Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

Apart from the dog, Petersson is completely alone out in the field, yet he still feels quite at ease here, in a place where everything can die yet also be born, a breaking point in people’s lives, a sequence of possibilities.

He runs his hand through his bleached hair, thinking how well it suits his sharp nose and hard blue eyes. The wrinkles in his brow. Business wrinkles. Well-earned.

The forest over there.

Fir trees and pines, undergrowth. A lot of game this year. His tenant farmers are coming later today, they’re going to try to get a young elk or a couple of deer. Something needs be killed.

The Fagelsjo family.

What wouldn’t they give for the chance to hunt in these forests again?

He looks at his arms, at the bright yellow Prada raincoat, the raindrops drumming on his head and the yellow GORE-TEX fabric.

‘Howie,’ Petersson calls. ‘Howie. Time to go now.’

Hard. Tough. An ice-cold machine. A man prepared to step over dead bodies.

That was how people talked about him in the business circles he moved in up in Stockholm. A shadow to most people. A rumour. A topic of conversation, something that was often the cause of admiration in a world where it was deemed desirable to be so successful that you could lie low instead of maintaining a high profile, instead of appearing on television talk shows to get more clients.

Jerry Petersson?

Brilliant, or so I’ve heard. A good lawyer. Didn’t he get rich from that IT business, because he got out in time? Supposed to be a real cunt-magnet.

But also: Watch out for him.

Isn’t he involved with Jochen Goldman? Don’t they own some company together?

‘Howie.’

But the dog doesn’t come, doesn’t want to come. And Jerry knows he can leave it be, let the dog find its own way home to the castle through the forest in its own good time. It always comes home after a few hours. But for some reason he wants to call the dog back to him now, come to some sort of arrangement before they part.

‘Howie!’

And the dog must have heard the urgency in his voice, because it comes racing over the whole damn field, and is soon back with Jerry.

It leaps around his legs, and he crouches down beside it, feeling the damp soak through the fabric of his trousers, and he pats the dog’s back hard in the way he knows it likes.

‘So what do you to want to do, eh, boy? Run home on your own, or drive back with me? Your choice. Maybe run back on your own, you never know, I might drive off the road.’

The dog licks his face before turning and running back across the field and hiding under a pile of leaves, before disappearing through the dark, open doors of the forest.

Jerry Petersson gets back in the Range Rover, turns the key in the ignition, listens to the sound of the engine, then lets the vehicle nose its way along the road again, into the dense, fog-shrouded forest.

He hadn’t locked the castle doors when he set off on his spontaneous morning drive around the estate after waking early and being unable to get back to sleep. Who was likely to come? Who would dare to come? A hint of excitement: I bet they’d like to come.

Fredrik Fagelsjo. Old man Axel.

Katarina.

She’s stayed away.

The daughter of the house.

My house now.

He moved in their orbit a long time ago.

A crow flies in front of the windscreen, flapping its wings, one wing looks injured somehow, maybe broken.

The castle is large. He could do with a woman to share it with. I’ll find one soon enough, he thinks. He’s always thought, in his increasingly large homes, that he could do with a woman to share it with. But it was merely a mental exercise that he enjoyed playing, and whenever he really needed a woman it was easy enough for someone like him: go to a bar, or call one of the numbers, and love would arrive, home delivery. Or a randy housewife in the city for a conference. Whatever. Women to share the present moment, women without any connections either backwards or forwards in time, women as desire-fulfilling creatures. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just the way it is.

He’d heard a rumour that Skogsa was for sale.

Sixty-five million kronor.

The Wrede estate agency in Stockholm was handling the sale. No adverts, just a rumour that a castle with a vast estate was for sale in the Linkoping area, and perhaps he might be interested?

Skogsa.

Interested?

Sixty-five million stung. But not much. And he got more than the castle for his money. Seventy-five hectares of prime forest, and almost as much arable land. And the abandoned parish house that he could always pull down and replace with something else.

And now, here, on this beautiful black autumn morning, when the fog and the relentless rain and the feeling of lightness and of being at home fill his body, he knows it was money well spent, because what is money for if not to create feelings?

He wanted to meet Fagelsjo when the deal was concluded in the office on Karlavagen. Didn’t exactly want to smirk at him, but rather give him a measured look, force the old man to realise how wrong he had been, and let him know that a new age had dawned.

But Axel never showed up at the meeting in Stockholm.

In his place he sent a young solicitor from Linkoping. A young brunette with plump cheeks and a pout. After the contract was signed he asked her to lunch at Prinsen. Then he fucked her upstairs in his office, pushing her against the window, pulling her skirt high up her stomach, tearing a hole in her black tights and pumping away, bored, as he watched the buses and taxis and people moving in a seemingly predetermined stream down Kungsgatan, and he imagined he could hear the sound of the great lawnmowers in Kungstradgarden.

The castle is supposed to be haunted.

The unquiet spirit of a Count Erik who is said to have beaten his son to death when the son turned out to be feeble-minded. And the Russian soldiers who were supposed to have been walled up in the moat.

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 Fagelsjo 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 Skogsa 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 Hogfeldt, went for the shady-business-dealings angle, and made out that he had forced the Fagelsjo 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 Fagelsjo 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 Fagelsjos’ 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 Gota 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 Linkoping 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.