Autumn Killing (44 page)

Malin stands naked in the changing room.

One message on her phone.

Daniel Högfeldt’s number, by coincidence, and she assumes that he must want a session that evening. She calls the messaging service to hear what he had to say.

‘Daniel here. I was just going to say that I’ve had an anonymous tip-off about your investigation. Call me?’

Daniel.

He doesn’t usually give us anything. Keeps any tips he receives for himself. And these days people keen for money and media attention often call the papers with tip-offs and leads instead of calling us.

How did that happen?

‘Daniel.’

‘It’s me. I got your message.’

‘Yes, I just wanted to say that I got a tip-off about Fågelsjö over the phone. That it had to be the father and daughter who killed Fredrik. As revenge. That they’re responsible.’

‘I can’t deny that we’ve considered that.’

‘Of course, Malin. But this informant was particularly insistent. He sounded relieved when I said I was already thinking of writing about the connection.’

‘A nutter?’

‘No, but there was something about him. Something that didn’t fit.’

‘What was his name? Did you get his number?’

‘No, no number came up. No name. And that’s pretty unusual as well.’

He’s using this as an excuse to call me, Malin thinks.

He’s got nothing. They get loads of tip-offs.

Anonymous.

About all sorts of things.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Malin. But this one was different. The fact that he was so insistent scared me.’

‘Did he have anything new to say?’

‘No.’

‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘You can come around to mine at nine o’clock tonight, then you can have what you want.’

Daniel is silent.

Malin sees herself in the changing-room mirror, careful not to look at her tired face, looks instead at her toned body.

‘You really are something, Fors, aren’t you? I was thinking I could actually help you with your work for once.’

‘What, with that?’

‘With the fact that it was a man and not a woman who called, for instance.’

‘Are you coming?’

The line breaks and goes silent.

He’s coming.

Tell me you’re coming. Then everything will be all right, if only for half an hour or so. That’s enough.

Malin is lying on her bed in her dressing gown, waiting for Daniel to come, feeling the urge to have him inside her.

Nine o’clock comes.

Half past.

Ten o’clock. And she feels like calling him, but knows that such humiliation would be pointless, that he actually didn’t want her and really was only trying to help.

In his own awkward way, with a meaningless tip-off.

Someone who wants things to be a particular way. Who wants to direct them to look in one direction when they ought to be looking elsewhere. The thought pops up again.

On the way home from the gym she called her dad.

He evidently hadn’t noticed any Spanish police watching over him and Mum, but on the other hand he hadn’t noticed his picture being taken either.

He told her that he and her mother were thinking of coming home for Christmas. Malin replied that Tove would be happy, but that they should expect fairly strained family relationships.

‘Are you having a tough time?’ Dad asked.

‘No, there’s just an awful lot of autumn at the moment,’ she said, thinking: Dad, we’re fighting for our lives on my planet.

Are you Malin? Fighting for your life
?

I think my father’s doing the same on his planet.

Axel Fågelsjö.

Father.

I can see both you and him clearly, you’re lying in your bed, and you’ve fallen asleep and are sleeping a dreamless sleep, a well-deserved rest after all that work trying to keep your impulses under control.

Axel is sitting at his kitchen table on Drottninggatan. He’s taken his beloved shotgun out of the gun cabinet in the bedroom.

He smells the gun, I’ve seen him do that before, and I don’t know why he does it. Now he’s locking the gun away in the cabinet again.

I don’t actually know what happened to me, Malin. I don’t remember anything. That seems to be unusual, from what I’ve been able to gather from talking to other people up here where I am.

But that doesn’t matter.

Because I’ve got you.

You’ll be able to tell me what my fate was.

You talk of your fate, Fredrik, but what do you know, my silver-spoon boy, about fate?

There’s no such thing as fate, just events that are the result of conscious actions.

When I ended up in the moat it was my own fault, no one else’s.

In the most fundamental sense, I caused that event myself.

