Autumn Killing

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.

Didn’t have the energy to go shopping, had nothing in the flat, and Tove likes pizza, she really does.

Tove pokes at the mushrooms.

‘Something wrong with the pizza?’

‘No.’

‘You normally like pizza.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it.’

‘But you’re not eating.’

‘Mum, it’s too fatty. I’ll get spots, and I’ll get fat. I had one on my chin last week.’

‘You won’t get fat. Neither your dad or I. .’

‘Couldn’t you have made something?’

And Tove looks at her as if to say: I know what you’re doing, Mum, I know what it’s like being grown-up, don’t try lying to me, or convincing me that you can handle it.

Malin pours some more wine from the box she bought on the way home the other day. Third or fourth, no, fifth glass, and she can see Tove wrinkle her nose.

‘Why do you have to drink tonight? Now that I’m here, like you wanted?’

Malin is taken aback by her question, so straightforward and direct.

‘I’m celebrating,’ Malin replies. ‘That you’re here.’

‘You’re really messed up.’

‘I’m not messed up.’

‘No, you’re an alcoholic.’

‘What did you say?’

Tove sits in silence, poking at the pizza.

‘Let’s get one thing straight, Tove. I like a drink. But I’m not an alcoholic. Got that?’

Tove’s eyes turn dark.

‘So stop drinking, then.’

‘This isn’t about that,’ Malin says.

‘So what is it about?’

‘You’re too young to understand,’ and Tove’s eyes flash with distaste and Malin wants to cut the shame from her own face, carve the words ‘You’re right, Tove’ in her forehead, then one of her hands starts to tremble and Tove stares at the hand, looking scared, but says nothing.

‘How’s school?’ Malin goes on.

‘Dad says you’re. .’

‘What does he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me what he says.’

Her voice too angry from all this tiredness, and the lamp above the worktop flickers twice before the light settles again.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re ganging up on me, the pair of you. Aren’t you?’

Tove doesn’t even shake her head.

‘He’s turning you against me,’ Malin says.

‘You’re drunk, Mum. Dad was the one who thought I should come round.’

‘So you didn’t really want to come?’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I’m not drunk, and I’ll drink as much as I like.’

‘You should-’

‘I know what I should do. I should drink the whole damn box. You’ve decided to live with your dad, haven’t you? Haven’t you?’

Tove just stares at Malin.

‘Haven’t you?’ Malin screams. ‘Admit it!’

Malin has got up, standing in the kitchen and looking angrily but beseechingly at her daughter.

Without changing her expression at all, Tove stands up and says in a calm voice, looking directly into Malin’s eyes: ‘Yes, I’ve made up my mind. I can’t live here.’

‘Of course you can, why on earth wouldn’t you be able to?’

Tove goes out into the hall and puts on her jacket. Opens the front door and walks out.

Malin downs her glass of wine out in the hall.

Then, as she hears Tove’s footsteps on the stairs, she throws the glass at the wall and shouts after her daughter: ‘Wait. Come back, Tove. Come back!’

Tove runs down Storgatan towards the river, past the Hemkop supermarket and the bowling alley, and she feels the raindrops and wind in her face, how nice the cold is, dissolving her thoughts and how the dampness in the air means that the tears on her cheeks don’t show.

Bloody Mum. Bloody sodding Mum. Only thinking about herself.

Dad’s working tonight. I could have stayed at home on my own. I can do that now, I want to, I should have.

I hope he’s at the fire station. Bloody Mum.

Her heart is thudding in her chest. Trying to get out, and her stomach clenches and she just wants to get away from the autumn, away from this shitty little city.

Up ahead, on the other side of the bridge, she can see the fire station. It’s glowing in the light from the tall, yellow street lamps.

She runs inside.

Gudrun in reception recognises her, looks worried, asks: ‘Tove, what’s happened?’

‘Is Dad here?’

‘He’s upstairs. Go straight up.’

Five minutes later she’s lying in the darkness with her head in her dad’s lap on the bed in his room. He’s stroking her cheek, telling her that everything will be all right. Then the light goes on and the alarm starts to howl.

‘Shit,’ Dad says. ‘Probably another flood. I’ve got to go. I don’t want to, but I’ve got to.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ Tove says, as her dad kisses her on the cheek.

Soon the room is dark and silent and she tries to think about nothing.

She sees herself standing on the edge of an immense plain in the darkness. She has no map, there are no lights in sight, but she still knows how to proceed. She just knows what she has to do, the certainty like a steady note inside her, entirely free of the sounds of childhood.

Her vision clouded by the cheap wine.

Malin is lying on her bed, listening to the raindrops drumming persistently on the window behind the blinds. She’s tried calling Tove, but her mobile is switched off.

She closes her eyes,

Faces drift through her mind.

Tove. Mum. Dad. Janne.

