The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  It was just that his own kids were so far out of reach on this lovely evening. One in London, two in Copenhagen. Which suddenly felt a painfully long distance away. Eva Backman would step inside her nice terraced house in less than ten minutes and see her three. And her husband, of course. Yes, there was the world of difference.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said. ‘This is where I turn off. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Sleep well, sweet dreams,’ said Inspector Backman, and threw him a kiss.

  Spot on, he thought. People on their own ought to have a right to that. A rich dream life, in the absence of anything more substantial.

  It was quarter past ten when she rang. Hearing her voice, Gunnar Barbarotti suddenly understood what it must feel like to be saved from drowning at the last second. At the same instant, he felt almost frightened by the wave of emotion that came washing over him; the blood pounded in his temples and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. But as for Marianne, she sounded completely calm and normal.

  What’s up with me, he thought in dismay. Look at this hand holding the receiver, it’s shaking, for God’s sake!

  Marianne explained that unfortunately the mobile phone her offspring had brought with them was playing up, and that was why it had taken her so long to get in touch.

  ‘So you’re in Hagmund and Jolanda’s kitchen?’ enquired Barbarotti.

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed Marianne. ‘It’s a bit late, I know, but luckily they hadn’t gone to bed. How are you?’

  ‘I . . . I miss you,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, and was able to swallow at last.

  ‘Glad to hear it. That’s why it’s good to be apart occasionally. To learn what missing someone means. Have you caught your letter writer yet?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Barbarotti, feeling no inclination whatsoever to talk to Marianne about work. But it was only natural that she should ask, of course. It was the letter writer who had forced him to leave Gustabo ahead of time. That was why they were now at opposite ends of a telephone line instead of skin to skin. ‘But we’re working on it,’ he said. ‘How are things with you? Did the kids get there all right?’

  She laughed. ‘Oh yes. But they were definitely a bit disappointed not to see their detective. You’ve got it made there, my darling.’

  I’ve deceived them, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Pulled the wool over their eyes, all three of them. What was it called? Groucho Marx syndrome. That very specific phenomenon of not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.

  ‘Go on with you,’ he said. ‘You know what teens are like, they change their views as often as they change their socks.’

  They exchanged a dozen comments at about that level of subtlety, then Marianne lowered her voice and said she was in oestrus and a bit tired of sleeping alone in a bed with room for two. Gunnar Barbarotti declared that for his part he was not in oestrus, but was prepared to sleep beside her for the rest of his days – or nights, to be precise – in a bed where there was barely room for a tiny lapdog or something, and at that point Jolanda obviously came into the kitchen for something. He could hear it, even in Kymlinge. Marianne took a deep breath, wished him good night and promised to go into Visby one day very soon and buy a new mobile phone. Without telling the children, obviously, because she didn’t want to infringe Gustabo regulations to that extent.

  After they had hung up, Gunnar Barbarotti went and sat on the balcony with a beer. Christ, he thought. I didn’t realize she meant that much. If I lost her I’d put a bullet through my brain.

  He sat there for a while and finished his beer, watching the remains of the sunset, which hung there like a mirage, a smear of palest yellow above Pampas and behind the tower blocks over in Ångermanland. And the jackdaws, that screeching horde, flocking in to roost on the roofs of the town and in the elms in the town park, he watched them too. They were early this year, weren’t they? He had always associated the jackdaw invasion with cooler autumn evenings. Late August, September. But of course they, too, must be there the year round, like all other living creatures. A man without a woman, was his next thought, but he couldn’t remember the rest of it this evening, either . . . is like a . . . ?

  His beer finished, he finally wrenched himself free of his self-pitying reflections and spared a thought or two for the continuing investigation. The murderer.

  The letter-writing murderer. It was the letters that made it all so singular. Made it feel unique, somehow. If the case had consisted merely of their finding a man who had been stabbed to death, they would have swung into action of course, but it would not have carried the same weight. The newspapers still hadn’t released the name of the deceased, but he knew they would tomorrow. And that was probably a correct decision.

  Perhaps it would also have been correct to tell the public about the letters and release Anna Eriksson’s name? Perhaps that way they could have got hold of somebody who knew something?

  On the other hand, it was easy to stir up panic. And if there was anything the tabloids liked to do, it was that. Project people’s inherent fears, frustrations and anger and direct it at one point, one scapegoat. It used to be ethnic groups, Jews or Gypsies or Communists, but nowadays it was individuals. A government minister, for example. Or an actor with alcohol problems. Or why not an unsuspecting detective inspector in Kymlinge? That was the intrinsic motor of the so-called pack. It had worked for as long as there had been newspapers, and it worked better than ever today, now that vulgarity and smut were the keys in which everything was to be sung.

  And now that a TV blonde’s new silicon lips were more significant news than genocide in some part of the world that wasn’t central Stockholm. Bloody hell, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Has this country ever been more superficial? Have we ever had a worse tabloid press?

