The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  Kristoffer sighed and took another cruller, although he was stuffed already. The potatoes in white sauce felt like a slowly swelling coat of glue inside him and he wondered whether he ought simply to drag himself upstairs and take a nap in the WUR while awaiting his brother’s return. Or perhaps it would be best to stay put and keep himself au fait – was that the phrase? – with what was happening. Or not happening.

  What in fact happened, at that exact moment, was that Granddad hauled himself out of his armchair and went over to the window. Thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet a few times. He cleared his throat loudly, still with his back to the others. He struck up with a ‘Hrrm. Now it’s like this: at four o’clock, Rosemarie and I have to be at the bank. We’ll have to see whether you folk have got on your way by then or not.’

  ‘Well of course they—’ started Rosemarie, but the thought changed direction halfway and took on a different significance. ‘Whatever are you saying, Karl-Erik? We can’t go off to the bank, now that—’

  ‘Now that what?’ Karl-Erik demanded, turning round. ‘We’ve got an appointment. Lundgren is expecting us and the Singlövs will have come all the way from Rimminge.’

  ‘That’s thirty kilometres at most,’ said Rosemarie. ‘They can easily go back home. You must realize we can’t leave Ebba and Leif in the lurch now that . . . and Kristoffer . . . no, we must stay here, and you’ll have to ring and cancel the meeting.’

  ‘I’m damned if I—’ began Karl-Erik, an as-yet-unseen vein bulging in his other temple, but before he could get any further in his argument, Ebba stopped him.

  ‘Please, Dad, not now,’ she said. ‘And Mum, you really needn’t cancel for our sake. It’s ridiculous. What is the point of five people sitting here waiting when three are more than enough, and what’s more . . . no, I don’t know – don’t know what I was going to say . . .’

  And with that, Ebba started to cry

  Initially, Kristoffer didn’t realize what was happening. Perhaps it was because he had never seen his mother cry before. At least not that he could remember. But it was a peculiar sort of crying, too, reminiscent of some kind of machine that wouldn’t start, like a little engine, in fact; her shoulders moved up and down and she exhaled and inhaled in small, panting gasps. Her head wobbled to and fro in time with her shoulders, and that was where the problem lay, thought Kristoffer; an engine coughing and spluttering and coughing again but the cylinders, no matter how many there were, could not work together to create any real propulsion.

  As if she had never cried in her life and didn’t really know how to do it.

  The others presumably didn’t realize what was going on either, because it took his grandmother a while to start clumsily stroking her daughter’s back and arms to console her. Leif stepped in to relieve her a few moments later and patted his wife on the head, while Karl-Erik just stood there in the middle of the room, looking like a male boxer dog that had trapped his paw in a lift door.

  At any rate, that was how it looked to Kristoffer, not that it occurred to him to lend his weeping mother a hand, either. She was his mother, he knew that, but he was convinced it would require a considerably better touch than he could provide. Yet it made him very uncomfortable to see her like this, so unexpectedly helpless, and when he glanced in Granddad’s direction he could see the same confusion and frustration in those eyes as he could feel revolving in his own mind.

  Damn, damn, damn, thought Kristoffer, as he clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t start sobbing as well. Mum’s crying, this is really serious. Get yourself back here Henrik, you fucker. This isn’t funny any more.

  A short while later, the tears had subsided and they had reached an agreement. Rosemarie and Karl-Erik would go and see Chalk-stripe Lundgren at the bank as arranged. The paperwork would only take an hour at most, and if the situation was unchanged when they got back to Allvädersgatan, the police would immediately be informed.

  That was the way they left it. There was no reason to be over-hasty.

  Kristoffer was never given the chance to voice his opinion on this plan of action, but having returned once again to his bed in the World’s Ugliest Room, he gloomily had to admit that if he had been, he would still have had no objections.

