The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  Kristoffer turned out to be a fairly quiet boy. He was fourteen, and Barbarotti could sense that he had grown up largely in the shadow of his brother, five years his senior. Henrik was plainly one of those richly gifted young people who succeeded at everything they did, that had been made unmistakably clear to him – whereas Kristoffer seemed to be, well, what? Certainly not a youngster going astray, but an extremely average fourteen-year-old.

  He had shared a room with Henrik during the stay at their grandparents’ house; Gunnar Barbarotti had been upstairs to see it, a cramped little galley with two beds, a chest of drawers and wallpaper so revolting that he wondered whether people who hung that sort of thing on their walls could really be in full possession of their faculties.

  On the subject of his brother’s disappearance, Kristoffer had little to add. He had fallen asleep just after half past twelve on the night in question, and at that point Henrik was still lying in his bed. He hadn’t noticed him get up and leave the room, he hadn’t heard a phone ring; when he got up the next morning he had assumed his brother had woken first and was in the bathroom or down in the kitchen.

  No, he couldn’t remember Henrik speaking on his mobile at any time in their Kymlinge visit. He might have sent a text or two, but he couldn’t even swear to that.

  They had chatted a bit, of course, but not a great deal. A bit about what it was like being in Uppsala, a bit about Uncle Robert, but nothing had been said to offer any kind of clue about the disappearance. Either of them.

  Barbarotti got a general sense that father and son enjoyed a good and easy-going relationship; the boy was tense of course, but as far as he could judge, this had nothing to do with his father’s presence during the conversation. But he still decided, as they were talking, that he ought to have a session with Kristoffer on his own in the next day or two, for another, slightly more probing interview.

  Partly because of the weariness he had detected in himself, partly because it couldn’t hurt.

  Unless, of course, things resolved themselves happily soon. Leif announced that they had no intention of going back up to Sundsvall until Henrik turned up.

  Just in case anyone was imagining otherwise.

  By the time Gunnar Barbarotti was standing in the hall with all five family members in front of him, it was half past five and he was searching in vain for something optimistic – or comforting, at least – to say as he left, but here, too, his own fatigue, exacerbated by an impending headache, threw a spanner in the works. All he could think of was:

  ‘We’ll keep on working on this and see how things go.’

  Well, he thought in the car on the way home, I certainly didn’t promise too much there.

  Sara didn’t seem any better. She was asleep in bed when Gunnar Barbarotti peeped cautiously into her room; she was breathing heavily and wheezily through her open mouth, and for a moment he felt terror grip him.

  What if this were the price? God had heard his prayer, but demanded a sacrifice: his daughter’s life. It was all some malevolent Old Testament story.

  He held on tight to the door frame, watching her and feeling his headache grow into a pulsating cloud under the top of his skull. I’m insane, he thought. I’ve got to stop playing with the higher powers; this sort of bargaining just isn’t on, talk about hubris.

  But before anything else . . . before anything else I’ve got to get a couple of paracetamol down me before my head splits open.

  His time with the Hermansson family had sent his spirits to a really low ebb, there was no doubt about it. The flat smelt dank and dirty. There was a sickroom stuffiness in Sara’s bedroom and the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes. He hadn’t done any food shopping or thought about checking in with a doctor. In Barbarotti’s world, you took to your bed if you got ill. Slept yourself better and had plenty of fluids. That was all. But what if it was more serious than that, what if she needed some kind of medicine? What sort of father was he?

  He went over and sat down on the edge of the bed. He pushed back his daughter’s matted hair where it was plastered to her face, and laid his hand on her forehead.

  Sticky, as he already knew. But not as hot as this morning, he reckoned. She opened her eyes, looked at him for a moment and then closed them again.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Tired,’ she whispered.

  ‘Well, you just sleep, love,’ he said. ‘Have you had plenty to drink?’

  He had put two fresh glasses beside her bed before he left around two – water and grape juice – and she had drunk about half of each. She moved her head slightly, perhaps giving a sort of nod.

  ‘I’ll just pop and get some shopping from the Co-op. Be back in half an hour. Is that OK?’

  Another head movement. He stroked her cheek clumsily and left her.

  Simple domestic chores – with the emphasis naturally on looking after a sick daughter – kept him occupied for the rest of the evening. He found some candleholders and lit candles here and there, he played Mercedes Sosa over and over on the CD player; there weren’t many albums in the flat that they both liked, but Mercedes Sosa was one of them. He made an omelette with steamed vegetables, and Sara took two mouthfuls and said it was lovely. He took her temperature, which had gone down to 38.5. He asked about her symptoms and she said her throat hurt. She felt sort of weak and achy. Just wanted to sleep.

  He let her do so, once he had changed the bed and aired the place a little. Then he left the door of her room ajar, creating at least the illusion of being together – but as to that warm cocoon of settling in as darkness descends, and quietly anticipating Christmas with a bit of making and wrapping and some nuts and home-made toffee, they came nowhere near. Not remotely near. That was partly because the ingredients were lacking, of course: not just the nuts and the toffee but also the wherewithal to make and wrap. And anyone with the enthusiasm for that sort of activity; some things were simply better from a distance and in the imagination.

