The dog’s nostrils contract, open again, and its big black pupils seem to want to devour the land around Skogsa.
The estate is never more beautiful than in the morning, when the approaching day seems to soften the earth and rocks. Rain is falling against the windscreen and roof and he stops the car at the side of the road, watching some birds hopping about on the oyster-shell coloured soil, pecking for worms in the rotting vegetation and the pools that are growing larger with each passing day. The leaves are lying in drifts here, and he thinks they look like a ragged cover in a beautiful, forgotten sketch for an oil painting. And under the cover life goes on. Grubs pupating. Beetles fighting each other. Mice swimming in streams of rain towards goals so distant that they can’t even dream they exist.
The dog is starting to get anxious, whimpering, wanting to get out, but Jerry soothes it.
‘There now, calm down, you can get out soon.’
A landscape.
Can that be a person’s fate?
Sometimes, when Jerry drives around the estate, he imagines he can see all the characters that have come and gone in his life. They drift around the trees, the rocks and buildings.
It was inevitable that he would end up here.
Wasn’t it?
Snow falling one New Year’s Eve, falling so thickly it makes this morning’s fog look as transparent as newly polished glass.
He grew up not far from here.
In a rented flat in Berga with his parents.
Jerry looks at himself in the rear-view mirror. Starts the engine and drives on.
He drives around two bends before stopping the car again. The dog is even more restless now, and Jerry opens the door, letting the dog out first before getting out himself. The dog races off across the open field, presumably chasing the scent of a deer or elk, or a hare or fox.
He looks out over the field for a while before stepping down onto the soft ground. He trudges about, watching the dog running back and forth along the line of the forest, leaping into a deep ditch before reappearing only to vanish into a pile of leaves where the faded ochre-colours compete for attention with others that seem to be powdered matt bronze or dull gold.
Apart from the dog, Petersson is completely alone out in the field, yet he still feels quite at ease here, in a place where everything can die yet also be born, a breaking point in people’s lives, a sequence of possibilities.
He runs his hand through his bleached hair, thinking how well it suits his sharp nose and hard blue eyes. The wrinkles in his brow. Business wrinkles. Well-earned.
The forest over there.
Fir trees and pines, undergrowth. A lot of game this year. His tenant farmers are coming later today, they’re going to try to get a young elk or a couple of deer. Something needs be killed.
The Fagelsjo family.
What wouldn’t they give for the chance to hunt in these forests again?
He looks at his arms, at the bright yellow Prada raincoat, the raindrops drumming on his head and the yellow GORE-TEX fabric.
‘Howie,’ Petersson calls. ‘Howie. Time to go now.’
Hard. Tough. An ice-cold machine. A man prepared to step over dead bodies.
That was how people talked about him in the business circles he moved in up in Stockholm. A shadow to most people. A rumour. A topic of conversation, something that was often the cause of admiration in a world where it was deemed desirable to be so successful that you could lie low instead of maintaining a high profile, instead of appearing on television talk shows to get more clients.
Jerry Petersson?
Brilliant, or so I’ve heard. A good lawyer. Didn’t he get rich from that IT business, because he got out in time? Supposed to be a real cunt-magnet.
But also: Watch out for him.
Isn’t he involved with Jochen Goldman? Don’t they own some company together?
‘Howie.’
But the dog doesn’t come, doesn’t want to come. And Jerry knows he can leave it be, let the dog find its own way home to the castle through the forest in its own good time. It always comes home after a few hours. But for some reason he wants to call the dog back to him now, come to some sort of arrangement before they part.
‘Howie!’
And the dog must have heard the urgency in his voice, because it comes racing over the whole damn field, and is soon back with Jerry.
It leaps around his legs, and he crouches down beside it, feeling the damp soak through the fabric of his trousers, and he pats the dog’s back hard in the way he knows it likes.
‘So what do you to want to do, eh, boy? Run home on your own, or drive back with me? Your choice. Maybe run back on your own, you never know, I might drive off the road.’
The dog licks his face before turning and running back across the field and hiding under a pile of leaves, before disappearing through the dark, open doors of the forest.
Jerry Petersson gets back in the Range Rover, turns the key in the ignition, listens to the sound of the engine, then lets the vehicle nose its way along the road again, into the dense, fog-shrouded forest.
He hadn’t locked the castle doors when he set off on his spontaneous morning drive around the estate after waking early and being unable to get back to sleep. Who was likely to come? Who would dare to come? A hint of excitement: I bet
Fredrik Fagelsjo. Old man Axel.
Katarina.
She’s stayed away.
The daughter of the house.
My house now.
He moved in their orbit a long time ago.
A crow flies in front of the windscreen, flapping its wings, one wing looks injured somehow, maybe broken.
The castle is large. He could do with a woman to share it with. I’ll find one soon enough, he thinks. He’s always thought, in his increasingly large homes, that he could do with a woman to share it with. But it was merely a mental exercise that he enjoyed playing, and whenever he really needed a woman it was easy enough for someone like him: go to a bar, or call one of the numbers, and love would arrive, home delivery. Or a randy housewife in the city for a conference. Whatever. Women to share the present moment, women without any connections either backwards or forwards in time, women as desire-fulfilling creatures. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just the way it is.
He’d heard a rumour that Skogsa was for sale.
Sixty-five million kronor.
The Wrede estate agency in Stockholm was handling the sale. No adverts, just a rumour that a castle with a vast estate was for sale in the Linkoping area, and perhaps he might be interested?
Skogsa.
Interested?
Sixty-five million stung. But not much. And he got more than the castle for his money. Seventy-five hectares of prime forest, and almost as much arable land. And the abandoned parish house that he could always pull down and replace with something else.
And now, here, on this beautiful black autumn morning, when the fog and the relentless rain and the feeling of lightness and of being at home fill his body, he knows it was money well spent, because what is money for if not to create feelings?
He wanted to meet Fagelsjo when the deal was concluded in the office on Karlavagen. Didn’t exactly want to smirk at him, but rather give him a measured look, force the old man to realise how wrong he had been, and let him know that a new age had dawned.
