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 Tove 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 found 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.

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.