You imagine, Malin, that you’re going to give me some sort of justice, reparation after death. As if I could have any use for that?

I don’t need anything from any of you.

I am already everything.

On Sunday a hard rain is lashing the ground, the people.

Malin stands in the window of her flat looking at the church tower, the way even the crows seem to be suffering in this wind.

She wants to hear Tove’s voice, meet her, they could have spent the whole day together now that Sven has forced her to take the day off.

But she doesn’t call her daughter, she does what Janne said, or at least what she thought he meant. She keeps her distance. Avoids her own reflection. If she were fourteen years old, she’d be slashing her wrists.

Instead she puts on her jogging clothes and runs twenty kilometres on various routes through Linköping. She sweats under the tight fabric, the city disappears before her eyes and she feels her heart, feels that she can still trust its power.

Back home again, she calls the station. Waldemar Ekenberg tells her that nothing new has happened in the case.

She leafs through her papers about Maria Murvall. She prepares her talk at the kitchen table. The evening darkness settles outside the window.

Malin looks around the kitchen, thinking: I have nothing, I can’t even handle Tove. And will I ever get the chance again?

There must be four hundred eyes, Malin thinks. And they’re all staring at me. I hope the collar of my beige blouse is sitting as it should under this pale blue lambswool sweater, and why the hell am I bothered what this lot think of the way I look?

The hall of Sturefors School is full, pupils tapping at their mobile phones. Malin is standing behind a lectern looking out over them, out at the hall she once sat in.

The headteacher, Birgitta Svensson, a woman in her fifties, wrinkled by smoking, and dressed in grey, is standing beside Malin, takes a deep breath and taps gently on a little black microphone with the fingers of one hand.

‘OK, let’s turn off our mobiles now.’

And to Malin’s surprise they listen to her.

With a chorus of bleeps the phones are switched off, and the voices fall to a murmur until there is silence in the hall.

The smell of damp cloth. Of teenagers’ sweet breath, of flaking plaster.

‘Standing beside me up here is Malin Fors, a detective inspector with the police. She’s going to talk to us about what the police do. Let’s make her very welcome.’

Wolf whistles. They all applaud and when silence settles once more Malin loses her train of thought and isn’t sure where to start, feeling a wave of withdrawal sickness course through her body, and she tries to focus on the clock on the wall.

09.09.

She’s supposed to talk for an hour, but about what?

The adolescents in front of her seem to know everything about the world, yet nothing at the same time. Calling them innocent would be a serious exaggeration, yet what do they know of violence? About human excess? Though a fair number must have seen more adult frustrations than they should have in their own homes.

Like Tove. My hand hitting Janne’s mouth. How could I?

Silence.

No words seem willing to cross Malin’s lips. A minute passes, then two.

The students are starting to squirm on their chairs.

‘Violence,’ Malin says. ‘I work with what we usually call violent crimes. Rapes, and abuse.’

She pauses again.

Sits it out.

‘And murder. And as I’m sure you’re aware, things like that do still happen in a peaceful city like Linköping.’

Then the words flow by themselves, and she explains how a typical abuse case might be dealt with, about a few real cases, but none of the worst ones.

‘We do our best,’ Malin says. ‘Let’s just hope it’s enough.’

Her nausea remains subdued while she is talking, the adrenalin and concentration making her feel OK, but once the students start asking about the murders they are currently investigating, all the air goes out of her.

‘Well, I think that’s enough from me. Thank you,’ she says, stepping down from the stage before anyone has a chance to ask another question.

The whistling and applause start up again.

There’s something ritualistic about the whole situation.

They would have applauded and whistled even if I’d been talking about the Holocaust, Malin thinks.

Outside the hall the headteacher comes up to Malin.

‘That went well,’ she says. ‘You even got a few questions. That never usually happens. But I suppose they’re excited about what’s going on at the moment.’

‘It felt like they were listening,’ Malin says. ‘But as to whether they learned anything, what do I know?’

