‘I wasn’t the one. .’
And Johan looks into Jonas’s scared eyes, sees that he realises that everyone around here, either by media or rumour, will find out his story and whisper it behind his back.
Then Waldemar raises one hand, tenses his open palm, and lets it fall hard across Jonas Karlsson’s mouth, and Jonas Karlsson screams and blood trickles from a cracked lip.
Waldemar leans over him.
‘Do you want more? Do you?’
‘I. .’
Another blow whines through the air, hits the back of Jonas Karlsson’s head, throwing him forward into the coffee table.
‘Well?’
‘I wasn’t the one driving,’ Jonas Karlsson yells. ‘It wasn’t me. Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.’
Malin’s woken up.
Her brain somehow shut off by the buzz of the plane, the constant rumble of the engines and the noise of the young children two rows in front. She has a retired couple next to her, suntanned, they’ve evidently spent a long time in the sun and could have been her parents. They smiled at her when she woke up, opening her hungover, bloodshot eyes.
The tin of Heineken in front of her is half empty. It’s calmed her body down, stifled the nausea.
An excursion to the heat.
But only physically. I want to get away, she thinks. She sees Jerry Petersson in the moat, his body drifting this way and that from the regular yet uneven movement of the water.
Looks like you were a bastard, Malin thinks. A real bastard. So why on earth do I care?
And then she hears a voice in the depths of her throbbing skull.
What else would you care about instead, Malin? Everything you ought to but can’t quite get to grips with?
‘OK, you’re going to tell us what happened.’
Waldemar Ekenberg’s voice is calm but commanding, and the words conceal the threat of further violence.
Waldemar has sat down beside Jonas Karlsson on the sofa, handing him a roll of toilet paper he’s just got from the bathroom, and Johan leans forward in his armchair and says: ‘Tell us the truth now. Jerry’s dead. He can’t do anything to you now.’
And Jonas Karlsson clears his throat, looks up, and starts to talk, with a piece of toilet paper stuck to the cut in his lip.
‘Jerry was at the party when I got there. I think he got a lift with someone else. At half past one Jerry wanted to go back into the city and I offered to drive him and the others. We went out to the car park where I’d left the car. Fredrik Fagelsjo had gone up to the castle with the people he wanted to carry on the party with, and we weren’t among them.’
‘So you were friends, you and Jerry?’
‘I was one of a lot of people in his gang. Friends? He didn’t have any friends. He could make you think you were his friend, sure. And I wanted to be his friend. I admired him, he was the sort of person you wanted to be, the sort you wanted to like you, at any price.’
‘So you admired him. Then what?’
‘The four of us, me, Jerry, Andreas and Jasmin were going to drive back to the city. When we got to the car Jerry announced that he wanted to drive. He was wound up about something, he’d been in a bad mood all evening. He got really aggressive when I refused at first. Shouting and screaming. So I threw him the keys, said: “You drive then, if it’s so fucking important,” and I got in the passenger seat and put my seat belt on, and Andreas and Jasmin got in the back, but they must have been too drunk to remember their belts.’
‘What was Jerry upset about?’
‘No idea. He always had loads of secrets.’
‘So you set off.’
Waldemar puts his arm around Jonas Karlsson’s shoulders.
‘Jerry really put his foot down.’
‘You didn’t get very far.’
‘We must have been doing sixty or seventy when we hit the bend. The wheels lost their grip and I remember thinking we were fucked, then the car was rolling over and over into that snow-covered field and it was like being inside a washing machine full of brilliant light, then everything stopped and it all went quiet. After a bit I saw Jerry hanging upside down beside me, he was struggling to get free, and he undid my belt, and if he was drunk before, the adrenalin must have cleared his head completely.’
Johan can see the scene in front of him.
The two young men staggering around in the snow, trying to protect themselves from the wind and the driving snow, then seeing the bodies further off in the field.
‘We saw them. Andreas and Jasmin. They were lying in the field.’
‘Did you go over to them?’
‘Yes. Blood was trickling from Jasmin’s ears, but she was still breathing.’
‘But you realised Andreas was dead?’
‘I think so.’
‘What next?’ Waldemar asks.
‘Jerry grabbed me by the arms and said: “I’m going to get done for this, I was drunk, but if we say you were driving I might get away with it.” He looked at me with his big blue eyes and I realised I’d never be able to say no to him. And I thought: What’s the point of Jerry’s life being ruined? He said: “If we say you were driving, the police will write it off as just an accident caused by ice, because you’re sober.”’
‘So you agreed?’ Johan asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Just like that? That sounds too straightforward to me.’
‘Jerry could be extremely persuasive. And he promised me all sorts of things before the police and the ambulance arrived. He promised to be my friend, and there was nothing I wanted more, it was like a dream come true. And he promised to give me money if he ever got rich.’
‘Did he become your friend?’
‘No, he moved to Lund, didn’t he?’
‘Did you ever get any money?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever ask?’
‘No. It was so long afterwards when articles about his businesses started to appear in the papers.’
Waldemar snarls his words: ‘You never tried to blackmail him when things started to go well for him? Or when he moved back here? You never threatened to tell the truth?’
‘No. What did I stand to gain from that? If the truth came out then everyone in the city would know I’d lied, and I’d just look pathetic. I could even have been charged.’
‘So aren’t you?’ Waldemar says. ‘Pathetic, I mean?’
Jonas Karlsson laughs nervously.
‘That’s exactly what I am,’ he says.
‘It never occurred to you that the parents had a right to know what really happened?’
Jonas Karlsson gestures towards the bottles on the table.
‘It occurs to me every day.’
‘So you never tried to get any money from Jerry? You didn’t go out to see him that night? And then it all went wrong?’
‘That night I was around at a couple of friends’, we were drinking till the early hours. You can call them.’
‘You bet we’re going to call them,’ Waldemar says.
Jonas Karlsson wriggles out of Waldemar’s grasp. Gets up and stands in the middle of the room.
‘Jerry Petersson wasn’t like other people. And everything he promised me that night, he didn’t do any of it.
