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.’
25
