Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

Sven Sjoman and four uniformed officers are inside the apartment on Drottninggatan. They picked the lock. The apartment is empty, no sign of Axel Fagelsjo, and no signs of a struggle.

Malin and Zeke arrive fifteen minutes later.

‘Good work,’ Sven says to Malin as they stand in the middle of the sitting room looking at the portraits on the walls. ‘Bloody good work.’

‘Now we just have to find Anders Dalstrom,’ Malin says. ‘And some concrete, conclusive evidence.’

‘We’ll find it,’ Sven says. ‘Everything points towards him.’

‘But where the hell is he?’ Zeke says. ‘And where the hell is Axel Fagelsjo?’

‘They’re together,’ Malin says. ‘I think they’ve been together much longer than either of them realises,’ she goes on. Thinks: if Axel Fagelsjo is in Anders Dalstrom’s hands, it’s my job to rescue him. But is it really worth me worrying about him? How can I have any sympathy for someone I find revolting in so many ways?

Then her mobile rings. Karin Johannison’s calm, assured voice at the other end: ‘The handwriting on the sign on the door and the blackmail letter are the same. The same person wrote the letter.’

Anders Dalstrom, images from a life

There are no explanations.

They’re pointless, and no one can be bothered to listen to them.

But this is my story, listen to it if you want to.

Father.

Your one working eye behind the lens of the camera, you say the pictures will resemble the way you see the world, with no depth of perception, and without any real hope. Did I inherit your hopelessness, your diffidence about life?

You must have been the most bitter and frustrated person on the planet, and you took that anger out on me, and I learned to creep out of the way, to disappear from the flat in Linghem and stay away until you calmed down.

People would see me, and there was talk about how you beat me and Mum because of your bitterness about your lost eye, your agony.

I saw you, Father, behind the camera, and I would run to you in spite of your anger, but I hesitated, instinctively, and I took that hesitancy with me in my dealings with other people.

At school I was alone at first, then they started getting at me, and none of the teachers could be bothered to care. They hunted me, hit me, mocked me, and I would shrink into the corners. One day, in year 4, they pulled my clothes off and I ran across the playground naked through the snow, and they chased me in front of a thousand eyes, and they kicked me when I fell.

They pulled me into the school building.

They forced my head into a toilet full of excrement and urine.

They did this over and over again and in the end I didn’t even try to escape. They could do what they liked, and my subordination made them even angrier, wilder, more bloodthirsty.

What had I done? Why me?

Because of the slouched shoulders you gave me, Father? The ones we have in common?

Stop, someone shouted one day, and then a muscular, confident frame was attacking the hunters, hitting them, giving them nosebleeds, shouting: ‘You’re not going to attack him again. Ever.’

And they didn’t.

I had finally gained an ally.

Andreas. Recently moved in from Vreta Kloster.

On his very first day at school he made me his. I’ve never understood why he wanted to be my friend, but maybe that’s just what friendship is like; just like evil, it suddenly shows up where you least expect it.

I lived through Andreas during those years, and his family would sometimes open their home to me, I remember the smell of fresh-baked buns and raspberry syrup, and his mother who used to leave us alone. What we got up to? The things boys do. We turned our little world into a big one, and I never really came home any more. You couldn’t reach me, Father, thanks to Andreas.

Your bitterness didn’t get hold of me, unless it actually did after all? Yes, it had probably already taken root.

You hit me, and I tried to make my way to whatever I thought was beyond the beatings, to what had to exist beyond the beatings.

Music. I found music, don’t ask me how, but it was inside me. Deep inside, and Andreas pushed me on, bought me a guitar with the money he earned picking strawberries one summer.

But then when we started high school something happened. Andreas pulled away, he wanted other people besides me, he dropped me as the world grew, but I never stopped hoping, because he was my friend, and I never managed to get close to anyone else in the same way.

He used to trail after Jerry Petersson, the coolest of the cool. And he used to fawn over the posh kids as well.

They weren’t even on my radar, not in my dreams. I knew I could never be like them.

And then Andreas died one New Year’s Eve.

Maybe I gave up then, Father?

I escaped into music.

And I sang at that last day of school, a song about what it’s like being born in Linkoping and growing up in the shadow of all manner of dreams, how we tried to drink the anxiety away in the Horticultural Society Park on those last evenings of high school, and I must have struck a chord, because the applause in the hall seemed to go on for ever. I was asked to sing it twice more, then that evening everyone wanted me to sing it on the grass in the park, even the posh girls.

You weren’t there in the audience in that hall with your camera, Father.

I started working in the health service, I rented a cottage in the forest to have space to write, and ended up staying there. I must have sent a hundred demo tapes to Stockholm, but I didn’t even get any replies to my letters to Sonet, Polar, Metronome, and the others.

Year followed year. I got a job in the old people’s home in Bjorsater. Often there were just two of us at night, we took turns sleeping, and nights suited me fine, they let me avoid other people. And you still hit me when you got the chance, even though you were almost blind from the cataracts in your eye.

I could have hit back, but I didn’t.

Why not? Because then I would have been like you. Violence and bitterness would have turned me into you.

Then Mum died, and you ended up in a home, completely blind now and your camera fallen silent for ever. Your fury a calm fury, your bitterness a gentle tone, your life a wait for death.

