The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘So what you’re basing this on,’ she said slowly – and not without an irritating undertone of ridicule, thought Inspector Barbarotti, ‘is a comment from a former wife at a wedding. Former wives tend to not always love their former husbands, perhaps that’s news to you, but—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he cut in with a sudden anger that felt surprisingly genuine. ‘I’m only saying it made me think a bit. It’s nearly a year since Henrik Grundt disappeared from Allvädersgatan, and we don’t know any more about what happened than – than Asunander’s sausage dog knows about the emancipation of women. If you’ve got anything better to go on, you’re more than welcome to put it forward.’

  ‘Interesting comparison,’ said Eva Backman. ‘And sorry, sorry. I trod on your sensitive toe there. Of course the family angle is interesting.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Though to be honest, we’ve never forgotten it. Have we? I thought we were in agreement that it was a dead end, that’s all. What motives could any of them have for killing Henrik? What would Jakob Willnius’s be? Had they ever even met before, Henrik and the nasty ex-husband?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti threw up his hands disconsolately.

  ‘No idea. No, it was an over-optimistic thought. But I just wanted to mention it to you.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing it.’

  ‘You’re welcome. But it’s daft to let all the flashes of inspiration stay in one pitiful head. Presumably you can agree with me on that?’

  ‘Daft indeed,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Especially a head like yours. I promise to think about it. Is dessert included in this glamorous lunch invitation?’

  ‘Coffee’s included,’ Gunnar Barbarotti said firmly. ‘That’s all.’

  In the first days – even the first weeks – after she decided to kill her husband, Kristina Hermansson felt the presence of a sort of mild euphoria. It wasn’t much, no more than a thin ray of hope really, but it cut through the darkness and she felt in her robotic existence a streak of . . . of something human. Her consciousness found direction. The convulsive state in which she had grown used to living, those slowly rotating fists – one in her stomach, one in her throat – perhaps wouldn’t inevitably be with her for the remainder of her days.

  With Jakob out of the way, she would be able to start her own penance and begin to tackle her own grief. Perhaps.

  But the new state proved transient. The fists clenched again. As she sat there with two-and-a-half-year-old Kelvin on her lap and looked into his cold, empty eyes, it felt as though she was being filled with all the darkness and despair of existence. It was terrifying and devoid of all hope. Life was a wretched joke. A cynical melodrama, she thought, cobbled together by some bitter failure of a TV dramatist in the inebriation of the dismal hour before dawn, to be avenged on their own lack of success. Yes, she could actually believe in a god like that, a peevish clown who intended the whole of creation as a farce and scorned it as some black joke.

  She had not worked for over a year now. Perhaps it was because of Kelvin. He wasn’t like other children; this was a truth she had pushed away from her for so long, but it was becoming increasingly impossible to keep it at a distance. He had not started walking until he was two and now, a good six months later, he still wasn’t saying anything – except for the occasional disconnected and incomprehensible word, which could escape him at the most unexpected times. He did not play with the other children, not even with Emma and Julius and Kasper, whom he saw every day at his childminder’s, three doors down in Musseronvägen. He scarcely even played on his own; he could spend short periods on Lego bricks or finger-painting, but was considerably more interested in demolishing than in building. He spent most of his time staring emptily in front of him, his fingers twining mechanically and aimlessly. As if he was brooding on something, she would think, as if he bore some black secret within him that he was unable to get proper sight of. A bit like herself, she thought. We’re both stuck where we are, my son and I.

  And then there was the sleeping. Kelvin could sleep fourteen to fifteen hours a day, which wasn’t normal.

  Perhaps she could have loved him, all the same. Kelvin wouldn’t harm a fly, and if only everything else had not been reduced to ash and ruins, perhaps she could have been content with his quiet ways. If it had only been him and her.

  Perhaps.

  But he did not absorb her. What absorbed her most through those dark days of mid-November was the possibility of recapturing that thin ray of euphoria.

