The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  As for Robert, they had reached a similar impasse. Gunnar Barbarotti had lost count of the number of people they had talked to in Kymlinge these past weeks – it must have been getting on for two hundred – but he knew all too well what the result was.

  Zilch. When Robert Hermansson left the town of his childhood fifteen to sixteen years ago, he also seemed to have cut all ties. Not a single one of those asked so far had been in touch with the missing reality TV personality even once in the course of the past decade. Or so they claimed.

  We’re stuck, thought Inspector Barbarotti. We’re as stuck as hell.

  And like some kind of inverted confirmation of his statement, at that moment an air hostess came by and pointed out that he had forgotten to fasten his safety belt.

  Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson battled her way up Hagendalsvägen. The wind was blowing straight at her, coming from the north-west, it was minus twelve and if she didn’t get indoors soon, she thought she would die.

  Perhaps not such a bad way to go, all things considered. Sinking to the icy pavement between the housing association office and Bellis the florist’s and taking her last breath on a dark and freezing January afternoon. It was hard to say what it was that had kept her clinging to life this past month, really hard. Ever since that terrible Christmas week she had felt as though she didn’t really exist, as if her soul had been sucked out of her body leaving only a shell, this brittle, scraggy, decrepit ghost of skin and bones that was now struggling the last few metres to Maggie’s Hairdresser’s up at the corner of Kungsgatan – not comprehending why on earth she hadn’t phoned to cancel her appointment, which she had made as the usual matter of course on her last visit.

  But never mind, she didn’t comprehend much of anything else that carried on happening either: not why she got up in the mornings, nor why she went out shopping for food for lunch and dinner, nor why she spent an hour doing a Spanish course with Karl-Erik every evening between nine and ten – the items of vocabulary went fluttering through her head like strange birds, in one ear, out of the other, not to mention the verb forms. Before going to bed she took a sleeping tablet that made her sleep for precisely five hours; she woke between four and half past, trying to prolong those absolutely blank seconds after waking, when her mind was still wiped clean. When she did not remember what had happened, scarcely even knew who she was, but the seconds were never more than seconds, and sometimes even less.

  And then she would lie there on her side with her hands thrust between her knees – turned away from her husband and from her entire life – while she stared over at the window and the sighing radiator and the sad curtains, waiting for a dawn that felt as distant as the answer to the question of what had happened to her son and her grandson on those dreadful days in December, when her soul had been sucked out of her body leaving this decrepit ghost of . . . and that was how the thoughts flapped round and round in her head like birds of a different feather, exhausted birds who came and went, came and went, and how could one possibly tell the difference between one morning and the next, tell one awakening from the first, or the eighth? That too was a question that did not seem the least bit inclined to find itself an answer.

  She opened the door and stepped inside. Saw that all four chairs were occupied, but Maggie Fahlén nodded to her to take a seat, it would only be a few minutes. She hung up her hat and coat, sat down in the small, tubular steel armchair and picked up a six-month-old women’s weekly magazine with a summertime picture of Princess Victoria on the front cover. She was smiling broadly to reveal an abundance of shiny teeth and did not look particularly bright, noted Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson, but then perhaps she wasn’t, poor girl?

  ‘So, tell me honestly, how are you doing, Rosemarie dear?’ started Maggie, once she was seated in the chair, glowering at her big, smooth face in the pitiless mirror. ‘It was simply dreadful, what happened. Have you heard anything?’

  That was two questions and one comment in the same breath, and Rosemarie stifled a sudden impulse to make her excuses and set off into the cold again. Apologize for the fact that the Hermanssons in Allvädersgatan were always causing such a commotion – first one thing and then another, television and newspapers and all that – but Maggie was ahead of her; she had been talking away since first thing in the morning, an inexhaustible and tireless commentary on all things great and small, in Kymlinge and out in the world. In the present, the past and the future. The hereafter too, if the customer favoured that sort of thing.

