The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Shame you missed it. And Sören Karlsson’s apparently going to be buried in Karlstad, so perhaps you’re not free for that one, either?’

  ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ said Eva Backman. ‘You seem pretty chipper, anyway. Rainy Monday and eleven months to your next holiday – are you on Valium or helium or what?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti shook his head.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Well, it’s none of my business. Shall we agree this is all clear now, then?’

  ‘Apart from the minor detail of Henrik Grundt, it’s crystal clear,’ concurred Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘But do tell me the rest of the Jane Almgren Story, if you feel like it. How did it go with this new witness? We were able to fill a few gaps, I gather?’

  ‘A few,’ said Eva Backman, draining the last drop of coffee from her mug. ‘So a woman turned up yesterday and told us that Jane might possibly have had a little affair with Robert Hermansson when they were in their teens. Well, affair isn’t the right word. There was a gang of them, evidently, and Robert had switched to – well, to this witness, in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘You might say so. And in the middle of the sleeping bag.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes, that was her phrase. They were camping somewhere out Kymmen way, and I don’t know if this is significant, but the witness, who was a friend of Jane’s, right, claimed that Jane went really wild and started threatening to kill Robert. Actually tried to do it, too, apparently.’

  ‘That far back?’

  ‘That far back. She was sixteen; as the twig is bent, so shall the tree . . . Anyway, there’s clearly a link to Robert going back a long way. Perhaps it’s like you said: she remembered his betrayal when she saw him on TV twenty years later. Sören Karlsson was the direct cause of the break-up of her marriage in Kalmar, wasn’t he, so I think we can probably assume there’s a revenge motive in the picture. In both victims’ cases.’

  ‘Some old business in a tent?’

  ‘Things just lie there smouldering, you know. They can flare up after twenty or thirty years, especially in minds that aren’t in proper working order.’

  ‘Yes thanks, I know. But what about her husband – ex-ditto, I should say?’

  ‘What indeed? He must have been a potential victim as well. But he and the kids were given some kind of protected identity. They live in Drammen in Norway; what do you think Jane Almgren was doing in Oslo? If she hadn’t been run over and killed, she might have got on his trail, too.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti chewed on his lower lip and thought about this for a while.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva Backman. ‘That sums it up pretty well. But you and I can shelve her for now, I think. Don’t you?’

  Barbarotti nodded. ‘I reckon so. Berggren and Toivonen can fill in the missing bits. The main thing left to do is the mental profile and Toivonen’s brilliant at that sort of thing.’

  Eva Backman gave a fleeting smile.

  ‘And what are you brilliant at?’ she asked. ‘When it comes to the crunch?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti drew himself up and avoided meeting her eye. He pulled a face and thought about it. ‘I’m glad you brought that up,’ he said. ‘I’ve wondered about it quite a bit myself.’

  ‘And what conclusion did you reach?’

  ‘I think – I think I’m a right devil for stubborn persistence.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Once, when I was at school, I spent two whole weeks solving the Königsberg Bridge Problem. We had a teacher who liked setting us that kind of puzzle. You know the Königsberg Bridges?’

  ‘I thought that one was insoluble.’

  ‘Yes, it is. And he told us that. But I didn’t care, and tried to solve it anyway.’

  Eva Backman nodded and bit the nail of her index finger. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And Henrik Grundt, since I assume that’s where this is leading.’

  ‘Far from insoluble,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Just give me a bit of time.’

  Eva Backman said nothing for a while.

  ‘How much time?’

  He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter. A few months or a few years. Though actually, it feels pretty urgent. They looked as if they were in shreds.’

  ‘Shreds? Who?’

  ‘The family. The whole lot of them, at the funeral. Hard to say who was suffering worst. But one thing’s for sure, it wasn’t Robert they were grieving for in that church. Poor devil, he didn’t even manage to be the main character at his own funeral. You have to admit that’s rock bottom.’

