The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  Quite right, observed Gunnar Barbarotti, applying shampoo to his thinning hair, and what could beat some tranquil Christmas time together, and five days off work spent with such a daughter.

  Absolutely nothing, O Lord, so hear my prayer.

  The miracle that secured God’s existence over the Christmas break came in two parts, and occurred between quarter and five to ten. First, Chief Inspector Asunander rang.

  Asunander was head of the CID with the Kymlinge police and Barbarotti’s immediate boss. He was bloody sorry to impose, he said, and if Gunnar Barbarotti couldn’t field the ball himself, he could pass it to Backman.

  Barbarotti chose to let this initial football metaphor pass without comment. Eva Backman was his colleague and good friend, and had also been able to arrange some days off over Christmas. She needed them, too, Gunnar knew, because her marriage seemed to have reached the point where it could very easily hit the rocks – but there was still a clear glimmer of hope. Eva’s husband was a certain Wilhelm, generally known as Willy, and founder, chairman and coach of KUT, the Kymlinge Unihockey Tigers. The couple had three sons of fourteen, twelve and ten, who all played unihockey and were seen as genuine budding talents. Over the past twelve months, Eva Backman had slowly but implacably started to loathe the sport and everything about it, after maintaining a neutral stance for many long years. She had confided to Barbarotti that she even came out in a rash in the crooks of her arms and round her neck whenever she was obliged to watch a match, which she normally had to do twice a week. She had confided this to her husband, too, and Barbarotti gathered he had not taken it the right way.

  But Eva loved her husband and she loved her kids. She didn’t want everything to go to pot because of some stupid sporting activity. Or because of her own unreasonable stance; Barbarotti and Backman had talked it over just a couple of days before, so he knew how things stood. Being required to work over the holiday period rather than spending Christmas with the family (with not so much as a training session scheduled for the red-letter days) could well have disastrous consequences for Eva Backman.

  But either Barbarotti or Backman had to take on the case, said the Chief Inspector, making it clear that there were no other options. Backman was actually the more obvious choice, being closer, but there was the matter of Backman’s domestic circumstances . . . not something one liked to bring into the equation, but the way things were looking, perhaps she could use a few days in the bosom of her family? What did Barbarotti think?

  Barbarotti agreed. In principle. And if even Asunander was aware of Backman’s situation, things must be pretty serious. What were the particulars of the case he had called about?

  Chief Inspector Asunander cleared his throat in the long-winded fashion for which only thirty years’ assiduous pipe smoking could pave the way, and explained that it concerned a missing person.

  Correction, two missing persons.

  Then he paused and adjusted his false teeth. They always slipped sideways when he talked too much. It was his job’s fault that he had them at all. Barely ten years before, when called out in the course of his duties, he had encountered a pumped-up bodybuilder armed with a baseball bat; the blow hit Asunander squarely in the mouth and he lost twenty-six teeth in half a second, which was quite possibly a world record but also led to a year or more of extensive jaw operations with not very successful outcomes. His dentures simply refused to fit snugly, and the perpetual need to readjust them meant that he often expressed himself as briefly as possible. Particularly if his hands were full and he was obliged to keep his pipe clamped in the corner of his mouth. Sometimes he sounded like an old-fashioned telegram, especially if he had already suffered some slippage. He tended to omit little things if they were not vital for comprehension.

  ‘Odd biz,’ he said. ‘Only report by phone so far – last night and this morn.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘Def time to get over there. Check in more detail. Right now. You take it?’

  ‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’ve got a train north at one thirty. A lot of arrangements to cancel if I’m taking it on.’

  ‘Got you,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Ring me in ten. Merry Chris.’

  He had just come off the phone when Sara staggered into the kitchen.

  He stared at her. Something was wrong. Her lovely auburn hair looked as if someone had peed in it. Her eyes were glassy and red-rimmed, she was breathing heavily through an open mouth and her full-length nightshirt had taken on the look of a grubby shroud – a sudarium. She stopped, propped against the fridge.

