Autumn Killing Read Online Free PDF Page B

with. I’ll find one soon enough, he thinks. He’s always thought, in his increasingly large homes, that he could do with a woman to share it with. But it was merely a mental exercise that he enjoyed playing, and whenever he really needed a woman it was easy enough for someone like him: go to a bar, or call one of the numbers, and love would arrive, home delivery. Or a randy housewife in the city for a conference. Whatever. Women to share the present moment, women without any connections either backwards or forwards in time, women as desire-fulfilling creatures. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just the way it is.
    He’d heard a rumour that Skogså was for sale.
    Sixty-five million kronor.
    The Wrede estate agency in Stockholm was handling the sale. No adverts, just a rumour that a castle with a vast estate was for sale in the Linköping area, and perhaps he might be interested?
    Skogså.
    Interested?
    Sixty-five million stung. But not much. And he got more than the castle for his money. Seventy-five hectares of prime forest, and almost as much arable land. And the abandoned parish house that he could always pull down and replace with something else.
    And now, here, on this beautiful black autumn morning, when the fog and the relentless rain and the feeling of lightness and of being at home fill his body, he knows it was money well spent, because what is money for if not to create feelings?
    He wanted to meet Fågelsjö when the deal was concluded in the office on Karlavägen. Didn’t exactly want to smirk at him, but rather give him a measured look, force the old man to realise how wrong he had been, and let him know that a new age had dawned.
    But Axel never showed up at the meeting in Stockholm.
    In his place he sent a young solicitor from Linköping. A young brunette with plump cheeks and a pout. After the contract was signed he asked her to lunch at Prinsen. Then he fucked her upstairs in his office, pushing her against the window, pulling her skirt high up her stomach, tearing a hole in her black tights and pumping away, bored, as he watched the buses and taxis and people moving in a seemingly predetermined stream down Kungsgatan, and he imagined he could hear the sound of the great lawnmowers in Kungsträdgården.
    The castle is supposed to be haunted.
    The unquiet spirit of a Count Erik who is said to have beaten his son to death when the son turned out to be feeble-minded. And the Russian soldiers who were supposed to have been walled up in the moat.
    Jerry has never seen any ghosts, has just heard the creaking and sighing of the stone walls at night, feeling the chill that has been stored up in the old building over the centuries.
    Ghosts.
    Spirits.
    The castle and outbuildings were run-down so he’s had everything renovated. This past year he’s felt like a foreman on a building site.
    Several times he’s seen a black car on the estate and assumed it was one of the Fågelsjö family getting a kick of nostalgia. Why not? he reasons. Mind you, he doesn’t know for sure that it is one of the family, it could be pretty much anyone, there are certainly people who’d like to visit.
    He was profiled in the
Correspondent
when it became known that Skogså had a new owner. He gave an interview, mouthed humble platitudes about fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. But what good had that done?
    The journalist, a Daniel Högfeldt, went for the shady-business-dealings angle, and made out that he had forced the Fågelsjö family from their ancestral home of almost five hundred years.
    Whining.
    Stop whining. No birthright gives anyone a lifetime’s right to anything.
    To this day, the article annoys him, and he regrets giving in to his vanity, his desire to send a message to the area that he was back. To recreate something that never existed: that was what he imagined he was doing.
    How much damage have the Fågelsjö family done to people around here, though? How many peasants and tenant farmers and wage-slaves have had to