  The snow went on falling and the hours passed. Rosemarie and Karl-Erik Hermansson drove to the bank and returned with their business accomplished. At that point, Kristoffer had slept for three quarters of an hour and lain awake for at least double that length of time; he came down the stairs just as Granny and Granddad were coming through the front door. He did not know how his mother and father had spent the afternoon, but they also presented themselves in the kitchen a minute later.

  Granny looked at Ebba and Ebba shook her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Kristoffer realized she had been crying again and this gave him a sense of helplessness he didn’t think he had ever experienced before. A sort of ice-bound panic, yes, that was more or less what it felt like.

  After a short discussion, it fell to Karl-Erik’s lot to take on the agreed task.

  As he stood there with the receiver in his hand, waiting for an answer, the wall clock in the dining room struck twice, indicating that it was half past six. It was Wednesday 21 December, and Robert Hermansson and Henrik Grundt were more missing than ever.

  16

  Detective Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti could just as easily have been called Giuseppe Larsson.

  When he came into the world on 21 February 1960, his father, Giuseppe Barbarotti, and his mother, Maria Larsson, were entirely in agreement on one thing. They would never have anything to do with one another again.

  They disagreed on everything else. Such as a name for their new baby boy (weight 3,880 grams, length 54 centimetres). Giuseppe thought it ought to sound Italian, Swedish being the language of peasants and yokels, and if they wanted to give the boy a good start in life, it was vital for him to have a suitable name.

  His mother, Maria, had no truck with such emotional, southern-European drivel. Their son should bear a healthy, ancient Nordic name; coming to school with a macaroni-and-greasy-charmer of a name would put him at the bottom of the pecking order from the very start. Giuseppe could wax his moustache and shove off to warmer climes; the boy’s name was none of his business.

  Giuseppe made it clear that this was a matter of such importance that if Maria intended to continue with her obstructions, he would seriously have to consider marrying her so he could exert legitimate influence over the naming of his first-born son. And other things as well.

  In the end they compromised, on the wise advice of Maria’s elder sister Inger, who single-handedly owned and ran a hotdog stall in Katrineholm. The Italian language was not to be despised, she thought, and if elements could be combined, the result often proved better than any fixation with one of the parts. Hot dogs with bread rolls were generally to be preferred to hot dogs with hot dogs. Or bread with bread.

  So they opted for Gunnar, after the sisters’ late and much lamented elder brother, and Barbarotti, after the child’s father – who, while its mother was still in the maternity hospital, was busily packing his possessions to move back home to Bologna. Both parties declared themselves to be at least semi-satisfied with the proposed solution, and neither of them thought Giuseppe Larsson sounded anything but daft.

  Which meant, if you wanted to split hairs, that there were actually two things they agreed on.

  It was when Gunnar Barbarotti was abandoned by his wife Helena – four years ago, when he was forty-one – that he made his deal with God.

  The nub of the matter was the existence of the latter. As for his own existence, Gunnar Barbarotti was all too painfully aware of it. He and Helena had been married for fifteen years; they had three children, and suddenly to discover – pretty much overnight – that you were part of SB, the Superannuated Brigade, had made him doubt everything. God’s presence or absence was admittedly not very high on the agenda – that was monopolized by questi
ons about the point of ploughing on at all, about what he had done wrong, why she hadn’t said anything earlier, how the hell he was going to spend his evenings when he couldn’t work overtime, and whether it wouldn’t perhaps be best to change job entirely. But a month after the blow fell, when he had already moved into his doleful little flat on Baldersgatan in Kymlinge, God popped up in the middle of the night, during a long succession of sleepless nights.

  Perhaps it was Gunnar himself who summoned Him. Projected Him up from his martyred soul to call Him to account – but be that as it may, they had a long and fruitful conversation, resulting in the aforementioned deal.

