The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

There was of course a very small possibility of Jane Almgren not being the perpetrator. As he had said to Backman. That she had just put her freezer at someone else’s disposal, as it were – but for the time being he did not want to give that solution any serious thought. It would only complicate the picture still further, and it was bad enough as things stood. Quite bad enough.

  So fourthly, then? Well of course, when it came down to it, this was the most crucial question of all. The one that was preying constantly on his mind. There was no doubt about it.

  Henrik Grundt. When they received the notification this morning that the other body in the freezer was not that of Robert Hermansson’s nephew, Gunnar Barbarotti had felt a dubious mixture of frustration and relief.

  Frustration that they still had that mystery to solve. Relief that there was still a small chance of the boy being alive.

  But it was not large, this chance, and he was the first to admit it. He had discussed the likelihood of Henrik Grundt being alive very thoroughly with Eva Backman, and they had agreed that it was probably around one per cent. At most. People went missing to start new lives, that did happen – they created new identities for themselves for one reason or another – but the idea that Henrik Grundt, at the age of nineteen, would have had such a reason, and made such a choice . . . well, it seemed pretty far-fetched. Admittedly he had been keeping his sexual orientation secret. They still hadn’t revealed this to his mother and father – it was slightly unclear why they had taken that decision, but perhaps it was just so as not to further increase the burden on them.

  But for this secret to have made Henrik take such a drastic step as running away from everything – leaving his parents and brother in the limbo of despair where they were undoubtedly marooned – seemed absurd, and for various good reasons. They had made that judgement call eight months ago, and they made the same call today, on learning what a terrible fate had befallen Henrik’s uncle.

  And last but not least, question five, or 4B, to be more precise. Was there really no link? Could it actually be pure coincidence for two people to disappear from the same family at the same address in the space of twenty-four hours? And for the one to have absolutely nothing to do with the other? What were the odds of that happening?

  This was yet another probability problem he and Eva Backman had been trying to thrash out between them for several months, not continuously of course, but at regular intervals – and just before he fell asleep on that protracted Thursday, Gunnar Barbarotti decided that if there were one scientific theory that did not apply to events at Allvädersgatan in Kymlinge, it was this one: probability calculus. Tomorrow he was going to tell that to Eva Backman.

  Satisfied with these observations and this decision, he turned over his pillow and started dreaming of a warm nighttime terrace in the Greek town of Helsingborg.

  30

  Karl-Erik had booked a hire car from the airport, and once they were on the motorway, Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson started hoping they would collide with an elk.

  She had not been back home since their move to Spain on 1 March. Almost six months, but it felt like six years. Or perhaps only six seconds. Sweden seemed simultaneously alien and oppressively familiar; like – while Karl-Erik fiddled with the ventilation system and disparaged the make of car, whatever it was, she tried to find a passable comparison – like a boil that had been surgically removed but then came back, she decided. Or a cancer.

  My old life a cancer, she wondered. Was that really the case? And why did these strange things come into her mind? Elks and cancerous tumours? On the way to her son’s funeral. Though maybe it wasn’t that strange. Suffocating dog days seemed to hang over the landscape they were driving through; the promised time of Canada geese and flowering algae on the lakes of the clay flatlands. Perhaps this was what people’s thoughts turned to when they could not bring themselves to look truth in the eye. Find the cherries in the cake.

  Coffin or urn, they had been asked. What would you prefer?

  Could you put a dismembered body in a coffin? Did they reassemble it, if so, or what? Had they already put Robert back together again? Dressed him somehow? Fixed his head to his neck and his . . . every time she approached these thoughts and questions, it felt as though her own guts were about to dissolve.

  Distractions, the tanned therapist in Nerja had told her. What you need, Mrs Hermansson, are distractions. Something to keep you busy, it’s actually a pretty common problem amongst my patients here. Lack of activity. It’s easy for black thoughts to come crowding in when you’ve nothing purposeful to spend your time on.