  He wondered how aware the murderer was of this. If he was deliberately writing his letters because he knew that it would make things harder for the police in many respects. Particularly the day it came out in the press. Because the fact of the matter is, thought Barbarotti, watching a new swarm of jackdaws make an elegant avian circuit before coming in to land on the ridge of Cathedral School’s roof, that two leads aren’t always better than one. Especially if one of them has been planted there by the murderer himself with the aim of . . .

  Well, the aim of what?

  It was a vexing question. Extraordinarily so.

  And what lay ahead for Anna Eriksson?

  More vexing still.

  Same thing again, noted Barbarotti as he came in from the balcony. Rather one vexing question than two.

  What was more, they were both pretty scary, and that hardly made things better. He remembered Eva Backman’s hand on his arm that morning. The fact that he – Detective Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti of Baldersgatan in Kymlinge – was the addressee of the letters was another disturbing factor, of course.

  Because what did it mean? Did it mean that he knew the perpetrator in some way? That the murderer’s name – once they got wind of it – would prove familiar? The converse, that the murderer knew who it was he was sending his letters to, seemed pretty obvious, at any rate. Didn’t it?

  What a total pain, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, checking the time, if only I hadn’t taken those letters from the postman that morning – or if he’d come just a minute later – then I would have been snuggling up in bed with Marianne at Gustabo about now. I can scarcely imagine it would have done the investigation any harm.

  Rape field, cows, churchyard, broadleaved woodland. Here in Kymlinge there was an acute lack of all those. Well, there was a churchyard of course.

  His head full of dismal thoughts such as these, he went to take a shower.

  10

  ‘We’ve located the air-conditioned arse.’

  Barbarotti looked up from his reports.

  ‘What?’

  It was Friday morning. He had read eight reports, the one in his hand being the ninth. It was the work of a certain
DS Wennergren-Olofsson. He had a rather flowery style, seldom making do with three words if he could use twenty. He was also known for being the only officer in the building who took more than ten seconds to sign his name: Claes-Henrik Wennergren-Olofsson.

  ‘Conny Härnlind,’ clarified Eva Backman, closing the door behind her. ‘The potential boyfriend of Anna Eriksson in Skolgatan.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Barbarotti, promptly closing his eyes to escape the sudden flock of names. ‘Located, you said?’

  ‘Yes indeed. He’s in Thailand, but not with Ms Eriksson. Nor any other woman for that matter – and by that I mean women from Kymlinge and environs. He went out there with a group of other young blokes a week ago, and it’s not so hard to guess what they’ve been up to.’

  ‘Who’s prejudiced now?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Backman. ‘Well, maybe I was being a bit hasty there, I’m sure they’ve gone there to discuss philately and ecumenical issues. But be that as it may, Anna’s still missing. I spoke to her mum and she doesn’t know anything either. They generally ring each other a couple of times a week. She lives in Jönköping. The worrying thing is . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The slightly worrying thing is that she evidently told her mum she was going to Gotland, too. Today, that is.’

  ‘And when did she tell her that?’

  ‘Sunday evening. Her mum called three or four times in the week but got no answer, so . . . so I just don’t know.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘That doesn’t sound good. She’s got a mobile, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll have to check if she used it at all this past week. I think . . .’

  ‘I just dropped in for a word with Sorrysen. He’ll already be in touch with the mobile phone operator, I should imagine.’

  ‘Good,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Then we’ll have the information this afternoon, with any luck. If a single woman doesn’t use her mobile phone for four days of her holiday, it means there’s something wrong.’

  He expected Eva Backman to say something about prejudices – almost hoped she would – but she didn’t. Shame, he thought. She realizes where this is probably leading, just like me.

  ‘We’d better be ready with a search warrant, hadn’t we?’ she suggested instead. ‘If we . . . well, if we get that kind of answer from the operator.’

  That kind of answer, thought Gunnar Barbarotti once she had left the room. That was one way of putting it, he supposed. A thin layer of linguistic balm applied to the wounds of reality. Though it was far from usual for Backman to talk like that.

  Which was also significant, presumably. He remembered again the hand she had laid on his arm.

  He sighed and returned to DS Wennergren-Olofsson’s deathless prose.

  At two o’clock on Friday afternoon, Astor Nilsson and profiler Lillieskog both left Kymlinge police station. Astor Nilsson would be back after the weekend, and Lillieskog would come any day he was summoned.

  ‘I did the follow-up interviews with four of Bergman’s acquaintances this morning,’ Astor Nilsson told them as they wound up the week over four cups of coffee and four almond tarts, chock-full of preservatives. ‘Like we said. And I can promise you on my mother’s grave that none of them has the slightest inkling of what lies behind the murder. None of them are saints, of course, but when you scrape away the rubbish, you’re left with the facts. Erik Bergman’s assassin isn’t to be found in his circle of friends. We can stop looking for him there.’

  ‘And then we had a few who were away, didn’t we?’ said Backman.

  ‘Correct,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘I accept that reservation. Though if you’re away you can’t simultaneously be at home, stabbing people to death.’

  ‘OK,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Let’s suppose you’re right. Where shall we look, then?’

  ‘I’ve no answer to that question for the time being,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘But I’m going back to Gothenburg and home to Hisingen to think about it over the weekend. If I come up with anything before Monday, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘You know where you can reach me if I can help in any way,’ Lillieskog declared in his turn. ‘I do wonder about the best-before date of this tart.’

