The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Crystal clear,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘You’re gagged,’ said Jonnerblad.

  ‘Understood,’ said Barbarotti, and rang off.

  He switched on the coffee machine and started spreading butter on a couple of slices of bread, and then Swedish Television rang to suggest he come to the royal capital and grace the sofa of the morning news programme the next day. Barbarotti said he was sorry but he was unable to do so because it could be detrimental to ongoing investigations, and hung up. He had barely sat down at the kitchen table when TV4 rang. They wondered whether he would like to be a guest on their evening sofa; he informed them politely but firmly that he was unfortunately already fully booked and thanked them for their interest.

  He gulped a mouthful of coffee, took a bite of bread, and received a call from the radio programme After Three. Before the woman had time to introduce herself, Barbarotti said he was in the middle of an important interrogation and hadn’t time to talk.

  Then he switched off all the phones, finished his breakfast and read the local morning paper. There wasn’t a word about any police assault.

  Marianne, he thought. Marianne would be exposed to Expressen today, as well.

  He reactivated his channels of communication with the outside world just after ten; he had enjoyed a long bath, forty-five minutes to the strains of Bach cello suites, sent up a three-point prayer of existence to Our Lord, and missed twelve calls to his landline.

  Fourteen to his mobile, and six messages to each of them.

  I’m in clover here, thought Inspector Barbarotti. No doubt about that.

  Or in the eye of the storm, or however one cares to put it.

  Off the case until further notice?

  That had never happened to him before.

  An official complaint? That had happened before. It happened to everyone, but it was normally a matter of some familiar perpetrator losing his rag and wanting to get his own back. The official investigations were always shut down, it was all part of the game, really, both the complaints and the shuttings down. Which was a shame – because now and then a police officer actually did overstep the mark, everybody knew that.

  He still hadn’t dared venture out to buy a copy of the evening paper; he wasn’t sure what time they usually got to Kymlinge and the thought of returning home empty-handed was far from appealing. Better to wait another half hour, he decided. Maybe think about some kind of disguise, as well?

  Still no call from Marianne. He wondered why that could be. It was the only thing that mattered to him, really. This was the uncomfortable truth that had started to dawn on him; he didn’t care what the rest of the world thought, or cared very little, at any rate, but the way Marianne reacted was vital to him. In the original sense of the word – crucial to his existence.

  He took this problem and both his phones and went to sit out on the balcony.

  So why hadn’t she been in touch? Either it was simply that no one had alerted her to the scandal of the day, or . . . or she had already read it and chosen to remain silent.

  He couldn’t countenance the latter. Jesus Christ, no way, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. There was no way the act of pushing that bloody hack Persson out of his front door could have such a devastating impact on his private life. Things simply hadn’t the right to develop in this sort of way – he had already had a word with Our Lord about it while lying in the bath with Bach, and Our Lord had been of the same opinion.

  He listened to his messages. Two were from Jonnerblad, one on each phone, and two from Inspector Backman; five were from assorted journalists and the other three from good friends who seemed to be acquainted with that day’s edition of Expressen, to judge by their tone.

  Both Jonnerblad and Backman asked him to contact the police, and he had no problem deciding which channel he would choose when he did so. No problem at all.

  Eva Backman’s private mobile. She rarely switched it off, and this time was no exception – she replied after three rings and asked him to wait. He assumed she wanted to go somewhere private before she spoke to him, and when she came back on the line he realized why she, of all the cops in the world, was the one he would hand-pick if he were forced to spend a year on a desert island with a colleague. If we didn’t have six kids with other people we could have got married, he thought suddenly. It wasn’t exactly a new idea, but it had been lying fallow for a while. It had no prospect of survival.

  ‘How are things?’ she asked. ‘I’m a bit worried about you.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, as a call came in on his landline. He checked the display to make sure it wasn’t Marianne and left it to ring. ‘But I haven’t read the paper yet. What does it actually say?’

  ‘It’s utter rubbish,’ said Backman. ‘Ridiculous to splash it across the newsstands like that. What really happened?’

  ‘That bugger tried to force his way in here last night. I pushed him out onto the landing.’

  ‘Thought as much. It says in the paper that you knocked him to the floor and threw him down the stairs. He did himself some damage too, evidently. Jonnerblad’s holding another little press conference at the moment, but he wants a word with you afterwards.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And I’m off the case?’

  ‘Until further notice, as I understand it. And it’s just as well for you to lie low, I reckon. The atmosphere’s a bit overheated here.’

  ‘Really?’ said Barbarotti. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

  ‘You know what, I think we might be starting to make progress,’ declared Eva Backman, and he could hear that she was trying hard to sound optimistic.

  ‘Progress?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. We’ve discovered that that couple, Henrik and Katarina Malmgren, were going on holiday to Denmark, and Sorrysen has just reported that they took the late evening ferry to Fredrikshavn . . . on Sunday, if I’ve got that right. But something isn’t entirely clear, so I think he’s on the phone to the ferry company as we speak.’

