by Håkan Nesser
He tried to hold onto those thoughts of Granny and the vicar and Benny Bjurling as long as he could – and of Uncle Robert, of course – but eventually he couldn’t do it any longer. Henrik slipped into his head through his right ear, and once he had ensconced himself there, he filled every nook and cranny. It was just the same as usual.
Hi, said Henrik. Here I am in your skull again.
Thanks, I noticed, replied Kristoffer.
You’ve no objection, I hope?
No, no, why would I?
I’m your brother, after all.
Yes, you’re my brother, after all.
Brothers have to stick together.
Exactly, Henrik.
In life and in death.
I know, but tell me one thing, Henrik.
Sure thing, brother.
Are you dead or alive?
That’s a good question.
Well, answer it then.
A good question, but a hard one. Not easy to find out.
Surely you must know if you’re alive or dead, though?
You might think so. How are you doing yourself, Kristoffer?
I don’t give a damn how I’m doing. But if you force your way into my skull and I let you stay there, then I want to know the state of play.
State of play?
Whether you’re alive or dead.
I realize that’s what you’re asking. But I’m afraid I’m prevented from answering your question.
But why? Mum’s losing her marbles, and Dad can’t go on much longer, either. If they at least knew where they stood, then maybe—
I get what you’re saying, Kristoffer, Henrik broke in, and it hurts me that things are like this for you all. But as I’ve tried to explain, I’ve got no say in the conditions that apply in current circumstances—
Current circumstances? Kristoffer’s mild irritation turned to anger. What sort of rubbish is that, the circumstances have been the same for ages now! And if you really want to know, I’m on the slippery slope now as well. Going right down. My school marks are dropping like a stone in a well, I’m drinking every week, and I’m actually pretty tired and fed up of you occupying me the whole time. I can’t put up with it for much—
I’m sorry, dear brother, but I’ve nowhere else to stay for the moment.
Eh?
Henrik sighed.
Because Mum’s so tied up with Robert. Granny’s one big tangle, there’s scarcely room for a postage stamp in there. Dad’s trying to swim through a whirlpool, you should keep an eye on him, Kristoffer, and at Kristina’s, everything’s closed up, as usual. Granddad, well, let’s leave him out of it, he’s gabbling something in Spanish.
Why is it closed at Kristina’s?
How should I know?
I thought you knew everything.
. . .
Wait, don’t go . . . no, you’re right, Dad really doesn’t look his normal self, what did you say he was trying to do?
Leif Grundt never noticed when he started to cry, but he became aware of it when the tears had been dripping onto his clasped hands for a while. At about the same time, he also felt himself slowly but surely being dragged down into bottomless despair. Yes, it really was just that – a sucking, bottomless whirlpool of despair – and for the first time in eight months he gave in and realized his son was dead. Of course, it was his black-sheep brother-in-law Robert lying up front in the oak veneer coffin of the second cheapest design, but it could just as well have been Henrik. His son was dead. Ebba’s and his firstborn son, Kristoffer’s brother. Dead, dead, dead – and it was no longer fitting for him, Co-op manager Leif Grundt, to believe anything else. To maintain the opposite. Not to his increasingly crazy wife, nor to God, nor to anyone else.
It was not fitting for Leif Grundt to be optimistic and strong any longer – to continue this wretched, desolate life day after day, hour after hour in some kind of absurd normality, as if there was still some kind of thread on which to fasten some kind of hope and meaning. Go to work every day, encourage the employees, joke with Kristoffer morning and evening, listen to how he had got on at school. Not let on that he knew the boy was secretly smoking and drinking beer . . . make sure there was food on the table, clothes were washed, bills were paid; all those little practical details and unbearably minute duties that were required to keep a family that had lost a son afloat – on an ever-shrinking, ever-thinning ice floe, until everything ultimately sank to the bottom and was reduced to nothing after all. He had not made love to his wife for nine months, had stopped even thinking about it. Life was at an end, it was as simple as that. It was over. They might just as well all go and lie down with Robert at the front.
