Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

The ceiling must be ten metres high.

Karin Johannison and two recently arrived colleagues have been through it and found nothing of interest, and now it’s their meeting room.

The walls are clad in dark wood panelling and empty custom-made bookcases that probably once housed a collection of leather-bound volumes. Which authors? Rousseau? Hardly. Shakespeare? Definitely. Sven Sjoman has settled into one of the bowed, white, upholstered armchairs in the middle of the room. He looks tired and thin, Malin thinks, but if Sven looks tired, what must I look like?

Zeke is sitting on a jagged modern chair on the other side of the rickety metal table. He’s taken off his raincoat, but there are still drops of rain on his shaven head. Waldemar Ekenberg has arrived as well, sitting on the sofa where Malin is evidently expected to join him. Waldemar smells of smoke, his eyes dark in the gloom of the library, and his long, skinny legs almost seem to disappear in the fabric of his loose gabardine trousers.

‘Sit down, Malin,’ Sven says, gesturing to the place beside Waldemar. ‘But take off that wet coat first.’

Take my coat off. Does he think I’m five years old or something?

‘Of course I’m going to take my bloody coat off,’ Malin says, and Sven looks surprised at her anger and says: ‘Malin, I didn’t mean it like that.’

She takes off her coat, sits down beside Waldemar and the smell of smoke from his clothes lifts her nausea to new heights.

‘Jerry Petersson,’ Sven says. ‘Murdered with extreme force. We can assume that for now until we get a more precise cause of death in Karin’s report. This is the first meeting, albeit rather hastily convened, of the preliminary investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.’

The group of detectives sits in silence.

The concentration and seriousness, the focus that’s always there at the start of each murder investigation, the feeling of urgency, that they have to get somewhere fast, because they know that for each day that passes, their chances of solving the case diminish.

Sven goes on: ‘I got the station to do a quick check. Jerry Petersson was born in 1965, and, as far as we’ve been able to see, he only has one close relative, his father, who lives in Aleryd Care Home. A priest and a social worker are on their way to break the news to him. We’ll have to wait before we interview him. He’s an old man.’

Gote Lindman and Ingmar Johansson had identified Petersson a short while before, out on the bridge over the moat. They weren’t in any doubt, and they’d both been strangely calm.

‘Any ideas about where to start?’ Sven says.

The tone of Sven’s voice is interested, honestly questioning, but Malin knows that he’s about to carry on talking again.

‘OK,’ Sven says. ‘What do we know about Jerry Petersson?’

‘A lawyer, originally from these parts,’ Zeke says. ‘Studied in Lund, but worked in Stockholm. Made a fortune and moved back here when he got the chance to buy Skogsa from the Fagelsjo family. The article in the Correspondent suggested that they’d fallen on hard times and had to sell. The reporter also hinted that Jerry Petersson had been involved in some dodgy dealings.’

‘I read that as well,’ Malin says, remembering that it was Daniel Hogfeldt who had written the article. ‘He must have had some serious capital to be able to buy this place. And I can imagine how bitter the Fagelsjos must have been at having to sell the estate. It had been in the family for, what, almost five hundred years?’

Fagelsjo, she thinks. One of the most famous noble families in the area. The sort of family that everyone knows something about. Without ever really knowing why.

‘We’ll have to question the Fagelsjos about the circumstances surrounding the sale,’ Sven says. ‘Find out which members of the family were involved.’

‘The family consists of a father and two children. A son and a daughter, I think,’ Zeke says.

‘How do you know that?’ Malin asks.

‘That was in the Correspondent as well. In one of those birthday profiles of the old man when he hit seventy.’

‘Children’s names?’

‘No idea.’

‘That should be fairly easy to find out,’ Waldemar says.

‘You’ll have to share out the interviews between you,’ Sven says. ‘Get them done as soon as possible. I’ll arrange for checks at the houses around here, and we’ll put out a message in the local media that we want to hear from anyone who may have seen anything unusual in the area over the past twenty-four hours.’

‘If he was really rich,’ Malin says, ‘then this could have been a robbery. Someone who heard about the new millionaire in the castle and decided to have a go.’

‘Maybe,’ Sven says. ‘The doors were open, after all. But from what we’ve seen so far, nothing seems to be missing in here. And Karin found his wallet in that yellow raincoat. The knife wounds to his torso suggest the sort of violent rage you don’t often see in robberies.’

‘No, I don’t get the feeling that this was a robbery or a break-in either. This is something else,’ Malin says.

‘What about Petersson’s business affairs?’ Zeke says. ‘If he was a bit sleazy, as the rumours seem to suggest, then there could be hundreds of people wishing him harm. People who were pissed off with him.’

‘That’s our most important line of inquiry right now,’ Sven says. ‘We need to try to find files and business records here in the house that might indicate how to proceed. What sort of dodgy dealings was he involved in? Any former colleagues? What about his business? Did he have anything going on at the moment that might have gone wrong? We need to do a serious background check on him. There must be loads of documented evidence. Waldemar, you and Jakobsson take that. Start by searching the castle for documentation once Forensics have cleared the rooms. We also need to find out if he had any sort of will. Who stands to inherit all this? That would be very interesting to know.’

