The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘I didn’t ask them,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Smart,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Let’s go and sit on the balcony. You’ve got time for a beer?’

  ‘Always,’ said Backman. ‘My menfolk haven’t carried out their threat to come home – yet. And it’s a nice evening.’

  ‘They seem to be getting ready for a crayfish party in the garden next door,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Perhaps we can pinch a bit of their atmosphere.’

  Inspector Backman smiled.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said, sinking into one of the chairs. ‘You’ve really thought of everything.’

  ‘One does what one can,’ said Barbarotti. He went to the kitchen and returned with two beers and two tall glasses. This balcony may be small, but it was definitely built for two, he thought involuntarily.

  ‘But in return, I want a thorough update,’ he said. ‘A proper oral report, all nice and clear, before I start my reading. You don’t happen to have solved the case between you in the course of today?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Backman admitted. ‘But things don’t look promising for the couple from Gothenburg, I’m afraid.’

  Barbarotti poured the drinks, and they raised their glasses to each other and each took a deep draught.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Barbarotti. ‘Not promising?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Backman, lounging back in her chair. ‘Mmm, it makes a bloody nice change to work on a balcony instead of inside a police station. I’m sure a lot of cases would benefit from this sort of approach.’

  ‘We can make this a permanent thing,’ suggested Barbarotti. ‘For as long as I’m suspended, at any rate. If you come round and brief me every evening, you’ll get a beer for your trouble.’

  ‘Why not?’ smiled Eva Backman.

  ‘Not at all promising?’ Barbarotti prompted her.

  She cleared her throat and her expression grew grave. ‘Yes, it’s starting to look that way. Everything points to Henrik and Katarina Malmgren having taken the late evening ferry from Gothenburg to Fredrikshavn on Sunday, and there are strong indications that they didn’t disembark on the Danish side.’

  ‘Strong indications . . .’ queried Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Could you spell them out, please?’

  ‘The fact that their car was left on the car deck, for example,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Well, that’s the only one, in fact, but it weighs pretty heavily, as I said. Don’t you think?’

  ‘They didn’t drive the car off the ferry?’

  ‘You’ve got it. An Audi, packed with holiday stuff, was left standing on the deck. Now of course it’s possible they decided to abandon the car and all their luggage and just walked off the ferry, but no one in the team has come up with any plausible explanation for them doing that. Maybe you can, though?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti frowned. ‘You mean they could have been murdered on the ferry? And . . . ?’

  ‘And thrown in the sea, yes. That’s one theory. Another is that they were murdered and stuffed into some other vehicle . . . and buried later in some bog in Denmark. Or somewhere on the continent, free choice of location.’

  ‘Crossing borders with dead bodies in the boot? Sounds a bit much.’

  ‘There are no borders in Europe any longer,’ said Backman. ‘But sure, I agree with you. It seems more likely they were dumped overboard under cover of darkness.’

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Well, what conclusions do you draw yourself?’ asked Eva Backman.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Two people drive onto a car ferry in their car. When everyone else has disembarked and the boat’s empty, four hours later, the car’s still sitting there. Ergo?’

  Barbarotti said nothing. For a while he just sat there contemplating the three red case files on the table. He waved away a wasp that was trying to sneak a look.

  ‘And the link with the other victims?’

  ‘We’ve scarcely had time to start on that yet. There are no obvious connections, at any rate. Henrik Malmgren’s a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. His wife Katarina’s a nurse anaesthetist at Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska hospital. Thirty-seven and thirty-four years of age respectively, no children and neither of them feature in our records.’

  ‘I know all that,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Has anyone searched their place yet?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘They’ve just started. Tallin, Jonnerblad and Astor Nilsson are there. The prosecutor took a while to authorize it, but the car’s been seized, too. It’s a primary line of enquiry, to quote the National CID.’

  ‘Primary line of enquiry? We’re looking for victims. I thought that a primary line of enquiry was to do with finding the perpetrator?’

  ‘So did I,’ said Eva Backman, taking a drink of beer. ‘Not that we local cops have much to boast of either. He did stand up for you to the press, by the way, Superintendent Jonnerblad, and I get the feeling your reputation’s going to be somewhat restored in tomorrow’s Aftonbladet.’

  ‘So I heard,’ said Barbarotti with a nod.

  ‘Heard?’

  ‘I spoke to Jonnerblad a couple of hours ago. But who reads that sort of official correction?’

  ‘Not many people,’ said Backman.

  ‘No, that’s just it. I’ve helped them put a face on police violence, in this town at any event, and there’ll be no shaking it off for a few years, I’m sure of that. He’s not letting me back into the group, either, Jonnerblad. He thinks it wouldn’t be tactical at this stage.’

  Eva Backman nodded.

  ‘Not until Expressen withdraws its official complaint to the police . . . a provocation to the public’s sense of justice, he said it would be.’

  ‘There is another reason for keeping you on the out of things, you know,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Oh yes? And what’s that?’

  ‘You’re the one the murderer writes to. There is a slight conflict of interests there.’

