Autumn Killing Read Online Free PDF Page A

the
Östgöta Correspondent
. Count Douglas was there. The historian Dick Harrison. The director of Saab’s aviation division. The head of information at Volvo. A parliamentary under-secretary with roots in the city. The editor-in-chief of the
Correspondent
. The Chair of the National Sports Association. Baron Adelstål.
    But no one from the Fågelsjö dynasty.
    He pulls on his thick black rubber boots.
    I’m coming now, Bettina.
    The calfskin gloves. What leather!
    Axel thinks that things will probably sort themselves out anyway. Hears Bettina’s voice: ‘Protect the boy.’
    I did protect Fredrik. I did what was necessary, even if, in theory, the bank could have been held responsible.
    The memory of Bettina’s face fades.
    Maybe I should have let things go to hell with the boy, Axel thinks, as he presses the cold button of the lift to go downstairs and out into the lonely dawn.

5
    No other engine sounds like that of the Range Rover: elegant yet powerful. And the vehicle responds nicely when Jerry Petersson presses the accelerator. Maybe that was how the horses of former centuries responded when long-dead counts pressed their spurs to the flanks of their sweating steeds.
    No horses here now.
    No counts.
    But he can always get a few horses if he meets a woman who likes them, they have a tendency to like horses, women. Something of a cliché, but this cliché was also a reality, like so many others.
    Jerry Petersson sees banks of fog drifting in across the fields, coming to rest beside the pine forest over to the east. The dog is sitting beside him in the passenger seat, letting its perfectly balanced body move in time with the vehicle’s suspension, its eyes searching the landscape for something living to chase after, stand over, help to bring down. Jerry Petersson runs a hand through its coarse, damp fur. It smells, the dog, but it’s a smell that suits the countryside, with its raw, penetrating authenticity. A beagle, a male, that he has named Howie after Howard Hughes, the Hollywood madman of the thirties who is said to have founded the modern aviation industry, and who, according to legend, ended up a recluse in a castle outside Las Vegas, dependent on blood transfusions.
    Jerry once read a biography of him and thought: if I ever buy a dog, I’m going to name him after an even bigger madman than me.
    The dog’s nostrils contract, open again, and its big black pupils seem to want to devour the land around Skogså.
    The estate is never more beautiful than in the morning, when the approaching day seems to soften the earth and rocks. Rain is falling against the windscreen and roof and he stops the car at the side of the road, watching some birds hopping about on the oyster-shell coloured soil, pecking for worms in the rotting vegetation and the pools that are growing larger with each passing day. The leaves are lying in drifts here, and he thinks they look like a ragged cover in a beautiful, forgotten sketch for an oil painting. And under the cover life goes on. Grubs pupating. Beetles fighting each other. Mice swimming in streams of rain towards goals so distant that they can’t even dream they exist.
    The dog is starting to get anxious, whimpering, wanting to get out, but Jerry soothes it.
    ‘There now, calm down, you can get out soon.’
    A landscape.
    Can that be a person’s fate?
    Sometimes, when Jerry drives around the estate, he imagines he can see all the characters that have come and gone in his life. They drift around the trees, the rocks and buildings.
    It was inevitable that he would end up here.
    Wasn’t it?
    Snow falling one New Year’s Eve, falling so thickly it makes this morning’s fog look as transparent as newly polished glass.
    He grew up not far from here.
    In a rented flat in Berga with his parents.
    Jerry looks at himself in the rear-view mirror. Starts the engine and drives on.
    He drives around two bends before stopping the car again. The dog is even more restless now, and Jerry opens