Death. Why put it off? What was the point?
But then things went into reverse. In some remarkable way, they actually did. As inexorably as a cork, Leif Grundt floated up out of the whirlpool, drew the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose with a resolute trumpeting that made the vicar at the front take an unplanned pause for thought. Because the one who first lays claim to madness as their domain, thought Co-op manager Leif Grundt – and Ebba had indubitably done that – then has the right to it for all time. The sole right.
When one grows weak, the other has to grow strong.
It was an incontrovertible truth and it was bloody unfair, thought Leif Grundt, but then he found himself thinking of what he had heard Bishop Tutu say on television once.
Or was it Mandela himself?
Those who have the strength have a duty to go on finding it.
Because that was exactly it. To go on finding the strength.
But he had been swept round in the whirlpool for the first time.
He blew his nose again, a little more discreetly, and this time the vicar was prepared.
‘That Olle Rimborg,’ said Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson.
‘Yes,’ said Kristoffer Grundt. ‘Who?’
‘Olle Rimborg, I took him for German, I remember now.’
‘We’d better be moving,’ said Karl-Erik. ‘We’ve got to get over to the church hall now.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Rosemarie. ‘I’m talking to Henrik – I mean Kristoffer – yes, that was his name, and he was a redhead even back then, now I come to think of it. Rimborg. Lively boy, on the whole.’
‘Er, yes?’ said Kristoffer.
‘He works at the hotel now.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s so much going on with all sorts of things nowadays, but he said he came back in the night.’
‘What?’
‘Right then, off we go,’ said Karl-Erik.
‘He came back in the night. Jakob, that is. Do you hear that, Kristoffer? That dreadful night when your brother disappeared – it wasn’t him we just buried, it was Robert, but Henrik is missing. He said it when we were there to what’s it called? Check in? Olle Rimborg, that is. Kristina’s husband came back at three o’clock, he said. They were in the same class, he and Kristina, but I didn’t teach Kristina at school of course, she didn’t do German and you shouldn’t teach your own children anyway . . .’
‘Look, it’s raining now as well,’ said Karl-Erik impatiently. ‘What in the world are you going on about? You’ll have to excuse Granny, Kristoffer, she’s a bit confused.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Kristoffer.
‘I should ask Kristina about it, definitely,’ Rosemarie went on. ‘I don’t know why he said it. Don’t interrupt me all the time, Karl-Erik. And you ought to trim your nose hair, too, couldn’t you have thought of that with this being a funeral and everything? And there really was far too much of that vicar. He must have been . . . Well, how tall was he? What do you think, Kristoffer?’
‘A hundred and ninety-eight centimetres,’ said Kristoffer.
‘Here comes Ebba to chivvy us along,’ said Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson. ‘Blistering barnacles, we’d better step on it. Where are we going?’
‘We’re going to the church hall for coffee, Mummy,’ said Ebba
Hermansson Grundt. ‘Whatever that’s supposed to achieve.’
‘Of course, I know we’re going to the church hall, Karl-Erik keeps rabbiting on about it,’ her mother declared firmly. ‘Those pills I’ve got are really something. I feel as bright as a button. So, you reckon a hundred and ninety-eight, Henrik, well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there . . . I mean Kristoffer. Olle Rimborg, that was it, I remember that, too. Don’t you go forgetting it, Kristoffer! But where’s Kristina got to?’
31
‘All right then,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘What have you come up with? Take it slowly, please, so you don’t have to go through it again. I’ve just come from a funeral and I’m even more dull-witted than usual.’
Gerald Borgsen stretched the right-hand corner of his mouth a centimetre, to show he’d appreciated the self-deprecation. He blinked a couple of times behind his lightly tinted glasses and started.
‘Quite a lot, actually,’ he said. ‘The most important thing first, maybe?’
Gunnar Barbarotti nodded.