  There were so many pitiably useless proofs that God existed, Gunnar Barbarotti and Our Lord were in total agreement on that. One after another, ephemeral circumstances or theological quibbles were cited as evidence that unequivocally settled the matter. Anselm. Descartes. Thomas Aquinas. What Gunnar was looking for – and God professed all the sympathy in the world for his quest – was something more concrete. A simple, rational method that could decide the question once and for all. It could be allowed to take its time, in God’s view. Certainly, but not too much time, said Gunnar, who had to take account of his own limited lifespan; he very much wanted to find out how things really stood while he still had some time on this earth left to him, and God listened and conceded to even this condition without any unnecessary palaver.

  Finally – it was getting on for five in the morning by then, and a snowplough conjured up by the Devil had started sending out sparks as it scraped the tarmac outside Gunnar Barbarotti’s bedroom window – they agreed on the following model of proof:

  If God actually did exist, then one of His principal tasks ought to be listening to the prayers of the unfortunate human race, and granting them to the extent that He considered them justified. He was of course right to reject immediately all those that were unseemly or self-interested. Gunnar Barbarotti could not for his part remember a single instance in his entire life when his prayers had been heeded. God countered with scepticism. And how many prayers have you ever sent me from a pure and earnest heart, you agnostic scoundrel? To his shame, Barbarotti had not kept track of this, though of course it could scarcely have been many – but that was all water under the bridge and from this point on he was prepared to give the whole thing a fair chance.

  All right, said God. We have a deal, said Gunnar, in English, as if a marginal language such as Swedish were not really capable of expressing or embracing an agreement of this calibre.

  The external timeframe was set at ten years. In this time, Gunnar Barbarotti would test the supposed existence of Our Lord by sending up prayers to Him as often as seemed appropriate and legitimate, and then – in a special notebook acquired for the purpose – note whether they were answered or not.

  Now naturally, this did not apply to just any foolish prayer – winning a fortune on the racing or the lottery, beautiful nymphs materializing out of thin air with no greater desire than bedding the inspector, and other such egoistic notions – but only to the altruistic, reasonable kind. The kind which could plausibly come to pass if you just had a bit of luck, and which had no ill effects on anyone else. A prayer for a good night’s sleep. For nice weather for a fishing trip. For his daughter, Sara, to sort out her differences with her best friend, Louise, in a satisfactory way.

  Gunnar Barbarotti had gradually (in consultation with God, of course) developed a points system to deal with how great the likelihood for a favourable outcome was judged to be. If Gunnar’s prayer was not answered, God always got a minus point – but if it was, Our Lord could win one, two or even three plus points.

  Twelve months after the divorce, God didn’t exist. He had scraped together a total of eighteen plus points and a whopping thirty-nine minus points, coming to minus twenty-one on aggregate.

  Things went a little better in the second year, and the balance was adjusted to minus fifteen. In the third year, He regressed to minus eighteen, but it was in the fourth – and current – year that the tide began to turn. As early as May, the score was even, and by mid-July, God actually existed by a very decent margin of six points, a lead that was however eaten up by a rather dismal and soggy week’s holiday in Scotland, an ear infection and an autumn packed with onerous and largely unproductive police work.

  Today, Thursday 22 December, God was two points below the existence line – with nine days to go before the end of the year. Admittedly, the marathon as a whole still had six years to run, but it would have been nice to see in the New Year in the pious hope that there was a benign higher power to turn to in one’s hour of need.

  So thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Maybe that was also why he had sent up a desperate three-point prayer late last night – and if only God had the sense to put it into effect, He would take the lead again, as it were. Only by one measly point, it was true, but in a postscript to his prayer, sent off a few minutes after he woke up this morning – less than an hour ago, in other words – Gunnar had promised the potentially existent Almighty that if his prayer were heeded this time, he would make no more requests until they were into the New Year. God could look forward to being left to exist in peace and quiet for at least ten days. Right through the change of year, in fact, so wouldn’t that be a feather in His hat?

  God replied that he wasn’t in the habit of wearing headgear of any kind, but that He would devote Himself to the task in hand with His customary goodwill and impartiality.

  It was a bit urgent, Gunnar pointed out. The train was due to leave at 13.25 and if nothing had happened by then, all would be lost. To put it bluntly.

