The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘That wasn’t my main reason for coming over,’ Hagmund went on. ‘My main reason is the detective. There’s a telephone call for him. It sounded urgent.’

  ‘Telephone?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Hagmund nodded and scratched the back of his neck. ‘The lady and gentleman clearly decided to leave their mobile appliances on the mainland. That does you credit, without a doubt. But as I say, there’s a rather eager female inspector on the line in my kitchen, and it might be an idea for him to come with me and talk to her. Sure you don’t want this little chap?’

  He dangled the rabbit in front of their eyes again. Marianne shook her head and Barbarotti got to his feet.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said. ‘Did they tell you what it was about?’

  ‘Top secret,’ declared Hagmund Jonsson. ‘State security, most likely. I can’t see them daring to shatter this idyll for anything less.’

  He gave a knowing wink. Marianne wrapped her dressing gown more tightly round her and Gunnar Barbarotti followed the farmer out to the road.

  ‘It seems your penfriend was serious after all.’

  He didn’t reply immediately. Fuck, he thought, I feared as much.

  He gestured to Jolanda Jonsson to leave him on his own and close the kitchen door. And waited until she had done so. If they wanted to eavesdrop, then at least let them have the inconvenience of picking up a receiver in another room, thought Barbarotti.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Eva Backman asked.

  ‘I’m still here,’ Barbarotti confirmed. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I assume you haven’t forgotten the letter you got before you bunked off to Paradise?’

  ‘No,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘How could I forget that? So tell me what’s happened.’

  She turned her head away to say something to a colleague, he couldn’t make out what.

  ‘Sorry. Yes, it’s murder. A jogger found Erik Bergman’s body out at Brönnsvik a couple of hours ago. The jogging track along by the river and up over the ridge, you know. He was out jogging too, it seems . . . Bergman, that is.’

  ‘Are you having me on?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘No,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I’m not, unfortunately. There’s a right old fuss here at the moment. What’s more, the jogger who discovered the body happens to be a journalist by profession. Johannes Virtanen, if that name rings a bell?’

  ‘I know who he is. But presumably the press don’t know anything about the letter?’

  ‘No, we’ve managed to keep that detail quiet for now.’

  ‘Good. And which Erik Bergman are we talking about? I mean . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Number three. The one with the knee injury and the IT company.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Which wasn’t entirely true. He was keenly aware of a chugging in his brain, but it was more reminiscent of the engine of an old banger that was about to breathe its last than of any kind of thought process.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said, sinking down on a kitchen settle under a wall hanging bearing the artistically embroidered motto Sufficient Unto the Day is the Evil Thereof. Quite right, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. That’s the way it is. And this day has scarcely even started.

  ‘Found at 6.55 a.m.,’ said Eva Backman. ‘He was single, of course, but we talked to a guy who evidently knows him quite well. Andreas Grimle, he works at Bergman’s company. Some kind of part-owner too, it seems. Anyway, he claims Bergman was in the habit of running that circuit two or three mornings a week. In summer, that is, before breakfast, between six and seven, roughly.’

  ‘MO?’ queried Barbarotti.

  ‘Stabbing,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Sorry, didn’t I say? Once in the back, a couple of times in the stomach plus a slash to the throat. He can’t have survived for long. He was swimming in a pool of his own blood, more or less.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘Certainly does.’

  ‘Have you been there to take a look yourself?’

  ‘Of course. Suppose we’ll have to see what the crime scene investigators find, but we mustn’t get our hopes up. The ground was dry and we know what that means. No footprints, no signs of a struggle, the murderer presumably leapt on him suddenly from behind.’

  ‘But I thought he was running? Isn’t it a bit hard to . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eva Backman. ‘We’ll have to think about that one. But he could have stopped him first . . . asked for help or something.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘And who’s been put in charge of the case?’

  ‘Sylvenius is leading the preliminary investigation.’

  ‘I mean the lead detective.’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  He didn’t reply. He hardly felt he needed to.

  ‘All right,’ said Eva Backman. ‘This is how things look. Asunander has left it in my competent hands for now. Though we’ve got everyone involved for the moment. Maximum show of strength. And I have a distinct feeling he’s expecting you to step in tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m on holiday.’