Sometimes I would read articles about Petersson, about how successful he was.

And it was as if something grew inside me, an invisible egg that grew bigger and bigger, until it cracked and out poured millions of tiny yellow snakes into my blood. They wore all my tormentors’ faces. Yours, Father, those of the boys in the school playground, even Axel Fagelsjo’s. I knew very well who he was, what he had done to you.

I wanted to get rid of the snakes. But they slithered wherever they wanted.

Then Jerry Petersson moved back. Bought the castle and the estate from Fagelsjo, and I got a letter, God knows who from, telling me the truth about that New Year’s Eve. It had never occurred to me that Jerry Petersson might have been driving. There were black-and-white photographs in with the letter, of him standing in the field, standing still with his eyes closed, as if he was meditating.

So I wrote my own letter, but my nerves let me down in the car park. He who had everything and who had taken everything from me, he stamped on me like I was an insect again.

But I crawled back up.

I swore to stand up for myself, he wasn’t going to break me and Andreas again, I’d demand money from him, even though I had no idea what I would do with it.

So early one morning I got in the car and drove out there.

The snakes were hissing, I could almost see them crawling inside me, see their leering faces mocking me.

I waited for him in front of the castle, with a heavy stone in my hand to protect myself, and one of Father’s knives in my pocket. Violence imprinted in the wooden handle he had held so often, with the Skogsa coat of arms branded on it — he must have stolen the knife when he worked there.

I had a piece of paper in my hand.

The snakes were seething.

Slithering within me. And they were fury and fear rolled into one.

I knew that something had reached its conclusion. And that something else was about to begin.

I look down on the earth, all the different worlds that history has given this city and the land around it. I see the rain lashing the trees, the grass, the moss, and the ancient rocks, and I know that there’s a lot left to come. I see a car approaching a castle at dawn one day, a black figure waiting beyond a moat.

That’s me I can see, heading towards my imminent death, but I don’t know that, and by the time I do know, obviously it’s too late. But now, in this moment that can encompass all of time, I can feel the steering wheel tremble in my hands.

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.

‘I killed your son,’ Anders Dalstrom screams, ‘and I’m going to kill you!’

He’s tied Axel Fagelsjo to a chair and he watches as the old man tries to pull himself free, a peculiar mixture of loathing and resignation in his eyes, the fear they betray, the fear that comes of not knowing what’s happening.

‘The same way you killed my father.’

‘I’ve never killed anyone.’

‘You killed him.’

Anders Dalstrom can see Axel Fagelsjo trying to say something else, trying to shout, but no sound comes out of his mouth.

He pulls a scrap of cloth from his bag, ties it tightly around the old man’s head, letting it slip deep into his mouth, it feels good to pull it tight, see the pain in his eyes, feel the waves of calm flow through his body.

He wanted to give the old man an explanation.

Force him to listen to it.

‘What sort of father do you think he was after you killed him? He hunted me with that camera, hunting me and trying to destroy me, as if he hated me for the life I still had ahead of me, as if I were his pain.’

Axel Fagelsjo squirms on his chair, trying to get loose, unless he wants to say something? Ask for forgiveness?

Hardly.

And Anders Dalstrom punches him in the cheek with a clenched fist, feels the pain spread through his knuckles and hands, and the violence is nice and soft, makes the evil disappear.

So he punches again, and again and again. The snakes move, the boys in the school playground, Dad’s blows, the snakes have their faces now, the excrement in the toilet, the pain of never experiencing any reliable love.

Pain, pain, pain.

All the pain of the world. All the world’s fury gathered in those blows. The fury that must have given Jerry Petersson forty stab wounds to his torso. How many will I get?

Who is he? Axel Fagelsjo thinks.

Bettina, who is he?

His confused talk. About snakes, and faces, but at the same time, in the middle of all the madness, he seems to know what he wants, who he is.

Against his will, Axel Fagelsjo gives in to his fear again and tries to get free, wants to run, escape, but he’s stuck fast, won’t get anywhere, so he may as well take the blows, try to make sense of this, and if it’s true that he killed my son, he’ll get what’s coming to him, I promise myself that, I promise all of those who have gone before me.

The room.

It’s beautiful and familiar, one of my rooms, no one else’s.

Bettina. Your ashes are scattered in the forest.

He’s stopped hitting me now, just sitting on a chair by the wall and he seems to be gathering his strength to say something.

‘Listen, old man.’

Anders Dalstrom gets up and goes over to Axel Fagelsjo in the middle of the cold room.

‘What you did to me, to my dad, would be reason enough for me to kill your son.’

He puts his fingers in Axel Fagelsjo’s nostrils and twists them upwards, and Axel Fagelsjo grunts with pain. Anders Dalstrom feels like pulling his nose right off his face, wants to feel warm blood on his fingers, feel the last cold-blooded, blind creatures slithering out of him.

‘And do you know what?’ he shouts. ‘I like using my body to show how powerful I am. Violence has spawned me, can’t you understand that?

‘I took him outside his house. Beat him to death there, then I drove him to the chapel.

‘I want you to know that.

‘What did you care about me? What Dad did to me when the pain in his eye and in his head took over?’

Then Anders Dalstrom strikes again, but he gets scared when he feels the old man’s chin against his knuckles.