  ‘Who in heaven’s name cut this for you last time?’ she said, raising her eyebrows to Rosemarie in the mirror.

  ‘It was . . . er, a new girl, I think,’ Rosemarie tried to remember. ‘She might just have been filling in for somebody who was off sick, I can’t really re—’

  ‘Almgren,’ Maggie cut in. ‘Jane Almgren, oh yes. My God, the state she left the customers in, it was a good job she didn’t stay any longer. Well, I would have sent her packing anyway, even if Kathrine hadn’t come back so quickly.’

  ‘Oh, ah, right,’ said Rosemarie Hermansson. ‘Well, I’m not sure – this one was a sort of dark blonde, I think.’

  ‘That was her,’ confirmed Maggie, snipping the air angrily with her scissors a couple of times. ‘Claimed she was a trained hairdresser and everything . . . and maybe she was, what do I know, I mean they let all sorts of people through these days. And Kathrine had rung in that morning to say it was appendicitis, so what’s a poor girl from Hudiksvall supposed to do, with only two weeks to go to Christmas Eve?’

  Hudiksvall, thought Rosemarie in confusion. Wasn’t Maggie born and bred . . . wasn’t she the daughter of the old caretaker Underström over at . . . ?

  ‘It’s just a saying,’ came the explanation, before she had time to ask. ‘I don’t know where it comes from . . . well, from Hudik I suppose, when you come to think about it. But she only lasted three days, that Jane, then Kathrine came back – to think that they don’t let you stay in for a couple of days even for an appendix any more, but I was jolly glad of it, of course. Anyway, I’m going to give you a hundred kronor discount today, Rosemarie, don’t let anybody say Maggie doesn’t take care of her customers. How would you like it?’

  ‘However you like,’ said Rosemarie, shutting her eyes. ‘Just a trim, you know.’

  ‘Though she lives here in town, apparently,’ Maggie went on as she inserted her comb into Rosemarie’s greying locks. ‘I’d never come across her before, but the other day she was in Gunder’s buying herring – maybe she’s got a cat. I couldn’t care less if she’s got a cat or not, as long as she never sets foot in here again to take her scissors to my customers.’

  ‘I remember chatting to her . . .’ said Rosemarie, so as not to seem impolite. ‘She was pleasant enough. God, I’m so tired, does it matter if I doze off while you’re doing me?’

  ‘You sleep, my dear,’ replied Maggie. ‘And just close your ears if you think I’m nattering on too much. My Arne says I’ll natter myself to death one day. Would you like me to wash it first?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Rosemarie sighed drowsily. ‘That would be rather nice, actually.’

  24

  You could get two human bodies in a freezer.

  She would never have thought it. And there was still room for a couple of packets of ice cream and bags of frozen berries on the top shelf.

  One body, certainly, but two? It almost seemed a bit odd. She had tried her hand at many professions, and she suddenly remembered she had also spent a couple of weeks standing in for a maths teacher at an upper-secondary school. She lied and said she had a degree, and nobody checked, as usual. Eight or ten years ago, a suburb to the west of Stockholm; she couldn’t remember the name and it hadn’t gone particularly well. One afternoon the teaching team had got together to set a common test, and she’d sat there feeling embarrassed and stupid because she couldn’t contribute anything; now she knew exactly which problem she would ask the pupils to solve.

  You have two dead bodies.
They weigh x and y kilos. You have a freezer with a capacity of 250 litres. How many pieces must you cut the bodies into for them to fit into it?

  She sat at the kitchen table, looking out into the street. It was evening, a raw, grey, windy January evening, and the people out and about were huddled over their supermarket bags and dogs. But there weren’t many of them; most were sensible enough to stay inside. She had cleaned the whole flat. There wasn’t a speck of dust left, and she had even wiped the skirting boards with a damp cloth soaked in Ajax. She had showered and washed her hair. She had spoken to her mother on the phone, focused on all the positive things in life that she liked to hear about.

