Autumn Killing

that a castle south-west of Linkoping is for sale — wasn’t that where you’re from? — thought he might be interested.

The memory becomes clear again.

Sweeps through his body.

He stands in all the rooms that have been his and feels all the cold hands that have ever caressed his cheeks or chest. He feels that he has always been on his way there: that is where I shall go, maybe one black autumn night full of fluid darkness. But I shall get there.

54

Axel Fagelsjo has dug out a photograph album from the old oak cupboard in the dining room and now he is sitting in his leather armchair going through the plastic sleeves with their black-and-white pictures.

Bettina with the children in her arms in front of the chapel, before they went to school.

Katarina with a beach ball down by the lake.

Fredrik looking anxious beside one of the strawberry fields.

A staff photograph. Men and women who worked for me. And that great oaf of a man, the one who drove the tractor into the chapel door, and we had to have a new one put in.

Fredrik and Katarina running over a meadow towards the forest in one picture. You took that picture, didn’t you, Bettina?

Is he with you now, Bettina? Is Fredrik with you?

He shuts his eyes. Feels more tired than he has ever done before. Wishes Fredrik were here with him. Talk to him. Say something nice.

Then his head empties, all his thoughts stop, and for a moment Axel Fagelsjo believes he’s about to die, that his heart or some blood vessel in his brain has given up, but he can feel himself breathing. He wants to open his eyes, but they stay shut.

He seems to hear Fredrik’s voice: ‘I can see you in the armchair in the sitting room, Father.

‘See myself in the pictures in the album. And I can say that I miss those days, when I was little and didn’t yet know what burden history lays upon people like me.

‘I was little then, but I remember the staff in the photograph.

‘That you called them — farmhands and maids.

‘And how violent you could be towards them.

‘You’re alone now, Dad, but you don’t realise it.

‘Buy back Skogsa. Install yourself there once again.

‘Sit here in your apartment for now and look around, look at Mum and me and Katarina in the photographs.

‘You’ll never understand that the only three things that matter are birth and love, Dad.

‘The third?

‘Death, Dad. Death.

‘That’s where I am now. Do you want to come with me?’

And with that the voice is gone, and Axel Fagelsjo’s thoughts fill his mind once more, and he wants to call the voice back, but knows it’s gone, never to return. What remains are the pictures. Like a broken film, they stretch out through the album.

You can’t hear me, can you, Father? You can’t see me, Fredrik, you can only see me as a photograph. Are you even sad? Or are you just mourning your own inadequacies, your inability to understand yourself?

It’s not too late yet, Father. You’ve got Katarina. You’ve got the grandchildren, and Christina would be happy to let you into her and their lives, if only you take the first step and let her know that she really is good enough.

You won’t get any invitations with your elbows.

You have to be bigger than your own instincts. You have to be adult about it, otherwise you’re on your own. You have to realise that we, your creations, are the people we are, and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

And Father.

There’s one thing you should know: I always tried to do my best.

I’m drifting behind you, Fredrik, you’re just as confused and basically alone in death as in life.

The mist is closing in around the forests, the city and the castle.

What is it that’s happening in that obscurity? In the gaps between what we see and hear?

In the police station, Lovisa Segerberg and Waldemar Ekenberg are threshing on through the files and digital documents, trying to find out who we were, what might be hiding in the remnants of our lives.

Zeke Martinsson is talking to his son Martin over the phone.

They don’t have much to say to each other, but he asks about his grandchild.

Johan Jakobsson has gone home to his children and his tired wife.

Karim Akbar has just had an argument with his ex-wife on the phone.

Sven Sjoman is eating the last of the year’s pickled gherkins from the garden, looking at the woman he has spent his life with and still loves.

Borje Svard is trying to pull a stick from Howie’s mouth out in his garden, while in the large bedroom inside the house his wife Anna clings to life as hard as she can, the tubes of oxygen hissing beside her bed.

I am so close to you now, Fredrik, drifting. Has it ever occurred to you that you could have taken my side that afternoon, that evening, that night?

You can see Malin Fors down there.

She’s happy.

Tove is with her in the flat. She’s finally made it, at last. They’re about to eat dinner, pizza. She’s staying over.

Mother and daughter. Together. The way it should be.

55

Tove came in the end.

She’s sitting opposite Malin at the kitchen table. Malin’s tired from work, from thinking, from drinking and not drinking, tired of all this damn rain. Can you make me feel a bit brighter again, Tove?

You’re more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you before. You are the only thing in my life that’s pure, clear, unsullied. When you called to say you could come for dinner I yelped with joy down the phone and you shut me up, seemed to think I was embarrassing.

Tick tock.

The Ikea clock still marks the seconds with a sound, even though the second hand has fallen off, and the faulty lamp above the worktop flickers every twenty seconds.

How can Tove look older, more grown-up, in just a week?

The skin stretched over her cheekbones, her features sharper, but her eyes are the same, yet somehow unfamiliar. Age, her relative age, suits her.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Malin says, and Tove looks down at her pizza, takes a sip from her glass of water.

Takeaway pizza.