  ‘Drew a losing ticket in the lottery of life,’ said Eva Backman. ‘But it wouldn’t by any chance be the case that you think Henrik Grundt is still alive?’

  ‘I find it hard to imagine he is,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Very hard.’

  ‘And just as hard to imagine he died a natural death?’

  ‘Almost as hard,’ sighed Barbarotti. ‘But if I can convince Asunander to sanction it, I’d like to sit down for three days and go over the entire case one more time. Everything we’ve got. All the interviews, the whole lot, turn every word inside out and question every damn person.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to do the opposite?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Question every word and turn every damn person inside out?’

  ‘You can be very irritating, Mrs Backman, do you know that?’

  ‘My husband often tells me so,’ said Eva Backman. ‘But you go ahead and talk to the boss. I saw him this morning.’

  ‘Asunander? How did he seem?’

  ‘Gloomy. Very.’

  ‘Then I’ll wait until tomorrow,’ decided Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘The Lord did not create the concept of haste.’

  ‘Are you acquainted with the Lord?’ asked Eva Backman. ‘I would never have thought it.’

  ‘Only a little,’ admitted Inspector Barbarotti. ‘Only a little.’

  FOUR

  NOVEMBER

  32

  Kristina got off the tube at Gullmarsplan because that particular train was heading for Farsta Strand. She leant into the squally gusts of wind, and battled her way across the deserted square and through the piss-drenched underpass up towards the Globe complex. The rain came driving in frosty cascades and she asked herself why she hadn’t followed Jakob’s advice, done her shopping in the market hall at Östermalm, and taken a taxi home to Enskede.

  But maybe that was how it worked – that it was in these trifling acts of disobedience she had her pockets of resistance. There, and there only. Why not? She had to find the oxygen for her survival somewhere.

  They were having guests. Two Danish film producers and their wives, an unaccompanied Swedish TV boss and a Finnish director, a lesbian. The cooking and drinking were to be fit for a prince. There was a pan-Nordic project at stake. Blinis and whitefish roe with schnapps. Venison and Barolo. Caramelized figs and chèvre cheese and coffee and Calvados and the whole shebang.

  She was tired to the bone. But she had decided to do her shopping at the Globe arcade; if she was obliged, in spite of everything, to play the young, perfect – and becomingly pregnant – wife, she surely at least had the right to decide where the raw ingredients were to be purchased? Those ingredients that in the course of the afternoon would be prepared and processed, to be ready towards evening for stuffing in the mouths of the ravenous media moguls and their heavily made-up wives. Plus the TV boss and the Finnish dyke.

  Simulated resistance, she thought again. It was only eleven in the morning. There was plenty of time, five to six hours having been set aside for gourmet preparations. Jakob had even promised to pick up Kelvin from the childminder; let nobody say he didn’t show his pregnant wife due appreciation and consideration.

  She went into the shopping arcade via McDonald’s. It was rammed full and she had to elbow her way through, but not a second more than necessary was spent out in the cold, persistent rain. She felt t
he need to sit down and rest for a short while before she made a start on the provisioning. She found a decent coffee place, took off her raincoat and ordered a cappuccino. She perched on a high stool at a tiny table amidst the crush. She had got her taste for coffee back last week. In the middle of the seventh month, just like last time.

  Last time, she thought, and as she absent-mindedly stirred the foam with the sad wooden stick, she tried to remember how she had felt when she was expecting her first child. The uncommunicative and introverted Kelvin. She tried to recall that feeling of unspecified expectation and naive optimism, to find its tone at least, but it was futile. Everything was so dreadfully changed. The terms of her life so fundamentally restructured that she sometimes asked herself if there was any point believing she was still the same person. Was it the same brain thinking these thoughts, giving her hand the order to raise the cup, and her mouth the instruction to explore the frothed milk that was still far too hot? A good question. She had been living in a perpetual and continuing nightmare for almost a year now, and there was no sign of it ever stopping. No sign at all.