  ‘Dad,’ she said feebly.

  Gunnar Barbarotti resisted the impulse to rush over to his daughter and lift her in his arms. ‘Sara, love,’ he said instead. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I . . . think . . . I’m . . . ill.’

  The words found their way singly over her cracked lips and barely had the strength to reach his eardrums.

  ‘Sit down, Sara.’

  He pulled out a kitchen chair and she sank into it. He put a hand to her forehead. It was burning hot. She looked at him with an empty gaze and half-closed eyes.

  ‘I don’t . . . think . . . I’m up to . . .’

  ‘Have you taken your temperature?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sara, go back to bed. I’ll bring you a drink and a thermometer. You really don’t look well.’

  ‘But Mum . . . and Malmberget . . . ?’

  ‘That’s cancelled,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’ve got to put in some hours at work as well. We’ll stay and have our Christmas here in Kymlinge, you and me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. Shall I help you back to bed?’

  She got to her feet and swayed, and he held her up by putting one arm round her waist.

  ‘Thanks Dad, but I can walk by myself. Need to pee as well . . . but if you could bring . . . bring me something to drink . . . that would be great.’

  ‘Of course I will, love,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. He fished out two fresh pillows with clean pillowcases. Opened the window to briefly air the room, tucked his daughter up in bed, put two glasses on the bedside table – one of water, the other of cranberry juice – stood over her while she took her temperature, 39.2, and as soon as he could see she had dozed off again, tiptoed gently out of her room.

  He made two phone calls.

  The first to Chief Inspector Asunander, to agree to take on the two missing person cases.

  The second to his ex-wife, to say he was sorry, but something had come up. Sara was in bed with a sky-high temperature and could hardly even stand on her own two feet.

  Once that was out of the way, he went over to the living room window and cast a glance up at the greyish-mauve December sky.

  ‘My humble thanks,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll be back in touch in January.’

  Then he got out his little black book and made a note.

  17

  Before setting off to number 4 Allvädersgatan, the point in Kymlinge where by all accounts the disappearances had originated, he dropped in at the station for a briefing from Sorrysen.

  Sorrysen was really called Borgsen, Gerald by forename and Norwegian by birth. He had worked in the district for five years and had – as Barbarotti generally put it – a remarkably strong sense of integrity. He was about thirty-five and lived a bit outside town at Vinge with his wife and two children. He never participated in any voluntary activities with his colleagues, never went out with them for a beer; he did not seem to have any particular interests and he almost always – hence the nickname – gave a slightly sorrowful impression.

  But he was beyond all question an honest and competent policeman.

  The briefing took ten minutes. Sorrysen had written a summary on two pages of A4, and he delivered the whole thing orally as well.

  Two people had been reported missing by the same informant, a certain Karl-Erik Hermansson, aged sixty-five, former upper-secondary teacher at
Kymlingevik School and very recently retired. The two missing persons were (1) his son Robert Hermansson, aged thirty-five, who had disappeared while on a visit to his parents in Allvädersgatan some time during the night between Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 December and (2) the informant’s grandson Henrik Grundt, aged nineteen, who had disappeared at some time during the following night, i.e. between 20 and 21 December. Both Robert and Henrik had been in Kymlinge on the occasion of a double celebration on the twentieth: Karl-Erik Hermansson’s sixty-fifth birthday, and his daughter Ebba’s fortieth (she being Henrik’s mother).

  Robert Hermansson was ordinarily resident in Stockholm. Henrik Grundt was officially registered at his parents’ home in Sundsvall, but also had a room in student accommodation in Uppsala, where he had just completed his first term of law studies. Or would complete it in January, to be precise, as the exams were held in the new year.

  The informant, Karl-Erik Hermansson, could offer absolutely no suggestion about what could have happened to either of the missing persons, nor could he say whether the two disappearances were linked in any way.