  Purposeful distractions, she had thought. No thank you. It had been May when she went there. She had given up after the second session. Sweet Málaga wine worked better in every way, and for the price of a single consultation she could buy eight bottles. And far from the cheapest brand, at that.

  She had grown used to it and developed a regular habit. Always two ice cubes. A glass first thing. Number two in the ‘garden’ sometime in the morning, while Karl-Erik was out on one of his ploys. On the bedroom wall they had a map of Andalusia, and by means of pins with little blue and yellow heads, he was marking every town and village he visited. Frigiliana. Medosa Pinto. Servaga. And the bigger places of course. Ronda. Granada. Córdoba. When he was at home, he was often writing, she didn’t know what. They spoke to each other less and less often, never sought physical contact, but she had no objections to this state of affairs. None at all.

  The third with dessert at lunch.

  Then it was time for the best part of the day, the three-hour-long siesta. And then three glasses in the course of the evening, the last just before bed. If anyone had told her a year ago – in that former, aborted cancerous tumour – that she would be drinking at least a bottle of wine a day, she would not have taken them seriously.

  But that was what it had come to. Sometimes, when the woman next door, a certain Deirdre Henderson from Hull, was there – on either their terrace or hers – it was even more. Especially when Mr Henderson and Karl-Erik were playing twenty-seven holes of golf. It was so much easier to speak English with a couple of glasses inside you, and Deirdre had even been known to switch into German.

  I’m a drunken old needlework teacher, she would think as she tumbled into bed at the end of evenings like that.

  And nobody cares. I’ve put on five kilos in less than six months, what’s more.

  But here she was now, sitting in the car without a drop of Málaga wine in her veins. Just a couple of tablets, tranquillizers – which should have been making her sleepy but weren’t. She assumed that must be why she was wishing for that elk. It was only quarter past eleven in the morning, and she dared not think how she was going to get through the day. The funeral was at three o’clock. Followed by coffee and cake for the mourners, in the church hall. Then a little family dinner, nothing fancy, at the hotel – and somewhere, somewhere at the end of that endless succession of seconds and minutes and hours and unbearable thoughts waited the breakdown, she knew it. It seemed as inevitable as – as a thunderstorm after a hot day at Lake Tisaren in Närke, where she had spent a couple of the best summers of her childhood, wherever that memory had popped up from.

  Tisaren? How funny, she thought, that my life peaked so early. Eleven or twelve years old, and all the rest had been a downward slope. Was it that way for everybody? Was loss of childhood the real moment of our death?

  Those peculiar thoughts again. The real moment of our death? Perhaps it was the effect of the tablets? Opening all those doors and windows of the soul that should by rights have remained closed.

  She was to take another two in the middle of the day; those were the orders of the old Swedish doctor she had consulted, the one who had lived in Torremolinos for the past forty years of his life, and who reminded her a little of an elderly Gregory Peck – or was it Cary Grant, she had always found it hard to separate those two greats in her mind – but they hadn’t helped so far, the tablets that is, and her hopes
of them ever doing so were minimal.

  So, while Karl-Erik hunched forward over the steering wheel, muttering and trying to get the only serious channel on the car radio, she decided she would double her dose. Come what may, he was not going to be pleased with her if she broke down, Karl-Erik.

  But best of all would be the aforementioned elk. Bang, straight into the windscreen, and then down with the curtain forever. To die on the way to your dismembered son’s funeral, that was just the sort of thing you could pray for to the god you didn’t believe in.

  The young man at reception sported a tie and a head of hair in the same shade. Light carrot. She thought she recognized him; perhaps he was a former pupil. They were always popping up, and she wondered if he had bought the tie to go with the hair or vice versa: dyed the latter. Seven out of ten young men had dyed their hair at some point, according to the magazine she had found in the pocket in front of her airline seat. She wondered if it was true.