  ‘It’s part of a batch from before they started putting dates on,’ Backman informed him obligingly. ‘Sometime in the sixties. You’re both very welcome to bring along a few other treats when you turn up again.’

  They shook hands, wishing each other a good weekend, and the party broke up.

  ‘Well then,’ said Backman when they were alone. ‘That’s our expertise gone.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Nothing from that mobile operator yet?’

  Backman shook her head. ‘They promised to email me the lists by three, so we’ll just have to be patient until then, anyway. Have you been through all the reports?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti shrugged.

  ‘Thirty-eight of the forty-two, anyway.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, it’s just as Astor Nilsson says, I’m afraid. There’s nothing that seems to lead anywhere. I agree with him that the murderer presumably didn’t know Erik Bergman particularly well. Not recently, that is . . . could all go back to something in their past. I mean, these things generally take some time to rise to the surface.’

  ‘Yes, and people do normally have some kind of reason for killing someone. Call me old-fashioned, but . . . ?’

  ‘We can always hope,’ said Barbarotti. ‘No link to any Anna Eriksson either, anyway. Things aren’t exactly moving forward.’

  Eva Backman finished her coffee and bit her lip. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘But the murderer must have had some idea of Bergman’s habits, mustn’t he? He knew he’d be going out for a run that morning. He can’t just have gone and crouched in a bush on spec. What does that tell us?’

  ‘That he’d been keeping him under observation for few days, maybe,’ suggested Barbarotti. ‘Sat in a car and checked out his usual movements, say.’

  ‘And we’ve asked the neighbours whether they saw a suspicious car in the neighbourhood, I assume?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti watched a fly crawl across his bare forearm. ‘Haven’t seen anything about that kind of sighting in the reports.’

  ‘Great,’ said Eva Backman, getting to her feet. ‘Just as well to think things through before we take any further steps. I’ll come and see you when I hear from the mobile operator.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  It took barely more than twenty minutes, in fact, and the result was as unambiguously negative as he and Backman had feared. Anna Eriksson – who lived in Skolgatan in central Kymlinge and was a Telenor customer – had not used her mobile phone since five past eleven on Tuesday morning. In the three days that had passed since then she had received twenty-nine calls but not answered a single one. Six text messages as well, though it was impossible to tell whether they had been read, but she certainly hadn’t replied to any of them.

  Backman handed the list of calls to Barbarotti. ‘Tuesday, 11 a.m.,’ she said. ‘The first unanswered call is registered as 12.26 p.m. What do you think?

  ‘That’s the day Erik Bergman was murdered,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I got the letter about Anna Eriksson in Wednesday’s post. He could . . . he must have posted it sometime on Tuesday . . . maybe in Gothenburg? You don’t think he could actually have . . . dealt with them both the same day?’

  He stared at Eva Backman, as if he was expecting her to give him a correct answer – but she merely looked at him with empty eyes and a mouth compressed into a line as thin as a razor blade. She sat there, utterly immobile with her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped between her knees, for a good while before she answered.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said finally. ‘But one thing I do know is that it’s time to pay a little visit to Skolgatan. We got the warrant from Sylvenius an hour ago.�
��

  Gunnar Barbarotti checked the time. ‘Seems a fair way to round off the working week.’

  The flat was not large and they found her straight away.

  For the first fraction of the first second, Barbarotti felt a perverse kind of triumph. We were right! It was her! We were on the right track!

  But then he felt nothing but disgust and impotence. Anna Eriksson, thirty-four years of age, single and in the employ of the Sfinx advertising agency in Fabriksgatan, had not gone on a trip to Gotland. Or anywhere else. She was lying under her own bed in her home at 15 Skolgatan, packaged up in two black bin bags, one pulled up from her feet, the other pulled down over her head, and she did not smell good. The sweetish stench coming from her dead body was unmistakeable in the warm, closed-up flat; they could smell it the moment they opened the door, and when Barbarotti knelt beside the immaculately neat linen of the tubular steel bed in the alcove and confirmed the fact – and then straightened up again – he suddenly felt a slight giddiness, resulting not so much from the sight that had met him as from unconsciously having held his breath for over thirty seconds.

  ‘Get that balcony door open,’ he instructed Inspector Backman.

  Of course it then took nearly an hour before the two plastic sacks were duly removed by the doctor and the crime scene technicians – and a further half hour before the first preliminary identification had been made (with the help of a shocked young couple in the flat opposite) – but Inspector Barbarotti was certainly in no doubt who it was, in the course of those ninety long minutes.

  Nor Eva Backman.

  Nor was there much doubt about how Anna Eriksson had been killed. Her pale and slightly swollen face was relatively intact, but was framed by an oval of dark, dried blood, smeared across her temples and down both cheeks, and when they carefully turned her round, the trauma to her skull and above her right eye was apparent. Blunt instrument, thought Gunnar Barbarotti automatically, forcing back the queasiness that was welling up inside him. Such as some iron piping. Such as a baseball bat. Such as any fucking thing.