  A general alert had gone out at ten the previous evening, but no sightings had yet been reported.

  One detail, which was not provided by the informant himself but which eventually emerged, was that the first to go missing, Robert Hermansson, was identical with the briefly infamous contestant of the same name in the so-called reality TV series Prisoners of Koh Fuk.

  ‘Wanker Rob?’ Barbarotti asked.

  Sorrysen had refrained from using the term himself, but he nodded in confirmation.

  As he left the station, he thought about Asunander’s description of the situation: Odd business.

  The chief inspector was not known for exaggerating, nor had he done so on this occasion, thought Gunnar Barbarotti as he got into his car and set off for Allvädersgatan in the western part of the town.

  A double disappearance on the darkest day of the year? Well, ‘odd’ hardly covered it.

  Karl-Erik Hermansson looked pale but collected, his wife Rosemarie pale and torn in several directions. Barbarotti had considered for a moment how strictly he ought to apply the basic rule of always speaking to the informants one at a time, but had decided not to follow it this time.

  Not to start with, at any rate. If more thorough questioning proved necessary, he would have to take them individually when the time came. They were sitting in the living room, rather over-furnished to Inspector Barbarotti’s mind – with the heterogeneity of styles and colours that bore witness to a long life shared by two residents who were none too troubled by the costly lodestar known as good taste. The suite was of dark brown leather and must date from the seventies, while the cream-coloured, glass-fronted display unit with dimmed lighting was of a considerably later vintage. On the walls hung a motley collection of pictures in frames that sucked the life out of the subject matter, and the wallpaper was pale yellow and blue with a claret-coloured border of floral garlands. On the solid pine table, Rosemarie Hermansson had laid out a spread of coffee, a ginger cake and four sorts of biscuits. The china was white with a blue floral motif and the paper serviettes were a festive red and green, but what the heck, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, he wasn’t here to write a feature on interior design.

  ‘Right then, my name is Inspector Barbarotti,’ he began. ‘I’ll be looking after this case, and trying to solve it to everybody’s satisfaction.’

  ‘Case?’ said Rosemarie Hermansson, dropping some ginger cake in her lap.

  ‘We hope so,’ said her husband.

  ‘Let’s start by running through the facts,’ suggested Gunnar Barbarotti, opening his notebook. ‘So you’d gathered the family together for a little party to mark . . . ?’

  ‘To mark the fact that Ebba and I happen to have been born on the same day,’ Karl-Erik Hermansson jumped in to explain, adjusting his shiny tie in mottled shades of green. ‘They happened to be landmark birthdays for us both this year. I was sixty-five, Ebba forty.’

  ‘Which day?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Tuesday the twentieth. The day before yesterday, that is. Well, it was just a modest little family affair. We’ve never been ones for anything grand or over the top, my wife and I. Have we, Rosemarie?’

  ‘No, yes,’ agreed Rosemarie Hermansson.

  ‘So it was our three children and their families. Ten of us in all . . . one of them just eighteen months old, our youngest grandchild. Yes, they all arrived on the Monday, and the party itself was the day after . . . on Tuesday, as I said.’

  ‘But by then, one person was already missing?’ asked Barbarotti, sampling his coffee cautiously. To his surprise it was strong and just how he liked it. I’m prejudiced, he thought. At every possible level.

  ‘That’s right, yes,’ said Karl-Erik Hermansson, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Though none of us actually realized the seriousness of it at that point, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why didn’t you realize the seriousness? Had your son . . . it was your son, wasn’t it, who disappeared between Monday and Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes, it was Robert,’ affirmed Rosemarie Hermansson.

  Gunnar Barbarotti gave her an encouraging smile but then turned back to her husband.

  ‘You say none of you saw it as serious. Does that mean Robert had some reason to stay away . . . that you perhaps thought you knew where he had gone?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ insisted Karl-Erik Hermansson. ‘This . . . er, this perhaps calls for a little explanation. My son . . . I mean our son, of course . . . hasn’t been himself recently.’

