Текст книги "Autumn Killing"

Автор книги: Mons Kallentoft

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

37

You’re babbling, Jochen.

What you told her about the accident, I have no memory of any New Year’s Eve in Punta del Este. Do I?

I see you standing on the terrace of your newly built castle looking out across the sea.

Of course I wanted to give you up.

Like a cowboy film, John Wayne on the run, escaping from the Apaches through a canyon on the border between Texas and Mexico.

I’m drifting away from you now, Jochen, leaving you there with your restlessness; you haven’t managed to escape that yet.

Swim a few more lengths of your shimmering black moat.

You should know that where I am now there’s no restlessness, only curiosity and fear and a thousand other feelings that I don’t know the names of. I don’t have to keep other people at a distance, I don’t need a moat.

I’m finally free from angst and shame.

But you aren’t, are you, Malin?

Malin looks at the hotel room.

It’s hot now, the air conditioning shut off automatically when she left, and the smell of mould is more noticeable. She’s taken all her clothes off and is lying on the bed wishing she’d been booked into a hotel with a pool, would love to feel cold water embrace her body.

Instead she looks at the grey-green patches of damp on the ceiling and waits for Zeke to answer his mobile.

It’s four o’clock, he ought to answer now.

And there comes Zeke’s hoarse voice in her ear.

‘Malin. What are you up to? How are you?’

‘I’m lying in the shabbiest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.’

‘How’s the weather?’

‘Sun. Hot.’

‘Have you seen Goldman?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

Suddenly there’s agitated shouting from one of the bars, then disco music pumping out at full volume.

‘A disco?’

‘A bar full of prostitutes,’ Malin says.

‘Exotic,’ Zeke says.

‘I was about to say that Goldman claims Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve, not Jonas Karlsson. According to Goldman, Jerry Petersson was drunk and persuaded Jonas Karlsson to say he was driving to avoid prosecution.’

Silence over the line.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke finally says. ‘Do you believe him? Or is he playing with us?’

‘Impossible to say. But we can use it. Put Jonas Karlsson under a bit of pressure.’

More screaming from the prostitutes.

‘Have you spoken to him yet?’

‘Yes. Jakobsson and Ekenberg went to see him. Now they can go and do it all over again.’

‘The Fagelsjo family?’

‘They claim they hardly remember the accident.’

‘They remember,’ Malin says. ‘No doubt about that.’

Zeke is silent for a moment, and Malin thinks about Gomez’s offer of a beer just now, and how she said no even though her body was shrieking for a cold beer, or preferably something even stronger.

But she resisted.

Then Zeke goes on: ‘Waldemar and Johan will have to talk to Jonas Karlsson again in the light of this new information. And we need to talk to the relatives of the others in the car. That’s still a possibility. Jonas Karlsson may have been trying to get money out of Petersson. One of the relatives might have found out the truth, and God knows what that could have stirred up. Stabbed forty bloody times.’

‘Talk to the Fagelsjos,’ Malin says.

‘Will do,’ Zeke says. ‘Fuck knows where this shit’s going to take us. Have you called home, to Tove?’

None of your business, Malin thinks. I haven’t wanted to call because Tove’s at school, isn’t she?

‘Never mind that now,’ Malin says. And hears how it sounds. ‘Sorry,’ she adds.

‘No problem, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘But you have to realise that this case isn’t more important than your own daughter.’

Shut up, Zeke.

‘Someone’s knocking at the door,’ Malin says. ‘Probably housekeeping. I’ve got to go.’

Zeke hangs up.

No knock at the door, she just wanted to end the call.

Jerry, Malin thinks. Jerry. If it was you driving that night, you locked it away in a little black safe and threw away the key, didn’t you? Only took it out when you were having a pissing contest with Jochen.

I never take my secrets out, Malin thinks, because I don’t know what they are. And you, Jochen, you don’t want to know what your real secret is, do you? You think everything can be controlled, that you can make the world do whatever you want.

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.

38

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.

She doesn’t have time to see the shadow over the peephole in the door, and Dad is suddenly standing in front of her, suntanned and jolly and happy to see her. His face is rounder and he looks well, and he pulls her to him, takes her in his arms and gives her a long hug without saying a word, and in the end Malin says: ‘Dad, I’m having trouble breathing.’

And he lets go of her. Steps aside. Says: ‘Let’s go in and see Mum,’ and Malin goes into the flat, sees the furniture and rugs they brought down from Linkoping, how badly they match the new Spanish hacienda-style furniture.

‘How are you?’ Dad asks as he follows her into the living room.

‘Fine,’ she replies, and out on a balcony with a view of the Atlantic she sees her Mum facing away from her, against the strange glow from the street lamps. Mum is sitting at a table in a pink tennis shirt, her hair still a blonde bob, and Malin wonders what her face looks like.

Wrinkled? Alert, angry, or just older?

Mum doesn’t turn around and soon Malin is standing beside her on the balcony, hearing Dad’s voice say: ‘Here she is!’ and now Mum notices her and Malin thinks that her face looks like it always has, only browner, with the same pinched expression in spite of the smile on her lips.

