Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

She closes her eyes.

Feels anxiety coursing through her body.

I’m tired of feeling so miserable, she thinks. Angry and scared. Why have I got the same look in my eyes as Katarina Fagelsjo?

Mum and Dad in a little while.

Golf clubs swinging against a blue sky. The worst non-activity of all.

This case, Malin thinks. It’s dragging me back to the growth-ring right at the centre of my trunk.

Malin’s fallen asleep. Lying defenceless with her arms above her head, like a child who knows instinctively that her mum will never leave her.

She’s dreaming about a man in a suit sitting in a futuristic office chair behind a mahogany desk in a room with large windows facing onto a busy street. The man is wearing a grey suit and he has no face.

He is talking to her. She wants to put a stop to it, but doesn’t know how.

‘You’re lying quietly on the bed,’ he says. ‘In your shabby room, and deep down you wish you could lie there all evening, all night, but you know you have to wake up, you have to go out, and soon you’ll get in the shower, try to shake off all your emotions before heading right into the middle of them.

‘You’ve come down here to this over-developed island to discover my secret, how I ended up with all those stab wounds in my body. And I’m grateful for that,’ the man says.

‘But you’re more interested in your own secret than mine.

‘Do you imagine you’re going to find it at your parents’ this evening? Don’t hope too much, Malin. Wouldn’t it be better to go home? Stop drinking and look after your daughter? But you can’t even manage that. That’s how weak you are.

‘It’s much easier to concentrate on me.

‘With me, you can glimpse truths and completely avoid having to deal with yourself.

‘Have a drink, Malin.

‘Drink, Malin.

‘It’ll make you feel better.’

Then the man and the room disappear. Only his voice remains.

Malin can hear his voice inside her, whispering: ‘Drink, drink, drink.’

And in her sleep she wonders where the voice comes from. Is it a gentle plea from her own body for calm, for release from the sadness, longing and fear?

She wakes up and the voice disappears, but the feeling of it lingers in the room.

She gets in the shower.

Fifteen minutes later she’s sitting in a shabby bar looking at her reflection in a chipped mirror.

The glass of tequila half full, the cold beer glass alongside misted up.

Mum.

Dad.

Here I come. But I should have brought Tove with me. So you could see her. The most beautiful of all beautiful things.

‘He’s not home this time either,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says as they try ringing on the door of Jonas Karlsson’s flat for the third time in a day.

‘And he hasn’t got a fucking mobile.’

‘Where could he be?’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘No idea.’

Johan looks at the door.

Solid and closed, in a way that suggests it wants to keep its secrets. They were here two hours ago, after Malin’s call to Zeke, and Jonas Karlsson wasn’t at home then either. Nor was he at work at the hospital.

Back at the station they’ve had police constables looking for the parents of the girl and boy involved in the car crash. Both couples are divorced now, but still live in the city.

Evening now. We can’t disturb them this late for something this flimsy, Johan thinks. But tomorrow we’ll have to.

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow, he thinks, as he turns on his heel and heads down the stairs, away from Waldemar, away from Jonas Karlsson’s flat.

Reluctant loss has an address.

Number 3, Calle Amerigo.

The two quick tequilas and beers have done their job.

Malin’s hands rest easily on her bare legs. She’s wearing a short white skirt and a pink blouse, not too creased even though they’ve been packed away in her case.

The clock on the dashboard of the taxi says twenty-five past seven. Dad’s words over the phone: ‘Come at half past seven, we’re sure to be back from our round by then.’

The taxi feels its way out of Playa de las Americas along a road that follows the sea, the worst of the noise and commotion is left behind, replaced by a residential calm. Hastily constructed hotels no longer line the shore, just equally quickly built blocks of flats where the careful decor of the balconies indicates pensioners.

Mum.

They spent a long time looking for a flat by the sea, but they were too expensive.

In Los Cristianos the taxi swings off towards the mountains, where increasingly tall white-plastered blocks scramble up ochre-coloured cliffs.

I haven’t seen my parents for three years.

Have I missed them?

Sometimes, maybe, when I hear Dad’s voice over the phone and he asks me to come down and visit, or when he’s been going on about the plants.

Mum.

I might have spoken to you ten times, and even then we only asked each other about the weather.

Have I missed you in Tove’s life? You, Dad, you’ve asked after her, of course you have. But you haven’t really cared, not properly.

That’s why I was able to move to Stockholm on my own with her and attend Police Academy, because I felt that you weren’t there, not for me, and not really for her.

Has Tove missed you?

Malin tried to call her a short while ago, but there was some problem with the line.

Of course Tove has missed her grandparents. Janne’s mother and father are long since dead, hardened smokers that they were.

Malin is tipsy from the tequila. She feels she can be honest with herself in the taxi.

The buildings here. Storage space for people.

What’s this scorched bastard volcano island got, apart from heat and a flight from responsibility?

‘Come at half past seven.’

Malin shuts her eyes.

‘We’ll be back from the golf course by then.’

The lift stops on the fourth floor and the chipped metal doors glide apart and Malin wants to close them again, run from the house and get a taxi back to the airport and get the first plane back up to the darkness and rain and cold.

She heads towards the door in the stairwell that must lead to her parents’ flat.

Warmer back home than here. The white, marble-like stone on the walls and floor of the landing seem to create a peculiar chill, a sort of cold she’s never experienced before, and she’s eight years old and standing outside the house in Sturefors, it’s cold and it’s raining and she’s lost her key and she can hear Mum inside the house. Mum knows she’s standing out on the steps and is freezing and crying and wants to get indoors, but she doesn’t open up, angry that Malin has lost her key.

Malin standing outside the door.

The door in Tenerife.

I’m going to turn back.

Maybe they aren’t home.

But she can hear the familiar voices through the door, first talking to each other in a normal conversational tone, then shouting at each other, and she’s lying in her bed in the room she lived in as a girl listening to them shouting in the bedroom at the other end of the house, and there are cold autumn nights, winter nights, spring nights and summer nights, and she doesn’t understand what they’re saying and she’s seven eight nine years old and doesn’t understand the words, but she knows Mum and Dad are shouting things that change everything for ever, the sort of things that change the direction of life, whether or not anyone realises it.

And now, outside this door, Mum and Dad’s words fall silent in her memory. Did they even exist, those words? She can only remember herself in the darkness. How everything was quiet and she lay there waiting for life to start.

Rattling.

Malin jumps back.