Autumn Killing

But Axel never showed up at the meeting in Stockholm.

In his place he sent a young solicitor from Linkoping. A young brunette with plump cheeks and a pout. After the contract was signed he asked her to lunch at Prinsen. Then he fucked her upstairs in his office, pushing her against the window, pulling her skirt high up her stomach, tearing a hole in her black tights and pumping away, bored, as he watched the buses and taxis and people moving in a seemingly predetermined stream down Kungsgatan, and he imagined he could hear the sound of the great lawnmowers in Kungstradgarden.

The castle is supposed to be haunted.

The unquiet spirit of a Count Erik who is said to have beaten his son to death when the son turned out to be feeble-minded. And the Russian soldiers who were supposed to have been walled up in the moat.

Jerry has never seen any ghosts, has just heard the creaking and sighing of the stone walls at night, feeling the chill that has been stored up in the old building over the centuries.

Ghosts.

Spirits.

The castle and outbuildings were run-down so he’s had everything renovated. This past year he’s felt like a foreman on a building site.

Several times he’s seen a black car on the estate and assumed it was one of the Fagelsjo family getting a kick of nostalgia. Why not? he reasons. Mind you, he doesn’t know for sure that it is one of the family, it could be pretty much anyone, there are certainly people who’d like to visit.

He was profiled in the Correspondent when it became known that Skogsa had a new owner. He gave an interview, mouthed humble platitudes about fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. But what good had that done?

The journalist, a Daniel Hogfeldt, went for the shady-business-dealings angle, and made out that he had forced the Fagelsjo family from their ancestral home of almost five hundred years.

Whining.

Stop whining. No birthright gives anyone a lifetime’s right to anything.

To this day, the article annoys him, and he regrets giving in to his vanity, his desire to send a message to the area that he was back. To recreate something that never existed: that was what he imagined he was doing.

How much damage have the Fagelsjo family done to people around here, though? How many peasants and tenant farmers and wage-slaves have had to endure their bailiff’s whip? How many people have been trampled underfoot by the Fagelsjos’ assumption that they’re better than everyone else?

Petersson hasn’t taken on any employees, instead he contracts people whenever anything needs doing, and he’s careful to make sure he pays them well and treats them decently.

And the story of the moat around the castle. That it was built in the early nineteenth century, long after anyone in this country had any need of a moat. That one of the counts got it into his head that he wanted a moat, and commandeered a load of Russian prisoners-of-war from von Platen’s work on the Gota Canal and worked them until they dropped, a lot of them dying of exhaustion. It was said that they interred the bodies in the walls of the moat when they lined it with stone, that they shut those Russian souls in for all eternity for the sake of a meaningless moat.

But sometimes it feels a bit isolated at the castle. And for the first time in his life he has felt that he could do with a friend. The security of having another living creature around him, someone who would take his side no matter what happened, who would sound the alarm if there was any danger approaching. And a dog was useful for hunting.

Is that something up ahead on the road? Howie? Back so soon. Impossible. Completely impossible.

A stag?

A deer.

No.

The rain is pouring down now, but inside the oil-smelling warmth of the Range Rover the world seems very agreeable.

Then the castle appears out of the fog, its three storeys of grey stone seeming to force their way out of the earth, the leaning walls straining towards the grey sky, as if they thought they should be in charge up there. And the light from the swaying green lanterns he has had installed along the moat. He loves the brightness they give.

Is that someone standing on the castle steps?

The tenant farmers he’s going hunting with aren’t due until later on, and they’ve never been on time yet.

He accelerates.

He feels with his hand beside him for the dog, but the warm fur isn’t there.

Of course.

Petersson wants to get there quickly, wants to hear the gravel of the drive crunch under the Range Rover’s tyres. Yes, there is someone on the steps.

The outline of a figure. Hazy through the fog. Unless it’s an animal?

The castle ghosts?

The vengeful spirits of the Russian soldiers?

Count Erik paying him a visit with his cloak and scythe?

He’s ten metres away from the black shape now.

Who is it? A woman? You?

Can it really be that person again? Certainly persistent, if it is.

He stops the car.

Blows the horn.

The black figure on the steps moves silently towards him.

6

Grey.

The morning light is grey, but it still manages to cut right into Malin’s eyes. The light is gentle, like a blunt knife found at the back of a kitchen drawer of a deceased and distant relative. She looks up, out through the living- room window. The clouds are clustered tightly in different layers in front of the sun, and she can feel how her skin is swollen over swollen flesh, and she tries to look around, but keeps having to close her eyes, to give her reluctant brain a rest and muffle its angry throbbing with darkness.

Her body is in a heap on the parquet floor, the radiator by her head warmer now than yesterday evening, and she can hear the water gurgling through the pipes.

An almost empty bottle of tequila beside her, the lid half screwed on, and she looks out at the flat.

Grey.

The whole of my world is grey, Malin thinks. More nuances of grey than my brain can comprehend, from the dark, leaden grey under the sofa to the almost dirty white of the walls.

And who’s that looking in through the window, whose face is that peering through the fog? The contours of her guilty conscience. Nausea. How the hell can I behave like this? A hand raised in anger.

I stink. I want to turn my face inside out so I don’t have to look at myself in the mirror.

How the hell am I going to get up from here?

I want to call them, Janne and Tove, but what would I say?

That I love them?

That it’s raining?

That I regret what I did?

‘Zacharias! Zacharias!’

His wife Gunilla is calling from down in the kitchen with her sharp telephone-ring voice. What does she want now?

‘Martin scored two goals last night,’ she calls.