Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7) Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Mons Kallentoft and published by Hodder & Stoughton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART 1: Respectable Love

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART 2: The Heart of Final Moments

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  PART 3: Despairing Love

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Mons Kallentoft grew up in the provincial town of Linköping, Sweden, where the Malin Fors series is set. The series is a massive European bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. Before becoming a novelist, Mons worked in journalism; he is also a renowned food critic. His debut novel, Pesetas, was awarded the Swedish equivalent of the Costa Book Award.

  Mons has been married to Karolina for over twenty years, and they live in Stockholm with their daughter and son.

  Also by Mons Kallentoft

  and published by Hodder & Stoughton

  Midwinter Sacrifice

  Summertime Death

  Autumn Killing

  Savage Spring

  The Fifth Season

  Water Angels

  Visit Mons’ website at www.monskallentoft.se and his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/MonsKallentoft and follow him on Twitter @Kallentoft

  SOULS OF AIR

  Mons Kallentoft

  Translated from the Swedish by

  Neil Smith

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Originally published in Swedish in Vindsjälar by Bokförlaget Forum

  Copyright © Hard Boiled Company 2016

  English translation © Neil Smith 2016

  The right of Mons Kallentoft to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 77640 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Prologue

  [The wind]

  Fingers around a neck. Hands.

  They press.

  Hard, harder, hardest.

  Air currents move across the heavens and gather between the stars, forming a cold, polished wind that races on, down towards the earth, thrusting aside the great drifts of forgotten lives residing in the dense forests. They make their way between the pines and firs, the black-and-white birches. Tug at the moss, cut the bark from the trunks, and the trees wonder: Isn’t it supposed to be summer?

  The wind sinks lower.

  Unsettles the waters of Lake Roxen, drives in across meadows and fields, up over the glowing lights of the motorway, over leaky retail barns and mass housing projects, over railway tracks and blocks of flats, towards the lights of the city and cobbled streets where a few nocturnal drifters are making their way through the mild summer night.

  A park, a red-brick building, and there the cold wind tries to find a way into a room, it makes itself small and slips in through a gap in the window, waits for a while. Inside the room is the smell of death, of life that has been lived and will soon be over.

  The mouth seeking air, in spite of weariness, in spite of the fingers pressing harder on the neck.

  And the wind that was born not long ago in a starlit heaven gathers itself together. Lets itself be sucked down into the lungs of an unknown body, becoming the last breath that fills them, becoming memories, violence and caresses and the heart that stops beating and the consciousness that slips into a blackness that becomes a clear, shining whiteness.

  The fingers around the neck have turned white.

  But now they relax.

  Only death breathes now.

  There is no more fear. No uncertainty.

  The wind listens to a voice that it alone can hear:

  That’s me lying there.

  Is it over now?

  There were so many words. I was tired of them. But I still want them back.

  The sun crawls slowly above the horizon, waking the city, giving life to the smells of a dying summer. The stinking contents of rubbish bins, the chlorine of swimming pools, thousands of plants in bloom.

  A storm waking. Fingers squeezing a neck.

  Whose fingers? Whose neck?

  The polished wind withdraws, and then the morning is still. A young woman moves towards the building and the park, walking slowly in the first light of day.

  PART 1

  Respectable love

  1

  Tuesday, 10 August

  Tove is breathing deeply. Walking down Drottninggatan. Enjoying the warm summer air filling her lungs.

  The façades of the fin de siècle buildings look like theatre sets made out of sand in the freshly woken sunlight.

  It is only a quarter past six.

  She ought to be tired, but isn’t.

  Her body is awake, her mind too, and her muscles feel fresh, as if her whole being is hungry for the day, the sort of hunger you only feel when you know you’re going to do something useful for other people.

  There’s no chill in the air, she’s not cold even though she’s only wearing a thin summer dress. The summer has been warm. And sunny. But not as crazily hot as that summer a few years back. She can’t bear to think of what happened back then. She’s put that behind her.

  Her mum hadn’t even got out of bed when Tov
e left home a few minutes ago to go to her summer job at the Cherub Old People’s Home. She didn’t want the job at first, she would rather have worked in a clothes shop or a bookstore. But in the end the Cherub was the only remaining option.