  ‘If you resume your duties tomorrow instead of on Monday, you’ve got a week until the elk-hunting season.’

  ‘I don’t hunt.’

  ‘I only meant it metaphorically.’

  ‘I see. Was that the way Asunander put it?’

  ‘No, it was just me, distilling the essence.’

  ‘Thanks,’ sighed Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Eva Backman cleared her throat. ‘I don’t always agree with our dear chief inspector,’ she said. ‘You know that. But in this case I actually do. That was a personal letter to you. Not to me or Sorrysen or anybody else. It wasn’t even addressed to police HQ. So it does . . . well, it does seem to be your pigeon. Though of course it’ll be the whole group of us really. Like I said.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti thought about this.

  ‘Perhaps that’s what he wants?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The murderer. Wants it to be me taking charge of the investigation.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that,’ said Backman. ‘Could be somebody you know, then?’

  ‘Yes, but why?’ said Barbarotti. ‘Why should anyone be so bloody stupid that they’d expose themselves to the risk?’

  ‘Stupid?’ said Backman. ‘I’m not so sure about that. More like cocky, I’d say. In any case, you’d probably better accept the challenge.’

  Barbarotti thought about it for three seconds. He felt he had no choice.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You can tell Asunander I’ll be there tomorrow morning. I think there’s a ferry at five this afternoon, but if anybody pops up with a confession before that, I want you to let me know.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling that won’t happen,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Unfortunately. And I’m sorry I had to break off your summer of love like this.’

  ‘I shall be taking the other days I’m owed at a later date,’ declared Inspector Barbarotti, and hung up.

  In time for some elk hunting, maybe, he supplied silently.

  What a morning, he thought, once he had left the Jonssons’ farm and come back up to the road. It starts with Bible study and questions about the essential nature of God, then she says she almost loves me and I round off the whole thing with a bit of murder and elk hunting.

  Marianne had few reproaches. Nor had he expected many from her.

  ‘We had eight of our ten days,’ she said when she had switched off the car engine in the car park at the ferry terminal. ‘Perhaps that’s all I can ask now I’ve fallen for a detective?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have opened that letter,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘If I hadn’t found it until Friday, they couldn’t have called me in.’

  But he didn’t know if he really meant that. It felt paradoxical, somehow; the notion that he was playing into the perpetrator’s hands was hard to shake off. By opening the letter, reading its warning and passing it on. And then, by instantly leaping into t
he investigation? Wasn’t that exactly what he – or she – wanted?

  Why send a letter to say you intended killing somebody in the first place? Before you actually committed the act? Was there any significance to it? Or were they just dealing with a nutcase, someone it was a waste of time trying to understand in rational terms?

  Impossible to know, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. No point speculating, not this early on.

  But he knew one thing for certain: he had never experienced a case like this before. Come to think of it, he didn’t think he had read about anything like it, either. The very fact of the perpetrator planning his deed was a rarity; the usual pattern was for one booze-fuelled party to lose his temper and make a fatal lunge at some other booze-fuelled party.

  Or his wife or some other person who happened to have displeased him. But that wasn’t what had happened in this case, he felt he could afford to assume that much.

  ‘These days with you have been wonderful, anyway,’ Marianne interrupted his thoughts. ‘Shame you didn’t get a day with those reprobate children of mine, too, though.’

  It had been decided that they would come on the Thursday, giving the four of them an afternoon, an evening and a morning together. He had met them a couple of times before and it had all gone surprisingly smoothly. He liked Johan and Jenny, and if it had not seemed presumptuous to claim it, he would have said they seemed content to put up with him, too.

  ‘Things are as they are,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to explain that their new friend the policeman has got to get home to catch a scary murderer, that’s the unvarnished truth of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think they’ll accept an excuse like that,’ concluded Marianne.

  Then she kissed him and gave him a little push towards the car door.

  The sensation of standing on deck and waving goodbye as the ferry put out from the shore was not a high point, noted Gunnar Barbarotti. Particularly not with his arrival a week earlier fresh in his mind. He found himself wishing he were a fourteen-year-old girl rather than a forty-seven-year-old detective – then he could have shed a few tears without suffering acute embarrassment.