  ‘Please accept my condolences,’ he said, at any event, and it sounded like something out of an old film. It occurred to her that it would suit her wonderfully well for all this to be just an old film that you could choose to stop watching at any moment. Get up from your uncomfortable seat and leave the auditorium.

  She did not reply. Karl-Erik was dragging a suitcase about behind her back. He seemed to be trying to keep out of sight of the young man; maybe it was in fact one of his former pupils and maybe, it suddenly struck her, Karl-Erik was feeling as self-conscious as she was. It wasn’t like him to let her handle – what was it called now? – the check-in.

  Not that they had devoted a particularly large part of their lives to checking in.

  ‘Just one night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll be in the same room, in fact.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You’ll be in the same room that Kristina and family had in December,’ clarified the receptionist, and gave an uncertain smile.

  ‘Oh yes?’ replied Rosemarie, wondering if that was the explanation. Perhaps he had been at school with Kristina. But he looked a bit young for that; Kristina was thirty-two, after all.

  ‘Yes, I was working that week before Christmas, it’s – it’s a dreadful business. And for you to have to . . .’

  He fumbled for words for a while and evidently found none that felt suitable, because he cleared his throat and gave her a form to fill in instead.

  ‘Life isn’t a bed of roses,’ she said. ‘So you know Kristina and Jakob, then?’

  ‘Not her husband,’ he said firmly. ‘Only saw him very briefly when he came back during the night.’

  ‘Came back during the night?’

  ‘Yes, I wasn’t expecting it. Three o’clock. And then they all left just before eight.’

  What is he talking about? she thought in confusion as she tried to focus on what she was meant to write on the form. He saw her bafflement and indicated two boxes. Name and signature, that was all.

  ‘We were in the same class,’ he said. ‘They haven’t arrived yet.’

  So that was the explanation, after all. And of course Kristina and Jakob were going to stay at the hotel, too. And Ebba and her family, what was left of it. She remembered that Allvädersgatan didn’t exist any more. She had done that a hundred times since this morning. That particular time and grief and malignant tumour was past; today, as they gathered to bury what remained of Robert, Kymlinge Hotel was where they had to be. It felt as makeshift and arbitrary as life itself.

  And death itself. If I have to stand at this counter for ten seconds more I shall start to cry, she realized, and held out an imploring hand for the room key. Or scream. Or sink to the floor as if I’d been shot.

  ‘There you are. Number one hundred and twelve. First floor. I’m really sorry it had to be in these circumstances.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And if there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.’

  He slid a small paper wallet with two plastic cards across the counter. Oh yes, of course, you don’t get hotel keys any more. Not even that. She gave him a nod; Karl-Erik was already over by the lift with the cases. Four tablets, she remembered, I’ve got to take four tablets as soon as we get into the room. Then I’ll tell Karl-Erik I need to sleep for an hour.

  Olle Rimborg, wasn’t that his name, that carroty receptionist?

  Reaching the lake, Hornborgasjön, she stopped in an empty parking area and threw up. It had almost become a habit. Throwing up. A faint mist floated above the flat, dreary landscape; the sun was scarcely coming through and the heat felt sticky. Dog days, she thought, and I’ve a child in my belly, it’s hardly surprising I feel sick. If anybody comes, that’ll do fine as an explanation.

  It was three hours until the funeral, but the drive would only take an hour and a half. She knew she had to get to the church at just the right time – only ten or fifteen minutes in advance, because if she got there too early it could all very easily run out of control. She had a limited number of readymade things to say that she had prepared in her mind, and she did not think she would be capable of uttering anything over and above those.

  No, I’m afraid Jakob isn’t here, he couldn’t get away. Something to do with an American company. Millions of kronor.

  No, I didn’t want to bring Kelvin all this way in the car.

  Yes, I’ve got to get straight back afterwards.

  Darling Robert, I’ve hardly slept, all these nights. Darling Robert, why?

  No sorry, Mum, I simply can’t bear to stay. It’s all so awful.