  ‘You don’t look happy,’ Marika at the antenatal clinic had said. That was where she had spent the morning so far. Well half an hour of it, at any rate. By rights she should have been attending an antenatal clinic in Old Enskede, but she had taken to Marika when she was expecting Kelvin, and Marika was based in the centre of town, at Artillerigatan. Jakob had suggested Enskede, but she had chosen Marika. Resistance.

  ‘You’re right, I’m not happy,’ she had replied. ‘I don’t want this baby.’

  She didn’t know what had got into her. She had never owned up to anything like that before. But that was what Marika was good at, she supposed. One of the things she was good at, drawing the truth out of people.

  She put her rough hand on Kristina’s arm and looked her deep in the eyes from just twenty centimetres away.

  ‘You’ll find a way,’ she said, in her ringing Finnish accent. ‘Believe me, when the time comes, you’ll find a way. Don’t you worry, dear.’

  Then she asked if there was any problem with the paternity. In any way. Kristina shook her head and thought that this wasn’t about the paternity, but the father himself. That was where the madness lay. She happened to be married to a murderer and it was the murderer’s child she was now carrying under her heart. But she was in this crazed murderer-husband’s power, there was simply nothing to be done about that; it was the punishment of the gods for having played a forbidden game, and for the rest of her life she would never escape its terms and conditions.

  But she had not confided any of this to Marika. That was another of the conditions – the silence.

  She sipped her coffee again and shook her head in the present, too. She swallowed both the hot liquid and the lump in her throat, as she had accustomed herself to doing. For a few moments, she watched two young women engaged in cheerful, lively conversation at the next table, and thought that if she had been born ten years later, one of them could have been her. The one with dark hair, if she’d been able to choose; she had such an attractive face. Carefree somehow, her future stretching ahead and no heavy baggage.

  Then a bare second passed and the plan came back into her head.

  Or The Plan; in recent days it had started presenting itself with initial capitals and italics, whatever that might signify. Like a sign suddenly flashing on in her head, its seven letters written in vivid, blood-red script.

  It had not been like that from the start. On the contrary, when it first showed itself it had been a mere thief in the night, tiptoeing discreetly, not intending to be spotted or taken notice of. But then it had, by some strange means, acquired a backbone, suddenly not allowing itself to be rebuffed so easily, hanging around and demanding precedence; it was certainly a remarkable thing, like a . . . well, like a beau at the ball who kept asking her to dance, and she couldn’t decide whether to send him packing or not.

  I’m your only option, he kept saying. Your only way out of this, Kristina. You know that, you can choose whether to admit it now or in ten years’ time. But sooner or later you’re going to take me in your arms. Your cowardice determines the length of time, nothing else; it’s your decision how many more days you want to spend under his tyranny.

  Murder, she thought. Kill him. That’s what he’s telling me, my beau.

  But none of these words spelling out her situation were ever italicized or lit up by a flash in her mind’s eye. It was more the opposite; as soon as she thought them, they faded and vanished into their own absurdity.

  Or the fog of her own timidity, or whatever it was.

  But that was still what The Plan amounted to. That and nothing else.

  The dream, on the other hand, never faded. It was replayed three or four nights a month and each time, every detail was uncompromisingly in place. Nothing changed, it was all still there: Jakob’s entry; Henrik’s terrified intake of breath; those protracted seconds of total silence and frozen motion; Jakob’s hands grabbing the boy from the bed, tossing him brutally onto the floor; his knee on his chest; her own stifled scream.

  Jakob’s three or four hard blows with his fist; his hands round Henrik’s neck; those eyes that seemed on the verge of popping out of their sockets; her own inability to do anything at all; the clenched teeth of her powerlessness and Jakob’s final words: ‘There, he’s dead now.’

  His stinging blow to the side of her head and his spittle in her face.

