AUTUMN KILLING Read online

  Jerry has never seen any ghosts, has just heard the creaking and sighing of the stone walls at night, feeling the chill that has been stored up in the old building over the centuries.

  Ghosts.

  Spirits.

  The castle and outbuildings were run-down so he’s had everything renovated. This past year he’s felt like a foreman on a building site.

  Several times he’s seen a black car on the estate and assumed it was one of the Fågelsjö family getting a kick of nostalgia. Why not? he reasons. Mind you, he doesn’t know for sure that it is one of the family, it could be pretty much anyone, there are certainly people who’d like to visit.

  He was profiled in the Correspondent when it became known that Skogså had a new owner. He gave an interview, mouthed humble platitudes about fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. But what good had that done?

  The journalist, a Daniel Högfeldt, went for the shady-business-dealings angle, and made out that he had forced the Fågelsjö family from their ancestral home of almost five hundred years.

  Whining.

  Stop whining. No birthright gives anyone a lifetime’s right to anything.

  To this day, the article annoys him, and he regrets giving in to his vanity, his desire to send a message to the area that he was back. To recreate something that never existed: that was what he imagined he was doing.

  How much damage have the Fågelsjö family done to people around here, though? How many peasants and tenant farmers and wage-slaves have had to endure their bailiff’s whip? How many people have been trampled underfoot by the Fågelsjös’ assumption that they’re better than everyone else?

  Petersson hasn’t taken on any employees, instead he contracts people whenever anything needs doing, and he’s careful to make sure he pays them well and treats them decently.

  And the story of the moat around the castle. That it was built in the early nineteenth century, long after anyone in this country had any need of a moat. That one of the counts got it into his head that he wanted a moat, and commandeered a load of Russian prisoners-of-war from von Platen’s work on the Göta Canal and worked them until they dropped, a lot of them dying of exhaustion. It was said that they interred the bodies in the walls of the moat when they lined it with stone, that they shut those Russian souls in for all eternity for the sake of a meaningless moat.

  But sometimes it feels a bit isolated at the castle. And for the first time in his life he has felt that he could do with a friend. The security of having another living creature around him, someone who would take his side no matter what happened, who would sound the alarm if there was any danger approaching. And a dog was useful for hunting.

  Is that something up ahead on the road? Howie? Back so soon. Impossible. Completely impossible.

  A stag?

  A deer.

  No.

  The rain is pouring down now, but inside the oil-smelling warmth of the Range Rover the world seems very agreeable.

  Then the castle appears out of the fog, its three storeys of grey stone seeming to force their way out of the earth, the leaning walls straining towards the grey sky, as if they thought they should be in charge up there. And the light from the swaying green lanterns he has had installed along the moat. He loves the brightness they give.

  Is that someone standing on the castle steps?

  The tenant farmers he’s going hunting with aren’t due until later on, and they’ve never been on time yet.

  He accelerates.

  He feels with his hand beside him for the dog, but the warm fur isn’t there.

  Of course.

  Petersson wants to get there quickly, wants to hear the gravel of the drive crunch under the Range Rover’s tyres. Yes, there is someone on the steps.

  The outline of a figure. Hazy through the fog. Unless it’s an animal?

  The castle ghosts?

  The vengeful spirits of the Russian soldiers?

  Count Erik paying him a visit with his cloak and scythe?

  He’s ten metres away from the black shape now.

  Who is it? A woman? You?

  Can it really be that person again? Certainly persistent, if it is.

  He stops the car.

  Blows the horn.

  The black figure on the steps moves silently towards him.

  6

  Grey.

  The morning light is grey, but it still manages to cut right into Malin’s eyes. The light is gentle, like a blunt knife found at the back of a kitchen drawer of a deceased and distant relative. She looks up, out through the living-room window. The clouds are clustered tightly in different layers in front of the sun, and she can feel how her skin is swollen over swollen flesh, and she tries to look around, but keeps having to close her eyes, to give her reluctant brain a rest and muffle its angry throbbing with darkness.

  Her body is in a heap on the parquet floor, the radiator by her head warmer now than yesterday evening, and she can hear the water gurgling through the pipes.

  An almost empty bottle of tequila beside her, the lid half screwed on, and she looks out at the flat.

  Grey.

  The whole of my world is grey, Malin thinks. More nuances of grey than my brain can comprehend, from the dark, leaden grey under the sofa to the almost dirty white of the walls.

  And who’s that looking in through the window, whose face is that peering through the fog? The contours of her guilty conscience. Nausea. How the hell can I behave like this? A hand raised in anger.

  I stink. I want to turn my face inside out so I don’t have to look at myself in the mirror.

  How the hell am I going to get up from here?

  I want to call them, Janne and Tove, but what would I say?

  That I love them?

  That it’s raining?

  That I regret what I did?

  ‘Zacharias! Zacharias!’

  His wife Gunilla is calling from down in the kitchen with her sharp telephone-ring voice. What does she want now?

  ‘Martin scored two goals last night,’ she calls.

  Other women have a different voice.