The headteacher takes Malin’s arm.

‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.’

Malin wants to pull away, but the look in the woman’s eyes is strangely intense as she looks into Malin’s eyes and says: ‘I’m sure they learned a good deal, and we’re very grateful to you. Would you like a cup of coffee in the staffroom?’

To her own surprise, Malin hears herself say yes.

Lovisa Segerberg is alone in paperwork Hades.

Waldemar and Johan have gone out for coffee.

She wonders whether to switch on Fredrik Fågelsjö’s computer or look through one of the hundreds of folders they haven’t yet had time to look at.

Instead she finds herself thinking about Malin Fors.

If it’s true what the rumours say: that she was caught drink-driving, but that it’s been hushed up. That she’s going into rehab as soon as the case is solved.

People are only human, and even police officers need a bit of slack sometimes. Otherwise there’d only be single-minded, cocksure officers left in the force, and no one wants police officers like that. Would the team cope without Malin Fors?

It would turn into something different, because Malin is the one who sets the tone. The person the others unconsciously lean on.

Maybe I should have coffee with her? Just us women. See how she feels?

Lovisa bats the thought aside and stands up.

Over on a shelf by the door sits a single black folder, apart from the others. God knows how it got there.

She pulls it down, then goes back to her chair.

Inside, three blank sheets of paper.

Beneath them an unfranked envelope, then some handwritten words on even whiter paper.

Lovisa feels time stand still as a warm sensation spreads through her body.

Could this letter be the thing they didn’t know they were looking for?

Birgitta Svensson leans back on a green sofa and takes a bite of a dry, mass-produced almond cake.

Malin is holding her cup of coffee in both hands, the heat of the drink feels good against her palms.

They’re alone in the staffroom, and Malin thinks that it has a peaceful calm, a calm that smells of tea and coffee and books and paper.

‘We only have one real problem at this school,’ Birgitta Svensson says, ‘and that’s bullying. It’s not a small problem either, but no matter what we do we can’t seem to get to grips with it.’

‘Are there particular pupils responsible for it?’

Malin remembers the boys she encountered in connection with a murder a few years ago, and the way they terrified the whole of Ljungsbro School.

‘If only it were that simple,’ Birgitta Svensson says. ‘No, it isn’t just a few individual bullies here, it seems to shift the whole time. Someone who was the victim yesterday can end up as the bully today.’

‘What have you done to try to tackle it?’

‘We’ve had speakers here. Group sessions. Individual counselling. But it’s like a plague. Whenever we think we’ve finally solved it, something new happens.’

‘Maybe it will get better once this year leaves. The problem might resolve itself.’

‘But the school needs to function now. For everyone.’

Tove.

You’ve never been bullied, Malin thinks. What would I do to anyone bullying you if you were?

Doesn’t want to know.

‘Last week,’ Birgitta Svensson says, ‘there was a boy in Year 8 who rubbed his cheeks with sandpaper in the woodwork class. It turned out that a big gang of boys in Years 8 and 9 had been tormenting him because his parents only have a rusty old car. Can you imagine? It was like it was OK to have a go at him, just because everyone else was. We couldn’t identify anyone who was worse than the others, and no one felt responsible, they were all just “joining in”.’

Birgitta Svensson makes quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

Then she leans forward, for the last bit of the almond cake.

‘Sandpaper,’ Malin says. ‘He must have been feeling terrible.’

‘To be honest, he looked dreadful. As if he was wearing a mask of wounds.’

Outside the school dining room there are posters from the Friends Foundation.

Encouragement to be friends with everyone, not to exclude anyone, to try always to see a person’s unique qualities and characteristics.

A pipe dream, Malin thinks. Show any weakness and you can be sure that someone will bite.

Did Jerry Petersson show weakness?

Fredrik Fågelsjö?

Were they open and weak, if only for a matter of seconds, and then reality struck, biting them with its greedy jaws?