Текст книги "Autumn Killing"

Автор книги: Mons Kallentoft

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

22

Tenerife.

Like a poem, a sketch within Malin.

Scorched mountains, slumbering volcanoes, an eternally shining sun above a muddle of houses. Swaying palm trees, sunloungers in long rows along the beaches, pools casting glittering reflections on mutated liverspots, cancer forcing its way through the skin and on into the bloodstream, and in a few months the dreams are over, those dreams of eternal life in the sun.

Fraying pictures from her parents’ paradise.

The flat she knows her mother thinks is far too small, maybe that’s why she and Tove have only ever been invited out of politeness, because Mum thinks the place she’s found for herself in the sun is too meagre?

Maybe Mum just wants to be left in peace. Ever since I first learned the word I’ve had the feeling that you’re avoiding me, that you’re pulling away. Are you ashamed of something, Mum, but don’t want to admit it? Are you trying to avoid me so you don’t have to see yourself in the mirror? Maybe it’s OK to do that with grown-up children, but not the way you did with me when I was four, when I somehow worked out that that was what was going on.

And what would we say to each other, Mum? Malin thinks as she sits at her desk, surfing between various articles about Jochen Goldman.

On several sites he’s described as the worst conman in Swedish history. It still isn’t clear how many millions he got away with when they emptied the Finera Finance company of all its assets. And by the time it was uncovered, Jochen Goldman had fled the country and his bourgeois roots on the island of Lidingo, the wealthy enclave on the edge of Stockholm.

He managed to elude the police, and Interpol.

Jochen Goldman, seen in Punta del Este in Uruguay.

In Switzerland.

In Vietnam.

Jakarta. Surabaya.

But always one step ahead of the police, as if they didn’t want to catch him, or else he had his own sources inside the force.

Jerry Petersson had been his lawyer. His intermediary in his dealings with the authorities and media at home. Goldman had written two books during his ten years on the run. One book about how he emptied the business and claimed he had every right to do so, then another about life as a fugitive, and to judge from the reviews, Jochen Goldman had tried to portray himself as a capitalist James Bond.

But he fell a long way short of that sort of style, Malin thinks.

Before Goldman carried out his heist, he spent three years in prison for fraud. At the same time he was also convicted of making unlawful threats, actual bodily harm, and extortion.

Pictures of him on the run.

A sharp nose in what was otherwise a round face, slicked back hair, playful brown eyes, and blond hair down to his shoulders. Big yachts, shiny sports cars made by Konigsegg.

Then, once his alleged crimes relating to Finera Finance had passed the statute of limitations, he popped up on Tenerife. A report in the online version of the business daily, Dagens Industri, shows a smiling, suntanned Goldman beside a black-tiled pool with a view of the sea and the mountains. A shimmering white house in the background.

Mum’s dream.

This is what it looks like.

White-plastered concrete, glass, maybe a garden with scrupulously neat plants, and bulging armchairs to lean back in and forget all the denial and bitterness.

Finally she comes to an old report in the business weekly, Veckans Affarer.

The tone is vague, hinting that Jochen Goldman may have disposed of people who got in his way. That people who had done business with him had disappeared without a trace. The article concludes by pointing out that these are rumours, and that the myth of Goldman survives and grows precisely through such rumours.

Malin takes out the note with the number that might be Goldman’s.

Nods to Zeke on the other side of the desk.

‘OK, I’m going to call our shadow now.’

Waldemar Ekenberg is drumming his fingers on the desk in the cramped meeting room. He fiddles with his mobile, lights a cigarette without asking the newcomer Lovisa Segerberg if she minds, but she lets him smoke, carries on calmly reading a summary that she’s found in one of the black files.

‘Restless?’ Johan Jakobsson says from his place.

‘No problem,’ Waldemar says. ‘But I’m running out of cigs.’

‘They sell them in the canteen over in the courthouse, don’t they?’

‘That’s shut on Saturdays. I saw they had a special offer on boxes of ten packs down at Lucullus. Can I have fifteen minutes to pop down there?’

Johan smiles.

‘Is that really a good idea? We need all three of us here, Waldemar. Come on, what the hell.’

‘You know how I get if I haven’t got any cigs.’

‘You can cadge one off someone, can’t you?’

‘Fuck, the air in here is terrible.’

‘Maybe because you smoke,’ Lovisa says from her chair.