  The possibility of killing Jakob.

  Daring to believe in it, at least. Thinking of it as an actual possibility, for the time being, that was enough. Because somewhere along the way, at some point on one of those dispiriting November mornings, her thoughts had achieved a certain clarity. A lucid state in which she told herself that it really would be possible. This chink that let the light cut through the darkness soon closed, to be sure, but she remembered it. And knew that this was precisely the step she had to take, sooner or later, if she were to pull through this.

  To kill.

  For there was no document, she had made up her mind about that. Jakob had not deposited anything, neither with a lawyer, nor anywhere else. If he died, nothing would come to light and reveal the background of the Henrik tragedy. He would not identify himself as a murderer, not even after his own death. Not even to take revenge on her.

  She was not entirely convinced that this line of reasoning really held good, but she decided to stick to it anyway. If she were to find the strength to make progress in any direction at all, she had to follow it.

  Kill him, then.

  But how?

  And when?

  And how to evade suspicion? Suspicion of her and suspicion linking Jakob’s death to events in Kymlinge. If he died and it all came out, the battle would have been in vain, anyway.

  Jakob’s death was the only road to take, but how should she embark on it without taking any false steps?

  She brooded on the problem for days and nights and seemed not to come a centimetre closer to a solution, but all at once – or so she persuaded herself – an option opened up.

  Or perhaps she was just imagining things. Perhaps it was all a question of distance. Of pushing things into the future and believing everything is easier to achieve somewhere else. Forgetting that you always, wherever you are, have to drag yourself around – your own presence and your own uncertainty.

  Thailand. It was Jakob’s idea. Two weeks in December. Just him and her; Kelvin left with the childminder. It had worked before; the boy was no trouble, after all, and the money they paid her always came in useful.

  Kristina had said neither yes nor no, but the next day he booked the trip: two nights in Bangkok, twelve on the islands off the Krabi coast. It was a few years since the tsunami and it could be interesting to see how they had coped with building things up again, thought Jakob. He had not travelled in Thailand for twelve years; Kristina’s experience of the country amounted to two weeks in Phuket back in 1996 or possibly 1997.

  They were to leave on the fifth of December, anyway, and come home on the twentieth, and that very evening she saw her opportunity.

  Swedish tourists had disappeared in Thailand before. Not only at the time of the tidal wave disaster. She had read about such things in the papers, and it wasn’t hard to visualize herself in tears, telling a local policeman with exceedingly poor English that her husband had gone missing. That she had not seen him for over twenty-four hours and that she was afraid something might have happened to him.

  She could see – very clearly – in her mind’s eye the helpless but kindly Thai people failing in all their efforts to get to the bottom of anything, and herself tearfully boarding a plane home to Sweden, five days earlier than anticipated. The tabloids back home would devote a headline or two to the case, not more. Shocked friends would ring to express their condolences.

  What would she need?

  A knife and a shovel, she thought. Both could undoubtedly
be purchased pretty much anywhere in Thailand, and the ground in the jungle was no doubt loose-textured and easy to dig, she was convinced of it.

  She could see the deed itself, too. The knife-thrust to the back on their night-time walk, perhaps she would lure him out with the promise of sex under the stars . . . his groans, the surprised (hopefully terrified) look in his eyes and the blood gurgling out of him; a couple more stabs of the knife, then an hour’s digging and finally a purifying bathe in the sea.

  So simple. So liberating.

  When Leif Grundt arranged a work experience placement for Kristoffer in a Co-op store in Uppsala, he himself thought it was a very good idea. The week fell at the very end of November and a few days into December, and if there was one thing the lad needed this miserable autumn it was to get away from home for a while. His form teacher and his study advisor had both agreed on that. Kristoffer, too, in his usual slightly listless fashion.

