AUTUMN KILLING Read online

  There was steel in her that night. Hard, rigid steel.

  Janne had come home a month later, and she had been immersed in her work on the Maria Murvall case, spending the weekends interviewing the officers in Motala who had dealt with the investigation.

  Tove was living her own life alongside theirs. Somehow this was how things had turned out.

  ‘She’s never home. Have you noticed?’ Janne asked one evening in April when they were off at the same time and Tove had gone to the cinema in the city.

  Malin hadn’t noticed, how could she have noticed when she herself was never at home?

  They talked about seeing a counsellor, trying to get some family therapy.

  Several times Malin had stood with the phone in her hand, ready to call psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord, who had offered to see her free of charge.

  But her tongue was paralysed.

  That spring Malin had watched them working in the garden again, father and daughter together, she herself merely a physical presence, her soul taken up with a complicated honour killing.

  ‘How the hell could a father ask his son to kill his daughter? Janne, tell me?’

  ‘OK, no more tequila tonight.’

  ‘I hate it when you give me orders. It sounds as if I belong to you.’

  Linköping is enveloped by ice-cold rain.

  What exactly is this city, other than a cocoon for people’s dreams? Side by side, the inhabitants of the country’s fifth-largest city push on with their lives. Watching each other. Judging each other. Trying to love each other in spite of their prejudices. The people of Linköping mean well, Malin thinks. But when a lot of people’s lives are governed by a constant anxiety about keeping their jobs and making their wages last till the end of the month, while a minority live lives of excess, solidarity doesn’t hold up. The city’s inhabitants live side by side, separated by thin geographic lines. You can shout to the council flats of the sixties and seventies from the gardens of lovely villas, and call back from the shabby balconies.

  Autumn is a time of decay, Malin thinks. The whole world is scared, waiting to be enveloped in the chill of winter. At the same time the colours of autumn are like fire, but it’s a cold fire that only cold-blooded animals can love and take any pleasure from. The only promise held by the beauty of autumn, the leaves like flames, is that everything is going to get worse.

  Her hands are no longer trembling on the steering wheel.

  All that is left is the damp chill against her thin body. It’s strong, my body, she thinks. I may have let everything else slip, but I haven’t neglected my training, I’m strong, I’m so fucking strong, I’m Malin Fors.

  She drives past the old cemetery.

  She sees the reflection of the cathedral spire hit the windscreen like a medieval lance ready to impale her.

  What happened tonight?

  What words were spoken?

  What raised eyebrow, what nuance in whose voice made them start again?

  She has no idea; she’s had a bit to drink, not much, but probably far too much to be driving this car at this moment.

  Am I drunk? Adrenalin has erased any intoxication. But I’m not quite sober. None of my colleagues will be out tonight, will they?

  You bastard. You pathetic, cowardly bastard, always running away. Calm down Malin, stop being ridiculous, stop it, no more drink, for fuck’s sake stop drinking, why don’t you leave, and did I hit him? Did I hit you in the kitchen, Janne, or did I just have my clenched fist in the air, pissed off at all your fucking ‘don’t’s?

  I was flailing at the air, I remember that now, now that I’m pulling up in the car outside the front door on Ågatan.

  The clock of St Lars Church, enveloped in a brittle fog, says it’s quarter to eleven. A few shadowy crows stand out darkly against the sky.

  No one in sight, and I don’t want to think about this evening, this night. Beside the church’s dark-grey stone, on the waterlogged grass, sit great piles of raked leaves. In the darkness it looks as if they’re rusting, surrendering their beautiful colours and letting themselves be consumed by the millions of worms emerging from the drenched ground.

  You jerked back, Janne, dancing out of the way – you’ve had plenty of practice with worse blows than mine – and I yelled that I was leaving, leaving and never coming back.

  You can’t drive in that state, Malin, and you tried to take the keys, and then Tove was there, she’d fallen asleep watching television on the sofa but had woken up, and she shouted, Surely you can see you can’t drive like that, Mum?

  Calm down now, Malin, come here, let’s have a hug, and I lashed out again, but again there was nothing but air where I hoped you were standing.

  I pretended I’d asked if you wanted to come with me, Tove, but you just shook your head.

  And you, Janne, you didn’t stop me.

  You just looked at the kitchen clock.

  Then I ran to the car.

  I drove through the blackest autumn weather, and now I’ve stopped. I open the car door. Black tentacles tear at the grey-black sky. Open holes of fear where the starlight ought to be seeping through.

  My shoes on the wet tarmac.

  I’m thirty-five years old.

  What have I done?

  2

  Thursday, 23, Friday, 24 October

  The key in the lock.

  Malin fumbles, her hands won’t obey even though they stopped shaking a good while ago.

  Miss.

  Hit.

  Miss.

  Like everything else.

  The flat became vacant the previous week, but she told Janne that she’d got new tenants, another group of evangelical students. This evening’s explosion, unavoidable, anticipated, postponed until it was feasible.

  Malin goes inside, shaking the raindrops from her blonde bob. There’s a smell, a mixture of damp and detergent, and Malin can feel that the autumn has crept through the cracks in the windows and spread across the walls, floors and ceilings.