  ‘So if he wrote to police HQ, we’d all have to stand aside from the case?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘We’d have to hire in some cops from Estonia?’

  Eva Backman gave a laugh. ‘Maybe. No, I suppose it’s mainly the other thing that’s making them keep you out of it. You had rather too much exposure today, just as you say, and people need time to forget. A few days, at the very least.’

  ‘But that shouldn’t exclude me from sitting in my office and investigating on the case.’

  ‘Of course not. But it’s much nicer here, like I said.’

  ‘OK,’ sighed Barbarotti. ‘You want another beer?’

  Eva Backman shook her head. ‘Thought I might fit in a run, and two beers in my system would be a bit too much.’

  Barbarotti nodded and rapped the pile of folders with his knuckles. ‘You get going,’ he said. ‘I’ll devote the evening to looking through the material. I’ll let you have my comments first thing tomorrow, if you drop by.’

  Inspector Backman got to her feet just as the partygoers down in the next-door garden struck up a well-loved drinking song. ‘Ah, there you go,’ she said, glancing over the balcony rail. ‘One day you and I are gonna get to a party too, just you wait and see.’

  ‘One can always hope,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘What’s happened about your holiday, by the way?’

  ‘Postponed until further notice,’ explained Inspector Backman. ‘What did you expect?’

  About three hours and a dozen drinking songs later, he had read through the contents of all three folders. Darkness had descended and an August moon, marbled in yellow and blood red, had sailed up over the uneven copper roofs of Cathedral School. All the jackdaws had fallen silent and the only screeching came from the drunken partygoers down below. He was still out on the balcony; an evening chill had crept over him, but a woolly cardigan and a blanket over his knees had kept it at bay.

  It really was a strange case. He basically knew that even before he star
ted wading through all the case material, but he could not help being struck by it again. In all likelihood, one of the strangest he had ever experienced.

  And terrifying. Particularly when you tried to visualize the perpetrator himself. To paint a picture of such a person.

  If Henrik and Katarina Malmgren really had been murdered, too, the man now had four lives on his conscience. That alone – the number of victims – made him kind of unique. There weren’t many murderers in the country with four dead bodies to their names, Barbarotti knew that. Most of those currently serving their sentences at Hall, Österåker or Kumla prisons had only one, and just a few had two or three. When you had killed four people, you were undeniably playing in the highest league.

  Or the lowest, depending on the standards by which one measured.

  And the fact that he had tipped off the police by letter in all four cases must make him extremely unusual in an international context, too, Barbarotti thought. Lillieskog had claimed not to know of any other case in which advance warning had been given in this way – that was why he had been unsure about the profiling. All profiling was built on experience, and if there was no experience, well, then you were building on a quagmire. So much for that sort of precision.

  The reams of papers in the folders included a statement from an eminent criminologist, asserting that ‘for once it could be a case of a murderer with some potency to his grey matter, which was why the police force currently found itself stuck in such a tight corner’. Barbarotti was aware of feeling inclined to agree with this somewhat rough and ready hypothesis.

  A smart devil, in short. Possibly without a criminal record. Possibly with an unshakeable determination to implement his plan and avoid getting caught. Just as Lillieskog had claimed, in fact.

  Not random killings. Not a serial killer, despite the large number of victims. Once he had killed those he intended to kill, it would be over. The only question was: how many were there on his list? And above all: what was the connection between the individuals on that list?

  There were hundreds of other questions, of course. Would they be able to stop him before he had finished, for example? Before he had murdered all those he was planning to murder? Would they be able to stop him at all?

  And Hans Andersson? What did the murderer mean by – to use his own words – ‘Hans Andersson can go on living’? Had there ever been an intended victim by that name or was it just a bluff? A smokescreen deployed in the midst of the battle, for some reason?

  And were Henrik and Katarina Malmgren really dead? In the folders, there were pictures of both of them: a man with a thin face and thinning hair, spectacles and an expression for which Barbarotti could find no better word than ‘ordinary’ – while Katarina was dark and had a livelier look to her, attractive in that powerful, slightly Mediterranean way. And there was a Kymlinge connection, too. She had evidently lived in the town for five years as a teenager, at the end of the eighties, out in Kymlingevik. And of course that was another important question: what role did Kymlinge play in all this? Did the killer have the same local links as three of his victims?

  In short, was he here in town? Did he just head off somewhere else to post his letters? And to kill Mr and Mrs Malmgren, perhaps?

  And if one were to assume they were actually dead, how had he achieved it? If it was as Backman said, then on top of everything else he must be a singularly cold-blooded individual, thought Barbarotti. Killing a man and his wife aboard a boat and then simply heaving their bodies over the side – without attracting attention – could not be at all straightforward.

  And why choose that particular method?

  As usual, Gunnar Barbarotti was well aware that all these small but significant questions, prone to – how had he put it the other day? – catching on each other as randomly as bent metal coat hangers in a dark wardrobe? . . . that these questions basically all belonged under one heading: Why?

