The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  Gunnar Barbarotti said he thought they were sensible to stay on for now, and offered his assurances that the police were mobilizing all available resources to get to the bottom of what had happened.

  That was a modified version of the truth, of course. What was actually happening was that they were waiting for tip-offs from Detective General Public and for telephone-traffic data from the mobile phone operators – Christmas had apparently held up that detail too; it was generally quicker – and that Sorrysen, assisted by Lindström and Hegel, was busily going through the lists of conceivable acquaintances of Robert Hermansson. Late on the afternoon of Christmas Day, Gunnar Barbarotti received a report on progress with the latter, and it was as unambiguous as it was negative. None of the thirteen people interviewed to date (the four labelled ‘close’ plus nine from the class list – all still living in the locality and proving easy to contact) had had any idea Robert had been visiting Kymlinge. That was what they claimed, at any rate, and Sorrysen said he hadn’t the slightest reason to doubt their statements.

  So that was that. Gunnar Barbarotti also asked Rosemarie Hermansson if they had said anything at all about Robert and Henrik coming to stay in the run-up to Christmas – told any non-family members, that was to say. She conferred briefly with her husband and then came back on the line to say neither she nor Karl-Erik had advertised their plans widely. Certainly not. But people naturally came to know about them anyway, somehow.

  At school, for example. She assumed. News always tended to float up to the surface there, sooner or later. Bad news especially.

  But had they kept a low profile where Robert was concerned, Gunnar Barbarotti wanted to know. Yes, admitted Mrs Hermansson, they had kept a low profile with Robert.

  He thanked her and rang off. He didn’t feel he had learnt anything, but he was used to that. He took the remaining piece of sushi and went back to Pete Dexter.

  On Boxing Day, Sara felt well enough to get dressed, clean her room and go out for a walk with a friend, and Gunnar Barbarotti decided to give Eva Backman a call. His colleague had now had four whole days in the bosom of her family and might be in need of a change. Even if she had not been exposed to a constant diet of unihockey.

  An hour and a cup of coffee at the Stork, for example? There was a case on which he’d be very glad of Backman’s opinion.

  Eva Backman accepted immediately. Willy and the kids were off to the cinema anyway, she said, so she needn’t even feel guilty. Gunnar Barbarotti couldn’t decide whether she was lying or not, but his need to talk to somebody with a bit of sense about the events at Alllvädersgatan was so pressing that he pushed aside any misgivings.

  They sat over their coffee for an hour and three quarters at Cafe Stork. He laid out the facts of the case and Inspector Backman listened with her hands folded and her eyelids characteristically half-closed; they had been working together for almost eight years now and he knew this did not mean his colleague had fallen asleep. On the contrary, the hazy look in her eyes meant she was paying very close attention.

  ‘Freaky as hell,’ she said when he had finished.

  ‘You reckon?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘Yeah. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. Any ideas?’

  ‘Gunnar Barbarotti shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble. I haven’t any ideas.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘None at all.’

  Eva Backman applied herself for a while to collecting crumbs from the cake plate with a dampened forefinger. ‘How do they seem?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The family. The whole gang. I mean, you get the sense . . .’

  She stopped short.

  ‘What is it you get the sense of, Eva?’

  Eva Backman said nothing but took out a cigarette packet.

  ‘You’ve started smoking again?’

  ‘No, that’s a misconception. I just look at the packet for a while, and anyway, you can’t smoke indoors any more and I’ve no intention of going out into the gale on that balcony.’

  ‘Sorry. Well, what was it you got a sense of?’

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Eva Backman, lowering her voice and leaning across the table. ‘If we find a woman murdered, we check whether she was married. If it turns out she is, we bring in the husband. In eight cases out of ten, he did it. Don’t look in your neighbour’s garden when you can smell the rat in your own. It’s all in the family. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Do you think this hasn’t occurred to me?’

  ‘Good, but I was a bit worried.’ She leant back, took a cigarette out of the packet and sniffed it.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Looking and smelling,’ said Eva Backman. ‘That’s not harmful. What were you saying?’

  ‘I can’t really remember,’ said Barbarotti with slight irritation. ‘But I think I was trying to explain that it’s a bit hard to sew this together into a family matter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Would Rosemarie Hermansson kill her own son and grandson and bury them out in the garage, is that what you’re trying to say? She’s a retired needlework teacher, for heaven’s sake, Eva. Needlework teachers don’t go around murdering their nearest and dearest.’

  ‘She taught German, too. I had her for two years.’

  ‘That doesn’t make a scrap of bloody difference. Focus now, or you’ll have to pay for your own coffee.’

  ‘All right,’ said Eva Backman, putting away her cigarettes. ‘But I didn’t say Mrs Hermansson was behind this. I just pointed out that it could be worthwhile trying to unpick these family relationships a bit. That’s not worth arguing about, now is it?’

  Barbarotti gave a snort.

  ‘Do you seriously think one of the others abducted Robert and Henrik? If so, why? How?’

