Autumn Killing by Mons Kallentoft

He’d have heard us by now.’
    ‘But his car’s down there. And the doors were unlocked.’
    ‘Showy damn car, that.’
    ‘Maybe, but you’d still like one.’
    They’re both looking at a free-standing clothes rack holding ironed cotton shirts in all manner of colours.
    ‘What do you make of him?’ Johansson asks.
    ‘Petersson?’
    ‘No, God. Of course I mean Petersson.’
    Johansson looks at Lindman. At the bitter wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, at the deep furrows on his brow.
    Johansson knows that Lindman lived alone on his farm for many years after his wife left him fifteen years earlier. She’d been to a conference in Stockholm and came home crazy, saying she couldn’t bear living on the farm any more.
    Someone must have fucked the sense out of her up in Stockholm.
    But now he’d found a new one, a mail-order Russian.
    ‘What do I think of him?’ Lindman says, stretching the words. ‘Well, he doesn’t seem to want to mess with our arrangements. Then there’s this bullshit about us coming running whenever he calls. What can I say?’
    Johansson nods.
    ‘Did you know him before?’ Lindman goes on.
    Johansson shakes his head.
    ‘They say he grew up in Berga. But I never read anything about his work. I don’t really care about crap like that.’
    Ingmar Johansson sees how the giant bear’s eyes sparkle. Could they actually be real diamonds?
    ‘He was pretty quick to get hold of this damn castle.’
    ‘Must have been a bitter blow for the count.’
    ‘Yeah, but it serves him right.’
    They stop in another of the rooms.
    Looking at each other.
    ‘Do you hear what I hear?’ Johansson asks.
    Lindman nods.
    Outside they can hear a dog barking furiously.
    Anxiously.
    ‘He’s upset about something,’ Lindman says. ‘No doubt about that.’
    They stand still for a moment before heading for one of the windows.
    A low cloud is dissolving into fog as it drifts slowly past the window, leaving small drops of moisture on the glass.
    They stand beside each other, waiting for the cloud or the fog to move. Listening to the dog, its anxious bark.
    Then they look out over the estate.
    The pine forest, the fir trees, the fields. Banks of fog are blocking their view down to the moat.
    ‘Beautiful,’ Johansson says. ‘Can you see the dog?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, you can see why the count loved this land.’
    ‘I bet he’s not happy in the city.’
    Johansson grins and looks away from the view. Down on the raked gravel in the courtyard stand the Range Rover and the car they arrived in.
    Then the fog drifts away from the moat. And there’s the dog, its dark shape jerking each time it lifts its head to the sky and barks.
    ‘That’s a warning bark,’ Lindman says. ‘A deer that’s fallen in the water?’
    The water in the moat is black, still. The green lamps along its edge are glowing faintly.
    But there’s something that’s not right. There’s something in the water that shouldn’t be there. Not a deer, Lindman thinks.
    The dog looks down, then barks desperately again.
    There’s something yellow floating in the blackness, a vague, almost pulsating yellow circle in his gradually deteriorating vision.
    ‘Johansson, what’s that floating down there in the moat? That light-coloured thing? That the dog’s barking at.’
    Johansson looks down at the water.
    Like a black snake held captive by ancient stone banks. Is that old story about the Russian soldiers true? he wonders.
    Some fifty metres away, on the surface of the moat, something pale, yellow, is moving slowly to and fro, a dark outline in the water, the shape, he recognises it instinctively, and wants to look away.
    A head.
    A body concealed yet still visible in the water.
    Blond hair.
    A face turned to one side.
    A mouth.
    He imagines he can see luminous fish, tiny sprats, swimming into the open mouth, a mouth that must long since have stopped gasping for air.
    ‘Fucking hell.’
    ‘Oh shit.’
    ‘Fucking hell,’ Johansson repeats,