘Do you know anything about Petersson?’

‘Only that he grew up around here and made a killing in the capital.’

‘Do you know how he made his money?’ Zeke asks.

Lindman shakes his head.

‘No idea.’

‘Did he live here alone?’

‘Only with the dog, as far as I know. What’s going to happen to it now?’

‘We’ll take care of it,’ Malin says, realising that she has no idea what they’re going to do with the dog, which is still barking outside in the car.

Then more questions and answers, if they saw anything unusual on the way here, any cars, if the Range Rover was parked in front of the castle when they arrived, if he had any idea about who could have done it, and what he was doing last night and first thing this morning.

‘I’ve got no idea who could have done it . . . I was at home on the farm. Ask Svetlana . . . You don’t think I did it? Then I wouldn’t have called you, would I?’

‘We don’t think you were involved in the suspected murder of Jerry Petersson,’ Malin says. ‘But we have to ask, we have to keep all possible lines of inquiry open, at the same time as we rule out some of the less likely scenarios.’

Malin and Zeke alone in the kitchen.

The white-tiled walls make Malin think of a slaughterhouse, then a mortuary, then she imagines that the fog outside in the forest and over the fields is gunpowder smoke from a seventeenth-century battlefield.

Blood and screaming.

Amputated limbs.

Rotting vegetation and slimy mushrooms underfoot.

Men without arms screaming in sulphurous smoke from burning straw. Legless creatures, children with their ears cut off.

All the things Janne had seen in Rwanda.

‘Why do you think the doors were open?’ Malin asks. ‘The art he’s got in here must be worth millions.’

‘Maybe he was inside when he saw someone coming up the drive, and he went out and didn’t lock up behind him? That would be entirely natural, wouldn’t it?’

‘Or he went out for a walk or a drive, and forgot to lock up?’

‘Or else he was the type who doesn’t like routine chores and didn’t bother to lock up, just for the thrill of it,’ Zeke says.

‘Or else he didn’t live alone. There might have been someone else in the castle when he went out.’

‘A woman?’

‘Maybe. It’s pretty unlikely, don’t you think? Living in a huge castle like this out in the middle of nowhere all on his own?’

‘But everyone says he lived on his own. Maybe he liked being alone?’

‘Can you hear the dog?’ Zeke went on.

‘No. But we should give it some water.’

Zeke nods.

‘What are we going to do with it?’ Malin asks.

‘Take it to the dogs’ home in Slaka.’

‘Or to Börje Svärd. He’s got kennels, hasn’t he?’

‘Do you think he’s up to it?’

His wife. Anna. On a respirator in the most tastefully furnished house Malin has ever seen. A good person in a bad body.

She thinks of her own flat. This kitchen alone is three times the size of the whole thing.

‘We need to know more about Petersson,’ Malin says, thinking: we’re fumbling through the autumn fog right now. But one thing is certain, he managed to do what I failed to do, getting away from fucking Linköping. So why, why on earth did he come back? What sort of voices were calling him back here?

‘Who do you think he was?’ Malin asks.

Zeke shrugs his shoulders, and Malin wonders what dreams and desires a man like Jerry Petersson might have had. What joy and pain might he have felt?

What do you want to know about me, Malin Fors?

I can tell you everything, if you listen carefully enough. I know you’re good at listening to voices that can’t be heard, to the soundless muttering that contains certainty and possibly even the truth.

I’m not a harsh person.

I never have been, but I still had faith in harshness, I’ve seen all it has given me. Certainly, it made me lonely, but I chose to believe that my loneliness was a matter of choice.

I don’t need anyone. I can’t live with anyone. I’m not scared of loneliness.

That’s what I told myself.

A car door closing.

A zip was pulled up over my face and for a moment everything went black, but then the world opened up before my eyes again. Simple and beautiful in a way it never has been before, and suddenly my faith in harshness felt like a mistake.

I’m wrong, I thought. You’re wrong, Jerry Petersson.

And now we’re rolling forward, the ambulance and me, and I curse myself as I lie there in that black plastic on the stretcher, bouncing up and down as the wheels try to get a grip on the gravel leading into the forest.

I’m in here.

In the cold black plastic.

I’m up here.

High up in the sky and looking down on Skogså, on Malin Fors and Zacharias Martinsson walking across the courtyard, wrapped up in themselves, on their way to Malin’s car where Howie has stopped barking, his tongue hanging thirstily out of his mouth.

On that old bastard Fågelsjö in his apartment.

Where are they going, all these people? From now on?

I can see that if I want to.

But instead I glide away to other spaces, I see myself, travelling the same way I am travelling now, the same way yet so endlessly different, a body on a stretcher, a pain that I can’t feel in this present now.

The boy is just as surprised each time he feels pain, yet it is nevertheless in that moment, when the ambulance lurches for some unknown reason and his hastily splinted broken shinbone hits the edge of the stretcher, that he becomes aware that he has a memory and that this isn’t always a good thing. At that moment it causes more pain than anything he has ever felt in his life, and he is aware of it, it’s as if this new pain is the sum total of all the previous pain in his life, and all of a sudden he understands his mum, but his father remains hidden to him, a pain of the soul impossible to comprehend.

Neither Mum nor Dad has been allowed to travel in the ambulance, and he can see his own anxiety reflected in the man sitting beside him, stroking his hair gently and telling him that everything’s going to be all right. That June day was the start of the first UN environmental conference, the first of its kind, and the bombs are still raining down on Southeast Asia.

There’s no lift in the block of flats in Berga. Their flat is on the second floor and he knows Mum has trouble with the stairs, that she’s in pain, always in pain, but he doesn’t know that the ligaments in her knees are long since locked by rheumatism and that she has asked the doctors in the regional hospital to increase her dose of cortisone, and that they have refused: ‘Stick it out,’ they say, ‘we can’t do anything.’

And, in her exhaustion, she can’t do anything for him, during the hours after Grandma picks him up from school and before Dad comes home from his shift on the production line.

He is balancing on the narrow railing of the balcony, and the rose bed five metres below looks so soft with all the flowers, their red and pink glowing against the peeling façade of the 1950s blocks, against the unkempt lawns where the parks department staff usually lie when they have their morning beers and pass around the bottle of vodka from mouth to mouth.

He isn’t scared.

If you’re scared you fall.

She calls to the boy from the kitchen, too tired to get up from the chair that she had dragged to the stove where the pea soup or mutton with dill sauce or stuffed cabbage is cooking, she shouts anxiously and angrily: ‘Get down from there! You’ll get yourself killed!’

But the boy knows he isn’t going to get himself killed, he knows he’s not going to fall.

‘I’ll tell your dad, he’ll sort you out when he gets home.’

But Dad never sorts the boy out, not even when he’s drunk, because he can always get away. Instead he takes him into the bedroom when he’s sober, and whispers to him to scream as if he were being beaten, and that’s their shared secret.

Down in the sandpit in the yard there are two little kids, and Jojje’s big sister is sitting on the only intact swing hanging from the frame. All three of them are looking up at him, not worried, but convinced he’ll manage his balancing act.

Then the phone inside the flat rings. He wants to go and answer it, like he usually does, and he forgets he’s up on the railing and his upper body sways, first one way, then the other, he wonders if it’s Grandma calling, to invite him out to the country that weekend because she forgot to ask, and the narrow iron railing disappears from under his feet. He hears Mum scream, he hears Jojje’s big sister scream, then he sees the buildings and the blue early summer sky, then the rose bushes cut into his body, he hits his leg hard and then there’s a burning pain and he tries to move, but nothing happens.