  Eva Backman shrugged. ‘OK, I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Just trying to be a bit constructive. What do you think, then?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti sighed and threw up his hands in resignation. ‘I told you. I don’t think anything.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Eva Backman, and for a moment a gentle look came into her eyes, as if she wanted to console him. It was soon gone. ‘But you’ve at least got a plan of action, I suppose? Even when we don’t know what to do, we have to come up with something. Otherwise we just get dozy and lethargic.’

  ‘It’s always so uplifting to talk to you,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘But yes, of course I’ve got a plan of action.’

  ‘Mhm?’

  ‘Does that mean you want to hear what it is?’

  ‘I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Well?’

  ‘The sister. Kristina.’

  ‘Got you.’

  ‘I’m off to Stockholm tomorrow. Robert’s flat, too, I thought.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Well, it can’t hurt to take a look. Erm, and then I’ll go on to Uppsala and try to make my entrée into student life.’

  ‘Bound to be lots going on in student life between Christmas and New Year,’ said Eva Backman with an indulgent smile.

  ‘Bound to be. I’m really looking forward to it.’

  ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Well, have a good trip.’

  ‘Haven’t been to Stockholm for a year,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  The detached house where Kristina Hermansson lived with her husband and son was in Musseronvägen in Old Enskede. It was a big old wooden villa, built in the 1920s or 1930s at a guess, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, and probably worth five million or more. A rapid calculation told him that his own flat in Kymlinge would fit beneath the rust-red tiles of the mansard roof five times.

  The husband, Jakob Willnius, still wasn’t home, but ought to be there within the hour, Kristina Hermansson informed him. He had asked to have a word with him as well, and the man had had no objection. Their son Kelvin was three houses along the street, with the childminder he shared with various other children, but as he was not yet two
, Gunnar Barbarotti decided to forego the questions in his case.

  They sat down in a large, glazed verandah with infrared heating, looking out over the garden. Kristina Hermansson was around thirty, with dark brown hair in a pageboy cut and, he thought, attractive. He couldn’t ever aspire to a wife and a set-up like this, he noted soberly. He had never come anywhere near, and he wondered why this lower-class perspective was presenting itself just now; he was not in the habit of falling into emotional trenches, but there was something about the blue dusk falling swiftly over the old fruit trees out there in the garden, about the creak of the basket chairs, about the exquisite, delicate cups she served the tea in – Meissen china, if he was not mistaken – that made him feel like a country bumpkin.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should have made you a sandwich, too, but . . .’

  He shook his head. ‘I had something on the train, it’s fine.’

  ‘. . . it’s really taken it out of me, all that’s happened. It feels so unreal.’

  She rubbed a little mark off the table with her thumb; it was an unconscious gesture, but it suddenly struck him that Kristina Hermansson was actually as much of a fish out of water in this setting as he was. The difference was that she had had a few years to get used to it.

  ‘You’ve got a beautiful home,’ he said. ‘How long have you lived here?’

  She calculated. ‘Four years . . . yes, it’ll be four years in April, in fact.’

  ‘Can you tell me about Henrik and Robert?’

  ‘Yes . . . what do you want to know?’

  He clasped his hands and regarded her gravely. ‘Anything at all that you feel might be important,’ he said.

  She sipped her tea but said nothing.

  ‘There must be a reason for their disappearance,’ he elaborated. ‘Possibly there are two reasons, entirely different, but it’s too early to make any judgement on that yet. I’m not particularly keen on coincidences. There’s an explanation – or it could be two – and if I knew what they were thinking and how they were feeling in the hours before they went missing, well, then presumably I’d also comprehend where they’ve gone. Or at least have a vague idea. Do you see?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Of the people who were there at your parents’ house, you must be the one who was closest to Robert. That’s my impression, anyway. Do you agree?’

  ‘I . . . yes, you’re right,’ she said, sitting up a little straighter. ‘We’ve always liked each other, Robert and I. I know most people consider him an idiot, but I don’t care about that. He is as he is, but it’s always worked between the two of us, somehow. He lived here with us for a while, actually.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. He came home after a few years in Australia and needed somewhere to crash. It was just for a few months.’

  ‘And Henrik?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What sort of relationship did you have with Henrik?’

  ‘I’ve always liked him, too. Him and Kristoffer. There was a period of a few years when I would step in as a kind of reserve mum for them occasionally; my sister has a capacity for devoting a bit too much of her time to her job. Though of course we haven’t seen that much of each other recently.’

  ‘And what are relations like between Robert and Henrik?’

  She thought about it, but only for a moment. ‘Non-existent. No, I don’t think they’ve ever been at all close. Are you asking this because you imagine there could be a link between . . . well, their disappearances?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘No,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I don’t believe there’s any link. Though that just means two mysteries instead of one, so I don’t really know . . .’

  ‘Let’s try to confine ourselves to observations rather than speculation,’ he suggested. ‘And let’s start with Monday evening – you stayed up talking to Robert and Henrik, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And you went outside and had a serious talk to Robert after he insulted your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know that we . . . well yes, we did, of course.’

  ‘What did the two of you say, exactly?’