‘Go on, then,’ Johan says. ‘But watch yourself, Waldemar. Watch yourself.’

‘I’m only going to buy cigs,’ Waldemar says with a grin.

The Spanish number is engaged the first time Malin dials, but the second time the phone is picked up on the fourth ring, and a nasal, slightly hoarse voice says: ‘Jochen, who is this?’

A voice from Tenerife. Clear skies, sun, a bit of a breeze. And no fucking rain.

‘My name is Malin Fors, I’m a detective inspector with the Linkoping Police. I was wondering if you had a moment to answer a few questions?’

Silence.

For a few moments Malin thinks Jochen Goldman has hung up, then he clears his throat and says with an amused chuckle: ‘All my dealings with the authorities go through my lawyer. Can he contact you?’

The cat after the mouse.

The mouse after a bit of string.

You miss the game, Malin thinks. Don’t you?

‘That’s just it, the lawyer Jerry Petersson, the man who represented. .’

‘I know what’s happened to Jerry,’ Jochen Goldman says. ‘I manage to read the papers down here, Malin.’

And you’ve still got your contacts, Malin thinks.

‘And you know why I want to ask you a few questions?’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Were you in Tenerife on the night between Thursday and Friday?’

Jochen Goldman laughs, and Malin knows the question is banal, but she has to ask it, and it’s just as well to get it out of the way.

‘I was here. Ten people can confirm that. You can’t think I had anything to do with the murder?’

‘We don’t think anything at this point in time.’

‘Or that we had a difference of opinion, Jerry and me, so that I sent a hit man to get my revenge? Forgive me if I can’t help laughing.’

‘We’re not insinuating anything of the sort. But it’s interesting that you should mention that.’

Another silence.

Flatter him, Malin thinks. Flatter him, then maybe he’ll drop his guard.

‘Looks like you’ve got a pretty nice house down there.’

More silence. As if Jochen Goldman is looking out over his property, the pool and the sea. She wonders if her flattery makes him feel threatened.

‘I can’t complain. Maybe you’d like to visit? Swim a few lengths in the pool. I heard you like swimming.’

‘So you know who I am?’

‘You were mentioned in Svenska Dagbladet’s article about the murder. Someone googled you. Doesn’t everyone like swimming? I’m sure you look good in a bathing suit.’

His voice. Malin can feel it eating into her. Next question: ‘So there were no problems between you and Jerry Petersson?’

‘No. You need to bear in mind that for many years he was the only person who stood by me and took my side. Sure, he got paid well for it, but I felt I could trust him, that he was on my side. I regard him, or rather regarded him, as one of my best friends.’

‘When did you stop regarding him as one of your best friends? Recently, or earlier?’

‘What do you think, Malin? Recently. Very recently.’

‘In that case, I’m sorry for your loss,’ Malin says. ‘Will you be coming up for the funeral?’

‘When’s it going to be?’

‘The date hasn’t been set yet.’

‘He was my friend,’ Jochen Goldman says. ‘But I’ve got other things to do apart from grieve. I don’t believe in looking backwards.’

‘Do you know of anyone else who might have had any reason to want to harm Jerry Petersson? Anything you think we should know?’

‘I mind my own business,’ Jochen Goldman says. Then he adds: ‘Was there anything else?’

‘No,’ Malin says, and the line goes quiet, and the fluorescent light above her head starts to flicker, as though it is flashing Morse code from the past.

One of your best friends, Jochen?

What do you know about friendship and trust?

Nothing.

But what do I know?

Not much, I have to admit, but there’s one thing I do know, and I’ve known it since the very first time we met: I wouldn’t want to be standing in your way if you thought you’d been let down.

I felt drawn to you from the start. I was appointed to represent you when you were accused of beating up one of the partners in the business, when he had a heart attack. And I realised I enjoyed your company, basking in the reflected glory of your Jewish chutzpah, your cheekiness. It was like you gave the finger to everyone who got in your way, no matter who they were.

But friends, Jochen?

Come off it.

You could well be the only person I’ve met in the last few years who’s actually frightened me.

Neither of us was, or still is, in your case, the sort who paid the slightest attention to friendship. That sort of thing’s for queers and women, isn’t it?

Your ruthlessness. Your contacts.

We were both smart. But maybe you got the better of me in the end? Or did I get the better of you? Maybe we did have a sort of friendship, the sort where two people devour each other’s souls, getting close to the other and seeing themselves reflected in each other’s shortcomings and successes, making them their own. Maybe it was that rarest sort of friendship, truly equal, and therefore so fragile? Why cling to something when there’s not really anything to lose?

