Souls of Air (Malin Fors 7) Read online

  She turns and hears the gravel crunch beneath her feet. There are no children in the playground yet, but they’ll soon be there, and beyond the playground the volleyball court lies deserted. The elderly residents love sitting on the Cherub’s big balcony, watching the children play. Listening to the noise from the volleyball court. Weather permitting, they’ll sit there for hours watching the commotion, enjoying the noise and the happy shouts.

  The Cherub was built in the eighties.

  Three storeys, heavy red brick with bright red, blue and yellow aluminium window- and doorframes. Tove can see the front of the building clearly beyond the birch trees and the tall hedge that runs along the edge of the path and leads up to the glass canopy framing the main entrance.

  This full-time rota is ridiculously harsh, she thinks. It feels like there ought to be twice as many staff. At least it does when things don’t run smoothly, which is most of the time.

  The head of the care provider lives in the city. Evidently he was the one who set up the company, which has its headquarters here. She knows they’re raking in obscene amounts of money. They bought a whole load of care homes from regional councils when social care began to be privatised. Got them cheap. Far too cheap, according to her mum. ‘Daylight robbery’, as she exclaimed once when she read an article about a doctor’s surgery in Berga that was quickly sold on to its staff for twenty times what the council had got for it. The fact that the article was written by her former boyfriend, Daniel Högfeldt, didn’t improve matters.

  How old could he be, the head of the company? Forty-five, maybe. He looks more like fifty. At least. He visited the Cherub once, just after I’d started. What was his name?

  She can’t remember. But he walked around in a shiny grey suit, pretending to inspect the way everything worked. It was in connection to one of Konrad Karlsson’s letters to the paper, and he had a smart PR woman with him who kept taking pictures on her iPhone. It was obvious he had no idea of how a care home functioned, and in the second-floor corridor he had put his arm around Tove’s shoulders and said: ‘Now you’re taking good care of our old folk, aren’t you?’ And she realised he might just as well have said ‘customers’.

  The PR woman took a picture, and Tove later saw the photograph on the company’s website.

  Hans Morelia.

  That’s his name.

  Oh well, never mind him.

  Tove takes hold of the cool door handle, and registers the way the smell of the summer morning, of dew drying on the grass, is replaced by a smell of disinfectant and life approaching its end, simultaneously rapidly and slowly.

  For Tyra and Viveka, for Konrad and Weine.

  If she can manage to make the days a bit better for them, then that’s a good way of spending the summer.

  3

  The shooting range is always quiet early in the morning.

  There’s no smoke rising from the crematorium over at Lilla Aska, a kilometre or so away. No body being burned yet, no faint smell of charred human flesh to unsettle the mind.

  The only sounds are birdsong and the vague rumble of distant morning traffic beyond the fields and dense clumps of birch trees.

  It’s nice to come here early.

  Creep in alone, shoot a few magazines at the fixed targets, even though I’m not a member.

  How could I afford that?

  Sometimes I shoot at birds, at squirrels, but I never hit them.

  I don’t want to hit them.

  Maybe wound them a bit, frighten them, just like I want to scare the shit out of that bastard.

  A fever is raging within me, I’m shooting it out of me now, on lonely mornings like this.

  I squeeze the trigger. Pretend I can see a face bleeding over by the ridge.

  No one has ever found me here.

  I shoot.

  See frightened birds fly across a blue sky.

  4

  How much can anyone love another person?

  As much as I love Lova, Hans Morelia thinks, and closes his eyes, breathing in the fleeting scent of his nine-year-old daughter, the way she smells of a better, more alive version of himself. As if there were nothing but life in her body, and death was utterly alien to it.

  Lova is pure love.

  Hans Morelia is standing on the terrace of his villa in Ramshäll. The house was built in the seventies, in a modernist style inspired by Palm Springs, and inside on the white walls hang works of art chosen by their consultant in Stockholm. Black-and-white photorealist paintings of buildings in New York. Hans Morelia is tired this morning, and can’t remember the artist’s name – he’s hopeless at names, but the paintings look nice, and they impress visitors.

  He takes hold of the steel railing that surrounds the terrace and looks out across Linköping.

  From up there he has a view of the whole city, and the sun makes the grass of Folkungavallen sports ground look almost blue. The enclosed swimming pool at Tinnerbäcksbadet shimmers white, but the bigger pool around it, which has a tarmac base, is dark as the abyss, as if anything could be concealed in the water. He can make out the pale façade of the Hotel Ekoxen, a black car on the road in front of it, and beyond the hotel lies the greenery of the Horticultural Society Park. The treetops form a chlorophyll-rich canopy, and through gaps in the foliage he can see the Cherub, and glimpses of its colourful window frames.

  The problems there.

  The old man who wrote all that rubbish in the Correspondent.

  It could have been even worse, but they managed to limit the damage and put a lid on things, and the paper didn’t seem to want to take matters further, seemed to want to stay on the right side of him, the way it did with everyone of any significance in the city. The story didn’t take off in the national press either, even though some left-wing troublemaker wrote an angry article in Aftonbladet, and the old man appeared on television.

