Autumn Killing

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.

40

Wednesday, 29 October

You should see them now, Malin.

What are their names, your colleagues? Waldemar? Johan?

They’re standing in the morning chill with Jonas Karlsson outside the building he lives in, asking him to go in, saying they have to talk to him, that he didn’t tell them the truth about what happened on that fateful New Year’s Eve.

You see, Malin, I’m keeping an eye on what you’re all doing.

It hasn’t been such a great morning for your colleagues. The prosecutor has ordered that Fredrik Fagelsjo be released from custody, he’s received a request from the lawyer, Ehrenstierna, which convinced him that Fagelsjo was unlikely to commit any further offences, and that he would remain at your disposal. ‘We can’t hold such a prominent member of the local community for a whole week on relatively minor offences.’

But you police still suspect him.

New Year’s Eve. When will that snow stop falling? When will those lawnmower blades fall silent?

Was I the one driving?

What was I doing at Fredrik Fagelsjo’s New Year party? I don’t want to remember, but it was one of those things people do, Malin, when we both want something yet somehow don’t, when we want to demonstrate our sovereignty, yet have to let go of it in order to get something.

Jonas is scared now.

I can feel it when I position myself just a few centimetres away from him. He knows that time has caught up with itself.

Jonas was on his way to work when the police came back. He tells them he spent the whole of the previous day at the trotting-track out in Mantorp.

Maybe he was the one driving after all?

Jochen is capable of playing with anyone just for the fun of it. Without all those games his life is pointless.

Now the door to Jonas Karlsson’s block of flats closes.

Waldemar’s hand on his shoulder as they disappear inside the building. And I am with you, Malin, beside your sleeping head ten thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine metres up in the air.

Secrets, Malin. You used to love secrets when you were a little girl, and now you’re obsessed with them.

The plane is moving through the atmosphere. You’re sleeping a dreamless sleep and you could do with it, you had to stop the taxi on the way to the airport so you could leap out and empty the previous day from your stomach.

Are you incorrigible, Malin?

You look so exhausted as you sit there leaning against the cold concave window, deaf to the roar of the engines. I actually feel like stroking your cheek, Malin, and that’s probably all you want, isn’t it?

Sinking into human warmth.

Sensing that it exists somewhere beyond the cold stones of the moat.

Jonas Karlsson has sat down on the sofa in his living room. Johan Jakobsson is sitting opposite him in an armchair, while Waldemar Ekenberg walks restlessly up and down the room. The coffee table is full of empty bottles and a squashed wine box, and the sour smell of drying alcohol stings their nostrils. But apart from the mess on the table, Jonas Karlsson’s flat is clean.

Waldemar’s long frame is shaking, his voice deep and coloured by a hundred thousand cigarettes.

‘You lied to us,’ he says, and Johan feels his voice make him shiver: the catch at the end of the words in spite of his local drawl, in spite of the smoker’s hoarseness.

Jonas Karlsson seems to have capitulated already, ready for the storm that’s coming his way now.

‘I didn’t. .’

‘Shut up, you soppy git,’ Waldemar shouts. ‘Of course you fucking lied. Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve. Not you.’

‘I. .’

And Johan wants to tell Waldemar to take it easy, to show a bit of consideration, but he stays silent. There’s something about the atmosphere in the room that he finds irresistible, against his will.

‘If you tell us the truth, there won’t necessarily be any consequences for you,’ Johan says. ‘It was so long ago. .’