Two men.

Our paths crossed, we were fated to meet, and we had in common the fact that we weren’t going to let anything or anyone stand in the way of what we wanted. But you were more stupid and more courageous than me, Jochen, and I had more money than you, but what did that matter? I was envious of your ruthlessness, even if it sometimes scared me.

Jochen, I see your suntanned body on the shiny chrome sunlounger beside the black chlorinated water.

I see Malin Fors at her desk.

She has her head in her hands, wondering how she’s going to get through the day. Then she thinks about me. The way I was lying face down in the moat, dead, I’ve accepted that now, and the sight of me there, or being lifted up through the air with my body punctured by senseless brutality won’t leave her alone, but it gives her something to think about, and that makes it irresistible to her.

Violence offers her some resistance. She hopes it can tell her something about who she is.

She needs me. She suspects as much.

Or else she already knows all too well. Just as I know what the boy suspected when the rays of the low autumn sun hit his eyes.

23

Linkoping, spring 1974 and onwards

The light pulsates in the eyes of the boy who owns the playground of Anestad School.

The previous week the retirement age in Social-Democratic Sweden was lowered to sixty-five, and a few months ago the Mariner 10 spacecraft flew past Mercury and sent pictures of the lonely planet back to earth.

Here and now, in the school playground, in the sharp rays of the sun, the verdant foliage of the birch trees rustles and the boy runs after the ball, catches it with one foot, spins around and then kicks the white leather ball with his toes and the ball shoots off towards the fence where Jesper is standing, ready to fend it off, but something goes wrong. The ball hits his nose and the blood that gushes out of his nostrils a moment later is a deeper, livelier red than the colour of the bricks in the walls of the low school building.

Eva, the teacher, saw what happened and rushes over to the boy. Yelling, she grabs his arm and shakes him before comforting the crying Jesper. She seems to want to scold rather than offer comfort, and she shouts right in the boy’s ear: ‘I saw that, Jerry, I saw that, you did that on purpose’, and he gets dragged away, he knows he didn’t hurt anyone on purpose, but maybe he ought to, he thinks as the door of the classroom closes and he is expected to wait for something, but what?

Jesper.

A doctor’s kid from the villas of Wimanshall. His dad’s evidently the sort of doctor who cuts people up.

The boy already knows that they treat the kids from the villas differently from him and the others from the blocks of flats in Berga.

It happens in the little things they think nine-year-olds don’t notice: who gets to sing the solo at the end-of-year assembly, who is suspected of misbehaving on purpose, who gets most attention and praise in class.

So a girl sings in the gymnasium, two boys play the flute, and he doesn’t recognise any of them from the place where he lives, and all of them apart from him are dressed in white and all of them apart from him have their parents there.

But he doesn’t feel lonely, feels no shame, he’s worked out that shame, even if he doesn’t understand the word itself, is pointless. That he isn’t like Mum, or Dad.

Unless he is, really? When he stands in the second row on the penalty-line of the handball court and is expected to sing songs decided by others for people he doesn’t care about, is he not like Mum and Dad then? Doesn’t everyone want him to be like his parents then?

Maybe he did aim for the nose after all?

Enjoyed watching the blood gush out from stupid Jesper’s nose, like it had been cut by the blades of a lawnmower?

There, in the gym hall, he actually knows nothing about the world, except that he is going to make it his.

He spends all summer drifting around the backyard on his own. He spends many summers doing this.

Mum has long since given up.

She developed an allergy to the cortisone they pumped into her to help the ache in her joints, and becomes stiffer and stiffer in a whimpering, corrosive pain that is gradually wearing away the woman she once was to the sum total of mute fury. Grandma has had a stroke, the cottage has been sold, Dad took redundancy from Saab and has drunk the last of the pay-off during the autumn. They had no need for his skills when they went over to production of the Viggen. He could have got work as a cleaner, or in the canteen, but wasn’t it better that he took the money, and looked ahead, to the future?

Dad likes the company of the parks department workers. The lawnmower, with its comfortably sprung seat. The blokes in the parks team don’t judge him, they don’t judge their own.

And the boy longs for the end of the summer holidays, for football training to start again. There are no differences out on the pitch. On the pitch he decides. On the pitch he can be a bit rougher, and what does it matter if the boy from Sturefors falls badly and breaks his arm?