Mum gets up.

Air-kisses my cheeks.

‘Have you been drinking, darling? You smell like you have. And you do look a bit puffy.’

And without waiting for a reply she goes on: ‘It’s lovely that you’re here, darling. Wonderful. It’s about time. We’ve bought the best paella from a place on the way back from Abama, oh, you should see the course there! What a course! Henry, get your daughter a glass of wine, would you? There, now sit yourself down,’ and Malin sits down opposite her mother on her parents’ balcony in Tenerife and she doesn’t know whether to look at her mum, around the flat, or out to sea.

‘So what are you really doing here?’

Mum is drinking her wine quickly and nervously and Malin is taking great gulps from the glass Dad has just put in front of her, and she wonders if this is what visiting your parents is like, when you’re an only child whom they haven’t seen for three years. Then Malin takes another deep gulp of wine and thinks that there aren’t any rules for this sort of thing, no accepted standards of human behaviour, and she wishes Dad were here, but instead she can hear him doing something in what must be the kitchen.

Mum opposite her, with her question hanging in the air.

‘A case I’m working on,’ Malin replies. ‘It led here. So I came down.’

And any other person would have continued to ask about the case, wondering what it was about, what the connection was that meant a detective inspector from Linkoping was prepared to take a five-and-a-half-hour flight down to Tenerife.

But Mum starts talking about the golf course.

‘You see, it’s in Abama, the most exclusive resort on the whole island, and it costs an absolute fortune to play even if you can actually get a tee-off time, but they held a lottery for slots at the Swedish Club and what do you know, we won! You should see the first hole, we were there with Sven and Maggan. .’

Malin pretends to listen.

Nods.

Inside she is telling Mum about Tove, how Tove is, that she’s growing up. She tells her about Janne, that they’ve separated and that she’s very upset about it and sometimes doesn’t know what to do with herself, and ‘if you mis-hit the ball there it can fly out to sea, and you lose three strokes and then the whole round is ruined’, and Malin tells her that she can see that she’s making a mess of everything, that she wants to drink, that she’s drinking too much, she drinks like a fish, and that deep down she’s already admitted to herself, but only herself, that she’s a fucking alcoholic, but that there’s no way she’s ever going to admit that to anyone else, and she nods happily when Dad pours her some more wine and suddenly plates appear on the table alongside a shop-bought paella in an aluminium tray with three langoustines perched on top of the yellow rice.

Darkness has fallen.

And Malin can hear hesitant, distant music from the pubs down by the shore, and she listens to it as Dad says: ‘Help yourself, Malin.’

And she stretches out too quickly and knocks her wine over.

Damn.

‘Oops,’ Dad says. ‘I’ve got it.’

‘Still as clumsy as ever!’ Mum says, and Malin feels like getting up and leaving, but she doesn’t move.

Malin can hear her mother chattering away to one of her friends on the phone in the living room.

Dad with his calm face opposite her, he almost seems to think it’s a relief that Mum’s left the table.

The paella is all gone.

It was good, Malin thinks, in spite of everything.

Mum’s been talking about golf, about hairdressers, about the rising price of food, about the fact that the flat may not be that big but its value has gone up, about some yoga class she’s just started going to, all this and much more, and then the phone rang and she went to answer it. Now Dad asks: ‘How are things with Tove?’

The wine has gone to Malin’s head.

‘She’s starting to get grown-up.’

‘Like you’ve been for a long time.’

You’re smiling at me, Dad.

‘And with Janne?’

He must know that we’ve separated.

‘It’s OK. We couldn’t make it work. No point trying, really,’ and just as Dad is about to respond to what she’s said, Mum appears in the doorway, saying: ‘That was Harry and Evy. They’re coming over. They’re keen to meet our clever detective inspector daughter.’

No, Malin thinks. No.

And Dad looks at her, says: ‘You know what, Malin? Why don’t you help me clear the table, then we can take a stroll down to the shop and get some ice cream before they get here?’

‘Yes, you do that,’ Mum says. ‘My feet ache. We must have walked at least twenty kilometres today. How many sixty-seven-year-olds can do that?’

Malin drains her wine glass.

Makes sure she gets the last drops, but Mum doesn’t seem to notice how thirsty she is.

39

The chiller cabinet and air conditioning of the little supermarket are groaning.

The shopkeeper greeted Malin’s dad like an old friend, and Dad had a long conversation with him in almost fluent Spanish. Malin didn’t understand a word of what they were saying.

‘Ramon,’ Dad says. ‘Nice bloke.’

And now he says: ‘What do you think? Vanilla or chocolate? You’d rather have chocolate, wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d rather have a beer in the bar next door.’

He gets a tub of chocolate ice cream from the freezer before turning to face her, the front of his pale blue shirt speckled with yellow from the paella, and Malin sees now that his hair is much thinner than when they last met.