‘Hrrm. It was Jane Almgren’s phone Robert Hermansson called the night he disappeared. And he had called her once before, a few days previously. We had that number, right back in December, but . . .’
‘Pay as you go,’ supplied Gunnar Barbarotti.
‘Spot on. And we didn’t get any further with it. Or we didn’t put sufficient resources into it, is probably how I should express it . . .’
It was a well-known fact that Sorrysen thought he was under-resourced. Gunnar Barbarotti tilted his head to one side, like that Finnish skier he still couldn’t remember the name of, and tried to look sympathetic.
‘There are over thirty million calls made every day in this country,’ Sorrysen went on. ‘From Robert Hermansson’s mobile, for example, at that point, if we focus on December, we had sixty-four different numbers to investigate. Jane Almgren’s was only one of those. Every number then generates a hundred to a hundred and fifty more, but if we’d really made sure to—’
‘I know, Gerald, for Christ’s sake,’ interrupted Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘It’s completely crazy, of course, that you have to deal with all this yourself, but tell me about this particular phone. Jane Almgren’s, that is. Not all that many calls were made to it in December, if I remember rightly?’
‘Only six,’ said Sorrysen. ‘Two to a pizzeria, one to a ladies’ hairdresser’s, one other, and two from Robert Hermansson.’
‘I remember that,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But how about earlier on? In November, say?’
‘Around twenty-five different numbers,’ Sorrysen told him patiently. ‘Mostly to other pay-as-you-go accounts and withheld numbers, but not all of them. It also seems, in fact, that she did some temp work at that hairdresser’s for a few days in December. Our friend Jane, that is. But after Robert’s disappearance, not a single call – that was the reason we couldn’t get any further.’
‘Even if we’d had the staff?’
‘I didn’t hear that. But there are a few calls to landlines, too.’
‘In November?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Four. I’ve looked into them all. Three to private individuals, one to a car-hire firm. Two of the individuals live in Stockholm, they’re both men, I’ve got their names and addresses of course, and they both say they’ve no idea who Jane Almgren is. The third individual doesn’t know anybody of that name, either, but in my view she’s still of interest to our investigation.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Her name’s Sylvia Karlsson. She’s seventy and lives in Kristinehamn. On twenty-second November last year she received a phone call from her son – from this number, that is – and since then she hasn’t heard from him.’
Aha, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, feeling concentration slip away from him. He turned his eyes from Sorrysen and looked out of the window instead. Noted that it was raining. Allowed several seconds to pass as he tracked the meanders of two water drops down the window pane.
‘Don’t forget those dull wits of mine,’ he reminded his colleague. ‘So, what you’re telling me is . . . ?’
‘Exactly,’ observed Sorrysen. ‘I can see you’re keeping up. It’s worth pointing out that we were in touch with this woman back in December – or possibly a few days into January – but at that point, she didn’t know she had a missing son, of course. They don’t have much to do with each other, evidently. But she turned seventy in June and he usually gave her a call on her birthday.’
‘Hmm,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Was he a bad lot?’
‘You could put it that way, if you wanted to be a bit old-fashioned.’
‘Nothing wrong with being old-fashioned,’ observed Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘What’s his name? Have we got him on record?’
‘Sören Karlsson. I did a search on his name and he’s got a nice little portfolio.’
‘Such as?’
‘A bit of everything. Narcotics offences. Assault and battery. Accomplice in a bank robbery. Various stretches in prison, twenty-two months in total. The last time was three years ago.’
‘Connection to Jane Almgren?’
‘We haven’t established one yet. But he was registered in Kalmar at the time she was living there. So it’s possible there’s a link. Not to say likely.’
Gunnar Barbarotti put his hands together and pondered.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘And since he’s in our records, I assume we’re busy comparing?’