  On the very first day Tove realised she had ended up in the right place, that she liked the old people, even if a few of them could be mean and demanding. The physical aspects of the job were distasteful at first, but she soon got used to them. Learned to disconnect her sense of repulsion and just wipe up the shit, and if the smell was too bad she simply held her breath or breathed through her mouth.

  The people who live at the Cherub are all handicapped in some way, but are mentally alert, more or less. The shame they feel at their physical helplessness is visible in their eyes, and is far worse for them than any discomfort I might feel, she thinks. The old people need help, deserve it, and I’m going to make it as easy as possible for them to accept it, and to go on living.

  It’s not really any more complicated than that.

  She realises that she will end up like that herself one day, in a similar bed with the same need of help, if she lives long enough. And her uncle, Stefan, is in the same state, in a nursing home in Hälsingland. Only last night she asked her mum if they were going to visit him, but her mum hadn’t wanted to set a date. She never does.

  Tove moves closer to the buildings along Drottninggatan, away from a bus that roars past on its way to the University Hospital.

  The sun is hot on her bare legs, and she remembers herself as a young child. On a beach somewhere. Yelping and shouting and her body thirsting for the sun’s rays as she emerged from the cold water.

  Tove thinks about the residents.

  Tyra Torstensson.

  Eighty-nine years old. A bit confused, but charming, half-blind, and as good as completely deaf. Unsteady on her legs, kind and grateful, almost submissive. She was a secretary back when she worked, for a lawyer, and has suffered more sorrows than most in her life, but each time she just got back up again.

  ‘Are you awake, Tyra?’ Tove has to shout when she rouses the old woman every day after her afternoon nap.

  Weine Andersson.

  A farmer. Old and tired, every joint in his body worn out. But he never complains. Not even about the food. His children treat him with respect when they come and see him, which they do often.

  Viveka Dahlgren.

  A clergyman’s wife. With fancy paintings by Krouthén in her room, and a bottle of port in her bedside cabinet. She’s the widow of a former bishop, abandoned by her three children, who have all moved far, far away from Linköping. She was a volunteer at the City Mission until her body could no longer cope. Until her sense of balance started to go.

  Mrs Dahlgren can be a bit arrogant, looking down on me and the others, making a fuss and demanding things that there really isn’t time for, but I think she just feels lonely.

  How do you end up that lonely, even though you’ve got children? What makes your children abandon you? Go away?

  Viveka Dahlgren is ninety-two now. Almost all of her friends are dead. There’s no one to hold her thin-skinned hand, and those of us who work there don’t have time.

  Could I abandon Mum? Tove wonders as she crosses Drottninggatan.

  Maybe that’s what I did when I started school at Lundsberg.

  When she’s home for the summer she wants to live with her mum. Doesn’t get on well with her dad’s young girlfriend. Anyway, he lives too far out in the countryside.

  The resident she likes best of all at the Cherub is Konrad Karlsson.

  He’s a fighter. Well read. A worker who improved himself through his own efforts. A worker who, just as he should have been enjoying his retirement, had a severe stroke and ended up paralysed down half of his body.

  But not paralysed in his soul.

  She can see his lined face in front of her. Would just like to sit with him, something she very rarely has time for. Would like to talk to him, see him listen to what she has to say, how he seems to have all the time in the world for her in particular. She wants to see him nod, reflect, and then hear his good advice about whatever it she’s wondering about.

  Unlike her mum, he really listens. It’s nice, Tove thinks, having an old person to confide in.

  Konrad Karlsson.

  His body may be weak, but he’s still got fight left in him. He was the person who wrote that letter to the Correspondent, the one that caused such a huge fuss. He listed ten points, detailing the failings at the Cherub and how cost-cutting had led to poor care so that the care provider, Merapi, could make a healthy profit.

  Over the past week Konrad has seemed tired, as if the heat were slowly eating him up.

  Don’t let the heat take him.

  Stefan’s home is also run by Merapi these days. The care there has got worse than it was before. All the good staff have resigned. Tove doesn’t want to think about it. She herself works for Merapi, even if it doesn’t feel like it. She works for herself. Even so, she’s part of a failing care system, whether she likes it or not.