He has friends. Like Rasmus, who’s the son of a sales manager for Cloetta chocolate. They moved here from Stockholm, and one evening the boy is around at Rasmus’s when Rasmus’s dad has business colleagues there for dinner, and his dad asks Rasmus to show the guests that he can do forty press-ups in a row, and someone suggests a competition. And then they are lying there on the parquet floor of the living room, him and Rasmus, doing press-ups alongside each other, and he goes on and on, long after Rasmus is lying flat on the floor, and their audience are shouting: ‘Enough, enough, point taken, young man.’

Rasmus’s dad says: ‘Rasmus, he’s not too good at school. But Jerry’s supposed to be pretty smart.’ Then he sends Rasmus to bed and the boy has to leave, and he is eleven years old and is left standing in the cold autumn evening outside the sales manager’s rented villa in Wimanshall looking up at the vibrant starry sky.

He goes home. The windows of the blocks of flats are like closed eyes, their bodies black shapes against the dark sky.

Mum is asleep in bed.

Dad is asleep on the green sofa.

Beside him a pizza box and half a bottle of Explorer vodka. The flat stinks of dirt.

But this isn’t my crap, the boy thinks as he creeps into bed beside his mother, feeling the heat from her sleeping body.

24

At a quarter past eleven Waldemar Ekenberg pulls up outside a run-down workshop on the Tornby industrial estate.

It has finally stopped raining, but the low, drifting clouds almost seem to be licking the shabby corrugated roof, where large flakes of red-brown plastic paint are flapping in the wind.

There is no sign above the two large, black garage doors, but Waldemar knows what’s concealed inside: a car mechanic’s workshop where no cars are ever repaired. The entire thing is a front for laundering money from various criminal activities. But the man behind it, Brutus Karlsson, is a smart bastard that they’ve never managed to get for anything worse than actual bodily harm.

Waldemar gets out of the car.

Walks calmly towards the workshop and knocks on one of the doors, hears steps approaching within.

It makes sense to use someone like Brutus, use him to get information. Several times he’s actually pointed Waldemar in the right direction, when they’ve had a case involving one of his competitors. Brutus Karlsson’s honour among thieves goes no further than people on the same side as him.

‘Open up!’ Waldemar shouts. ‘Open up!’

Brutus will recognise my voice, he thinks, and there’s a mechanical sound as the door slides up.

‘You?’ Brutus Karlsson says. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

The man in front of him, in jeans and a leather jacket, is short but broad-shouldered, and Waldemar knows perfectly well that there’s violence in that body. There are rumours that Brutus Karlsson was behind several severe beatings in the underworld. Amongst other things, he’s supposed to have crushed the spine of some bloke from Poland.

Brutus Karlsson’s face is broad, and there’s a scar across his nose that doesn’t sit well with his blond hair.

‘Can I come in.’

A question, yet not a question.

Behind Brutus Karlsson in the shabby garage stand three men of Slavic appearance. They’re all wearing Adidas tracksuits and seem to have very little to offer society.

Waldemar steps inside.

The garage door closes behind him.

In the centre of the workshop stands a table surrounded by six chairs. There are a few tools on a workbench, but there’s no smell of oil or petrol, just damp.

Waldemar thinks it’s best to get straight to the point.

‘Jerry Petersson,’ he says. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

Karlsson looks at him.

‘And who the hell is that?’

‘You know who,’ Waldemar says, taking a step closer to him.

The three Slavs move closer, their eyes darkening, and Waldemar sees one of them clench his fists.

‘So you come waltzing in here with your arrogant pig’s attitude, asking about some fucking bastard?’ Karlsson says.

‘Jerry Petersson.’

‘I know who he is. Don’t you think I read the papers?’

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

Waldemar takes a quick step forward and takes a firm grip of Karlsson’s jaw with one hand.

‘Stop playing so fucking tough, you little shit. Do you know if Jerry Petersson had any dealings with anyone on your side of the law?’

The Slavs hesitate, waiting for a signal from Karlsson, and with his free hand Waldemar pulls his pistol from the holster beneath his jacket.

‘OK, OK,’ Karlsson says in a slurred voice. ‘I can assure you of one thing. Petersson had nothing to do with anyone on this side anywhere around here. If someone like him had been involved, I’d have known about it. Let go, for fuck’s sake.’

