Read Autumn Killing for Free Online

endure their bailiff’s whip? How many people have been trampled underfoot by the Fågelsjös’ assumption that they’re better than everyone else?
    Petersson hasn’t taken on any employees, instead he contracts people whenever anything needs doing, and he’s careful to make sure he pays them well and treats them decently.
    And the story of the moat around the castle. That it was built in the early nineteenth century, long after anyone in this country had any need of a moat. That one of the counts got it into his head that he wanted a moat, and commandeered a load of Russian prisoners-of-war from von Platen’s work on the Göta Canal and worked them until they dropped, a lot of them dying of exhaustion. It was said that they interred the bodies in the walls of the moat when they lined it with stone, that they shut those Russian souls in for all eternity for the sake of a meaningless moat.
    But sometimes it feels a bit isolated at the castle. And for the first time in his life he has felt that he could do with a friend. The security of having another living creature around him, someone who would take his side no matter what happened, who would sound the alarm if there was any danger approaching. And a dog was useful for hunting.
    Is that something up ahead on the road? Howie? Back so soon. Impossible. Completely impossible.
    A stag?
    A deer.
    No.
    The rain is pouring down now, but inside the oil-smelling warmth of the Range Rover the world seems very agreeable.
    Then the castle appears out of the fog, its three storeys of grey stone seeming to force their way out of the earth, the leaning walls straining towards the grey sky, as if they thought they should be in charge up there. And the light from the swaying green lanterns he has had installed along the moat. He loves the brightness they give.
    Is that someone standing on the castle steps?
    The tenant farmers he’s going hunting with aren’t due until later on, and they’ve never been on time yet.
    He accelerates.
    He feels with his hand beside him for the dog, but the warm fur isn’t there.
    Of course.
    Petersson wants to get there quickly, wants to hear the gravel of the drive crunch under the Range Rover’s tyres. Yes, there is someone on the steps.
    The outline of a figure. Hazy through the fog. Unless it’s an animal?
    The castle ghosts?
    The vengeful spirits of the Russian soldiers?
    Count Erik paying him a visit with his cloak and scythe?
    He’s ten metres away from the black shape now.
    Who is it? A woman? You?
    Can it really be that person again? Certainly persistent, if it is.
    He stops the car.
    Blows the horn.
    The black figure on the steps moves silently towards him.

6
    Grey.
    The morning light is grey, but it still manages to cut right into Malin’s eyes. The light is gentle, like a blunt knife found at the back of a kitchen drawer of a deceased and distant relative. She looks up, out through the living-room window. The clouds are clustered tightly in different layers in front of the sun, and she can feel how her skin is swollen over swollen flesh, and she tries to look around, but keeps having to close her eyes, to give her reluctant brain a rest and muffle its angry throbbing with darkness.
    Her body is in a heap on the parquet floor, the radiator by her head warmer now than yesterday evening, and she can hear the water gurgling through the pipes.
    An almost empty bottle of tequila beside her, the lid half screwed on, and she looks out at the flat.
    Grey.
    The whole of my world is grey, Malin thinks. More nuances of grey than my brain can comprehend, from the dark, leaden grey under the sofa to the almost dirty white of the walls.
    And who’s that looking in through the window, whose face is that peering through the fog? The contours of her guilty conscience. Nausea. How the hell can I behave like this? A hand raised in anger.
    I stink. I want to turn my face inside out so I don’t have to look at myself in the mirror.
    How the hell am I going