  Zacharias ‘Zeke’ Martinsson, detective inspector with the Linköping Police, twists his body out of bed. Gets up, feeling that the damp in the room has made his body unnaturally stiff. Not much light is creeping past the edges of the black blind, so he knows the weather outside must still be atrocious, a perfect day for staying indoors, fix a few things that need doing around the house.

  Martin.

  He got an NHL contract in the end. After his success at the World Championships in Moscow they were throwing money at his agent, and six months ago he moved out to Vancouver.

  Rich.

  And famous.

  ‘If you want any money, Dad, for a holiday or a new summerhouse, or to come out and visit, just say. Linus is growing fast, you must want to see him?’

  Twelve thousand kronor.

  That’s how much the cheapest flights to Vancouver cost.

  Each.

  A hefty chunk of a detective’s salary.

  He’s eight months old now, the boy, my grandchild. I want to see him. But getting Martin to pay for the tickets?

  Never.

  All those millions that the lad’s earning just for entertaining a few exhausted uneducated souls. Sometimes it disgusts Zeke, just as ice hockey’s affected macho bullshit always has, the way the players and coaches and fans all think they’re so tough. But what do they know about real roughness, real danger, and the demands that makes of you? Have any of those prima donnas in their oversized padded shorts got what it takes if things really kick off? Sundin? Forsberg? Not a chance.

  ‘Zeke, they’re showing the goals on 4. Hurry up.’

  Gunilla has done the whole ice hockey thing. All the ferrying around. Cheering him on, while he couldn’t get past his dislike of the game and would rather sing with the Da Capo choir instead.

  He pulls on his underpants, feeling them stretch over his thighs and balls. Standing in the darkness of
the room he rubs his hand over his shaved head. The two days of stubble is sharp against his hand, but not enough for him to need to shave.

  Goal.

  My son.

  And then Zeke smiles, against his will, the lad’s coping with those prima donnas pretty well. But rush downstairs?

  Never.

  She’s not sleeping by my side. This bed is an ocean of lost opportunities.

  Police Chief Karim Akbar would like to be able to put his arm around his wife, but she isn’t there, he’s been rejected in favour of someone else. But maybe it’s better this way? For the past few years he hasn’t dared approach her, scared of getting burned by her refusal.

  She was always tired.

  Tired after working double shifts as a social worker, when half her colleagues had emigrated to Norway to work for twice as much money for two thirds of their old hours.

  There’s something I’m not seeing, Karim had often thought. But what? He had turned the feeling into an abstract problem instead of grabbing it and trying to work out what it meant or what the consequences might be. He had reflected upon how two people can spend their whole lives living side by side without ever understanding each other, and that the feeling of emptiness that both destroys you and surrounds you in that sort of relationship must be similar to what his father felt when he arrived in Sweden as an engineer, but failed to find either a job or a place in society. His father had ended up hanging from a noose made with a nylon tie in a flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall.

  Sometimes Karim has been struck by the idea that she wanted to get out. That she wanted a divorce. But if that was the case, then why didn’t she say so? He was a sufficiently enlightened man not to claim any right of ownership.

  But he hadn’t managed to pursue the thought through to its conclusion, hadn’t summoned up the energy to ask her.

  And then she left. Took their nine-year-old son and moved in with another bastard social worker in Malmö.

  She dared. But he knows she was scared, maybe still is.

  But there’s no need.

  I’d never be like my compatriots, the brother and father we caught a month or so ago. They make me sick.

  Divorce.

  A better word for loneliness and confusion. He’s tried to take refuge in work, in his new book, looking at issues of integration from an entirely new perspective, but it’s slow-going. Instead he has tried to come up with activities to keep their son amused when he visits.

  An every-third-weekend dad. She wanted sole custody and he gave in. It wouldn’t have suited his rota at work to be a single parent every other week. And it was geographically impossible.

  Bajran is with her and the other man this weekend.

  In September they spent his birthday in Stockholm, and his son went with him to Götrich where he got some new suits, and he even let Bajran choose a couple of ties.

  The suits are made of fine, soft wool. Cashmere. An extravagance that an upstart police chief like him can indulge himself with. That and a Mercedes.

  He pulls the covers tighter around him, hearing the rain clatter on the windowsill and thinking how much he wants to move to a flat in the city, closer to everything. Lambohov is too reminiscent of Nacksta and Sundsvall.

  But of course things could be worse. And Karim sees Börje Svärd’s face before him, the detective’s bold twisted moustache. He’s on sick leave at the moment: Anna, his wife, has MS and needs round-the-clock care, help with her breathing, the illness has hit the nerves controlling the muscles around her lungs.

  ‘She might have six months,’ Börje said when he applied for leave so he could be her carer.

  ‘Take all the time you need to look after your wife,’ Karim replied. ‘There’ll always be a job for you here.’

  And Malin Fors. Something’s going to crack there, Karim thinks. But can I do anything about it? She drinks too much, but, God knows, we need her in the department.

  Sven Sjöman, superintendent and head of the investigative unit of Linköping Police’s Violent Crime Division, likes to think that he’s coaxing the innermost secrets out of wood: its beauty, and the functional, attractive shape that lives within it.

  It’s an absurdly romantic notion, of course, but if having woodwork as a hobby isn’t romantic, it can still be full of love.