  Tove is approaching the park now, can see the tops of the birch trees and smell the scent of summer-Linköping.

  Growing, alive.

  As if everything alive in the city were enjoying the heat and the sun. But every now and then she picks up the stench of decay in her nostrils, proof that the city’s inhabitants can’t keep the dirt at bay altogether, that life and death are both happening all the time.

  There’s a smell at home, in her mum’s flat.

  At first it was only there sometimes, but now there’s a definite stink in the flat all the time. As if something has died. A cloying, sickly smell. She and her mum have tried to locate its source, but it’s impossible to say where it’s coming from. At first they thought it was the sink, but when they leaned over the plughole there was no smell there. Same thing with the shower. And they’ve tried keeping the windows closed, so the smell can’t be coming from outside.

  Some days it’s stronger, others weaker, but it’s always there.

  Her brain gets used to it after a while, but her awareness that it’s there is always nagging away at the back of her mind.

  How does the jungle smell?

  She’s applied to do voluntary work at the end of the summer. In Rwanda. That, and a whole load of options at university. She’s hoping that Rwanda works out, but hasn’t said anything to her mum about her plans. But she knows she’s curious. She’d probably go mad if she found out.

  Mum. Is she awake yet?

  She hasn’t had a drink for almost a year. Not since she broke up with Peter. She’s been alone since then, she seems calmer, as if something happened to her when she was in Vietnam, solving that case of the missing girl. Sometimes she seems almost tranquillised.

  She exercises and works, and doesn’t appear to be either frustrated or happy.

  She just is, and that’s not like her.

  It scares me, Mum, the fact that you’ve decided to make do with nothing.

  2

  Malin Fors stretches out in bed. Reaches her arms up towards the wall, points her toes down, pretends that horses and chains are attached to her limbs.

  But nothing happens. Her body just feels lethargic.

  She heard Tove leave a short while ago but pretended to be asleep, didn’t feel up to talking to her so early in the morning.

  It’s nice to have her home, even if it is just for the summer. Tove got dumped by her boyfriend Tom, who finally seemed to realise that it wasn’t fitting for a smart boy from Östermalm to go out with the only scholarship student in the whole school. And what would he want her for now, anyway, now that their days at Lundsberg are over and he is no longer shut away in the middle of the forest for weeks on end?

  Tove seems to have taken it well, even if she doesn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps they were making use of each other, making life at school bearable together. She no longer goes on about designer shoes, or bags and clothes. She seems to have foun
d her way back to her old self, the wise, incisive person she always was, in spite of the chaos surrounding large parts of her childhood.

  I’m proud of what she’s doing now.

  Looking after the elderly. Without grumbling, almost with joy. A crap job in most youngsters’ eyes, but not Tove’s.

  Malin pulls the covers over her head.

  Seeking refuge from the light filtering through the venetian blind.

  But the covers can’t keep the light out, can’t give her darkness, they just make everything flat and shallow, as if her whole world were tiny and the sky made of cotton that needs washing.

  Tove.

  The look in her eyes sometimes, over the breakfast table. On the sofa in the evenings.

  You despise me, Malin thinks. And I can understand that.

  She breathes in the stale smell under the covers, the stench of the flat, faint, like a trace that barely registers in her nose. She can’t bear to think about childhood and chaos, can’t bear to focus on how her whole being is consumed with anxiety at the way she neglected Tove. It’s too late now anyway, and she forces herself into a sort of neutral state, where she can control her feelings instead of vice versa. Where her lungs fill with air without her consciously having to breathe. The state she’s been in since she returned home from Vietnam.

  But I can’t lie here any longer.

  In my cave. Under a sky made of cotton.

  I have to get up.

  To the station.

  And, ideally, fit in a run first.

  Run the night’s dreams to ground. Run some life into me, into my body.

  Tove opens the gate of the Horticultural Society Park. Walks through it, thinking once again how neat all the beds are, how the grass looks greener now that it’s been left to grow slightly longer.

  She looks through the trees and bushes, off towards the large clearing in front of the stage. Thinks about how all her former classmates at the local school had a party there to celebrate leaving school, presumably smoking joints and fucking amongst the trees on the observatory hill. Drinking warm beer. Cold and refreshing in memory.