  ‘Not that much. He said he felt awful and almost couldn’t bear being in the house. Said he felt ashamed. I told him to pull himself together and try to play along. It’s worked before. I asked him if he had any plans for the future, and he said he thought he’d go away somewhere and finish writing his novel.’

  ‘His novel?’

  ‘Robert’s had this novel on the go for . . . well, I don’t really know when the project started. Ten years ago, perhaps. I suppose he thought it would be a convenient time for sitting alone in some corner of the world and getting the book finished.’

  ‘I see. He never said anything about taking his own life?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, he didn’t. I’ve wondered about that, of course, but I don’t think he was suicidal . . . or is. He’s not the type, although one can never know. But he’s been through quite a lot, Robert, and I don’t remember him ever talking along those lines. Or being afraid that he might do it. He knows . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  She gave a laugh. ‘I think he knows I’d be absolutely furious with him if he took the coward’s way out. That I’d come and haunt him in the kingdom of the dead and hold him to account and so on.’

  ‘Your mother said she thought he’d been in therapy after that TV business. Do you know if that’s correct?’

  ‘I think he went to see a psychologist a few times.’

  ‘You don’t happen to have his or her name?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti nodded. ‘And Henrik?’

  ‘You mean was Henrik . . . was Henrik likely to take his own life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, why should he be? Of course, I’ve thought about that, too, but it seems totally absurd. If Robert or Henrik – or both – had killed themselves, why haven’t they been found? Bodies can’t vanish into thin air, can they?’

  ‘A person could jump into Kymlinge River,’ suggested Gunnar Barbarotti tentatively. ‘But we haven’t started dragging it yet. We think we need some kind of reason first. So what I’d like to know now, if you don’t mind, is what you and Henrik talked about on Monday evening. And how he seemed. Have you thought any more about it since our phone call?’

  ‘I’ve done little else,’ said Kristina Hermansson. ‘But I’m getting nowhere. Like I said, we mostly talked about things we remembered from when he and Kristoffer were younger; I was with them quite a lot back then. A bit about how he was finding Uppsala, too, but not that much . . . and, er, he might have mentioned a girl, I think her name’s Jenny, but I didn’t get the impression it was anything very serious. I’m – I’m sorry, but I can’t invent things that don’t exist.’

  ‘And on the Tuesday?’

  ‘We didn’t talk much on Tuesday. And never just the two of us on our own. It was Dad and Ebba’s big day, lots going on, and loads of people there all the time. I didn’t really think about Henrik very much – though he did sing for us at dinner. He’s got a lovely voice, Henrik.’

  ‘What time did you and your husband go back to the hotel, roughly? You all went together that evening, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we did. It must have been soon after half past eleven.’

  ‘Did you say goodbye to Henrik?’

  ‘Yes – yes, of course I did.’

  ‘And you didn’t notice anything in particular?’

  ‘About Henrik?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, why would I have? There was nothing unusual about him. We were all busy talking about where Robert had got to, of course. We’d sort of ignored it during dinner, so as not to spoil things for Dad and Ebba. But once we left the table we started discussing where he could be. I think Mum was the most anxious.’

  ‘And how about you?’

  ‘Well of course I wondered. But like I said, I
thought he’d bottled out, basically. Found some old friend, and I expected him to turn up the next day.’

  ‘I see. And then you went to the hotel and the next morning you all drove up to Stockholm?’

  ‘Yes. We’d vaguely planned to drop in at Mum and Dad’s for breakfast, but it turned out Jakob had to get back for a meeting around twelve o’clock, so we had to leave earlier.’

  ‘And when did you find out Henrik had gone missing?’

  ‘Not until we got home. Mum rang and told us . . . that is, she said they didn’t know where he was. It didn’t sound all that serious to start with . . .’

  ‘But Robert was still missing. Surely they must have . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course. Mum was pretty shaken, but I think she was trying to act more calmly than she actually felt.’

  ‘But it wasn’t until Wednesday evening that your father contacted the police. Can you explain why he waited so long?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Kristina Hermansson. ‘I’m afraid there’s a very simple explanation. It hit Dad terribly hard, that business with Robert and the television programme. He really didn’t want Robert in the spotlight again. I think the others had a job persuading him to ring at all.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Yes, well, perhaps that doesn’t sound so odd, in the circumstances.’

  He shifted in the basket chair. Drank some tea. Although, he thought, that just makes the rest of it seem all the more peculiar. I’m getting no further forward with this.

  Not a centimetre.

  His conversation with Jakob Willnius took half an hour. He stayed put in the same basket chair and looked out of the same mullioned window. Jakob Willnius had a glass of white wine, while Barbarotti stuck to the tea.

  The pickings were sparse. Very sparse. Television producer Willnius confirmed his wife’s account of what had happened during their stay in Kymlinge on every point, and as expected he had no insight whatsoever into the characters of the two missing individuals. He had never even met Henrik before – and had scarcely exchanged more than ten words with him on this occasion. As for Robert, he had had him to stay in the house for a month or so, a couple of years ago, but they hadn’t really got into any deep conversations, Jakob Willnius explained with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. Robert was Kristina’s raison d’être, not his.