  But the old boy won’t make any more fuss. Not any more.

  Cars and bicycles on St Larsgatan.

  Pedestrians like ants.

  He’s wanted to move away from Linköping for a long time, up to Stockholm, move the entire office there. But that hasn’t happened. Everything has been changing so quickly and he’s had so much else to think about and plan. And Lova most definitely doesn’t want to move, she’s happy at Ånestad School, and gets on well with her classmates. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for her, so they’ll be staying here, in this miserable, stuck-up backwater whose inhabitants get dressed up in fancy suits and dresses just to go for a Saturday walk in the city centre.

  Madeleine is happy belonging to the limited social scene of the city.

  Extremely happy.

  His wife wants to be queen of Linköping, and she will be as long as the deal goes through. She’d sell her own grandmother for that, Hans Morelia chuckles to himself.

  How did I end up here? he thinks, as he looks over towards ‘the tower’, the high-rise office block in Tornby where Merapi’s headquarters are located. Fifty employees work there, taking care of administration, invoicing, and the coordination of the different parts of the business.

  I made my move at just the right time, he thinks. I had enough contacts to be able to set up the company quickly and finance the purchase of the woefully undervalued units.

  Then, once the sell-off was finished and he had a portfolio containing seventy healthcare operations, old people’s homes, X-ray departments, orthopaedic clinics, surgeries, sheltered housing, and plenty more, spread across the whole country, and his company was officially valued, he had assets of two billion Swedish kronor, his income was huge, and his debts amounted to just one billion. He was, quite simply, far richer than he could ever have dreamed of.

  He had been in the right place at the right time.

  Then followed years of big, complicated deals. For a while he owned pretty much half of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg. And now that it’s time to sell, he’s good for one and a half billion kronor as long as the deal with the Americans goes t
hrough without any problems.

  ‘Dad.’

  Lova is calling him from the living room.

  ‘Dad, have you seen my iPhone?’

  Hans Morelia turns around.

  His daughter is standing by the terrace door smiling at him. Her fine blond hair frames her face with its gently rounded cheekbones and mascaraed eyelashes, even though she’s not really allowed to wear make-up.

  Could any young girl be prettier or more beautiful than her?

  Impossible.

  Could anything bad happen to such a beautiful girl?

  Impossible.

  She’s above all the brutality of the world.

  He and Madeleine have tried to have more children, but it hasn’t happened, and somehow all the love that Lova spreads around her is enough. Deep down he doesn’t actually want any more children. He can’t contain any more love than he already feels for Lova.

  ‘Try the kitchen table, darling.’

  ‘OK. Can we buy some new riding boots later on today?’

  ‘You know I’ve got to work. We’ll get them next week.’

  She pulls an unhappy face, then smiles, adjusts her jeans and goes back indoors.

  He turns towards the city again, and looks across to the hospital. Merapi runs the urology department and infection clinic there.

  They’re earning money. More than ever.

  And they’re doing so thanks to kaizen, a Japanese expression that he has adopted, which means making every detail a bit better, a bit more cost-effective, for instance, not putting fresh paper on treatment beds if the paper isn’t dirty or crumpled from a patient.

  He tries to see the patients as customers, who should receive the service they can expect, no more, no less, but who should still feel happy and safe; the service that can be afforded in a system of taxation like Sweden’s, where most people don’t have private health insurance; the level of service that is reasonable if the company providing the care is to maintain realistic profit margins. How much would it cost to treat every little ache?

  Recently he has sometimes felt he is being stalked. He has thought he could see someone standing in the garden in the evenings, in the darkness, but he knows it must be his imagination. There’s never anyone there when he goes out to check. He’s just a bit paranoid, because of the deal. When the media coverage was at its height, their security company suggested he should have a bodyguard. But he thought that was ridiculous. In little Linköping! Then the package of excrement appeared through the letter box. As luck would have it he was the one who found it, and he hasn’t mentioned it to Madeleine or Lova.

  At first he was going to report it to the police. But in the end he didn’t bother. That was the price you had to pay if you earned as much money as he did. But the lack of boundaries implicit in someone sending a package of that sort scared him.

  Lova is safe here, and you can’t give in to fear.

  I’m not inhuman, he thinks, the way some bloggers and left-wing journalists claim. If you’re a director and entrepreneur in the business of providing care, sometimes you have to be blunt and look at the numbers.

  What do people think? That care is free?

  Look at Spain and Greece. They’ve been finding out the hard way what things cost.

  He’s allowed to think things like that, but must never say them out loud.

  He knows that.

  Just as he knows that he can’t cruise around in his sports car every day in Linköping. He can only drive the Maserati that’s parked down in the garage occasionally. It gets up the noses of the city’s touchy citizens.

  Hans Morelia looks down, at his shiny brown John Lobb shoes, and he feels ashamed, knows he mustn’t think like that. He knows there’s a difference between his company and others, that their business is unique because the customers are people in difficult situations. Sympathy is one aspect of the business model, part of the whole ethos of the company, even.

