Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

‘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 Borje Svard. 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 Linkoping. 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?

12

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 Skogsa, 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 Fagelsjo 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.

13

Linkoping, Berga, 1972 and onwards

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 facade 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.

He’ll have to accept the consequences.

They put him in plaster up to his thigh to keep him from moving. They give Mum more cortisone so she can look after him. Dad gets the pushchair out of the cellar and he rides in that when they go to the supermarket in the shopping centre, and people stare at him as if he were a baby lying in it.

When the plaster is removed he runs faster than he ever has before.

He knows what the bags mean now. He keeps his distance whenever they appear, and Dad’s bitter words reach him less and less often. He, Jerry, is a hundred steps ahead in everything, yet he still seeks Dad’s embrace sometimes, even though he knows that it can close around him like a wolf’s jaws, and Dad’s strong fingers can become the blades of the lawnmower cutting into his body, and his words can be their honed edges: ‘You’re good for nothing, lad.’

During the last weeks of summer, his last ever in nursery school, they have to do a test.

Remember the things on a picture. Pair things together. Things like that, and he realises what it means to be clever, the admiration it occasions in people who don’t expect intelligence in anyone. But the look, those pebble-sized eyes, are still unbeatable when it comes to getting what he wants.

His schoolteacher has seen the results of the tests from nursery school. She calls out his name with a note of expectation on his first day at school, then she sees his address on the report and feels disappointed, her shoulders slump, this could be a big problem, a kid from Berga with a brain.

He’s quickest at counting.

Best at writing.

Can read the most words. Sticks up his hand when no one else knows the answer, and he can see that his teacher feels distaste towards him, but he doesn’t yet know why. He doesn’t see the dirt on his clothes. The filth in his ears. His long, greasy hair. The holes in his sweater. He gives her the eyes instead, and something happens during the third year. She becomes his protector, takes him on, sees who he is and what he might become.

He stays out in the evenings. Creeping home, but sometimes Dad’s awake.

And he does what Dad might have wanted to do in the evenings once he’s quenched his thirst with wine and cheap beer. What Dad would never dare do: he hits when he says he’s going to.

He hits anyone who gets in his way. He hits the headteacher when Mum and Grandma have come to school for a meeting.

But he is allowed to stay.

An exceptional talent, his teacher says.

After that he hits people when they’re not looking.

He hits his way out of all the feelings, the nameless feelings that have nowhere to go in the closed circle of the backyard in Berga, the flat’s two rooms, Anestad Junior School, Grandma’s various homes, and his nimble feet drum restlessly on the ground, wondering what on earth this world is good for.

14

The ambulance with the perforated body.

It’s heading purposefully off towards the forest, slowly, as if anxious not to wake or upset the dead man. The dog in the car barks after the ambulance, jumping up at the window.

Standing in front of the castle, Malin can see the green lanterns swaying in the wind, and their forest-tinted light makes the grey daylight hazy. Mouldering heaps of leaves at the edge of the forest. Like crumpled paper painted in bright colours by the children at a closure-threatened nursery school. And the trees, their bare crowns watching the day’s peculiar performance from their elevated position above the leaves, waving goodbye when the wind helps the branches to move.

The same questions as always at the start of an investigation. Malin poses them to herself, aware that all the others in the team will be asking the same things.

How to make sense of this?

What’s happened?

Who was he, Jerry Petersson? The answer to the question of where the violence came from is always hidden in the victim’s life. And death. What prompted him to return to the city and surrounding area? He had been back for about a year, but sometimes evil moves slowly.

Then the forest seems to open up before her eyes, the gaps in the trees seem to get wider, and the space is filled with a darkness teeming with shapeless figures.

Malin imagines she can hear a voice, as if all the figures were speaking with one voice, saying the same thing: ‘I shall drift here for a thousand years. I shall be lord of this land.

‘Save me!’ the voice goes on. ‘I was guilty of many things, but save me, grant me forgiveness.’

Then it calms down, whispering: ‘Why did I become the person I ended up as?’

Young snakes, pale yellow, seem to be slithering around Malin’s boots. She stamps her feet but they don’t disappear.

She blinks slowly.

The snakes and the shapes are gone.

An ordinary, depressing, grey, misty, autumn forest. Gravel beneath her feet.

What was that all about? Am I going mad? But she isn’t worried, the drinking and all the rest of it has probably just got a bit much. Then she thinks about the fact that just a few hours ago someone was wielding a knife here.

Murdering.

Killing Jerry Petersson.

She switches on her mobile again, she’s had it turned off since she arrived.

Two missed calls. Both from Tove, but no messages. I ought to call her now, I really ought to.

The dog is quiet, calm. Must have lain down on the back seat.

‘Malin! Malin!’

She recognises Daniel Hogfeldt’s voice. He’s calling to her from the driver’s seat of one of the Correspondent’s reporters’ cars.

She feels like giving him the finger.

Instead she waves at him.

‘What have you got for me?’

His voice, eager.

‘Forget it, Daniel,’ she calls.

‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? And it was Petersson.’

‘You’ll find out later. Karim’s bound to call a press conference.’

‘Come on, Malin.’

She shakes her head, and he smiles a warm, gentle smile, exactly the sort of smile she needs.

Is it that obvious?

Daniel wrote the article about Petersson. Might he know something? Can’t ask him now, that would be giving too much away.

She had thought that her trysts with Daniel would come to an end when she moved back in with Janne. Then one evening, after she’d sweated everything out in the gym in the basement of the police station and still felt it wasn’t enough to calm her down, he had called when she was about to get in the car and go home.

‘Can you come over?’

Ten minutes later she was lying in his bed in Linnegatan.

They didn’t say a word to each other. Not then. Nor the next time, or the next, or the next.

He simply took her as hard as he could, and she took him in return, and they yelled out together, looked at each other, seeming to ask, what the hell is this? What are we doing? What’s wrong with us?

Daniel Hogfeldt looks at Malin, and can’t help thinking that she looks terrible, almost so terrible that she isn’t sexy any more.

He’s tried to get her to see him as more than just a body, but that hasn’t been possible. She can’t seem to shake her low opinion of him, assuming he only wants information about cases, when in actual fact it’s her that he wants to find out more about.

She’s moved back in with her ex-husband again. But how well can that really be going? When she still wants to fuck my brains out?

It’s fairly obvious that she isn’t happy. But if I tried to say anything she’d turn on her heel, do anything to avoid the issue.