Autumn Killing (34 page)

Can you spread forgiveness over time?

How can we approach forgiveness, Malin and me? Because somehow it’s as if we can only do one thing together: feel that we have some sort of debt to each other, that our lives are nothing but an insult, an inadequacy, an injustice that needs to be apologised for.

Have we grown too old, Malin?

How long must an apology be allowed to work between people like us? Twelve years. Thirteen?

Tove likes liver pâté with pickled gherkins.

She’s sitting watching television upstairs.

Curled up in its glow.

At home here.

You’re going to want me to apologise for her making that choice, Malin. Aren’t you?

She’s been to the cinema with her friend Frida.

Seems to steer clear of boyfriends, hasn’t really had one since Markus. Since Finspång.

‘The sandwiches are ready, Tove. Do you want herbal or ginger tea?’

No answer from upstairs.

Maybe she’s fallen asleep.

Tove leans back on the sofa and zaps through the channels.

Desperate Housewives
. Some reality show. A football match. She ends up watching a documentary about an artist who’s made a sculpture of one of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center, a woman falling to the ground. The sculpture was going to be placed where the towers stood, but people said it was degenerate. Unworthy.

As if they refused to accept that there were people who were forced to jump from the buildings.

She takes a bite of her sandwich.

She couldn’t handle going to see Mum. Not tonight. Tonight she just wants to sit in the darkness and watch television, hear Dad doing whatever he’s doing downstairs.

And the sculpture on television.

A crouching bronze figure. Slight in the wind, just like in the real world. It looks like you, Mum, Tove thinks. And she wants to go down to Dad, ask him to take her home to Mum’s, see how she is, maybe stay there with her. But Dad probably wouldn’t want to do that. And maybe Mum would be cross if they just showed up like that.

Her mobile buzzes.

A text message from Sara. Tove taps a reply as the television shows a close-up of the sculpture’s frightened face, its shimmering bronze hair floating in the wind.

Zeke Martinsson looks at the clock at the top corner of the screen.

8.49. Still relatively calm in the station, everyone must be busy somewhere else. No morning meeting today, they went through everything in enough detail yesterday, everyone knows what they’ve got to do.

Malin should have been here long ago. They ought to be well on their way to Söderköping by now.

Where are you, Malin?

Down in the gym? Hardly.

Has something come up to keep you away? Doesn’t seem likely.

Did you feel like giving in to the pain yesterday?

To drink?

Gunilla wondered why he got home so late, even though he’d called to say he’d be working. He stood in the kitchen and lied straight to her face without a moment’s hesitation, and without managing to feel any shame. Instead he felt sorry for her, for having a man who could betray her without hesitation after so many years of marriage. And he had fallen asleep quickly, imagining Karin Johannison’s thighs around him.

Zeke looks around at his colleagues. Some in uniforms. Some without. Focused yet somehow aimless. What do you all want, really?

Malin doesn’t know what she wants, yet she still does it every day. Here, in this open-plan office she gets straight down to the task of trying to make people believe that no harm can come to them.

So where are you, Malin? Zeke’s phoned three times, twice on her mobile and once on her landline, but no answer. Maybe she’s at Janne’s?

No answer at Janne’s either.

Högfeldt?

Too complicated. I don’t know anything about what they get up to.

‘Where’s Malin? Shouldn’t you be in Söderköping by now?’

Sven Sjöman’s tired, somehow compressed voice as he calls from the lift door.

Zeke gets up.

Gives Sven a look, and Sven frowns and looks as if he’s thinking that she might have messed up badly, maybe we should have taken her problems even more seriously?

The two detectives meet in the middle of the room.

Look at each other.

‘I think she’s at home,’ Zeke says.

‘Let’s go,’ Sven says.

Zeke rings Malin’s doorbell and hears the angry signal on the other side of the door.

Sven standing silently beside him, wearing one of the force’s dark-blue padded raincoats.

No talking in the car.

What would they say?

Zeke rings again.

Again.

Sven opens the letterbox and peers in, and the sound of heavy breathing, a sleeping person’s movements, seeps out to the stairwell.

‘Have you got a skeleton key?’

‘I keep one on my key ring,’ Zeke says.

