Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

‘Do you really believe they did it?’ Malin asks. ‘Murdered their own son and brother? No matter what the reason?’

‘Even if Axel and Katarina didn’t do it themselves,’ Waldemar says, ‘they could have arranged for it to happen. That goes for both murders.’

‘But why such a grandiose gesture?’ Zeke asks.

‘To divert attention away from themselves,’ Waldemar says.

‘We just need to do more work here, into every aspect, this feels like our main line of inquiry right now,’ Sven says. ‘Try to work out what they’ve been up to recently, what calls they’ve made, to start with.’

‘Email?’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘We’d need to seize their computers for that,’ Sven says. ‘We’ll start with their mobiles. We’ve got enough grounds for that now.’

‘It’s too early for computers,’ Karim adds. ‘After all, we’ve got nothing concrete on them at all.’

‘We spent today checking the neighbours closest to the castle again,’ Sven says, ‘and around Fredrik Fagelsjo’s house. Chances are he was there on the evening he was murdered. But no one saw anything. Linnea Sjostedt didn’t bother with her shotgun this time round.’

The detectives laugh.

‘And Karin’s report?’ Zeke goes on.

Sven nods.

‘She was quick. It’s just arrived, even though she said it would be tomorrow at the earliest. Fredrik Fagelsjo died of a blow to the back of the head. A blunt instrument, a rock, something like that. A hard blow, but not hard enough to rule out the perpetrator being a woman. And, as she said at the crime scene, it’s impossible to tell if the perpetrator is right- or left-handed. Not much blood-loss, but the blow caused severe internal bleeding in the brain that will have made him lose consciousness immediately. Time of death sometime between ten o’clock on Thursday evening and two o’clock Friday morning, which basically gives Axel and Katarina Fagelsjo alibis, unless they’re involved in this together. Axel’s supposed to have left his daughter’s at two o’clock that night.’

‘Goldman,’ Zeke says. ‘He could have been there.’

Sven pauses before going on: ‘Fredrik Fagelsjo was in all likelihood undressed in the chapel after his death. The body was free from soil and dirt, which suggests that he wasn’t undressed elsewhere. But we haven’t found any clothes. Karin found the same fibres on the body as on the floor of the chapel. These could have come from the perpetrator’s clothing, probably an ordinary pair of jeans.’

‘Can Karin say if he was killed there?’ Zeke says.

‘The blood found in the chapel is Fredrik Fagelsjo’s, but it’s impossible to tell if the blow was dealt there or somewhere else.’

‘So,’ Malin says, clearing her throat, ‘what you’re saying is that someone might have beaten Fredrik Fagelsjo to death at his home and driven the body to the chapel. Or that Fredrik Fagelsjo could have been murdered somewhere else and then taken to the chapel. Or that someone might have abducted him and taken him to the chapel, and killed him there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unless he was in the chapel or out at the castle of his own free will,’ Malin says, ‘then got taken by surprise by someone there. Or he arranged to meet someone there. That gives us several thousand possible scenarios. I presume Forensics have checked the Villa Italia?’

‘Forensics found no evidence of violence either in the villa or in the surrounding area,’ Sven says. ‘But there are plenty of stones in the farmyard that could have been used to hit him over the head. Seeing as it’s been raining for ten hours solid, any traces of evidence have been washed away.’

‘What about at the castle, around the chapel?’ Zeke asks.

‘The door was unlocked,’ Malin says. ‘And the Fagelsjo family had access to the keys, of course. But the murderer could have used the victim’s keys, if he had them on him.’

‘We haven’t found any keys,’ Sven Sjoman says. ‘We’ll have to ask Christina Fagelsjo if she knows where her husband’s keys are.’

‘The crime scene may have been free of forensic evidence,’ Malin says, ‘but it’s still got a story to tell. He was laid on that vault like a sacrifice. A family sacrifice? Could it be some sort of ancient Nordic way of restoring family pride?’

‘Hence the focus on the surviving Fagelsjos,’ Karim says.

‘But what if someone’s trying to get us to concentrate on the Fagelsjo family?’ Malin says, to put into words the doubts she felt when at the crime scene.

‘You mean, to protect themselves?’ Zeke asks.

‘That’s stretching it,’ Waldemar says. ‘What if Fredrik Fagelsjo murdered Petersson, and someone wanted revenge for his murder? Who would have any interest in avenging Petersson’s death?’

‘His father,’ Johan says.

‘But he’s old and hardly capable of orchestrating something like that,’ Malin says.

‘So who actually liked Petersson?’ Sven says.

‘No one, as far as we can tell,’ Zeke says.

‘I think Katarina Fagelsjo liked him,’ Malin says.

And the other detectives in the room fall silent, looking expectantly at Malin.

She throws out her arms.

‘It’s just a hunch, OK? Let me think about it a bit more. I want to break out of the circles we seem to be stuck in.’

‘Try to uncover the facts, Malin,’ Karim says. ‘We haven’t got time for hunches.’

Malin tries to focus on the whiteboard, on Sven’s notes, make some sense of the words, pen-strokes, colours.

But any sense of context eludes her, this entire investigation is like a palette full of mixed-up paint, a grey mess.

‘Neither of them seems to have been Mr Popular, exactly,’ Zeke says. ‘Fagelsjo was a failure. And if you ask some people, Petersson was a little piglet turned big swine.’

There you sit in your depressing room, trying to uncover the truth .

Me, a big swine?

I might have been a big swine once upon a time, if you mean that I was ruthless in business.

But where do you think my ruthlessness came from?

Why did I scare the other partners of that smart law firm to the point where they kicked me out, even though I brought in more money than anyone else?

Why did I lose the popularity contest?

The man standing alone in an office on Kungsgatan, close to the smart social hub of Stureplan, feeling the breeze from the newly installed air conditioning against his face, doesn’t care about that. In all respects except one, he’s looking to the future.

Stockholm, 1997 and onwards

Jerry feels the cool air stroke his cheeks. Below him, on the other side of the polished office windows, Kungsgatan snakes down towards Stureplan in the late-summer sun. In Humlegarden, red lawnmowers are moving over tired grass, their blades in his dreams like bearers of all he thinks he has left behind. The blades force him onward, give him no time to rest, but he knows that at some point he will have to stand up to them.

He is standing here for the sake of money, at least that’s what he thinks, unless it’s because having an office here makes a good impression when he’s standing at the upstairs bar of the Sturehof. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.

The boxes from the move haven’t been unpacked yet, and he has just had a call from his first client at Petersson Legal Services Ltd. Jochen Goldman wanted help setting up an endowment insurance in Liechtenstein.

This room. Its fine lines, free from dirt, the opportunity it gives him to create his reality himself. The sofa in the corner upholstered in shiny white fabric.

Clients come and go through the room. People and buses and cars hurry past in all seasons along Kungsgatan, a young man, little more than twenty years old, sits before him and explains an idea, an opportunity, an advanced piece of technology that might come in useful in the new economy.