Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

‘I’ll talk to her, Zeke. The trip to Tenerife was partly an attempt to give her a bit of breathing space.’

‘You should see her now. It doesn’t exactly look like she spent her time in a luxury spa.’

‘Maybe the trip was a stupid idea. We’ll have to see how it goes,’ Sven says. ‘You’re making sure you drive when you go out together?’

Zeke nods.

‘I drive pretty much all the time.’

He pauses.

‘I’m sure what happened in Finspang last year hit her hard,’ he goes on.

‘It did,’ Sven says. ‘But who wouldn’t be badly affected by something like that? I don’t think she can understand that. Or accept it.’

The clock on the wall of their usual meeting room says 15.37.

The investigating team is all there.

Windows here, unlike in paperwork Hell.

No children in the nursery playground, but Malin can see them through the windows, running about the rooms, playing as if this world was altogether good. A red and blue plastic slide. Yellow fabrics. Clear colours, no doubts. A comprehensible world for people who grab life with both hands and live in the present.

The people in here, Malin thinks, are the exact opposite.

Karim Akbar’s face is composed, his body seems to have been taken over by a new sort of middle-aged seriousness, on the verge of exhaustion.

Autumn is wearing us down, Malin thinks. We’re turning into characters in a black-and-white film.

Zeke, Sven Sjoman, Waldemar Ekenberg, Johan Jakobsson, even young Lovisa Segerberg from Stockholm, seem ready for a long break from anything involving police work and rain.

The investigation.

Right now it looks as if it’s in danger of rusting solid, like the entire city.

Lines of inquiry.

Snaking back and forth across our brains like the lights on a communal ski track.

Suspicions. Voices. All the people and events that emerge when they lift the stones that made up Jerry Petersson’s fairly short life.

Sven is standing at the whiteboard at one end of the room. On the board he has written a list of names in blue marker pen.

Jochen Goldman.

Axel, Fredrik and Katarina Fagelsjo.

Jonas Karlsson.

Andreas Ekstrom and Jasmin Sandsten’s parents.

Then a row of question marks. New names? New information? Anything that can help us move on?

Malin takes a deep breath. Looks across at the children in the nursery. Hears Sven’s voice, but can’t bring herself to say anything.

Fragments from a meeting.

Her own account of her trip to Tenerife.

That Jochen Goldman is ambiguity personified.

Her encounter with Andreas Ekstrom’s mother. The others listen attentively. Lovisa tells them that she is steadily working through the files and contents of Jerry Petersson’s hard-drives, but that it would take at least five specially trained police officers to do it at anything like an acceptable rate, and Karim saying: ‘We don’t have the resources for that.’ They still haven’t found a will, nor anything like a blackmail letter, nor even anything remotely suspicious. They’ve spoken to several more of Petersson’s business contacts, but the conversations haven’t produced anything.

And Waldemar and Johan tell them about their latest conversations with the Fagelsjo family, and how they claim that they can hardly remember the accident, and that they managed to get hold of Jasmin Sandsten’s father, Stellan, at work out at Collins Mechanics, but that the conversation gave them nothing except that he had an alibi for the night of the murder. They hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to Jasmin’s mother; she and her daughter were evidently at a rehabilitation home outside Jonkoping.

Zeke on his meeting with Hans Ekstrom.

Grief.

A dead child.

So many years later, perhaps it doesn’t matter much who was driving and whether or not they were drunk.

A child, a cherished child, is dead. Or, possibly even worse, a living death.

Guilt.

Fundamentally meaningless. But can the anger ever end? Forty stab wounds, years of fury unleashed.

Sven quickly explaining the prosecutor’s decision to release Fredrik Fagelsjo. Then: ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on him’, empty words, and he knows it. They don’t have the resources to keep an eye on him.

‘Contacts,’ Waldemar snarls. ‘Who knows what that bastard Ehrenstierna’s got on the prosecutor?’

And Malin thinks about her own work.

The inquiries.

Maria Murvall.

The violence and the hunt for the truth that she imagined might be able to comfort those left on earth when their relative was drifting about in some sort of bright, radiant sky.

‘Did you check your contacts in the underworld?’ Sven asks Waldemar.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Waldemar says, and the others laugh cautiously. ‘I checked. But it doesn’t look like Petersson had any connections there.’

And she hears Sven saying that they’ll have to keep digging through Petersson’s life, try to follow the threads of the inquiry as doggedly as possible. Following the lines they already have.

‘We,’ she hears Sven say, ‘are at a stage in the investigation where everything just seems to be spiralling downwards. We might make a breakthrough, or we might get hopelessly stuck. Only hard work can help us now.’

Listen to the voices, Malin whispers quietly to herself.

‘I’m going to Vadstena to talk to Jasmin’s mother.’

‘Soderkoping,’ Sven says. ‘You can go tomorrow, you and Zeke.’

‘I’d like a word with you, Malin.’

Sven’s voice had sounded formal, authoritative, outside the meeting room, and now she’s going up the stairs beside him to his office, and he closes the door behind them and tells her to sit down.

Carved wooden bowls on a white pedestal. Malin knows Sven has made them himself.

She’s sitting in front of him, with him behind his desk with his familiar furrowed face, although Malin can’t quite come to terms with the new wrinkles that have appeared since he lost weight.

There’s a stranger in front of me, and he’s talking to me, he’s worried about me. Don’t worry, Sven, I’m doing enough of that myself, can’t you just leave me alone?

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘I’m fine. Tenerife was great.’

‘So it was good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get a bit of sun?’

Malin nods.

‘And you got to see your parents?’

‘I met them. That was nice.’

‘I’ve been — and I still am — worried about you, Malin. You know that.’

Malin sighs.

‘I’m OK. Everything’s just a bit much at the moment. I’ve split up with Janne, and things haven’t settled yet.’

Sven looks at her.

‘And the drinking? You’re drinking too much, that much is obvious just from looking at you. You-’

‘It’s under control.’

‘That’s not what I’m hearing and seeing.’

‘Has someone talked to you? Gone behind my back? Who?’

‘No one’s said a word. I’ve got eyes of my own.’

‘Zeke? Janne? He’s perfectly capable of-’

‘Be quiet, Malin. Pull yourself together.’

After Sven’s stern words they sit in silence facing each other across the room, and Malin knows Sven wants to say something else, but what could he say? It’s not as if I’ve turned up drunk at the station.

Or have I?

‘Has Zeke said anything?’

‘No. I’ve got eyes of my own.’

‘So what now?’

‘You carry on working. But think very carefully before you drive. Let Zeke do the driving. And try to pull yourself together. You’ve got to.’

‘Can I go now?’ Malin asks.

‘If you like,’ Sven says. ‘If you like.’