‘She’s lying on the hall floor.’

Zeke shakes his head, suppresses the instinctive anxiety gripping his stomach and focuses on action.

She’s breathing.

Asleep.

Could be injured.

‘Give me the key,’ Sven says, and a few seconds later the door is open and they see Malin on the hall floor, a white T-shirt pulled up above her navel, little pink hearts on her underwear.

No blood.

No bruising, no wounds, just the sound of heavy, longed-for sleep, and a strong smell of alcohol.

An empty tequila bottle.

The
Correspondent
next to her head.

They kneel at her side, look at each other, no need to ask the question that’s going through both their heads.

What are we going to do now?

Turn off the rain. It’s too cold. And it’s drumming on my skin in a bloody annoying way, and what on earth’s that, so cold against my legs?

I don’t want anything to do with this, and who are those people talking?

Janne.

Yell: ‘Daniel, fucking stop doing that!’

Fucking stop.

And the drops keep drumming and they’re icy cold and what am I doing outside with no clothes on in this weather and what are they saying?

Sven. Zeke.

What the hell are you doing here?

‘Hold onto her.’

‘Sit still.’

Fabric against my body. Zeke’s face, his shaved head, and he looks focused, Sven, are you there, and I see the bathroom now, the shower, I can feel it against my head and shit, shit, the water’s cold, and I see them now, both of them, I’m sitting in the bath and they’re showering me and my T-shirt’s clinging to my body and my knickers, the stupidest pair I’ve got, they hardly even cover the hair down there, and just stop . . .

‘Stop it, I know what your fucking game is!’

She flails with her arms.

Tries to force the shower-head away.

Drops.

But the liquid ice, the small sharp needles batter her, forcing her back.

‘Let me sleep, you bastards!’

The dressing gown is warm against her skin and the coffee slipping down her throat is hot. Her head is throbbing, and Malin wonders if she’s seeing double, with two Svens and two Zekes and she wants to scream out loud, or drink more, but the look in their eyes holds her back.

Sven on a chair by the window. Zeke standing by the sink, looking first at the broken Ikea clock and then at a pigeon that settles on the windowsill for a few seconds before flying off towards the church tower.

Say something.

Tell me off.

Tell me I’m a bloody awful person.

A weak-willed drunk, just someone else who can’t resist the slightest internal demon.

Call me a shit. An arsehole.

But neither of her two colleagues says anything.

They’ve forced her to take two aspirins and two hydration tablets, and now she knows they’re expecting her to finish the coffee.

They go out into the hall, she can hear them talking. Hears Sven say: ‘I’ll keep an eye out, keep her on her feet, we can’t manage without . . .’

Zeke: ‘She needs a detox clinic.’

Is that really what he says? I must have heard wrong. He’d never say something like that.

They come back. They stand beside her in the kitchen without speaking.

And when the coffee is finished Sven says: ‘Get some clothes on, then you and Zeke get over to Söderköping. You’ve got a job to do.’

Somehow Malin has survived the drive, she has no idea how, and now, just before lunchtime, she and Zeke are standing in a room with flowery wallpaper in Söderköping’s rehabilitation home. In front of them sits Ingeborg Sandsten in a deep-red armchair. Beside her lies Jasmin Sandsten in a blue wheelchair, and under a leaf-green blanket they can see her spastic body, twisted by years of involuntary muscle spasms. One of her brown eyes is open, the other closed, and her gaze betrays no sign of conscious life. Jasmin Sandsten breathes in heavy rattles and sometimes lets out a growling sound, and every time the sound escapes from her mouth her mother reaches over and wipes the saliva from the corner of her lips with her right hand.

A window in the background. A bare, wind-tormented tree, a desolate canal path that seems to be waiting for summer visitors on bikes and the canal company’s old white-painted passenger boats full of American tourists.

A mother who has never strayed from her daughter’s side, Malin thinks, feeling a deep respect for the two strangers in the room. Even if Jasmin doesn’t know what’s going on around her, she must know that she hasn’t been abandoned. Do you know, Malin thinks as she looks at the girl in the wheelchair, that you’ve got pure love on your side? Your mother is what people ought to be like. Isn’t she?

If Tove had ended up like this.

