The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  After an hour or so, when everyone seemed to have had their doze – but with Troaë still working away doggedly behind her easel – the question of a boat trip to des Glénan came up again. They are a small group of islands fifteen to twenty nautical miles from Beg-Meil; Henrik and Gunnar had been talking over lunch about a trip there and the boats that run several times a day from a small harbour east of the point. But it’s also possible to hire a boat yourself, and the two of them were clearly used to the sea, so the question now was what it might cost, and what other terms and conditions might apply. The plan, as I understand it, is for us all to go together in the next few days, and Anna and Katarina immediately chipped in with enthusiastic comments about an exclusive all-day trip with picnic baskets and bottles of wine and fishing tackle, and a private island without any other tourists, making it sound as though we were the select few, and I felt a sense of nausea creep over me at this sudden burgeoning of elitism, but I noted that Erik had nothing to say on the matter. Perhaps he is starting to get tired of these two couples, but with Erik, one never really knows.

  The Glénan discussion was interrupted by Troaë, announcing that she had finished painting. That was to say, the picture wasn’t finished, but she no longer needed us in position, she explained. Katarina asked again if we could see the result, but this was not allowed. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, but on no account before the painting was complete and the paint had dried. The girl gathered up her things and crammed them into her rucksack; then she did something rather astonishing. She informed us that she was going for a dip, and duly threw off her hat, took off her swimsuit and sprinted down the beach and straight out into the water, stark naked. The only one of our party to say anything was Erik. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘That was a surprise.’ His voice came out a little thickly.

  She was back five minutes later, unselfconsciously drying herself with a red towel, her small breasts thrusting, and you could see she had a pathetic little tuft of dark hair on her pudenda, no more than a hint; I felt she was putting on a show that trod a fine line between childish innocence and sophisticated acting. We were all stealing glances at her and I noted that nobody in the group could find the words to puncture the unnatural silence.

  Then she put her swimsuit back on. Picked up her rucksack and hat and waved goodbye. Plodded up the slope from the beach, over the top, and was gone.

  ‘Fuck me,’ repeated Erik, and gave a loud and slightly artificial laugh. ‘What a little madam!’

  Gunnar joined in the laughter and before long, the others followed suit. Ten minutes later we called it a day, the Malmgrens setting off west – their house is a kilometre inland, halfway to Bénodet, apparently – while the rest of us headed east over the dunes. Nobody suggested getting together for dinner that evening; I could detect a weariness and a drowsy sense of saturation amongst the whole group, and as we parted from Gunnar and Anna below their house by the beach at Cleut-Rouz, we did so without promises in either direction. Erik was quiet and muted, as if brooding on something; we said little on the walk back to our house, and I sensed he was getting tired of my company, so when we got there I asked him outright. Asked if he thought it was time for me to move on and leave him.

  ‘Christ, no,’ he answered. ‘But we’re not married, don’t forget. We’ve got to give each other some space, but the day I think I want you to go, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably stay a couple more days, then.’

  ‘If you feel you ought to be making yourself useful, you can always cook dinner tonight,’ he added. ‘We’ve got loads of eggs, and I’d be happy with an omelette and some veg, what do you say?’

  I nodded. We hung our swimming things over the patio rail and I went indoors and started rummaging round in the kitchen.

  As we were eating, and having a couple of beers each, we talked a bit about the others. Particularly about the women. ‘If you had to spend a night with one of them, who would you choose?’ Erik asked.

  He looked unexpectedly serious as he said it and I thought for a while before answering. ‘Hard call,’ I said. ‘I’d really need to try them both before I could express an opinion.’

  He evidently found this a thoroughly valid answer, roared with laughter and narrowly avoided spraying beer all over the table. ‘Hell yes,’ he said. ‘Do you mean both together or one at a time?’

  ‘One at a time,’ I said. ‘It’s easy to lose focus otherwise.’

  Erik nodded, but stopped laughing. That’s the way he is, it’s struck me in these few days we’ve been in each other’s company; he can turn off his laughter in a split second. Switch it back on again just as fast, come to that. His states of mind have sharp edges but they don’t seem to go very deep. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Whatever we do, we need to keep focused. What do you reckon to Anna and Gunnar? Do they seem properly focused to you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘To be honest, they seem pretty banal to me. Well, she does, at any rate.’

  He leant back, propped his sandy feet up on the scuffed blue wooden rail round our patio and drank from his bottle of beer. ‘People tie themselves for no good reason,’ he said, trying to adopt a philosophical tone. ‘That’s where they get it wrong. They think you have to be a couple, but Gunnar and Anna would be much better with each other if they didn’t have to pretend they’re a permanent item. Don’t you reckon?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s been a long time since I lived with a woman,’ I said. ‘So I’m not the right man to judge these things.’

  Erik was quiet for a while. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘I quite fancy grabbing Anna for myself, just to see the reaction. What do you say? Might liven things up a bit.’