  Like the threadbare lines of dialogue in one of those soaps she used to write. And not eye to eye with Ebba. She must remember that. Preferably not eye to eye with anyone else, either. Exploit your bereavement, Jakob had instructed her. If you absolutely must go. But (switching language) don’t fuck it up, whatever the hell you do, don’t fuck it up.

  She knew what it meant when he started speaking English.

  This is my brother, she replied. Robert was my brother.

  His eyes took on that fake look of indulgence. He said he knew that, just as he knew Henrik had been her nephew. Yes, he was familiar with those strong family feelings amongst the Hermanssons. He surely did not need to remind her of how things stood?

  No, he did not. If there was one thing Kristina did not need to be reminded of, it was how things stood.

  If I die, she had asked him once the shockwaves of the first few weeks had begun to subside, in about mid-January, will you tell them?

  It hadn’t taken him more than a couple of seconds to think about it.

  We’re both going to live until we die a natural death, you and I, Kristina, he had explained in an almost kindly way. If it happens any other way, I’ll make sure they find out.

  She threw up again. Nothing but bile this time. It was painful. She leant her cold and sweaty forehead against the peeling, rusty top of the rubbish bin and thought she believed him. That’s just the way he was, Jakob Alexander Willnius, and nowhere in the world was there any compassion to be found.

  She looked at her watch. It was ten past one. She got back in the car, reclined the seat and shut her eyes.

  Kristoffer Grundt had only been to one other funeral in his fifteen-year-old life. This time last year, a boy in the parallel form in his own year had hanged himself the day before the start of the autumn term, and half the school had sat in the church, sobbing. They all knew Benny Bjurling had been the victim of bullying ever since lower secondary, but now he was suddenly some kind of inverted hero.

  ‘Those whom the gods love die young,’ Mr Hovelius the headmaster had said, and Kristoffer had thought that if there really was a god, then this would presumably be his most important task.

  To love those that nobody else loves. As he had sat there in the hard church pew, he had felt this to be a great and just thought, something from which you really could squeeze a little consolation – and now, in the equally hard pew in Kymlinge church and faced with the closed co
ffin, placed at the front on the little raised platform, and containing, as far as he could judge, the dismembered body of his uncle Robert, he tried to find his way back to that feeling.

  But he couldn’t. True, he was more or less certain Robert had been pretty unloved in the course of his thirty-five years on earth, but Kristoffer found it hard to imagine that any special favours awaited him on the other side. Benny Bjurling had been a victim and that was a plus, of course, but Uncle Robert had been . . . well, what, wondered Kristoffer. A real goddamned loser? You weren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, and he had nothing to complain of personally, but if you got pissed and then wanked in full view on TV, and went on to get yourself murdered and chopped into little bits, well, your life probably hadn’t been up to much. He remembered thinking Uncle Robert was a bit cool, back then, at Christmas when he went missing, but he didn’t think that any more.

  The vicar, who was tall and thin – couldn’t have been much under two metres – contrived to make something out of it, even so. It does not become us to judge. What do we know of what is at work within a person’s heart and within the eye of God? Robert Hermansson may perhaps have burned his candle at both ends, but many are they who now see for the first time what an empty space he leaves behind him.

  Kristoffer couldn’t help finding that impressive. He heard his mother snuffling on his right-hand side, and from Granny to his left came something partway between a hiccup and a belch. He wondered whether Granny was quite with it. She’d seemed a bit odd when she got out of the car in front of the church. Her mouth was half open and she looked cross-eyed. Granddad had to prop her up, or that was how it looked, to stop her falling over and to keep her moving at the same time, so she didn’t just grind to a halt. ‘How are you Mummy?’ Auntie Kristina asked, and Granny said something along the lines of: ‘He always made more Easter witch cards than anybody else. He had such cute knees.’ Assuming Kristoffer had heard right.

  Well, Granny had probably slightly overdone the tranquillizers, but that was only to be expected. Cute knees?