  But once he had put the boy on the train on Saturday 27 November – and put himself in the car for the drive back to Stockrosvägen – he felt a sudden lump in his throat. It was late afternoon. Dingy twilight and thin, driving rain. The house would be entirely empty. No Kristoffer. No Henrik. Not even any Ebba; his wife had – on her bearded therapist’s advice – decided not to leave the Vassrogga clinic for the last two weekends of her treatment. Being at home was evidently considered bad for her. Leif Grundt had little insight into what actually went on at Vassrogga, but in some obscure way he still felt they had made the right judgement where the weekends were concerned. Ebba had not displayed any pleasure when she had come back to him and Kristoffer on previous Friday evenings, and when he drove off with her on Sunday afternoons she seemed to have no hesitation in leaving them again. Just the opposite: though she did not express herself one way or the other, there were signs to indicate that she thought it was nice to go back.

  Or, at any rate, Leif Grundt thought he could detect such signs.

  Perhaps three weeks’ total separation would foster a change of mind? Perhaps twenty days without her wounded and mangled family were what it would take to shake something up inside Ebba Hermansson Grundt?

  But probably not. Leif Grundt was under no illusions. For the past few days, that embroidered sampler hanging above his own grandmother’s nursing-home bed – which he had sat and spelled his way through as a five-year old – had kept coming into Leif’s mind at ever shorter intervals.

  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  Wise words to rely on in one’s hour of need, thought Leif Grundt. Though not particularly optimistic ones.

  But anyway, things were as they were. He would be alone at home for a whole week. As he drove along the familiar streets up to Hemmanshöjden, through intensifying grey rain, he tried to remember when anything like that had last happened.

  It must have been a very long time ago, he concluded. And he had never been completely on his own at Stockrosvägen, he knew that for certain. A few hours maybe, an afternoon, but a whole week? Never.

  Hence the lump in his throat. And of course, there was nothing very odd about that. Leif Grundt had always had problems with people who saw themselves as victims. Who blamed circumstances and gave themselves the right to be bitter. But just now, he felt he was on the verge of it himself; it wasn’t easy to find any benign angle of approach from which to view this state of affairs. He was stricken. No doubt about it. His family lay in ruins; it had started with Henrik’s disappearance and things had been unravelling ever since. Barely a year had gone by, and Leif Grundt had simply not been able to imagine that anything like this could happen – that it would lie within the realm of possibility. Sometimes, he couldn’t help asking himself how things would look in another year’s time, if it all continued at this pace. How would the Grundt family look by December next year? And the year after that?

  But at the same time, he felt guilty. He couldn’t really understand why; surely it was hardly his fault that Henrik had gone missing? Or that his wife was going out of her mind? Or that Kristoffer was going astray?

  But there it was, something pricking his conscience. Perhaps it was just that phrase Bishop Tutu had used, or whoever it was.

  Those who have the strength have a duty to go on finding it.

  But what if he no longer had the strength?

  He parked the car in front of the garage, as usual. As he had done a thousand times before. He climbed out and hurried the few steps through the rain to the front door, thinking that he ought at least to have left the light on to mark the desolation. Mark the desolation? Where did expressions like that come from? Was there something amiss with his own thoughts too, with the words that cropped up in his head? They seemed to come from some secret store inside him that he had never glanced into before. Never needed to.

  But he had not put a light on. He did so now, instead, going round upstairs and downstairs and switching on all the lights; then he picked up the phone and called Berit in Uppsala to let her know Kristoffer had departed on schedule.

  Kristoffer was going to stay at Berit’s while he did his work experience. Leif Grundt had no brothers or sisters, but he had two cousins he was close to. Berit in Uppsala and her twin brother Jörgen in Kristianstad. Henrik, too, had spent a couple of weeks at Berit’s, last autumn while he was waiting to move into his student room in the Triangle. She was divorced, but still lived with her ten-year-old daughter out in Bergsbrunna, in a house that was far too big for her. She was more than happy to take in Kristoffer, just as she had taken in Henrik last year.

  So how are you doing? she had asked, and Leif Grundt had not known what to answer.

