Deeds of Autumn by Anders de la Motte

Author:Anders de la Motte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

35

Autumn 2017

A

nna is in her office at seven o’clock the following morning. Agnes is going to ride her Vespa to the train station, so they haven’t even seen each other, let alone tried to talk things over.

Grönwall, or possibly a member of her own team, has printed out the information from the criminal records database on Rylander, including a photograph, and put everything in a file on her desk. She appreciates the efficiency, but decides it’s probably a good idea to lock her door from now on. The photo is eight years old and he’s wearing ordinary glasses, but there is no doubt that the body in the tree and Kent Joakim Rylander are one and the same person.

She leafs through the file. Rylander started with petty theft and minor drugs offences in his late teens, then advanced to car theft, burglary and various degrees of receiving stolen goods. A slightly more serious narcotics crime put him behind bars for a few years. As soon as he came out, the merry-go-round began again. He drifted from place to place in southern and central Sweden, changing his address virtually every year. Gradually he moved from narcotics into fraud and document forgery, crimes that carry shorter prison sentences but require greater skill, which suggests that Rylander wasn’t stupid. Like so many other criminals, he used many different names. He called himself Kenta, Kekke, Jocke and similar variations on his two first names. He also changed his surname no fewer than three times before settling on Rylander.

Anna searches for relatives and discovers that his parents are dead and he’s never been married. However, there are three children, all by different women. The first child, a daughter, was born at the beginning of the ’90s when Rylander was only in his early twenties. The other two didn’t come along until he was well over thirty, and are still minors. She decides to ask one of her team to inform the eldest daughter of his death, and find out what she wants to do with the body when it’s released. She closes the file. Kent Joakim Rylander lived as a parasite feeding off other people, avoiding all responsibility, and even though he had three children, he lacked close family. He also died as he lived – alone. Anna thinks of Agnes. Their relationship is back to square one, and she has to find a way to deal with that. Try to get back to how things were over the weekend.

Tell her, HÃ¥kan whispers. You know you have to.

She pushes him away, takes a snap of Rylander’s photo with her phone and sends it to DJ Kristian. Then she calls him and asks him a straight question.

‘Yes, that’s the guy who gave me the USB stick.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’

‘As sure as I can be. The photo looks as if it was taken a while ago. Why do you want to know – I thought you’d dropped the case?’

‘Have you ever heard of Kent Joakim Rylander?’

‘I don’t think so.

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