  The lathe rumbles. The sawdust sprays up onto his blue T-shirt with the logo of the Berg Lumberyard.

  Sven’s workshop, in a soundproof room in the basement of his house in Valla, smells of fresh wood-shavings, of varnish and polish, of sweat.

  The hour he spends down here each morning is the best but also the loneliest hour of the day.

  He’s never liked loneliness.

  Prefers the company of other people.

  His wife’s, for instance. Even if they don’t say more than they need to each other after all these years.

  His colleagues.

  Karim.

  And Malin. How are you doing, Malin? She hasn’t had a good year, Sven thinks as he takes the rough bowl off the lathe. Then he switches off the machine and enjoys the silence that quickly fills the room.

  It probably wasn’t a good idea for you to move back in with Janne again. Not a good idea at all, but I could never tell you that. You have to take care of your own life, Fors. I can sometimes show you the way at work, but that’s happening less and less; there’s no longer much need for it.

  But in life.

  You reek of drink more and more. You look grey, exhausted, sad.

  Oh well.

  As long as it doesn’t get any worse. Janne, your husband, or rather the ex-husband that you’re back together with, called me, wanted me to do something. He told me about your drinking, and it’s certainly pretty obvious. At least sometimes. And I made him a promise. But to do what? Talk to you? You’d be furious. Suspend you? There’s no justification for that. Send you to an expert? You’re so stubborn, you’d refuse to go.

  Getting a bit drunk is part of being a detective.

  What with all the crap we see, it helps ease the pressure.

  He tightens his belt. Four holes in, now, twelve kilos down. Better blood results. But far too many dull evening meals.

  ‘Put your overalls on. Now. I don’t want to have to tell you again.’

  Detective Inspector Johan Jakobsson is standing in the hall of his terraced house in Linghem. His five-year-old daughter is in a world of her own, singing, and his words don’t come close to penetrating her bubble.

  Why the hell did they agree to go to the in-laws this weekend, now that he finally has a Friday off? The last thing they need is another panicky morning with a load of unnecessary aggressive words firing through the air like stray bullets.

  ‘Can you sort Hugo out? I’ll take Emma.’

  His wife nods and bends down for the boy’s blue jacket.

  ‘I don’t want to have to tell you again.’

  ‘Do you have to get so cross?’ his wife asks.

  And so it starts.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to set off for Nässjö at this ungodly hour.’

  ‘It’s Dad’s birthday.’

  ‘Yes, sixty-three. It’s not like he can’t manage without us.’

  His wife’s mouth tightens. She’s not going to dignify that with a reply, Johan thinks as he reaches for their daughter, grabbing her thin but strong arm and pulling her to him.

  ‘Get your jacket on.’

  ‘But she won’t need it in the car.’

  He lets go of his daughter’s arm.

  Shuts his eyes.

  Wishes he was on call this weekend. Then he could have invented some incident, or something might really have happened.

  The children. His eyes are closed, but he can still hear their voices and it’s as if they become more distinct to him now, and they sound happy, full of confidence about life in spite of their sullenness, and he thinks that the thousands of hugs and kisses, the hundreds of thousands of words of praise, a million smiles and reassurances that they’re love
d more than anything actually work. It is possible to create happy individuals, it’s simple and definitely worth the effort.

  ‘Johan,’ his wife says. ‘Relax. We don’t have to rush if you don’t want to.’

  On the grubby, whitewashed wall in front of him there are four coat hooks. One of the middle ones is loose, dangerously close to falling off.

  Waldemar Ekenberg has opened the terrace door and is taking deep drags on his cigarette. The terrace is out of the wind, otherwise he wouldn’t be standing here. He’d be crouched under the extractor fan over the cooker.

  He looks up at the sky. At the dense grey-white roof of the world.

  His morning cigarette.

  There’s nothing better. Even if his wife will complain that he smells of smoke when he goes back to bed.

  Waldemar didn’t hesitate when a temporary position in Linköping came up. He had enjoyed his earlier secondment there in connection with a gruesome case into the murders of teenage girls.

  They didn’t want him, he knew that, but they couldn’t ignore his experience when all the other applicants were fresh out of Police Academy.

  Fors. Sjöman. Jakobsson. Akbar. Martinsson.

  Not a bad collection of cops really. A decent clear-up rate. Not too burned out.

  Fors.

  Completely manic, apparently much worse after what happened to her daughter, and since she got back together with that fireman.

  But she’s a fucking good detective. And very easy to tease.

  And that can be a lot of fun.

  And she’s hitting the bottle. A lot of his colleagues over the years have succumbed to drink. And he’s never been able to do a thing about it. Once they’ve fallen to the bottom of the bottle there’s no way back.

  Jakobsson.

  Worn out by his kids.

  He and his wife back in bed never had any, and that’s probably just as well.

  Now there’s just us to worry about. They were in Thailand last winter, just the two of them, and they could take it as easy as they liked, unlike all the families with little kids in the hotel.

  The love of a child. Love for a child.

  You can’t miss what you’ve never had, Waldemar thinks, taking the last drag on the cigarette.