  ‘And you’re sure she’d be willing?’ I asked, mainly because that was the question he was expecting.

  ‘That’s the impression I got when we went for our swim last night,’ said Erik. ‘And she seemed almost jealous of that kid girl, you noticed that, I bet?’

  ‘She was pretty provocative.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Erik, and laughed. ‘But Anna didn’t like Gunnar gawping at her, that was obvious. She thinks she’s the one who deserves to be gawped at; it’s a tendency most women have.’

  I made no reply. This is just the kind of conversation I find hard to stand. That cod philosophizing, those cheap generalizations, those summings-up of paltry life experiences that so readily happen after a couple of drinks. You dumb jerk, I thought. You don’t know a damn thing about life, and if I stuck a knife in your belly and twisted it and held up a mirror for you while I was at it, you’d discover the ignorance in your own eyes. That would teach you something.

  I was taken aback by the sudden, articulate anger welling up inside me. After all, until now I had felt a kind of affinity with Erik, but now he engendered nothing but disgust in me.

  ‘Though I actually find Katarina more interesting,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a different kind of femininity there.’

  ‘Why not go for her instead, then?’ I asked.

  He just sat there, rolling the beer bottle across his forehead.

  ‘It would cost too much,’ he said in the end. ‘Big investment and possibly no return on it at all. No, I’ll leave her to you.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  It was getting towards dusk now. A hedgehog came ambling serenely across the lawn and disappeared under the tool shed, and I thought that this could be his cue to ask me a thing or two about myself and my circumstances. But he didn’t do it this time, either; we’ve been in each other’s company for five days now and he still knows nothing about me. I gave him a name and a place that first day in the car, and that was all. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so genuinely uninterested in his fellow human beings as Erik Bergman. It took me a few days to realize this was the case, but now I can see it clearly. If he’d started prying and bombarding me with questions about my background, it would scarcely have been possible for me to live here with him on these open-ended terms. O
n the other hand, one does wonder why he’s letting me stay here at all. I have to admit that I can’t work it out. If he’s got any homosexual expectations, he’s certainly concealed them well.

  He drained his beer and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I reckon we’ll go along on that trip to the islands, anyway,’ he said. ‘If they sort out the boat and everything.’

  ‘Could do,’ I replied, and we didn’t say much more after that. Just sat and stared into the deepening darkness, and after fifteen or twenty minutes Erik said he was tired and was going to turn in. I said I’d take care of the washing-up and perhaps stay up a bit longer, and he nodded and went off to his room. I heard him channel-hopping on the radio for a while, but he soon tired of it. I cleared away as promised and then took my notebook and another beer and went back out to the patio. I started my summary of the day; if Dr L knew how conscientious I am about my writing, he would be full of praise. We all have our individual routes to healing, he would often say. In your case, writing, recording what has already played out, is one of the more important components, possibly the most important of all.

  I don’t agree with Dr L on everything, but in this case I am coming to appreciate that his assessment is right. Words are what force us to choose our path.

  It is half past ten. The sea sounds like the breathing of some enormous creature, out there in the dark. The insects flutter round the lamp. I feel whole and strong, and these people with whom I am temporarily associating do not touch me. They do not reach to my core, and as long as they stay on the periphery, I can handle them as easily as I wield this pen in my hand.

  My last thoughts on the terrace this evening go to Troaë. I wrote at the start that she must be an old woman in a young girl’s body; that was really just a phrase that came into my head, but when I think about it, I believe it comes quite close to the truth. Perhaps that is the way with reflections that present themselves without invitation, they often possess a weight and a pregnancy that their more artful and considered equivalents lack. An immediacy.

  For there was something in that laugh, in the deft hands removing the swimming costume from the young body. The movements of experience, dancing over virgin territory; I wish expressions like that were not so easily accessible, and that they had the sense to keep out of my consciousness. The immediacy I was just talking about has no natural value per se, and I hope that girl is not going to turn up in my dreams.

  Anyway, I shall go to bed now. The calm I feel within me is only superficial, and possibly a harbinger of storm and darkness, but I shall in all probability spend a few more days on this sun-drenched coastal strip.

  Commentary, July 2007

  I was so right to start with him. Rereading my account of that conversation with a person so utterly emotionally paralysed, I can only congratulate myself. Although I had no inkling that evening of what lay ahead, I still managed to put my finger on Erik’s character; the sum total of goodness in the world had not been depleted by his death, in fact just the opposite. Not that I am driven by ethical considerations, far from it – but it does one no harm to be reminded of them. No one will miss Erik Bergman – it has taken five years to restore the balance that was disturbed in Mousterlin, to start to restore it, and the intervening years have been terrible. I have lost count of the nights when I awoke in a cold sweat after dreaming of the girl’s body in my arms, lost count of the moments I have felt myself on the brink of a sheer drop of despair, ready to take my own life.