  She’s shaking.

  Must turn up the radiators.

  Another feeling here now.

  A lonely feeling. But also a feeling of something new?

  The furniture is all where it should be.

  The Ikea clock on the kitchen wall is still broken, the second hand lying still at the bottom of the face.

  She stands in the living room, wanting to turn on the light, but she can’t be bothered to press the switch. Better to slump onto the sofa in the welcoming darkness. A darkness that is all her own.

  Tove.

  Fifteen years old this year.

  Still mad about books and top of her class, but all that has a heavier tone now, as if the game has become serious, as if time is taking its toll on her.

  You’re too young for that, Tove.

  A few boyfriends have come and gone during the course of the year.

  Goodbye, Peter. Hello, Viggo.

  Can I let her go? I can’t punish her with my own feelings of guilt. And she seems to be fine. Malin can see it in her daughter, the glow in her eyes, the way her girlish posture is becoming that of a woman. Malin’s hopes, unexpressed: Hold your ground, Tove, you don’t want to become a mother for many years yet.

  Concentrate on your education.

  Aren’t I supposed to be giving a talk in a school sometime soon? Malin thinks. The very thought of babbling in front of a group of tired, disinterested students makes her feel miserable, so she brushes it aside.

  Malin lies down on the sofa.

  Feels the damp clothes against her skin.

  The tequila burned out of her body now.

  It feels as if the evangelical students’ sanctimony is still clinging to the flat, making her feel slightly nauseous.

  Janne. She wants to say she’s sorry, but doesn’t know where to start. And Tove, how can I explain to you? Could you even understand?

  What do I really know about your life now, Tove? I have no idea at all, except that this flat is your home, you can
move in here with me, anything else is out of the question.

  Your books, out at Janne’s.

  I’ve tried sitting down beside you a thousand times over the past year, on the sofa, on your bed, asking you how you are, but the only words I get out of you are: ‘I’m fine,’ accompanied, soundlessly, by: ‘Leave me alone, Mum.’

  And what do I want from you, Tove?

  Your forgiveness? Reassurance that everything’s all right?

  Can things ever be all right? That woman, the murderer, held you down on the floor with her bloody hands and was about to kill you.

  And I’m the one who brought that scene into being.

  There are a thousand wretched ways for it to rain. Raindrops can have any number of colours, even at night, they can take the copper of autumn leaves and make it their own, the rain can become a shower of sparks in the glow of the street lamps, sparks like flying cockroaches.

  Malin has slumped to the floor of the living room.

  Watching the red, orange and yellow cockroaches flying through the air, hearing their jaws snapping, and she forces them away, chasing them with a flame-thrower, and she can smell charred cockroach corpses as she hounds them from her sight.

  Nothing but mundane reality out there now.

  Clouds.

  Weeks, weeks of different shades of grey over her head, no blue in sight. Record rainfall, and television weather forecasters talking about a flood of biblical proportions.

  She found the bottle at the back of the cupboard above the microwave. She knew those buttoned-up religious types wouldn’t so much as have sniffed at it. So she had left it there, consciously or unconsciously, for future use.

  She drinks straight from the bottle.

  Who gives a damn if she’s hungover tomorrow? It’s been a quiet autumn since she caught the father and brother who planned and carried out the murder of their daughter, their sister. She’d had a Swedish boyfriend. And that was enough.

  Vomit.

  Sometimes it can actually be nice to be hungover. I’ll have to get to grips with everything tomorrow, get my things from Janne. Isn’t he on duty, so I won’t have to see him? I’ll bring Tove’s things. Talk to her about moving back in.

  I’m drunk, Malin thinks, and it’s nice.

  3

  Mum.

  You’re so angry, Tove thinks, as she pulls the covers over her head and listens to the rain clattering on the roof, hard and fierce, as if there were an impatient god up there drumming millions of long fingers.

  The room smells of the country. She was just looking at the rag-rugs, resting like flattened snakes on the floor, their pattern like a beautiful series of black-and-white pictures that no one will ever be able to interpret.

  I know, Mum, Tove thinks. I know you blame yourself for what happened last summer, and that you think I’m bottling up all sorts of things. But I don’t want to talk to a psychologist, I don’t want to sit there babbling opposite some old lady. I’ve been chatting to other people on trauma.com instead. In English. It’s as if it all gets easier when I see my own clumsy words about what happened, and about how scared I was then. The words take the fear away, Mum, I’ve only got the images left, but the images can’t get me.

  You have to look forward, Mum. Maybe you think I haven’t seen you drinking. That I don’t know where you hide the bottles around the house, that I don’t notice that your breath smells of alcohol behind the mask of chewing-gum. Do you think I’m stupid, or what?

  She and Janne had remained at the kitchen table when Malin disappeared with all her rage.

  Janne had said: ‘I hope she doesn’t crash the car and kill herself. Should I call the police? Or go after her? What do you think, Tove?’

