Gote Lindman, just turned fifty-two, runs a hand over his wet, shaved head. He’s only been inside Skogsa Castle once before.
At the age of eight he stood with his father in Axel Fagelsjo’s study and listened as Fagelsjo dictated the terms of that summer’s work, and the future, in return for them being allowed to rent an old soldier’s cottage over in the far south-west corner of the estate.
‘When I call, you come.’
Lindman imagines he can hear the count’s voice, the harshness and violence concealed in it, as he and Ingmar Johansson, a few years older than him, walk along the corridor on the first floor, looking at the bare, grey stone walls and the peculiar pictures that adorn them every five metres or so.
‘He’s got a dog,’ Lindman says. ‘But it can’t be here, or we’d have heard it by now.’
‘A yappy beagle,’ Ingmar Johansson mutters.
It’s more than forty years since Lindman was here with his father.
His own dealings with the Fagelsjos were managed through the solicitor’s office in the city, and thankfully he only leased land from them these days, having bought himself a farmhouse outside Bankekind.
He had been informed by a solicitor when the sale of Skogsa was already a fact. His tenancy would continue as before.
They walk past room after room.
Peering in, padding about on wooden floors, stone floors, metre after metre of unused space. They had arrived in Lindman’s black Saab, now parked beside Petersson’s Range Rover out in the courtyard. The door to the castle was unlocked and the alarm was flashing green. They hesitated before coming in, not wanting to upset the castle’s new owner.
Petersson had appeared in Lindman’s yard one day, standing next to his Range Rover with a broad smile, wearing that stupid yellow coat. The wind was blowing his mane of bleached hair, and Lindman had realised that the visit could only mean trouble.
‘You know who I am?’ Petersson had asked, and Lindman had nodded in reply.
‘Any chance of coffee?’
Another nod.
And then they had sat at the kitchen table eating Svetlana’s cakes and drinking freshly made coffee, and Petersson had explained that things would continue exactly as before, but that he had one demand: when he wanted to go hunting, they would come, no matter how bad the weather was, no matter what else was going on.
‘When I call, you come. Got it?’
Ingmar Johansson peers into the castle kitchen.
Copper saucepans hanging in gleaming rows from the ceiling. Even in the dim morning light they’re sparkling. The entire kitchen is new, white marble on the walls and floor, shiny steel appliances, a two-metre long stove with ten gas rings.
But no sign of life.
No Jerry Petersson. The owner of the land that he rents, just like Lindman, is nowhere to be seen.
The call had come on Thursday evening.
‘I need you here tomorrow at eight o’clock. We’re going for deer. There are too many of them.’
Like hell there were too many deer at Skogsa. More like too few, but Petersson’s voice brooked no argument. And he had been clear about the terms of the arrangement.
‘It was definitely eight o’clock?’ Johansson said.
‘On the dot,’ Lindman replied.
They had spoken on the phone just after their visits from Petersson. They had agreed that it could have been much worse, he might have wanted to introduce large-scale farming to the castle estate. Petersson hadn’t answered when Johansson asked him straight out about his plans for the farm, and just said he was there to talk about hunting.
‘Make sure you arrive on time.’
Petersson had been firm on the phone.
And here they both were.
But there was no sign of Jerry Petersson.
The steps are steep and dangerously slippery for wet boots. So they proceed carefully to the second floor, calling Petersson’s name, but their voices just rebound off the bare stone. Above them, in the twenty-metre high space above the stairs, hangs a crystal chandelier that must be several centuries old, adorned with over a hundred half-burned candles arranged in several ornate circles. On one wall hangs a mostly blue painting of a man squeezing suncream onto a woman’s back.
Panting, they reach the second floor.
‘He ought to get a lift put in,’ Johansson says.
‘Expensive,’ Lindman replies.
‘He can afford it.’
‘Shouldn’t we start in the cellar?’
‘Sod that. He’s probably got a torture chamber down there. You know, iron maidens and a single chair in the middle of the room.’
‘Bloody hell. I had no idea you had that sort of imagination,’ Lindman says.
They move through the rooms.
‘So he lives on this floor,’ Johansson says.
‘Bloody weird pictures,’ Lindman whispers as they emerge into a room containing several large photographs of a Christ-like figure immersed in a yellow liquid.
‘Do you think that’s piss?’ Johansson asks.
‘How the hell would I know?’
A large sculpture of a pink and purple plastic bear with sabre-teeth decorated with jewels and eyes that look like diamonds shines at them from one corner.
A painting of a Cambodian prisoner seems to want to chase them from the room.
The furniture looks as if it was designed for a spaceship: straight lines, black mixed with white, shapes that Lindman recognises from the interior design magazines he usually looks at when he’s waiting to have his hair cut.
‘Bloody hell, the things people choose to spend their hard-earned money on,’ Johansson says.
‘Petersson? Petersson! We’re here!’
‘Ready for the hunt. Time to shoot some deer!’
They stop, grinning at each other, then there’s a cold silence.
‘Where do you reckon he could be?’ Lindman asks, unbuttoning his green overcoat and wiping the sweat from his brow.
‘No idea. Maybe out on the estate? Doesn’t look like he’s in the castle. He’d have heard us by now.’
‘But his car’s down there. And the doors were unlocked.’
‘Showy damn car, that.’
‘Maybe, but you’d still like one.’
They’re both looking at a free-standing clothes rack holding ironed cotton shirts in all manner of colours.
‘What do you make of him?’ Johansson asks.
‘Petersson?’
‘No, God. Of course I mean Petersson.’
Johansson looks at Lindman. At the bitter wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, at the deep furrows on his brow.
Johansson knows that Lindman lived alone on his farm for many years after his wife left him fifteen years earlier. She’d been to a conference in Stockholm and came home crazy, saying she couldn’t bear living on the farm any more.
Someone must have fucked the sense out of her up in Stockholm.
But now he’d found a new one, a mail-order Russian.