  Everything was in brilliant balance.

  Her mother had been admitted again, but she herself was still out. Signed off sick for a month at a time, that was how it had been since the summer. They were always changing doctors up at the hospital, and each new one gave her a month, the same old medication and sessions with this or that therapist attached to the care in the community programme. The therapists came and went, too.

  It worked well for her. Nobody was really in control, she lived on the margins and got by on her social security payments. The inactivity gave her time to think and plan.

  Consider whether she needed one more. Whether she should tackle Germund, too.

  Or would Mahmot be satisfied that she had already achieved atonement? It wasn’t easy to know, he didn’t always make things as plain as one might have wished, Mahmot.

  The first one had been an easy decision. He was a pig. She hadn’t hesitated for a moment. No balance was possible in the world while he remained alive.

  The second had come to her in a sudden and rather funny way. She’d had no idea what a force of evil he represented, not before he was suddenly there, like a thorn in her flesh. Mahmot had only had to whisper the word in her ear: kill, and she had realized that this, this was just the right way to untie the knot.

  I want my children back, she had been bold enough to demand. All in good time, Mahmot whispered. All in good time you will get everything back. I have big plans for you, Jane, and have I ever disappointed you?

  No, o great Mahmot, she mumbled as she caught sight of a little mark and started to give the oak-veneer tabletop an extra polish with the palms of her hands, soft, circling movements, but I haven’t got room for another one in the freezer. I’ve got to be practical, too, not just indulge in the lovely, passionate things all the time. I’ve got to find Germund and my children, they’ve taken my children away from me, Mahmot. They’re hiding from me, I don’t know where they are.

  That is good, my girl, whispered Mahmot. Do not think about it now. Close your eyes, and I shall step forward and kiss your brow and make my home in your fingers. You know what I can do when I reside there?

  Thank you, great Mahmot, she whispered in her arousal. Thank you, o thank you! I wish all men were dead and there was only You. Do you want me to . . . ?

  He did not answer, but she still knew how she should proceed.

  THREE

  AUGUST

  25

  Ebba Hermansson Grundt is dreaming.

  She dreams she is carrying her son Henrik. She has had the same dream on a number of nights all through the summer, and it is so painful.

  He is heavy, her son. He is hanging from her collarbone, dangling inside her body; between her heart and her stomach is a big empty space that she never knew she had inside her.

  He is hanging in two Co-op carrier bags, green-and-white plastic, and he has been chopped into little pieces, her son Henrik.

  It isn’t easy carrying your adult child in pieces in the dog days of summer, and when Ebba wakes in a cold sweat at dawn, she clasps her hands and prays to God. She never believed in God, all her life, but she still asks for his help after these dreams. There is really nothing else to try.

  She is no longer working. For the first few months without Henrik, she stuck to her usual timetable. All through January and February, and a little way into March. Her hospital colleagues were astonished. How can a woman who has lost her son – or whose son is missing, at any rate – just carry on as normal? Operation after operation, ward round after ward round, case conference after case conference, and ten to fifteen hours’ overtime every week. As if nothing had happened. How is it possible? What kind of person must it take?

  But then she met Benita Ormson, her old friend from university, who had been possessed of the same capacities and brilliant prospects as Ebba when they were medical students in Uppsala; her only real rival, in fact. They had taken it in turns to come top and second in every single exam: anatomy, cell biology, internal medicine, surgery, infection, gynaecology – but Benita chose psychiatry as her specialism after their compulsory stint as general doctors, surprising many by her choice of this low-status option. Perhaps there had been depths and dimensions to that quiet, dark-haired young woman from Tornedalen that no one had really grasped. Not even Ebba; when they found themselves at the same weekend conference in Dalarna in the middle of March, it was the first time they had met for six . . . no, seven years.