‘We can do that if you like, Malin,’ and the next minute they’re sitting in the bar, in lingering thirty-degree heat under a whirling fan in the ceiling, and Malin wipes the condensation from her glass and thinks that the feeling is the same here as back home in the Hamlet or the Pull amp; Bear. The walls of the bar are covered with blue tiles, decorated with white fish caught in nets.

Dad takes a deep gulp of his beer and says: ‘Mum doesn’t change.’

‘So I see.’

‘But somehow it’s easier down here.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s less pretending.’

Malin takes a mouthful of beer and nods to show that she knows what he means, then she takes a deep breath.

‘You’ve been having a tough time,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Anything you want to talk about, love?’

Do I want to?

What would we say to each other, Dad? And the fish on the tiles, half of them have their eyes closed, as if they’re in a dark moat, and she feels like telling him about her dreams, about the boy in them, tell him and find out who he is, find out what’s hidden in the darkness in those dreams.

‘I’ve been dreaming about a boy,’ she says finally.

‘A boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘A little boy?’

Dad is quiet, drinks some more.

‘Did Mum ever go away when I was little?’ Malin goes on.

‘The ice cream’s melting. Shall we go back?’ he says.

‘Dad.’

‘Some things are best not spoken about, Malin. Some things are just the way they are and you have to accept it. You’re pretty good at not letting anyone get too close. You always have been.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’

Malin empties her glass in four large gulps before she gets up and leaves a five-euro note on the bar.

She and Dad stand beside each other on the pavement. Cars go past and the noise of people’s voices merges with unfamiliar music.

‘You’ve got a secret, you and Mum, haven’t you?’ Malin says. ‘Something you’re not telling me, even though you should.’

Dad looks at her and he opens his mouth, moves his mouth and tongue, but no words come out.

‘Tell me, Dad. I know there’s something I need to know.’

And he looks as if he’s about to say something, then he looks up at the balcony of the flat and Malin can just make out the figure of her mother up there.

‘The secret. There is a secret, isn’t there?’

And Dad says: ‘We’d better get back up with the ice cream before it melts. Our friends will soon be here.’ Then he turns and walks away.

Malin doesn’t move.

‘I’m tired, Dad,’ she says, and he stops, turns back towards her again.

‘I’m not coming back up. I’m going to go back to the hotel.’

‘You have to say goodbye to Mum.’

‘Explain to her, will you?’

And they stand there facing each other, five metres apart. They look at each other for almost a minute, and Malin is waiting for him to come over to her and give her a hug, and force everything that stings and burns away from reality.

He holds the ice cream up.

‘I’ll explain to Mum.’

Then Malin sees the back of his shirt. Pale blue and sweaty in the dim light from the bar, the shop, the street lamps, the stars and the half-moon.

What are you doing here?

Jochen, do you usually come here? Is that you, sitting over at the bar, showing off your bronze skin?

What’s she doing here?

They seem to be wondering, the men sitting by the counter around the podium where the naked girls are dancing in blue fluorescent light. She’s in one of the bars opposite the hotel. She can crawl home from here.

Lesbian?

I don’t give a damn what you think, Malin thinks. I don’t give a damn that each shot of tequila costs thirty euros and that the girls keep disappearing with men behind a curtain.

African women.

Balkan girls.

Russians.

Many of them must have ended up here after being threatened with violence. How many of them are going to end up like Maria Murvall?

But now they’re dancing, their oiled skin shining as they spin listlessly around the poles with their eyes empty of emotion.

Malin downs her fourth tequila and at last the room, the girls, the men around her start to lose their edges and blur together into a single warm, calm image of reality.

I can sit here OK, Malin thinks.

This bar is my place.

She raises a finger and calls the bartender over.

He fills her glass and she puts money on the bar. She knows that as long as she pays, she’ll be allowed to drink, and if she ends up falling off her stool they’ll carry her out into the street and tuck her out of the way so she can sleep it off.

But I’m going to cling to this planet, she thinks.

Then she closes her eyes.

Tove’s face. What’s she doing now? Is the beast there by her bed about to strangle her? Do drowned sewer rats wants to nibble the skin from her sleeping body? I’m coming, Tove, I’ll look after you.

Janne’s face. Daniel Hogfeldt’s. Mum’s, Dad’s.

Away with you all. Do you even wish me well?

Away.

Maria Murvall. Mute and expressionless, yet still so clear. As if she’s chosen to withdraw from the world to avoid seeing the darkness.

Jerry Petersson. Trying to move in the moat, clamber out, but the green spirits are holding him down, the fish, but also the worms and crabs and eels and aggressive black crayfish eating away at his body, falling from his mouth and empty eye sockets.

Jochen Goldman’s body. Is he going to come after me now? Am I in his way? Am I going to end up as shark food?

I don’t care.

The Fagelsjo family’s self-awareness and bitterness. A car rolling over and over like a huge snowball on a cold, snowy New Year’s Eve.

Dark-coloured cars.

Eyes that see, but notice nothing. The world disappears and becomes soft and malleable, simple and easy to understand, to like.

Drink, drink, drink, says the voice. Drink. It’ll make you feel better, everything will be fine.

I’m more than happy to listen to that voice, Malin thinks.