  ‘Aha?’ said Barbarotti. ‘What is it that’s not entirely clear?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I can ring and tell you once I’ve had a word with Sorrysen. But we’ve had the analyses of the first three letters. Linköping tells us there are no fingerprints, and no saliva either . . . our friend the murderer seems to have been pretty scrupulous, but then we knew that already.’

  ‘Yes, I had a feeling they wouldn’t find anything,’ agreed Barbarotti. ‘Well, tell Jonnerblad he can ring me on my mobile if he wants anything. I think I’ll switch it on for five minutes on the hour and half hour, there’s a bit too much shit in circulation for me to keep it on the whole time.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Eva Backman. ‘If it doesn’t sound way too soft of me, I actually feel a bit sorry for you.’

  ‘It sounds way too soft of you,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ said Eva Backman, and gave a laugh. ‘But then you’re forgetting I’m a woman. We’ve got that, you know, empathetic streak that you blokes are lacking.’

  ‘Empa . . . ? What did you say it was called?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I thought I’d drop round on the way home from work today. Brainstorming with the gang here doesn’t really work for me . . . If you don’t mind, that is?’

  ‘You’ll be welcome,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’ll treat you to a beer on the balcony. What’s happening about your holiday?’

  ‘Seems to have been postponed for a few more days,’ said Eva Backman. ‘And Ville’s threatening to come back from the cottage. The boys have started moaning about his cooking, apparently.’

  ‘Police officers shouldn’t be allowed holidays at all,’ said Barbarotti. ‘It just messes up routine procedure. But that’s all the time I can spare you right now. I need to get out and buy an evening paper, and then I’m going to lie down on the sofa and relax for a couple of hours.’

  ‘I take back what I said about fe
eling sorry for you,’ said Eva Backman, and rang off.

  It was even worse than he had expected.

  And he had expected quite a lot. He sank down at the kitchen table, spread the paper out in front of him and realized, rather to his surprise, that he felt sick.

  He was all over the front page. Half of it was taken up with a headline in inch-high letters.

  EXPRESSEN REPORTER KNOCKED OUT COLD BY THE POLICE

  The other half comprised a large, grainy picture, which that flash-happy photographer had seemingly managed to take at the exact moment he shoved Göran Persson in the chest. It didn’t look pretty; the detail that had come out in sharpest focus was Barbarotti’s facial expression, reminiscent of a ruthless karate king delivering the fatal blow to his defenceless opponent.

  And that goddamned reporter did indeed look as if he was falling helplessly backwards.

  But knocked out cold? By a pair of fists to the chest?

  He turned to page eight, where the truth about this new case of police brutality was exposed, and related in all its atrocious detail. With purely peaceful intentions, experienced and respected crime reporter Göran Persson had tried to obtain a comment from police officer Gunnar Barbarotti at his flat in central Kymlinge – on the grounds that the perpetrator of the two murders recently committed in the town had sent letters to this particular officer, as reported in detail in Monday’s paper. Without any provocation, Barbarotti had at that point attacked the poor defenceless journalist, punching him violently, and had then thrown him down a steep staircase, knocking him out and breaking two bones in his body.

  In his body? thought Barbarotti. Well, where the heck else would they be?

  Shocked and injured, Göran Persson had left the scene with the help of the paper’s photographer and spent the night in Kymlinge hospital. The incident had been reported to the police and the whole affair naturally put a severe damper and hindrance on the investigation currently being undertaken – with no sign of progress to date – by the Kymlinge police, with reinforcements from Gothenburg and the National CID as they hunted for the letter-writing murderer, now assumed to have two lives on his conscience.

  Damper and hindrance, thought Barbarotti. Perhaps he had bumped his head after all? Unusually, the article was unattributed. Maybe someone at the paper had realized it would look like wearing too many hats if Göran Persson put his name to the piece.

  The officer leading the case, Detective Superintendent Jonnerblad, had not been available late on Monday night when Expressen tried to contact him for a comment on Inspector Barbarotti’s reckless attack on free speech and its representatives. In a hastily conducted opinion poll of people in and around Kymlinge, as many as 66 per cent said they had little or no confidence in the police force’s ability to get to grips with the rise in criminality. Over the summer, for example, not a single one of the twenty-two reported house-burglary cases in the district had been solved. There were good grounds for asking what the police force was doing with its time.

  On page five there were more pictures of combatants Persson and Barbarotti. He had no idea where they had come by the photograph of him, which gave him the dishevelled appearance of someone who had just emerged from a ditch where he had slept off a drinking bout. He had dark shadows under his eyes and looked rather like the late Christer Pettersson, suspect in the Olof Palme assassination case. The reporter, for his part, had a split lip, a bruise under one eye and a bloodstained bandage round his head, and roughly resembled an emphysema patient who had just been run over by a steamroller.

  There’s no end to this, thought Detective Inspector Barbarotti. If I see that devil again I shall give him a proper thrashing.