  I see, said God, switching to English.

  Good, said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  The matter at stake was Christmas.

  Ever since the sudden breach with Helena – between Christmas and New Year four years before – Gunnar Barbarotti had found it hard to get into the proper, authentic Christmas spirit. Nor had the former husband and wife adopted the idea of celebrating the festival together for the sake of the children, a solution that was more the rule than the exception amongst their circle of acquaintances. They operated an every-other-year system: all three children with Helena the first Christmas, all three with Gunnar the second, and so on. This year it was to have been Gunnar’s turn to welcome Lars and Martin to his little flat in Kymlinge; the eldest child, their daughter Sara, who was eighteen and in her second year at upper secondary, already lived with her father – a decision that she had taken at the time of the divorce, rendering him astonished and delighted in equal measure.

  But Lars and Martin – now nine and eleven – lived with their mum in Södertälje.

  With their mum and their replacement dad, Fredrik, to be precise. Until recently, at least. Fredrik Fyrhage had arrived on the scene suspiciously soon after the separation, but Barbarotti had managed to resist the temptation to look into the matter more closely. Sometimes dignity was more important than knowledge. It had cost him some sleepless nights, but he had done it.

  At any event, this Fredrik had proved himself from the word go to be a real wonder man, possessing pretty much without exception all the important qualities and virtues that Barbarotti himself lacked – right up until September this year, when he left Helena, Lars and Martin without explanation for a dark-skinned belly dancer from the Ivory Coast.

  Hearing of this, Barbarotti attempted to console his ex-wife. At least the man didn’t seem to be a racist.

  But Helena had had a nervous breakdown, even so – and to crown it all, her father up in the mining town of Malmberget suffered his first stroke at about the same time. He was relatively fortunate, emerging from it alive, though with marked impairment down his left side, an ironically fitting aftereffect, Gunnar Barbarotti thought, for an old miner who had been a Communist all his life. These two things – the black belly dancer and the stroke-afflicted mine worker – coming together, however, made Barbarotti weaken. After a couple of tearful phone calls he had agreed to take Sara up north to the p
it for the celebration of a proper family Christmas beneath the Pole Star. Granny and Granddad. Gunnar and Helena. The three children.

  Having made this promise in mid-October, he had regretted it every day since. If there was one set of people Gunnar Barbarotti couldn’t stand in this world, it was his former in-laws.

  Hence his prayer.

  O Lord, You who for the time being do not exist, although perhaps You do after all, throw a real spanner in the works of this damn trip. Let me off, let Sara off, grant me and my daughter a quiet Christmas here in our home in Kymlinge with pasta and lobster and Trivial Pursuit and some good books – and an early-morning Christmas service if we manage to get up in time – instead of this wretched family funeral for seven people in a cramped, frost-damaged four-room asbestos prefab and endless darkness and deep-frozen relationships and a perverse old Communist with left-side paralysis and his aggrieved wife. O Lord, do anything, but let no one come to harm or dishonour, and just a tip, I could imagine myself slipping on a patch of ice and breaking some minor bone in my body, or having a heavy icicle fall off a roof onto my head, I’m prepared to go that far, but You know best O Lord, and there are three points at stake as You know, Amen.

  Gunnar Barbarotti looked at the clock. It was twenty past nine. He had eaten half a breakfast in bed and read a whole newspaper; it was time to get up and make coffee. Stand in the shower and await a miracle.

  On the way to the bathroom he passed Sara’s room, debated for a moment whether to give her an initial wake-up call, but decided to leave it. She could well afford to sleep for another hour; if he knew her, she would have packed her bag the previous evening, and she was generally a marvel of efficiency in the mornings.

  In fact, she was a marvel all round, he thought as he stood under the shower, and not just in the mornings. He had read somewhere (Klimke, presumably) that of all the joys a man could experience here on earth, there was nothing to match the joy that a good and wise daughter could bestow.