  Why were these murders being committed? What was the reason . . . because presumably there was a reason? A nub, a pivot, which would make the whole thing comprehensible, once they finally gained sufficient insight. That was what it was all about. Comprehending. Understanding as much as they could and leaving it at that.

  When Gunnar Barbarotti was going through school in the liberal seventies he had been taught that it was more important to ask the right questions than to know the right answers. He had often wished his school years could have coincided with some other decade.

  As he listened to one of the crayfish party guests perform ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ – accompanying himself on the guitar with a pretty peculiar set of chords – his mind turned to the letters and the question of timing. Was the murderer genuinely giving the police a chance? Or was it rather a case of the messages about the intended victims always arriving too late to offer any prospect of saving lives? Not even a theoretical possibility of doing so? Barbarotti watched a pigeon come in to land on the balcony rail of the flat next door as he reversed through his memory. The most recent letter had arrived in Monday’s post; if the Malmgrens really had been murdered, the crime – crimes – had in all probability been committed on the Sunday night or in the small hours of Monday. OK then, the murderer had in all likelihood posted the letter before he set to work, but he must have known that by the time the police had it in their hands, he would already have carried out his plan.

  And what was more, he must have been absolutely certain he was going to succeed.

  Was there any chance of intercepting the items of mail any earlier? They had discussed getting the Post Office involved – but taken no action. How would it work, in practice? Would all the postmen and postwomen in west Sweden who sorted the mail for their own rounds have to be alerted to the name of the addressee and the envelope type currently in favour, and be instructed, if they suspected anything was brewing, to contact the Kymlinge police? Or their local police authorities, as police appeals on the radio always said? No, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, that just didn’t sound workable. It seemed to be playing into the murderer’s hands even more.

  He always expressed himself in the future tense – said that he was going to kill this person or that – but by the time the matter came to Barbarotti’s attention it had already descended through the tenses to the . . . what was it called . . . preterite? It had already happened. Too late to do anything about it.

  Perhaps there was a linguistic aspect to it all that would appeal to Axel Wallman.

  He sighed and listened distractedly to the muted applause, thankfully announcing that the tipsy troubadour had finished knocking at those pearly gates. Barbarotti, remembering that morning’s dream, assumed he had not been admitted.

  He tucked the folders under his arm and came in from the balcony. It was after eleven and if nothing else, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, I’ve been spared thinking about Marianne and my inner darkness for a few hours. That’s always something.

  Work is the only effective way of counteracting anxiety, he had read somewhere. Perhaps that was right. And if you had been sacked – albeit temporarily – there was surely nothing to stop you indulging in a bit of private detection?

  Especially if you happened to be the only one in direct contact – albeit rather one-directionally – with the murderer.

  Suspended? Gagged? Well, thought Inspector Barbarotti, why don’t I just get a late deal on a package to the Med and stop giving a shit about all this?

  Another good question.

  21

  On Wednesday morning he woke early, aware of having slept only patchily. There was a dull thrum in his head and a prickly feeling all over his body. As soon as he took the local paper out of his letterbox, he realized there would be no need to go down to the convenience store to read about himself. Monday evening’s contretemps between the powers of law and order and the representative of free speech had not gone unremarked by Kymlinge’s voice in the world. It was front-page news, with further reports inside.

  But unlike Expressen, the paper
chose to publish neither names nor pictures of the parties involved; it only said that a reporter from an evening paper had got into a dispute with a police officer, resulting in an official complaint. It was not even spelt out who had complained about whom, and Gunnar Barbarotti thought what a shame it was that the local paper had only about a tenth as many readers as that muckraking rag from the capital. Not counting GT, though that was more or less identical to Expressen.

  But the local paper hadn’t stinted on its coverage of the murders themselves, or the letter writing, though there was nothing he had not already read in Backman’s red files, and he was aware of feeling rather grateful for this fact. The newspapers knew nothing more than the police, at any rate.

  What’s up with me? he thought. Surely that’s not anything to be grateful for? Have I so little confidence in the lead investigators since they lost their ace that I expect to glean more from the papers than the formal case material? Do I belong with the 66 per cent now?

  I must be losing my grip.

  Backman turned up to collect her files just after eight, and promised to keep him updated on the day’s developments.

  ‘And if you come round for a while this evening I’ll give you something to eat, too,’ offered Barbarotti. ‘Not just beer and a whiff of crayfish.’

  Eva Backman thought about this for a moment before she accepted. With the proviso, she said, that the situation down in the summer cottage in Blekinge didn’t take such an alarming turn that Ville arrived home with the kids. You never knew, and it also depended a bit on the weather, which was looking rather grey at present. Though of course there was a difference between Kymlinge and coastal Kristianopel.

  ‘So did these give you any ideas?’ she wanted to know as he handed over the case files.

  Barbarotti shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t. Nothing immediate, anyway.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Though it’s all churning round at the back of my mind, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a breakthrough once we combine Mr and Mrs Malmgren with the two previous victims. As long as you lot make a proper search of the place, you’ll find the connection this afternoon.’