  And it struck him that thoughts like this were utterly typical of perpetrators of violent crime across the board.

  He slid his finger into the Bible.

  The same place. It was remarkable. How unlikely was that? But perhaps he had left it lying open at that page for a while, last time? He seemed to remember there was a card trick that worked like that. And old books nearly always fell open at the most frequently read pages if you left it to chance, didn’t they? Or an index finger.

  Matthew, then.

  Matthew. Chapter 6, verse 23.

  But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

  He looked at the surrounding verses and saw that there were crucial matters under discussion. Our Lord and God and Mammon were all there – but still, he thought, my eye is evil? What did that signify? What lesson was he expected to draw from it?

  The fact that things felt pretty dark at the moment hardly needed pointing out by a higher power.

  He closed the Bible with a sigh and switched on his mobile.

  Four new voicemail messages, but above all, a text from Marianne. Finally, he thought, his fingers fumbling over the keys. My life’s turning a corner.

  She asked him to give her time.

  Or that was how you could describe it if you wanted to see it positively. Given what she had read in today’s Expressen, she needed to consider things, she wrote. I’ve read it, need to think. It would be wrong to make any hasty decisions. But he was welcome to ring.

  That was all. He wandered round the flat in restless indecision for fifteen minutes, until he plucked up courage. She didn’t answer. He wandered round for ten more. Tried again, and this time she was there.

  ‘You mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ he said. ‘That’s not how it happened.’

  He knew how unconvincing he must sound. Like when a notorious addict tries to justify beating his wife for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t my fault. She took her time replying, but he at least had the presence of mind not to offer any more lousy excuses in the ominous seconds of silence.

  ‘Yes, I’d really like to know what happened,’ she said finally. ‘Of course. But there are the children to think about, too. Them above all, in fact. They’ve read the paper and they’re finding it a bit hard to take in that it’s you. I don’t know what to tell them.’

  He swallowed. The children? A couple of hours ago, Helena had said almost the same thing.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Here’s what happened: that reporter tried to barge into my flat. I bundled him out of the door, that was all.’

  ‘That was all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence. He could feel a clenched hand twisting in his stomach.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘Gunnar, please, I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘You prefer to believe what they write in Expressen?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m only saying that . . . that it’s hard to get the children to understand something like this.’

  ‘Yes, I get it. And what about . . . us?’

  She hesitated again. Dark seconds went sailing by on the way to no-man’s-land. Or a graveyard. Or an inferno. Where were all those images coming from, he wondered. These images and rootless thoughts again.

  ‘I don’t know about us,’ she said in the end. ‘You’ll have to give me a bit more time.’

  ‘Are you saying this just because of what they printed in Expressen today?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘I’d be grateful for an honest answer, Marianne. I proposed to you last week, remember. You promised me an answer this Wednesday. Today’s Tuesday.’

  ‘I know what day it is.’

  ‘Good. So I’ll ring you tomorrow as we agreed.’

  ‘If you ring me tomorrow, the answer’s going to be no. You’ve no right to pressurize me like this.’

  ‘OK, I won’t ring then. Do you want to give me a new date or should I consider this a closed chapter?’

  ‘Why are you putting pressure on me, Gunnar? I can’t make a decision right now, why do you find that so odd?’

  He checked himself and thought about it – and at the same time felt a slight pride in having been able to do it.
Check himself. I’ve grown up a bit, he thought. If this had been in the Helena years, I’d have slammed the phone down at this point.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve had a bad day today,’ he said. ‘I’ve been served up to the whole of Sweden as a hooligan. An official complaint’s been lodged against me, I’ve got the sack and the woman I love doesn’t want me.’

  ‘You got the sack?’

  ‘Suspended from work, anyway.’

  ‘But surely they can’t . . . ?’

  ‘Oh yes they can. And it’s only natural, considering the situation. Isn’t it?’

  Her breathing at the other end of the line sounded distressed. Amazing that one can detect distress just from a breath, he thought. Amazing that it’s audible on the phone. For some reason he found this comforting.

  ‘Gunnar,’ she said, ‘how about this? Ring me on Saturday, and we’ll see. I’ll talk this through with Johan and Jenny, I’ve got to do that . . . can you bear to wait until then?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I might need a bit of time to sort out one thing and another, myself.’

  ‘Saturday, then?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  He felt a bit better after the call than he had done before he rang her. Or so he tried to convince himself. He switched off the phone without listening to the other messages.

  How do I feel inside, he wondered. Darkness or light? Graveyard or inferno?

  He crumpled Expressen into a ball and rammed it into the bin, then went to sit on the balcony with a crossword instead.

  20

  Inspector Backman turned up around 6.30, bringing with her three big red files.

  ‘Thought you could probably do with a bit of stimulation,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Save you having to go to the park and feed the pigeons.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘If you read through them tonight, I could collect them on my way to work tomorrow morning. This is basically everything we’ve got in the case to date. You know most of it already, of course.’

  ‘Have Jonnerblad and Asunander approved this?’