And Waldemar lets go, takes a step back and puts his pistol back in the holster, and as he is snapping it shut he realises his mistake. One of the Slavs flies at him and Waldemar feels a fist hit him over one eye, and he falls to the filthy grey-painted floor of the workshop. The three Slavs hold him down, their breath smells sourly of garlic and all he can see is their unshaven cheeks.

Karlsson’s scarred face above Waldemar.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are? Coming here like this. Throwing your weight about. Do your colleagues even know you’re here?’

And Waldemar feels fear grip his stomach, no one knows where he is, anything could happen now.

‘They know where I was going. They’ll be here if I’m not back within an hour.’

Karlsson gestures with his head, and the Slavs let go of Waldemar.

‘Get up,’ he says.

Then Waldemar is standing facing him, the Slavs in a circle around them.

An arm flies out and Waldemar ducks instinctively, but the blow hits him on the cheek. Then another, to his left eye.

‘What the fuck are you doing, beating up a cop?’ Waldemar shouts.

‘Listen,’ Karlsson says. ‘I’ve got enough shit on you to get you put away. I can dig out a dozen men you’ve beaten up in the course of your duties.’

Two quick punches.

A burning pain and Waldemar spits, realises he has to get out of there, have a cigarette.

‘Fuck off now, pig,’ Karlsson says, and behind him Waldemar hears the door rattle, and thinks, fucking hell, how long before I can retire?

Malin and Zeke have picked up the car from outside Hamlet, and now they’re waiting outside a room in Aleryd Care Home while the nurses change Ake Petersson’s incontinence pad.

Zeke didn’t ask about the car and Malin was glad he didn’t, the last thing she wants is a stern lecture.

From inside the room they hear groaning, but no whining, no cross words. The walls of the corridor are painted white, stencilled with pink flowers. A clock with a white face and black hands sticks out from the wall. It says 2.20, and Malin can feel the pizza she’s just eaten at the Conya pizzeria churning in her stomach. But the fat has soothed her hangover and she can’t feel any grimier than she already does. Must go to the gym, she thinks. Sweat all the crap out.

Thank God Zeke hasn’t mentioned what she told him yesterday, about leaving Janne again.

The smell here.

Ammonia and disinfectant, cheap perfume and excrement, and the odour that slowly dying old people give off.

A man in a wheelchair is staring out at the rain through a window at the end of the corridor. It stopped a while ago, but not for long. How much can it actually rain?

Then the door opens. A young blonde nurse shows them in. In the bed, its top end propped up, sits a thin man with a chiselled face, and Malin thinks that he looks like his son, his dead son, and what would have happened if Tove died, if she had died in the flat in Finspang more than a year ago?

Everything would be over.

But in the man’s watery, grey, alcoholic’s eyes there is no grief, just loneliness. He has one hand clenched into a stroke-victim’s claw, his right hand, so maybe he can still talk, but what if he’s mute, what if he has trouble distinguishing dreams from reality? What do they do with the conversation then?

One of his eyes, on his lame side, seems blind, fixed in its socket, a broken, rigid camera, only capable of filming black.

‘Come in,’ Ake Petersson says as the other nurse leaves the room. One corner of his mouth droops when he talks, but it doesn’t seem to affect his speech.

‘You can sit over there.’

By the wall is a worn green sofa. Brown curtains cover the window, shutting out the season.

It’s uncomfortable, and Malin looks at the framed photographs on the table beside Ake Petersson, the woman, young and beautiful, then older with eyes weary from life.

‘Eva. Taken by rheumatism. She died of an allergic reaction to the cortisone when she was forty-five. She took all that she had in the house, must have hoped her allergy to the medicine had gone.’

Jerry.

Your mum. So she died. How old would you have been then? Ten? Fifteen?

‘That’s when I stopped drinking,’ Ake Petersson says, and it’s as if he wants to tell them his whole life story, relieved that somebody finally might want to hear it. ‘I pulled myself together. Stopped working for the parks, got some training in computers. Got a job doing data-entry.’

‘Sorry for your loss,’ Zeke says.

‘We would have preferred to wait,’ Malin says. ‘But. .’

‘He was my son,’ Ake Petersson says. ‘But we didn’t have much contact over the last twenty-five years.’

‘You had a falling-out?’ Malin asks.

‘No, not even that. He just didn’t want anything to do with me. I never understood why. After all, I stopped drinking when he was sixteen.’