Just go, Tove. Live where you like. I don’t care.

She can’t handle their mocking smiles so she forces them away and then sees Daniel Hogfeldt’s face, his lips are moist and she feels her crotch contract inside her jeans; the drink has made her horny, it’s difficult to resist but not impossible, and then she sees Maria Murvall running through her closed room.

Fagelsjo.

The living and the dead, the soulless.

Jochen Goldman.

The thug that Waldemar kept going on about back at the start.

Andreas Ekstrom’s mother. Jasmin Sandsten’s mother in another tragic room.

Jonas Karlsson. Were you blackmailing Petersson? Did you want to be like him? But seeing as there was probably only one killer, it can’t be you. We checked, and you’ve got a cast-iron alibi for the night of the second murder.

Anders Dalstrom, Andreas Ekstrom’s friend. Could he have found out who was driving and murdered him for the sake of his lost friendship?

Fredrik Fagelsjo. How does all this fit together? The threads of different lives singing in the darkness. Black birds squawking at them through the rain.

The bed, the world, spins around and around. What is it I’m missing? she thinks. What is it I’m not seeing?

How much wine have I drunk? Two glasses? Five? I’m probably OK to drive. Of course I can drive. There won’t be any patrols out at this time of night, will there?

You get out of your car in front of the castle, Malin.

A beautiful castle, but your drunken eyes can’t tell.

It could never be my castle, but I wanted what I thought was there.

The green lanterns are hanging darkly along the moat, the imprisoned souls of the prisoners-of-war are whispering, their mouths glowing.

You were lucky on your way out here.

No mishaps, no pedestrians to hit, no patrols wanting you to blow in a tube.

I feel for you, Malin. You poor, wretched wreck of a human being, who can’t even handle your love for your own daughter.

The doors to the castle are locked.

Malin has brought with her the bottle of vodka she bought at the same time as the wine box, drinking straight from the bottle as she walks around the castle towards the chapel.

The raindrops seem to be leaping from the skies as if from a burning building.

Her cotton jacket, the thin one that she for some reason put on, is soon wet through and cold, and she coughs, stumbling along the edge of the dark forest towards the building.

A son murdered and laid out naked upon the family vault. The upstart in the moat. Privilege. Denial. Degeneration, and a party one cold New Year’s Eve. History like a pressure cooker for people’s souls.

The door to the chapel is locked. She doesn’t have a key, so she stands in the archway by the door looking in at the icons, or the place where the body lay. She drinks from the bottle, two warming mouthfuls, missing the sweet, nuanced taste of tequila.

But the rawness of the vodka matches this moment better.

The forest behind the chapel seems to be moving. Evil is on the move, slithering, and all the windows of the castle seem to be lit up, skulls grinning in the recesses, laughing at all her shortcomings, well aware that the dead, and death, always win.

What am I doing here?

I’m searching for a truth. Fleeing from another.

She throws the bottle of vodka in the moat.

Full again.

The black water greedily swallows the bottle. No fish now.

There’s a green glow from the cracks between the stones. Where does the light come from?

She can feel how she’s losing her grip on the world, but the rain anchors her to reality, and she walks around the castle a few times to clear her head before getting back in the car to wait, listening to ‘non-stop music’, a numbing racket that almost makes her fall asleep. She looks over towards the forest. Between the trees, scarcely visible in the darkness, the young snakes are there again. The shapes are there, but she can’t hear their collective voice, if it’s actually there at all. Maybe they’ve said all they wanted to say?

‘I’m not scared of you,’ Malin shouts towards the forest. ‘Fucking bastard snakes.’

She blinks, and the snakes are gone. All that’s left is darkness, and she almost misses the slithering creatures, doesn’t want to be without them. Then she hears the sound of a lawnmower, of feet trying to escape the blades.

She puts her hands over her ears and the sound disappears.

She feels almost sober a few hours later, as she turns the key in the ignition and leaves the castle and the spirits and souls behind her.

She drives past the field where the accident must have happened. Stops, but doesn’t get out.

The darkness and rain seem to shake figures out from the past, black souls that are still moving over the grass, the moss and the rocks, trying to escape what they are.

She drives on.

Increases her speed.

On the approach to Sturefors she passes a warning triangle by the side of the road. A hundred metres further on she sees a police patrol car, its lights on.

A uniformed officer she doesn’t recognise waves at her to pull over.

She wants to put her foot down.

Follow Fredrik Fagelsjo’s example.

Get away, but she stops.

The uniform raises an eyebrow when she winds down the window, an anxious look in his eyes.

‘Detective Inspector Fors,’ he says. ‘What are you doing out at this time of day?’

He is a mask, Malin thinks. A talking mask, with thin skin stretched over his cheekbones.

The uniform frowns.

‘I’m afraid I must ask you to blow into this.’