  And she hadn’t known what to say. Most of all she wanted her mum to come back, to rush into the kitchen in her very best mood, but things like that only happened in bad books and films.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she had said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  And her stomach had been aching, as far as her chest, a black pressure that wouldn’t let up, and Janne had made sandwiches, had told her things would sort themselves out once her mum had calmed down.

  ‘Can’t you go after her?’

  And Janne had looked at her, then simply shaken his head in response. And the ache had found its way up into her heart and head and eyes, and she had to struggle to hold back the tears.

  ‘It’s OK to cry,’ Janne said, sitting down beside her and holding her. ‘It’s awful. It’s awful, because no one wanted it to turn out like this.’

  ‘It’s OK to cry,’ he had said again. ‘I’m going to.’

  How can I help you, Mum? Because no matter what I say it’s like you’re not listening, don’t want to listen, like you’re trapped in an autumn river full of dirty torrential water and you’ve made up your mind to float off into the darkness.

  I can see you in the kitchen, on your way to work, in the mornings, on the sofa in front of the television, or with all your files about that Maria woman.

  And I want to ask you how you are, because I can see you’re feeling bad, but I’m scared you’d just be angry. You’re completely shut off, Mum, and I don’t know how to get you to open up.

  And there’s so much else that I’d rather think about: school, my books, all my friends, all the fun stuff that I feel I’m just at the start of. All the boys.

  Tove pulls the covers down. The room is there again.

  The ache in her stomach, her heart, is still there. But for me it’s quite natural that you don’t live together, you and Dad. And there’ll be more fighting. Because I don’t think you’re coming back here, and I don’t know if I want to live with you now.

  A crow has landed on the windowsill. It looks in at her. It pecks at the glass before flying off into the night.

  The room is dark.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Tove thinks. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Janne is lying in bed with one of the bedside lamps on. He’s reading a folder from the British Armed Forces. It’s about building latrines, and it helps him to find his way into his memories, to Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan, where he most recently constructed latrines in a refugee camp. The memories from his time in the Rescue Services Agency mean that he can avoid thinking about what happened this evening, about what has happened, and now must happen.

  But the images, black and white in his memory, of people in desperate need in distant corners of the planet, are constantly shoved aside by Malin’s face, her red, puffy, tired, alcoholic’s face.

  He confronted her several times. And she evaded the issue. Yelled at him when he poured away the drink from the bottles she’d stashed away, screaming at him that it was pointless, because she still had ten bottles hidden in places he’d never find.

  He pleaded with her to see someone, a psychiatrist, a therapist, anyone at all. He had even spoken to her boss, Sven Sjöman, telling him that Malin was drinking more and more, but that it might not be visible at work, and asking him to do something. Sven had promised that something would be done. That conversation had taken place in August, but nothing had happened yet.

  Her rage. Against herself. Presumably because of what happened to Tove. She refused to accept that it wasn’t her fault, that there is evil everywhere, always, and that anyone can get in its way.

  It’s as if her stubbornness has led her in the wrong direction. That she’s absolutely committed to driving herself as far down as she can go.

  And tonight she hit him. She’s never done that before.

  Dig deep. Dig deep.

  Regular check-ups. Bacteria sanitation.

  Janne throws the files across the room. Turns out the light.

  It was pretty stupid, really, he thinks. To imagine that a bloody terrible experience could make us work together as a family. As if evil could be a catalyst for good. In truth the complete damn opposite has happened.

  Then he looks at Malin’s side of the bed. Reaches out his hand, but there’s no one there.

 
; 4

  Sleepless dawn.

  Axel Fågelsjö is about to get up from his leather armchair, but first he rubs his fingers over the worn, shiny armrest and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray on the leather-topped sideboard. Then he lets his legs take the weight of his heavy yet still strong seventy-year-old body and pulls in his stomach, feeling strangely powerful, as if there were some enemy outside the door that he needs to fight with one of the many hunting rifles in the cabinet over in the apartment’s master bedroom.

  Axel stands in the sitting room. He sees Linköping wake up outside the windows, imagines its inhabitants in their beds, all those people with their different lives. Anyone who says there’s no difference between people doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

  The trees in the Horticultural Society Park, their crowns blown this way and that by the wind. Only gentle rain now. Not the sort of downpour that drives the rats out of the sewers. That’s happened several times this autumn. And the city’s pampered middle classes have been horrified by the beasts nurtured in subterranean Linköping. As if they refuse to accept that there are rats living beneath their well-shod feet. Rats with hairless tails and razor-sharp teeth, rats that will still be there long after they themselves are gone.

  It’s been a long time since he slept through the night. He has to get up at least three times to go to the toilet, and even then he has to stand there for five minutes before releasing the little trickle that made him so incredibly desperate to go.

  But he doesn’t complain. There are people with far worse ailments than him.

  He misses Bettina when he wakes up at night. Only an empty white bed where she was always contours, warmth and breath. As luck would have it, she went before the catastrophe, before Skogså slid out of his grasp.

  The castle was at its most beautiful on mornings like this.

  He can see the castle within him, as though he were standing in front of it, at the edge of the forest.

  The seventeenth-century grey stone walls seem to rise up from the fog, more potent than nature itself.