  And in Benita’s arms, Ebba Hermansson Grundt finally crumbled. On the eighty-third day after her son disappeared, she broke down, and it felt like a parachute jump without a parachute.

  It has been five months now. Since 12 March she has not worked a single day. Not a single hour. Every morning, Leif goes off to the Co-op and Kristoffer to school, just as usual, but Ebba is in internal exile. Twice a week she sees a therapist, twice a month a psychiatrist. The latter is not Benita Ormson, which is a disadvantage; in Benita Ormson’s care she could recover and move on with what she now needs to move on with – under the somnolent guidance of Erik Segerbjörk, she will get nowhere at best. You’re a lemur, Erik, she confided in him during one of their sessions, but it was just water off the back of the foolish duck he was, and he smiled kindly beneath his beard and gave a few lazy blinks.

  Although to be honest, she has no desire to move on. Or at least not in the direction envisaged by psychiatric science.

  But she gets on better with the therapist, a hatchet-faced woman of around sixty. She is intelligent, listens in moderation, and has a sense of humour. Moreover, she has no children of her own which, Ebba discovered almost immediately, is a distinct advantage. It puts the emotional side on a firmer footing; she’s not sure why it should be so – but she does not under any circumstances want to sit and talk to another woman with a son or a daughter who, in principle, could disappear. It would be improper.

  Benita Ormson has no children, either. They talk on the phone once a week, on average. Ebba Hermansson Grundt can’t complain about lack of backup. She is getting all the support one could reasonably expect from those around her and from the hospital system. She has a network, a word she secretly detests.

  But none of it brings her a millimetre closer to getting better, because that is not what is at stake here. Ebba doesn’t want to get better.

  She wants her son back. If he is dead, she wants his body back so she can bury him in the cemetery.

  If someone has killed him, she also wants to get hold of that person.

  It is as simple as that. She could not care less about anything else.

  Not Leif, not Kristoffer.

  Make no demands of me, she thinks. She does not say it, but she thinks it. You keep to yourselves, Henrik and I will keep to ourselves; please respect the rules of the game. It is not Ebba who wrote these rules; they are a fundamental base that she will not and cannot depart from by the force of her own strength and will; it is not a question of priorities, not a question of putting one child before the other, not at all. Leif and Kristoffer belong together in the same self-evident way. That’s how it has always been. Whenever they played partnership whist or Monopoly in teams of two, when they were cooking or doing a pile of washing up. Whenever they went out on a family ski trip. Ebba and Henrik, Leif and Kristoffer, and that – that is why this lost son has left a hole so much, so infinit
ely larger in his mother’s soul than in his father’s or brother’s. Leif and Kristoffer know it as well as she does. They do not talk about it, there is no need.

  But it is so painful to dream about those Co-op carrier bags dangling from her collarbone, swinging from side to side in that space filled with absence inside her, which just seems to get bigger and more desolate with every passing hour. Every day and week and month; this Monday in the dog days it is 244 days since her fortieth birthday, and every day, each and every one of those unbearable days and nights that has passed, is so immutably like all the rest.

  I know I’m insane, she sometimes thinks, but that is a label of no interest whatsoever. Leif and Kristoffer treat her with a different sort of attention from the way they used to; she can see it, register it, but it is of no importance. Only one thing is of any importance, one single thing. She must get her son back. She must – if nothing else, she must find out what has happened to him. The uncertainty is the worst thing of all.

  The uncertainty and the lack of action.

  Take the matter into one’s own hands, then, thinks Ebba Hermansson Grundt, and this is at least a fairly new thought; not something that has been with her through all those days, through all that darkness.

  The idea that she must do her share. That here lies the only solution which can stop the empty space from growing.

  For God helps those who help themselves. This truth has certainly been pulsating through her for a number of days, and on this particular morning, when she gets up to a pale August day with a sparse covering of cloud, she knows it is time to get started. A mother looking for her lost son, that’s what this is all about. A mother and a son. Nothing else.