Did you hurt him? Malin wonders. Was that why?

‘Maybe I wasn’t the best father in the world. But I never hit the lad. Nothing like that. I think he just wanted to get away from everything I stood for. I think he felt that way even when he was a child. He was better than me, to put it bluntly.’

‘What was he like as a child?’ Malin asks.

‘Impossible to handle. Did crazy things, got into fights, but he was good at school. We lived in a rented flat in Berga, but he went to the Anestad School with all the doctors’ kids. And he was better than them.’

‘What was he like towards you? And you to him?’

The words literally pour from Ake Petersson.

‘I worked a lot when he was a kid. A hell of a lot. That was when things were going well in the aviation industry.’

The old man twists in the bed, reaching for a glass from the bedside table and drinking the transparent liquid through a straw.

‘Do you know if he had any enemies?’

Zeke’s voice is soft, hopeful.

‘I knew no more about his life than I read in the papers.’

‘Do you know why he bought Skogsa? Why he wanted to move back here?’

‘No. I called him, but he hung up every time he heard it was me.’

‘Anything that might have happened when you were still in touch?’

The old man seems to consider this, his pupils contracting, then he says: ‘No. Of course he was an unusual person, the sort people used to notice, but nothing special ever happened. I really didn’t know much about his life even back then. When he was at high school. Before he moved to Lund. He never used to tell me anything.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ Malin asks. ‘Try to remember.’

The old man closes his eyes and sits in silence.

‘Could he have been homosexual?’

Ake Petersson remains calm when he replies: ‘I can’t imagine that he was. I seem to remember him liking girls. When he was at high school there were several girls who used to phone the flat in the evenings.’

‘What was Jerry like in high school, generally?’

‘I don’t know. He’d pretty much turned his back on us by then.’

‘So Jerry moved to Lund?’

‘Yes. But by then he’d broken off all contact.’

‘What about before that?’

But Ake Petersson doesn’t answer her question, and says instead: ‘I did my grieving for Jerry a long time ago. I knew he’d never come back to me, so I got all the sadness out of the way in advance, and now he’s gone all I’ve got is confirmation of what I already felt. Strange, isn’t it? My son is dead, murdered, and all I can do is revisit feelings I’ve already had.’

Malin can feel that her marinated brain isn’t keeping her thoughts in order, and they wander off to Tenerife, to Mum and Dad on the balcony in the sun, the balcony she’s only seen in pictures.

And pictures, black and white, emerge from her memory, she’s very young and wandering around the room asking for her mum, but Mum isn’t there, and she doesn’t come home either, and she asks Dad where Mum’s gone, but Dad doesn’t answer, or does he?

Strange, Malin thinks. I always remember Mum as being there, yet somehow not. Maybe she wasn’t even there?

Tove.

I’m not there. And she feels acutely sick, but manages to control the gag reflex.

Then she forces herself back to the present, and stares at the wall of the room. A shelf full of books. Literary fiction, by famous difficult authors: the sort Tove devours and that she can’t stand.

‘I started reading late in life,’ Ake Petersson says. ‘When I needed something to believe in.’

Dad!

Dad, Dad, Dad!

What would I need you for? To raise my hand against?

You know why Mum took the cortisone, the pain in her body ended up as pain in her soul.

You dragged yourself up from that green sofa for your own sake, not mine, and what did you get up for? Sitting and programming the simplest sort of code, the only thing your pickled brain could handle.

I see you there in bed, your cramping stroke-paralysed half-body is like a physical embodiment of the muteness that always characterised your side of the family, those taciturn, useless men.

You tried to contact me, Dad. But I wouldn’t take your calls. What would we have said to each other?

Would we have spent Christmases in Berga eating cheap sausages? Meatballs, Jansson’s Temptation, pickled herring ad nauseam?

You stopped trying to contact me.

Certain doors have to be closed for others to open. That’s just the way it is. But at the same time: is there anything more exciting than a locked door?

I had been hoping you’d get in touch when I moved back to the city. When I bought the castle. I could have had you driven out there, I could have shown you my home.

Someone else could have come too.

There’s something tragic about you now, as you tell the nurse to angle the blinds so you can look out at the rain. You speak to her nicely, with a meekness you’ve learned to express perfectly.

You look out into the room.

One eye blind after the stroke.

You blink.

As if you can see something you could never see before.

Is it me you can see, Dad?