Autumn Killing

71

‘Mum?’

Tove’s voice a hammer-blow to her heart as Malin opens the door on her way out of the block on Drottninggatan.

Zeke beside her, restless, wanting to run to the car.

‘Tove.’

Can’t talk now, darling.

A quick run-through in Axel Fagelsjo’s apartment just now.

Where can Axel Fagelsjo and Anders Dalstrom be? In all likelihood, together.

Sven: ‘If Anders Dalstrom took Fredrik to the castle, he may have taken Axel Fagelsjo there as well. Zeke and Malin, get out there at once. Talk to Katarina Fagelsjo and anyone else connected to this. Dalstrom could be a danger to the public, we need to get hold of him as soon as possible.’

‘Mum, I was wondering if I. .’

Malin hears her daughter’s voice as she’s running towards the car, not taking in what she’s saying, instead: ‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’

She clicks to get rid of Tove, but a moment later she wants to call back, has to apologise for the way everything turned out the evening she came around, when she just let her disappear, and she’s the world’s worst mum and sorry, because it isn’t so damn easy being human.

On the other side of Drottninggatan the Horticultural Society Park lies dark and cold and the rain is boring down from the sky now, restricting their visibility ahead and she wonders what Tove wanted, knows she ought to call back, maybe she needs me now, but instead Malin says: ‘OK, drive. Fast as you can. Quick!’

The car’s headlights are eager searchlights heading along the rain-tormented tarmac of Drottninggatan.

Malin’s mobile rings again. Tove? Not this time. Another number on the display.

‘Malin.’

‘Johan Stekanger here.’

The solicitor. Jerry Petersson’s executor. The man who found Fredrik Fagelsjo.

‘I wanted to tell you that the castle was sold yesterday. For twice as much as Petersson paid for it. Petersson’s father accepted the offer.’

‘Who bought it?’

‘I’m afraid. .’

‘There’s nothing to stop you telling us.’

‘I. .’

‘Now!’ Malin says. ‘Otherwise I’ll be on your backside like a tick from hell for the rest of your life. So, who bought it?’

‘Axel Fagelsjo himself, who else? We signed the contracts yesterday, and he got the keys to the front door as a symbolic gesture. We’ve put all of Petersson’s possessions in storage, and the art’s gone to Bukowski’s auction house. He laughed at that business with the keys, said he’d kept several sets. And I don’t think Petersson ever changed the locks.’

‘He’s bought back the castle,’ Malin says.

Zeke keeps his hands on the wheel, staring ahead at the road as they drive out of the city, out into the dark countryside.

‘That was quick work.’

‘An old fighter,’ Malin says, as they head towards the castle way above every speed limit.

They must be there.

Fields.

Forest.

What’s on the move out there? What is it that clouds people’s minds? What drives them to do things that there are hardly any words for? Like the honour killing they’d investigated before this case.

What makes a person not answer a call from her daughter? Malin shuts her eyes, sees Tove on the floor of that room with the mad woman bent over her. Sees a rape victim on a chair in a dark corner of a godforsaken room in a godforsaken hospital.

Tove Fors.

Fredrik Fagelsjo.

Anders Dalstrom.

Jerry Petersson.

I know what unites you.

I can do something for you, Tove. For me. For us.

If I can’t manage to love you, who on earth could I manage to love?

They’re the first car on the scene, and the castle rises up from the black earth, an ark for all the feelings human beings have ever felt.

The green lanterns are glowing, spreading green light over the water in the moat. Unless the glow comes from the water itself?

No car in front of the castle.

And Malin runs up to the door, yanks at it, but it’s locked.

Shit.

They aren’t here.

Zeke comes up behind her.

‘Doesn’t look like they’re here,’ he whispers, and Malin wonders why he’s whispering.

‘Damn. I was so sure.’

Silence around them, except for the rustling of the forest.

‘He could have locked the door behind them with Fagelsjo’s key,’ Malin says.

‘Let’s go round,’ Zeke says.

And they circle the castle, over to the chapel, deserted and shut up. The rain patters on their jackets and Zeke is moving stiffly in front of her.

They’re walking in silence.

Where’s the car? Malin thinks. They must be here.

They turn a corner, and they can hear a car, maybe one of the patrol cars, coming up the drive, and now they can see light, a thin strip of light seeping out from the shutters on one of the cellar windows.

They look at each other.

Nod, wipe the rain from their faces, run to the front of the castle, the gravel and stones crunching under their feet.

They see three uniformed officers getting out of a patrol car.

‘The door,’ Malin shouts. ‘They could be in there. In the cellar.’

And a moment later the uniforms are throwing themselves at the door, but their efforts are wasted.

‘This is impossible,’ one of them shouts, and Malin orders them back, draws her pistol from its holster, and ignoring the risk of ricochets she kneels down at the side of the steps leading up to the doorway and shoots off the black-painted iron lock, probably several hundred years old, emptying her magazine, and the lock falls from its chiselled hole onto the stone steps.

Malin is first inside.

Rushing through the rooms.

The kitchen like a shiny white slaughterhouse even in the darkness.

She rushes down the steps into the cellar, expecting to see Axel Fagelsjo down there together with Anders Dalstrom. But what will the scene look like?

The cellar is dark and cold and she’s having trouble breathing, she can feel the others behind her, their fear, their footsteps drumming rhythmically on the stone floors. She crouches as she goes through the passageways, kicking open the door to what must once have been a prison cell. Was this where the Russian prisoners-of-war were locked up before they were walled up in the moat?

They go through one, two, three rooms. All empty.

Then a fourth door.

Light coming from behind it.

Malin presses the handle.

What am I going to see?

She opens the door.