‘Jakobsson’s not on today,’ Waldemar says.

‘Call him in,’ Sven says. ‘And you two, Malin and Zeke, start by questioning the two men who found him.’

They talk to Ingmar Johansson first.

The tenant farmer is slurping coffee on the other side of the table in the castle kitchen, running one hand through his blond hair at regular intervals, telling them how he was uneasy at first when he heard that the castle had a new owner, but that everything had seemed ‘fine’ once he’d had the chance to talk to Petersson.

‘He wasn’t planning to change the terms of our lease.’

‘No changes at all?’ Zeke says.

‘No, not really.’

‘Not really?’ Zeke wonders.

‘Well, he wanted me to go hunting with him whenever he felt like it.’

‘And you didn’t object?’

‘No, why should I? It does me no good if there’s too much game running around on the land I lease.’

‘How often were you supposed to do that?’ Malin asks.

‘Whenever he called.’

‘But how often?’

‘He never said. When he called yesterday it was the first time in a long while.’

‘You didn’t see anything odd when you got here?’ Malin says, even though she had asked the same thing when they had first arrived at the castle. Wants to twist the truth out of Ingmar Johansson with the force of repetition.

‘No. I came with Lindman, and the Range Rover was parked in front of the castle. I assumed Petersson was inside the castle and would be out shortly, and when he didn’t come out we went inside to look for him.’

‘You didn’t see any other cars?’

‘No.’

‘Were the doors to the castle open?’

‘You’ve already asked me that. Yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to get in, would we? Those doors wouldn’t be too easy to force.’

‘You weren’t here earlier today?’ Zeke asks. ‘Or last night?’

‘No, why on earth would I have been?’

Ingmar Johansson’s face seems to crumple, his lips tighten and he looks at them suspiciously.

‘Ask my wife at home if you don’t believe me. We spent all evening watching television before we went to bed. She made me breakfast this morning.’

‘Do you know anything else about Jerry Petersson that you think might be of interest to us?’ Malin asks.

‘No, not a damn thing.’

‘Nothing about his business affairs?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did he live here alone?’

‘I think so. He didn’t have any staff. They say he just called people when he needed them.’

Johansson pulls a face that says: That’s enough questions. I’ve said my piece.

‘You can go now,’ Malin says tiredly. ‘But we might need to talk to you again.’

‘You’ve got my mobile number,’ Johansson says, standing up.

Gote Lindman is a lonely man, Malin thinks as she sees his face against the white tiles of the kitchen.

A lonely farmer who’s probably at his happiest when he’s working a thresher or looking after his livestock, if he has any. The woman he’s mentioned, Svetlana, sounded more like a piece of furniture than a life partner.

Lindman has just told them the same things they heard from Johansson. That they were summoned to go hunting, that they’d entered into an informal agreement with the castle’s new owner, and that it didn’t bother Lindman, because hunting was what you did in the autumn and that was when there was least work to do on the farm anyway.

‘Petersson seemed like an honest man.’

Lindman says the words with emphasis before going on: ‘It’s a bugger that we had to find him in the moat like that, things could have gone all right. I’m sure of that. Fagelsjo was an unpleasant bastard.’

‘Which one?’ Zeke asks.

‘I used to deal with the old man, Axel.’

‘Unpleasant, how?’ Malin asks.

‘His manner, well, it was. . he really let you know who was in charge, let’s put it that way.’

Lindman falls silent, shakes his head, then a sudden rush of fear crosses his face.

‘How did he let you know?’ Malin asks.

‘By raising the rent all of a sudden, for instance,’ Lindman said quickly.

Malin nods.

Modern castle owners. The same power relationships as always, the same oppressed tenant farmers as always, the same inferiority as always. But at the same time some people are predisposed to dislike any figure of authority.

‘Do you know anything about Petersson?’

‘Only that he grew up around here and made a killing in the capital.’

‘Do you know how he made his money?’ Zeke asks.

Lindman shakes his head.

‘No idea.’

‘Did he live here alone?’

‘Only with the dog, as far as I know. What’s going to happen to it now?’

‘We’ll take care of it,’ Malin says, realising that she has no idea what they’re going to do with the dog, which is still barking outside in the car.

Then more questions and answers, if they saw anything unusual on the way here, any cars, if the Range Rover was parked in front of the castle when they arrived, if he had any idea about who could have done it, and what he was doing last night and first thing this morning.

‘I’ve got no idea who could have done it. . I was at home on the farm. Ask Svetlana. . You don’t think I did it? Then I wouldn’t have called you, would I?’

‘We don’t think you were involved in the suspected murder of Jerry Petersson,’ Malin says. ‘But we have to ask, we have to keep all possible lines of inquiry open, at the same time as we rule out some of the less likely scenarios.’