  Linköping is almost beautiful this morning. As the sunlight shines down on the kaleidoscope of roofs and the surrounding fields, on the water and forests far off on the horizon.

  So what does he have here?

  The Americans are there somewhere.

  Nexxon.

  To them, a billion or two is nothing. They have hundreds of billions, and healthcare in Sweden is a growth sector for the future, according to their analysts.

  Hans Morelia wants to sell now, he’s only forty-five, but the past ten years have been a hell of a journey, and his blood pressure is uncomfortably high, and refuses to go down, despite the medication. He’s tall and skinny, but out of shape, and the years are showing on his thin face.

  Better to sell up.

  Take a break for a few years.

  Try to focus on Madeleine and, even more, on Lova. Get a private tutor and drift around the world for a few years. Madeleine would love the luxury of the hotels. Lova would love seeing the world. He knows that. She could manage without Ånestad School. She’s not so young any more, in a couple of years’ time she’ll be a teenager, and then she won’t care about me at all, except for when she wants money.

  I don’t have any illusions, Hans Morelia thinks, closing his eyes and making Linköping disappear.

  Something strikes him as odd.

  When he closes his eyes everything goes completely black, even though it’s a bright morning and it ought to be almost white inside his eyelids.

  Instead just disconcerting blackness.

  But there’s nothing to worry about.

  What could happen?

  Kaizen, down to the very smallest detail.

  He opens his eyes and turns around to go and see what Lova’s doing, before getting in his car and driving to the office, to face the challenges of the day.

  5

  The air from the hairdryer is warm against her neck, like a fleeting, gentle caress. Malin feels her hair flutter and dry out, and in her mind’s eye sees the strands flying about in the mirror as they gradually approach the point where they could get scorched.

  She doesn’t open her eyes.

  Doesn’t want to see her morning-tired face, the ever deeper wrinkles, the lines on her forehead that will soon, anytime now, become a permanent frown.

  Almost forty.

  But she’s in better shape than ever, could run a marathon without any trouble, and she wouldn’t be ashamed of her naked body if there was a full-length mirror in the flat.

  She’s let her hair grow, and her bob has grown out into long, even hair that brushes her shoulders. Sometimes she pins her fringe back with clips, but usually she prefers just to brush it aside; the gesture seems to have a calming effect, like fingering the beads of a rosary.

  It’s been a year in neutral.

  A year of control.

  Of denying needs, handling them.

  Handling the longing for a warm, soft body whispering warm, soft words in her ear.

  Peter.

  Bastard.

  She hasn’t spoken to him since she threw him out, after finding him with his American medical student in the duty doctor’s room at the hospital.

  She’s seen them in the distance on Linköping’s pedestrianised shopping streets, and has turned on her heel and gone a different way, each time feeling like a hostage in her own life. And what does she do then?

  When she can’t drink?

  When she can’t settle down at the bar of the Hamlet and fill herself with beer and lukewarm tequila?

  I suppress it. Think about other things, about nothing, and I swim and lift weights and run, run as fast as I can, as far out into nothingness as possible.

  Warm air at the roots of her hair now, and this year it has sometimes felt like her brain would catch fire. But it never has. Just like her soul, it’s getting used to an emotionally neutral state where nothing means anything.

  Of course she feels a desire to drink, but she can control it. Her thirst doesn’t run quite so deep any more.

  She’s been working too. Working and wor
king. Alone at the station late into the evenings, she has tried to wake herself to life, tried to find a way back to her old, limitless self, where everything happens at the same time, where good and evil, love and death blur into each other to form a dangerous but enticing whole.

  But I’m safer like this, she thinks. Less of a danger to myself.

  She switches the hairdryer off. The sudden silence is wonderful and she opens her eyes and looks at her face in the mirror.

  Wrinkles around her eyes.

  Me.

  Malin Fors.

  I’m older, more experienced.

  So why do I know less than ever about who I am and who I want to be?

  In the living room Malin opens the window.

  No one can see in, so she doesn’t care that she’s naked.

  She lets in the newly woken air of the summer morning, and down in the park by St Lars Church she can hear birdsong, she can’t tell what sort. The recently renovated walls of the church glow in the light, and the white stucco seems to want to flee from the sky beyond.

  She breathes in.

  Thinks of when Tove was small and lay asleep in her bed, her ribcage rising and falling, rising and falling.

  Filling herself with life.

  The first thing you do when a badly injured patient is admitted to Accident and Emergency is stabilise their breathing. Everything else is of less importance.

  Tove must have arrived at work by now, she’ll be wearing her mauve cotton tunic and getting ready to go in to see one of the old folk, maybe that Konrad she talks so much about, the one she’s been discussing the proletarian writers of the 1930s with.

  Business college.

  She never talks about that any more.

  In the kitchen Malin makes herself a cup of coffee with the new espresso machine. One of the black coffee cartridges.

  Strong and hot.

  Bitter.

  What shall I wear?

  Why not nothing at all?

  Her body feels neutral, as if it simply is; a functional machine that only occasionally reacts with an uncontrolled impulse in the crotch or heart.