Autumn Killing

69

Skogsa, Friday, 24 October

Jerry looks ahead through the fog, gripping the shaking steering wheel. The Range Rover carries him over the ground.

Who’s that waiting up ahead? Is that you, Katarina, finally come back to me?

Or is it someone else? Some obstinate bastard? Tell me it’s you, Katarina. It’s you, isn’t it?

It isn’t you, Katarina.

It’s never you.

I get out of the car and see Anders Dalstrom in front of me, his face desperate, his black hair wet, he’s holding a stone in one hand. He refuses to give up and I fix my gaze on him, but nothing happens, he doesn’t back down.

‘I want five million,’ Anders Dalstrom yells, and I laugh and say: ‘You’re not getting anything. I’ll crush you like a little rat if you don’t leave now. It’ll be worse than in the car park.’

Anders Dalstrom holds out a note with his free hand.

‘My account number,’ he yells, and the rain makes the ink on the note illegible and I laugh again.

He gives me the note.

‘Five million, within a week.’

An amused grin crosses my lips, but then I get bored, crumple the note and toss it onto the gravel, not giving a damn about Anders Dalstrom and his damn stone.

Anders Dalstrom picks up the note with his free hand and puts it in the pocket of his jacket.

I turn to walk away, then hear a howl from the depths.

I see something black coming towards me, feel a sudden pain and I fall. Then decades of cumulative fury are sitting on top of me and it burns and burns and burns in my stomach and Anders Dalstrom crawls away from me and I feel my brain, my thoughts vanish into pain.

I crawl across the gravel, the pain in my head and my guts feels like the final pain of all, spreading through my whole body like an ancient wind.

He’s killing me, I manage to think, as I crawl under the chain around the moat, and I imagine I see a stone hit the surface of the water.

Is that blood running over my eyes?

I’m the boy again, I’m the man. I’m with Katarina beside calm water, possibly a river, and I anoint her back with oil and she whispers words of an extinct language in my ear.

The wind owns me now. And I fall, I’ve stopped breathing by the time I hit the water in the moat and at last the shiny blades of the lawnmower have fallen silent and I open my new eyes.