‘You bet,’ said Gerald Borgsen with unusual emphasis. ‘If he turns out to be Robert Hermansson’s roommate in the freezer, you’ll know within four hours. I should—’
‘Hang on,’ cut in Barbarotti. ‘I want to get this clear in my mind. So it could be the case that Jane Almgren killed this Sören Karlsson sometime before she turned her attention to Robert Hermansson? Then she kept his mobile and used it for a week or two, but suddenly stopped using it?’
Sorrysen nodded. ‘More or less, yes. Maybe the battery ran out. Or the money on the card. The last call is actually the one Robert made to her, the night he disappeared.’
‘And all this is thanks to . . .’
‘. . . thanks to mobile phone monitoring,’ supplied Sorrysen. ‘Correct again.’
Couldn’t you have worked all this out in December? thought Gunnar Barbarotti, but he did not ask the question out loud. Instead he said ‘Thanks Gerald,’ and got to his feet. ‘Will you be staying tonight until word comes through?’
Sorrysen cleared his throat and gestured in the direction of his loaded desk. ‘Got plenty to be getting on with, as you see. Yep, I’ll be here. I’ll ring you when I know.’
‘You do that,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, and left his colleague’s office. He checked the time. It was ten past six. Some people claimed Gerald Borgsen did an average of twenty hours’ overtime a week, but Barbarotti had never gone to the trouble of checking if that was actually the case. It could easily have been an underestimate.
For his part, he wasn’t going to put in any overtime. No more than he already had today. He was going to swim a thousand metres and then take a sauna for an hour. It was Friday evening and Sara had promised to cook a pasta dinner for half past eight. As long as he didn’t trip over any corpses on his way to the sports centre, he should fit it all in nicely.
Perhaps put a call through to Helsingborg later on, too.
They had to wait until Saturday morning for the identification. Gunnar Barbarotti had no idea why it had taken so long, and he didn’t bother trying to find out.
‘I’ve put a sheet of paper on your desk,’ said Sorrysen’s weary voice on the phone. ‘Now you can read all about our friend Sören Karlsson. He was about thirty-nine. We don’t really know if he made it to that last birthday in November, because we can’t say exactly when he died. And I didn’t ring his mother to tell her, I thought I’d leave that to you. I’m a bit tired of telephones. Bye.’
Despite that last comment, he called again two minutes later.
‘Thanks Gerald,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, and hung up.
An hour later, he was in his office holding Sören Karlsson’s past in his hand. In Sorrysen’s minimal handwriting – he was one of the last people alive who still liked writing things by hand – it covered just over half the sheet of paper and told him that SK was born in Karlstad in 1965, and that he had left home and moved to Stockholm after finishing a basic course at upper secondary in 1984. That he had lived in about ten different places in Sweden, had some twenty different ways of making a living, and that his first documented criminal act was an assault on a seventy-six-year-old woman in the course of snatching her bag on Västerlånggatan in Stockholm’s Old Town. That was in the summer of 1988. He had never been married and had no children that they were aware of. For a period of eighteen months in the late 1990s, he had lived at an address in Kalmar while working for a smallish cleaning firm, and there was a reliable witness statement to confirm that he had at this time briefly kept company with a certain Jane Almgren – who was at that point still married, had two children and worked for the same cleaning firm.
Right then, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, and gave a deep sigh. That’s the lot.
At the bottom of the sheet, Sorrysen had written a telephone number and a name. Barbarotti closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths through his nose. Time to ring Mrs Sylvia Karlsson in Kristinehamn, no doubt about it. To ring her and explain that it had nothing to do with negligence, the fact that her only son had omitted to ring and wish her a happy seventieth birthday.
Hope she isn’t in, he thought, and started dialling the number.
But he didn’t enter into any kind of bet with God, and Sylvia Karlsson answered gruffly after the second ring.
‘How was the funeral?’ asked Eva Backman.
It was Monday morning. And raining. Gunnar Barbarotti had spent most of Sunday in Helsingborg and across the water at Helsingør (and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art), and had not got home until nearly midnight. A total of almost ten hours in the car, but what wouldn’t one do?