  Interesting way of putting it, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. But fine, if you went and masturbated on television, you were presumably not quite yourself. He noted that Rosemarie Hermansson was shredding her red and green serviette in her lap and he had a distinct sense that she was not far from breaking point.

  ‘I am aware of that television programme,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t see it myself. I don’t watch much television at all, in fact. So you saw a link between his disappearance and . . . well, how he was feeling?’

  Karl-Erik Hermansson seemed to be hesitating. He glanced at his wife and fingered his tie again. It was silk, unless Gunnar Barbarotti’s eyes deceived him. Thai silk, if he were to venture an educated guess. Perhaps he had had it as a present on the big day.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Karl-Erik Hermansson, finally. ‘I didn’t have time to discuss it with him properly. I was going to, but I didn’t get the chance. Things don’t always turn out quite as planned . . .’

  Once he had said it, he appeared to shrink a little. As if he had admitted something he had not been intending to admit, thought Barbarotti – and that left the space for his wife to say something.

  ‘Robert arrived around seven on Monday evening,’ she explained. ‘So did the others. We had a bite to eat, nothing very special, and some of them stayed up talking for a while after Karl-Erik and I went to bed . . . and it’s like Karl-Erik said, there wasn’t really time for any individual conversations that evening.’

  ‘But Robert was one of those who stayed up a bit longer?’

  ‘Yes. I think it was him and Kristina, our daughter. They’ve . . . well, they’ve always been close. Ebba and Leif’s sons stayed up too, I think.’

  ‘And then Robert vanished?’

  Rosemarie exchanged a look with her husband, as if to get his confirmation that she could continue. ‘Yes,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders dejectedly. ‘He apparently went out for a walk and a cigarette. That’s what Kristina says, anyway . . .’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘About half past twelve, perhaps a bit later.’

  ‘And who was still up at that point, I mean when Robert went out?’

  ‘I think it must just have been Kristina and Henrik. Kristoffer says—’

  ‘Just a moment. Who’s Kristoffer?’

  ‘Ebba and Leif’s younger son. Well, you’ll get a chance t
o meet them all later . . .’

  ‘I see. So what does Kristoffer say?’

  ‘He says he went up to bed just after half past twelve. And Robert, Kristina and Henrik were still there . . . well, here in the living room.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti nodded and jotted something in his notebook.

  ‘And Kristina?’

  ‘They went back to Stockholm yesterday.’

  ‘What time yesterday?’

  ‘Early in the morning.’

  ‘But you discussed Robert’s disappearance with her on Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes of course. Though it took us a while to notice he was gone. And it was the big day, as well. People coming round with presents and so on . . .’

  ‘When did you notice he was missing? Robert, that is.’

  Mr and Mrs Hermansson looked at each other. Karl-Erik’s brow furrowed and then smoothed out again.

  ‘Around lunchtime, maybe . . .’

  ‘At first, we assumed he’d gone out for a walk during the morning,’ his wife added. ‘It was later in the afternoon that I discovered he hadn’t slept in his bed at all.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti made some more notes. Drank some more coffee. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We might have to go into all this in slightly more detail eventually. First I must try to get an overview of what happened.’

  ‘It’s incomprehensible,’ said Karl-Erik Hermansson with a heavy sigh. ‘Completely and utterly incomprehensible.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti made no comment, but inside he was starting to feel that this was an interpretation he could certainly subscribe to. At least for the time being.

  Completely and utterly incomprehensible.

  ‘I shall talk to the Grundt family afterwards, of course,’ he said. ‘But first I’d like to hear what you two can tell me about Henrik.’

  It took twenty-five minutes for the Hermanssons to tell the inspector about Henrik Grundt and his disappearance. In Gunnar Barbarotti’s notebook, however, it amounted to just six lines.