  But Mercedes Sosa and the candlelight did what they could. And the paracetamol had worked; his headache was gone. At around nine, Helena rang from up in Malmberget and reported a little tartly (but not as tartly as he had expected) that they were missed but that everyone was fine; the snow was two metres deep, it was minus twenty-five and her father seemed to be taking the situation in his stride. Gunnar Barbarotti had a word with each of his sons, five minutes each, and was told that Granny had made a gingerbread house that was as wonky as anything, and that they were going to ski down Dundret Mountain tomorrow. He said he was sorry he couldn’t be with them but they would get their presents at New Year instead of Christmas.

  After the call, he checked to see how things were with Sara. She was sleeping like a log. He took a beer out of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. He started reading through the notes of his conversations with the Hermansson family, and tried to visualize what had actually happened.

  It really wasn’t easy. Two people had vanished without trace from the same address at an interval of around twenty-four hours. None of those he had talked to had any idea where they could be.

  In the middle of the night, they had gone off somewhere. To the same place, perhaps? Could that be it?

  He found it hard to believe. All the information he had received seemed to point to Robert Hermansson and Henrik Grundt having very little to do with each other. They happened to be related, that was all; uncle and nephew, but none of the other family members were able to recall them so much as talking to one another on the Monday night, while they were still at the house in Allvädersgatan.

  Though both had sat up late, he reminded himself. If he had understood correctly, a quartet of them had stayed up longer, after the others retired for the night. Siblings Robert and Kristina, and siblings Kristoffer and Henrik Grundt. Then Robert Hermansson had gone out for a smoke and vanished.

  And the next night, Henrik Grundt had left his bed and vanished.

  That was how it appeared.

  Why? Gunn
ar Barbarotti shook his head in frustration and took a gulp of beer. It was a peculiar case all right. He felt there weren’t even any sensible questions to be asked.

  But hopefully, he thought, hopefully it would be possible to sketch out a plan of action, even so . . . How he would set about trying to get somewhere with all this.

  The missing persons alert was the first possibility, of course – an action that had already been taken; their pictures would be in the paper tomorrow and perhaps some insomniac local would have seen something. A glimpse of one or the other on their way to something as yet unknown in Kymlinge.

  It wasn’t entirely impossible, at any rate. One could always hope. But what would he himself, lead investigator Barbarotti – and thus far the only police officer (except perhaps Sorrysen) involved – do next?

  Loyal to his notebook and his usual procedures, Gunnar Barbarotti started drawing up a list.

  Ten minutes later he had come up with four points, all of which could be tackled the following day.

  1) Make phone contact with those present at Allvädersgatan who had not yet been questioned: Jakob Willnius and Kristina Hermansson. Especially the latter. Decide poss. time to meet in person at a later date.

  2) People Robert Hermansson knows in Kymlinge? Which old friends might he still be in touch with? Talk to them.

  3) Interview Kristoffer Grundt again. If there’s anyone keeping quiet about something (consciously or unconsciously), it has to be him. The brothers shared a room and must have talked to each other quite a lot.

  4) Look into mobile phone traffic.

  That was it. And Sorrysen had presumably already started work on point four. Mobile phone traffic was Sorrysen’s area, that had become standard practice for some reason, but of course he would have to check his colleague was shouldering the task in this case, too.

  Because both Robert Hermansson and Henrik Grundt were equipped with mobiles. Naturally. Gunnar Barbarotti had read somewhere that there were more mobiles than people in the country. Fifteen years ago, there were more wolves than mobiles. It was what it was, there was a time for everything.

  He drank up his beer and checked the time. Twenty past ten. He got a clean tea towel out of the cupboard, wet it under cold running water, went in to see Sara and wiped her face with it. She woke with a start.

  ‘Dad, whatever are you doing?’

  ‘I’m helping my dear daughter with her evening ablutions,’ he explained kindly.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she groaned. ‘Give me some water to drink, don’t throw it in my face.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Tired,’ said Sara. ‘I had a dream about you.’

  ‘What?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to dream about?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ said Sara. ‘But it wasn’t very nice. You went out to buy something, and then you disappeared. I don’t like the idea of you disappearing.’

  ‘But I’m sitting right here,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘I can see that,’ said Sara with a wan smile. ‘And I’m grateful. And I’d be even more grateful if you brought me that water and let me get back to sleep.’

  ‘Right away, love,’ replied Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Right away.’

  19

  The day before Christmas Eve, heavy snow fell on Kymlinge and surrounding areas.

  Gunnar Barbarotti woke early and looked out of the bedroom window in amazement at a landscape that could just as easily have been Malmberget. Or Murmansk. A thick layer of white snow beneath a grey-black sky. Between the two, a whirl of movement. But still a sort of deathly stillness.

  He got up to fetch the newspaper from the hall. Popped his head round Sara’s door and saw that she was asleep and had drunk a whole glass of water and half her grape juice. He got himself a bowl of yogurt and a glass of juice from the kitchen and snuggled back into bed. He started to leaf through the newspaper.