  Like a documentary. It wasn’t a dream, strictly speaking. It was an authentic – completely authentic and minutely accurate – memory sequence of that night. Wrapping Henrik’s dead body in the sheet. Heaving it off the fire-escape balcony down into the bushes. Dragging it to the car. No one had seen them. No one had heard them. It was four-thirty by the time they were done. Then he slapped her face again and raped her. By seven they were sitting in the hotel restaurant having breakfast. Kelvin too, inserted into the red-lacquer high chair after sleeping like a log all night. It was quarter to eight when they left Kymlinge.

  He had dealt with burying the body by himself. She still didn’t know where Henrik’s grave was. He had been gone all the following night, so she knew he had made a serious job of it. Maybe the sea, maybe some stretch of forest near Nynäshamn – he knew his way round there. She never asked, and he would never have told her.

  And when he explained the framework for the continuation of their life, she had already known what it would be.

  If you expose me, I expose you.

  A few weeks later he had added that other thing.

  If you kill me, it’s all there in my will.

  If you kill me, it’s all there in my will.

  For a long time, she had believed it. For a long time, she had had dreams of that document, too. Believed in its authenticity.

  Believed he had really written that. Gone to a lawyer and handed over a sealed envelope: To be opened after my death. Or: To be opened in the event of my death in unclear circumstances.

  Now she had her doubts. She had been suspecting for a while that there was no such document. What interest could Jakob possibly have in being exposed as a murderer after his own death? Was there really any reason to leave himself with that legacy?

  It was a terribly difficult question. She had spent days and weeks turning it over in her mind. And there were other questions that followed from it.

  For example: did he really hate her so much? So much that he wanted to punish her even when he was no longer alive?

  In that case, why had he opted to bind her so closely to him at all? To trap her like this. Was it really as simple as that? He wanted a wife who would never deny him anything? Whom he had given himself the moral right to rape night after night, whenever he felt the urge.

  Perhaps? Perhaps that was it? Perhaps Jakob Willnius was constituted that way, and was so sick that he could – and wanted to – live like that. There were indications that it might be so. Some men were like that, deep down.


  There was a more interesting supplementary question. Gradually, having turned it over in her mind countless times, brooded on it for several weeks, she almost dared to reclassify it as a statement.

  The important, really crucial part – from Jakob Willnius’s point of view – was of course not actually writing a document of that kind, but convincing his wife that such a document existed. The latter was what enabled him to tie her hands behind her back and provided him with life insurance, not the former. That was the fact of the matter.

  Surely, Kristina asked herself. Surely? Surely? Surely?

  And it was by means of the cautiously uttered, barely audible answer of ‘yes’ to this half-rhetorical, half-desperate question that the plan was hatched. The Plan.

  She took a mouthful of coffee and checked the time. It was twenty to twelve. The chatty friends at the next table had been replaced by a tired man with a pile of shopping bags at his feet. The arcade was bustling with people. Young, old. Dry, rain-drenched. Men, women. I’d swap, thought Kristina Hermansson, distractedly stroking her taut belly, I’d swap identities with any of these people, without a second’s hesitation.

  Then she got to her feet, leaving her cardboard cup of coffee half-drunk on the table, and went off to the supermarket to commence her wifely duties.

  But how, she thought. How?

  Leif Grundt parked the Volvo on the drive and turned off the engine. He just sat there with his hands on the steering wheel, unable to bring himself to get out. It was half past nine in the evening. It was a Thursday in November. It was raining.

  The house lay in darkness, apart from Kristoffer’s room, where a bluish flicker revealed that the television was on. Leif Grundt was tired, tired to the bone. He had left home before seven this morning, got away from the shop eleven hours later and then spent another two sitting with Ebba at Vassrogga.

  She spent her weekdays there and her weekends with the family. A private clinic; some form of intensive therapy, he wasn’t sure what it actually entailed. Twelve to fifteen kilometres inland along the Indalsälven river, anyway; it had been three weeks so far, and would continue for another three. Every Thursday evening there was a family conversation session, and he went along and tried to be nice and understanding. He managed the nice bit OK, he supposed, but the understanding was harder. He didn’t think his wife seemed to be making any discernible progress.