  Yet it is not my death that will atone for what happened, but theirs. Actions must have consequences, and I am merely a tool for achieving that justice. It is all very simple and I do not intend to let myself be trapped; when I finally drove that knife into Erik Bergman’s belly that beautiful morning, I could clearly feel the fresh air rushing into my own body.

  Need I say any more?

  1–7 AUGUST 2007

  6

  Christina Lind Bergman was a dark-haired woman in her early forties.

  His immediate impression was that she seemed unexpectedly composed for someone whose only brother had just been stabbed to death. But twenty-four hours had passed, of course, and perhaps she had taken some kind of sedative. He also remembered that she was a doctor, and was presumably familiar with that sort of medication.

  The first thing she said once the formalities were out of the way – having refused coffee, tea or water – seemed to indicate his assessment had been correct. She was collected.

  ‘My brother and I weren’t particularly close,’ she said. ‘It’s just as well for you to know that. I realize you’ve got to interview me, but I can promise I shall have nothing to contribute. Nothing at all.’

  Excellent, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. So we won’t be going into this with unrealistic expectations, anyway.

  ‘Uh huh,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could expand on that at all?’

  Yes, she did think so. She rubbed something from the corner of her eye with the knuckle of her little finger and launched in.

  ‘I’m five years older than my brother. It’s just the two of us. There’s a bit too much of an age gap for us to have played together properly as children. When I was younger, I hoped we might get on a slightly better footing with each other when we grew up, or, well, I think that was what I hoped. But it never happened. Erik never grew up.’

  She paused briefly, as if expecting some sort of comment on this assertion, but Barbarotti gestured to her to go on.

  ‘No, he never grew up,’ she repeated. ‘Never matured. He’s one of those men who keep the outlook they had on the world in their teens for the rest of their lives. Everything is a kind of game, people are toys you can discard when you get tired of them. Especially women. You might say they’ve stayed in the changing room after the boys’ football match, those men . . . It sounds harsh and I don’t enjoy saying it, but why should I beat about the bush?’

  Why indeed, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, and shrugged his shoulders in a half-hearted gesture that he himself couldn’t really interpret.

  ‘Unfortunately, he’s always had the money to be able to drift through existence on his own terms,’ she went on without waiting for him to ask another question. ‘Our parents have always bailed him out.’

  ‘But his company’s doing well, isn’t it?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Nowadays, yes,’ said Christina Lind Bergman, and pulled a face. ‘But I don’t know how many millions Mum and Dad poured into it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Barbarotti. ‘So you’re saying your brother was some kind of spoilt yuppie?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Christina Lind Bergman. ‘But he had no empathy, either, it’s important not to overlook that detail just because he sailed through life with everything handed to him on a plate. No, I gave up on him years ago.’

  ‘How much contact did you have with him?’

  ‘None at all. We’ve even stopped seeing each other at Christmas. Mum and Dad don’t come back home any more – they have a house in Spain now. And I don’t know any of his friends, I’m not going to be the slightest use to you, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  She thought about it. ‘Last summer. Though that was only by chance. I was in a cafe in Lysekil, where I live . . . and work at the hospital. He was on a sailing jaunt with some friends, and happened to come in. We just said hello.’

  ‘Did he introduce his friends?’

  ‘Only by their first names. Two guys, similar to Erik, as far as I could judge. Tanned and broad-jawed and a bit the worse for drink. I can’t remember what they were called. Micke and Patrik or something like that, I think.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti nodded. Nice family, he thought. Strong ties and all that. ‘How do you get on with your parents?’ he asked.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with the murder of my brother.’

  ‘Perhaps you could answer anyway,’ requested Barbarotti.

  ‘Not all that well,’ admitte
d Christina Bergman. ‘To be honest, I see myself as the white sheep of this family.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Well, I still have to ask you whether you have any idea at all who could have killed your brother.’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘You mean why somebody might have done it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t help you there, either. Not that I find it hard to imagine he might have treated someone extremely badly. And that person could have reached the end of their tether and stabbed him. But that’s mere speculation and can scarcely be of any use to you.’

  ‘You sound as though you aren’t even surprised?’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Of course I’m surprised,’ she said. ‘One always is, surely, when some kind of accident happens?’

  No, thought Gunnar Barbarotti once he had escorted Christina Lind Bergman to the lift, ten minutes later, there was definitely no need for a sedative in her case.

  ‘Guess,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Twenty-five,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Backman. ‘The right answer’s nineteen. But that’s bad enough, I reckon.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Can I see?’

  She passed him the list and he glanced quickly through the rows of Anna Erikssons. ‘Some have different spellings,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Three with a “c”, one with only one “s”. If we assume the murderer’s spelt it correctly, that takes us down to fifteen. Do you think we should work on the assumption that he can spell?’