What would I have done? I can’t even bear to think about it.

‘We should have been in Tenerife,’ Ingeborg Sandsten said, laying her thin hands on her equally thin thighs. ‘At the Vintersol rehabilitation centre, but they turned us down at the last minute when they found out how badly handicapped Jasmin is. So we came here instead. This is very nice too.’

Malin’s first thought is: ‘What a coincidence. I’m just back from there,’ but that would have been an insult to the mother and daughter who never made it.

Ingeborg Sandsten’s face is thin and lined, showing signs of never-ending exhaustion, and the woman’s tiredness makes Malin feel more alert.

‘I’ve looked after Jasmin since the accident. I get money from the council to be her carer.’

‘Can she hear us?’ Zeke asks.

‘The doctors say she can’t. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think she can.’

‘Our colleagues spoke to your former husband yesterday,’ Malin says.

‘He’s still angry.’

‘Has he spoken to you? Have you heard what we suspect happened on the night of the accident?’

‘Yes, he called me.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘It might be true, but it doesn’t make any difference, does it?’

‘You didn’t know anything about that?’ Malin asks.

‘I see what you’re getting at. I didn’t know. And I was here with Jasmin all last week.’

Then the growl from Jasmin as her face contorts in unimaginable pain. She must have been very pretty once upon a time. Ingeborg wipes her grown-up daughter’s mouth.

‘Did Jasmin know Jerry Petersson before the evening of the accident? Do you remember?’ Malin asks, aware that she’s fishing, casting out nets and hooks, trying to catch underwater voices.

‘I don’t think so. She’d never mentioned him. But what do any of us know about the lives of teenagers?’

‘And the Fågelsjö youngsters? Did she know them?’

‘She was in a parallel class to Katarina Fågelsjö. But I don’t think they were friends.’

‘So you didn’t know anything about what happened that night?’ Zeke asks again. ‘That it might have been Jerry Petersson driving?’

‘What do you think?’ Ingeborg Sandsten said. ‘That Jasmin might have told me?’

Two dozen heavy raindrops hit the windowpane like a salvo.

‘Deep inside her dreams Jasmin remembers what happened,’ she goes on. ‘Deep, deep inside.’

The car pushes through the waterlogged landscape of Östergötland. Grey, lifeless forests, lonely grey fields, grey houses.

Zeke’s hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.

Malin takes a couple of deep breaths.

‘It was you who asked Sven to talk to me, wasn’t it?’ she asks.

Zeke takes his eyes from the road for a moment. Looks at her. Then nods.

‘So are you angry now, Malin? I had to do something.’

‘You could have said something to me directly.’

‘And you’d have listened, would you? Sure, Malin, sure.’

‘You went behind my back.’

‘For your own good.’

‘You go behind a lot of people’s backs, Zeke. Think about what you could lose.’

Zeke takes his eyes from the road again. Looks at her, before his hard green eyes fill with warmth.

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he says.

‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ Malin retorts, then the sound of the car engine takes over and she swallows some saliva to suppress the lingering nausea.

Her mobile rings when they’re about ten kilometres from Linköping.

A number Malin doesn’t recognise. She takes the call.

‘This is Stina Ekström. Andreas’s mum.’

‘Hello,’ Malin says. ‘How are you?’

‘How am I?’

‘Sorry,’ Malin says.

‘You asked if I remembered anything particular about the time leading up to the accident. I don’t know if it means anything, but I remember one of Andreas’s friends from when he started high school. Anders Dalström. He and Andreas were friends, it started when we moved to Linghem and he started secondary school. I seem to remember that Andreas looked after him. But they didn’t see so much of each other when they started at different high schools. I remember him from the funeral. It looked like Andreas’s death hit him hard.’

‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘I think he still lives in the city. But I haven’t seen him for a long time.’

‘So they were friends?’

‘Yes, in secondary school out here.’

Then Stina Ekström falls silent, but something stops Malin from ending the call.

‘We were angry back then,’ Stina Ekström goes on. ‘Jasmin’s parents were angry. We’d both lost our children, in different ways. But anger doesn’t get you anywhere. I’ve learned that all we have in the end is how we treat our fellow human beings. We can choose. To empathise, or not. It’s as simple as that.’