  After the call, he sank down at the kitchen table and wondered how to make the time pass this Saturday evening. Not to mention Sunday.

  And how he could deal with that gnawing feeling of negligence. Of having not done enough for his wife and his son.

  I ought not to have sent him away, he thought suddenly. I only did it to be left in peace for a week. If I were a good father, I wouldn’t have pushed the problem away like that.

  He looked at the time. It was twenty to five. He put his head in his hands and started to weep.

  35

  Kristina took the underground to Fridhemsplan and walked the few blocks to Inedalsgatan. It was Sunday afternoon. The Sunday before Advent, with its text on the Last Judgement. In three days’ time it would be 1 December and that was the date by which Robert’s flat had to be cleared out. That was what she had agreed with the landlord; or rather with the tenant who sublet the flat to Robert. Erik Renstierna.

  She had put it off twice. She had promised to empty the flat by 1 October, and then by 1 November, but it had not happened. Jakob had shown a certain amount of understanding – or indifference, at any rate – the first time, but the second time he was furious.

  ‘Are we supposed to pay the rent on Wanker Tarzan’s hole for the rest of our lives?’ he demanded to know.

  But now she had sorted it all out. Tomorrow, Monday, a removal company would come and decant all her brother’s possessions into a Shurgard self-storage unit; on Tuesday, two highly qualified cleaners would arrive. If she wanted to go through anything or pick up some form of memento, today was her last chance. When the formal arrangements were made after Robert’s death, this was the scenario they had all agreed on. His daughter Lena-Sofie had expressed no immediate claims, either directly or through her mother, and the other potential beneficiaries – his parents Rosemarie and Karl-Erik – had shown the same lack of interest, so Brundin the lawyer had made do with dividing Robert’s financial assets of just over four thousand kronor into two equal parts (after first subtracting his own fee of three thousand six hundred) and distributing them amongst the direct heirs.

  And Kristina had undertaken to arrange the emptying of the flat.

  Robert had already been carved up once. In a way, it would have felt hard to carve up his property as well.

  There was a drift of junk mail on the hall floor. Th
e flat had a stuffy, shut-up smell. She had never set foot here before, even though it had been Robert’s home for eighteen months and she lived in the same city. She could not prevent a feeling of shame creeping over her as she thought of this, and she did her best to nip it in the bud. She walked round the flat for a while, switching on all the lights she could find. Two small rooms plus a tiny kitchen, that was all. It had stood untouched – apart from a couple of police visits – for eleven months; she decided against opening the fridge door. The melancholy was palpable, which was what she had expected. Dirt and mess. Cheap furniture, tatty art posters on the walls, nothing of value. Naturally, there were reasons why no visits had been paid in his lifetime, she thought. Good reasons. She had liked her brother, considerably better than most of the others had, but that did not mean she wanted to be involved in his existence. Would have wanted to be involved; she had not imagined him alive for a long time, but just for a moment there, she actually had done. It suddenly struck her hard, the realization that he was dead. That he had been for almost a year. Robert, that stupid oaf.

  What am I doing here, she thought, biting her lip to stop herself crying. What sort of meaningless ritual do I think I’m performing by tramping round in this squalid place? Duty? Scarcely. Robert was never the dutiful type; quite the opposite. Nor was she. Burn all that crap, Kristina, he would presumably have urged her if she had ever bothered to ask him. Don’t go poking around in this garbage heap, the shit will just rub off on you!

  There was a fairly well-arranged bookcase in the living room, at any rate. Robert had been quite a keen reader, and perhaps she could take a few books with her? But why? What would the point of that be? She turned her eyes to the desk. It was large, and cluttered with junk, but on the right-hand end, beside the computer, there were two piles of paper, one on its stomach, as it were – lying face-down – the other on its back. Could it be . . . ? She suddenly remembered that Robert had talked about a novel. It surely couldn’t be . . . ? She turned the stomach pile over so the text was uppermost. She put the two piles together and looked at the front page.