  The piece about Robert Hermansson and Henrik Grundt was on page six. Two columns, with photos of both the men who had disappeared. The headline was short and sweet: MISSING.

  There was only a single line about one of them having appeared in the not unfamiliar television series Prisoners of Koh Fuk, and the piece said the police had no suspicions as yet that foul play lay behind either of the disappearances.

  Gunnar Barbarotti had not spoken to any journalists himself, and he wondered who had. Sorrysen or Asunander, presumably. And he wondered how long it would take for the tabloid evening newspapers to get hold of the story. Not very long, if they adopted their usual working methods. And then the headline would not stop at MISSING, he felt pretty certain of that. Mrs Hermansson in particular had tried insistently to enlist his help on this, but of course he had not been able to offer her any guarantees. The whole point of going to the press was to get the public involved, and if the public got involved, it was naturally impossible to exclude the tabloid press.

  Impossible, and perhaps not entirely desirable either, he had tried to explain. Normally, that was. However you looked at it, it was difficult not to allow that the mass media per se had a certain right to exist. For better or worse.

  So Gunnar Barbarotti had said. Mrs Hermansson had had to concede, and her husband had done the same, and Barbarotti hoped that at any rate those wretched reality TV commentators in the royal capital would not use the same epithet for Robert as they had done last time he was on the agenda. He also hoped they would consider themselves above having to come out to the sticks the day before Christmas Eve. Seeing as they now had vintage Christmas TV presenter Arne Weise and the whole holiday viewing schedule to analyse.

  But he knew full well it was no more than a pious hope. Come to that, hadn’t Arne Weise retired a few years ago? Or died? In some areas, Inspector Barbarotti was aware that he was painfully out-of-date. More wolf than mobile phone, you might say.

  He finished reading the paper and started planning his day. What should he do? He looked through the list he had written the night before, and decided to postpone his return visit to Allvädersgatan until the afternoon. Better to give them a little time and try to establish contact with the sister in Stockholm, to whom he had not yet spoken. And ring the station to assure himself they weren’t forgetting to let him know if any tip-offs came in. They ought to be well aware of that anyway, of course, but you never knew. If it was Jonsson on phone duty, there could be a delay of hours or even days, he knew from experience. Particularly with Christmas and suchlike in the offing.

  He got through to Sorrysen. No, no tip-offs had come in yet. Not even from old Hörtnagel, who was notorious for phoning in, whatever the subject. During that Soviet submarine scare in Hårsfjärden he had rung in several times to report periscopes in the River Kymlinge, and whenever there was an escaped prisoner on the loose anywhere in the land, Hörtnagel would generally have spotted him. He was Austrian and considered himself to have a considerably better overview of things than could be expected from simple Swedes with sluggish old peasant blood in their veins.

  ‘Maybe he died this autumn?’ suggested Gunnar Barbarotti. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask whether Sorrysen might also know if Arne Weise was still alive, but he kept it to himself.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sorrysen, keeping his voice flat. ‘He had his eighty-seventh birthday last week, and I saw him on skis in the town park an hour ago.’

  Barbarotti looked out of the window again. Perhaps going out for a ski wouldn’t be a bad idea for me, either, he thought. All that oxygen in the air and so on. ‘It would be good to know straight away, if anything does come in,’ he said.

  Sorrysen promised to see to it. He also promised to deal with the mobile phone traffic, having, as expected, already noted both the relevant numbers, and they ended the call. Gunnar Barbarotti stayed in bed a while longer and tried to remember whether he still owned a pair of skis these days, but he came to no conclusion. He assumed they’d disappeared at the time of his separation from Helena. Along with so much else.


  He got up and went into the shower. It was high time to get started on his day’s work.

  ‘Kristina Hermansson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Gunnar Barbarotti. I’m a detective inspector in Kymlinge.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s about your brother and nephew going missing. Have you got time to talk at the moment?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes of course.’

  She sounded muted and mournful. Her voice was quite faint and he assumed she was talking on a cordless handset quite a long way from its base unit. Or perhaps it was just that his own ears had had enough. News of his faraway Italian father was that he had been stone deaf for the past five years, so perhaps his son was also predisposed that way.

  ‘I’ll need to see you in person, too, for a more thorough talk. You and your husband. Is there a convenient time in the next few days?’

  ‘Of course. We’re spending Christmas here in Stockholm. How do you want . . . ?’

  ‘Let’s come back to that. But for now, I’ve got a few questions that you might be able to help me with.’

  He could hear her drinking something. Or maybe it was just interference from the meanders of his own ear canals.

  ‘Of course. I naturally want to do all I can to – to help shed light on this. It’s truly awful, I don’t understand what could have happened. Have you any idea where they’ve gone?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘No. I spoke to Mum late last night. She told me you came round, sir, and talked to . . . er, all the others.’

  ‘No need to be formal, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Sorry. Well yes, good.’

  He thought he could detect that she was not far from tears.

  ‘If we start with Monday night,’ he suggested. ‘I understand you sat up talking to the two missing persons after the others had gone to bed. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. It was me, Robert and Henrik . . . and Kristoffer. The others went to bed a bit earlier.’