  But he wasn’t. And being an airheaded teenage girl could prove rather a drag in the long run, too.

  I hope there are going to be more weeks like this in my rudderless life, he thought when he could no longer make out the waving figure on the quay outside the terminal building. But I can bloody well do without the partings.

  Then he went down to the cafeteria and bought himself a large plate of meat and potato hash with beetroot, and a beer to go with it.

  5

  It was quarter past nine and the sun had set by the time he climbed into his Citroën in the long-stay car park at Nynäshamn. For some reason he hadn’t really understood, the ferry had gone at reduced speed, and the crossing had taken forty-five minutes longer than normal.

  A dark drive home, he thought as he started the car. Three and a half hours’ splendid isolation. He was not unaccustomed to solitude, but now it suddenly felt like a predatory animal, a shaggy beast that had been starving for a whole week and would now delight in sinking its teeth into him.

  Before long, however, he had managed to make contact on his mobile with Inspector Backman. That was something, at least.

  ‘You’re my voice in the night,’ he explained. ‘The eagle has landed and requests an update.’

  ‘I thought I felt the earth move,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Must have been that quake in the underworld. Well, I’m still at work, actually.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘How many suspects have you identified? Am I ringing in the middle of the crucial interrogation? In that case . . .’

  ‘We haven’t really got that far yet,’ Inspector Backman admitted. ‘But we’ve started to narrow it down. We think we’re dealing with a right-handed man between seventeen and seventy.’

  ‘Great,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘We’ll have him any day now. Are you sure it isn’t a woman?’

  ‘Could be a woman,’ conceded Backman. ‘But the knife went in with some force, so she must be strong and fit, if so.’

  ‘And probably not seventy,’ suggested Barbarotti.

  ‘Fifty-five at most.’

  ‘Tell me the rest,’ asked Barbarotti.

  Eva Backman sighed and launched in. ‘Well if we start with forensics, the technicians have basically hoovered an area the size of a football pitch round the crime scene. I daresay they’ll present us with their analysis sometime between Christmas and New Year. We’ll have the pathologist’s report tomorrow morning, but there won’t be any sensational revelations in it. He died of those knife wounds, presumably within a minute or two. DNA doesn’t seem to be an option. And then, well, we’ve started mapping out his family and his circle of friends, of course. We’ve got about fifty people to talk to, that’s what I’m doing now. Deciding priorities. Which ones we’re going to talk to, and in what order; he seems to have got about a bit, Erik Bergman . . .’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Bachelor with plenty of money, that’s all. Liked going to the pub. Knew a lot of people . . . not a computer nerd, if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘I get the picture. What else?’

  ‘We’ve got an expert profiler coming from Gothenburg tomorrow. There’s something of a tradition of this sort of letter writing in the US, apparently. And a number of studies of that kind of murderer. It’s pretty unusual here, of course, but this chap might have something useful to tell us. We’d better listen to what he has to say, at least. He’s coming tomorrow afternoon, so you’ll get to meet him.’

  ‘Is there anything about Bergman having felt under threat or suchlike? Enemies?’

  ‘No, nothing like that has emerged as yet. We’ve mainly been talking to this Grimle, the business partner I told you about . . . plus a few other good friends and the victim’s sister. She lives at Lysekil, and I talked to her for an hour, but they don’t seem to have kept that closely in touch. She’s five years older.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Nix.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘On holiday in Croatia. But they’ve been informed. They live in Gothenburg, in Långedrag to be precise. They expect to touch down at Landvetter tomorrow afternoon. Well off, as you’ll already have worked out; they wouldn’t be living in Långedrag otherwise. Sold a big technology company two years ago and retired.’

  ‘Ah, like that, is it?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Any girlfriends? He must have had the occasional longer-lasting relationship? How old was he, in fact? Thirty-six?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Eva Backman. ‘His age, that is. But when it comes to relationships there’s not a lot to go on, apparently. He lived with a girl for a few months about ten years ago, but that seems to be it. To be honest . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘To be honest, I wonder if he wasn’t perhaps a pretty unpleasant kind of guy. Picked up women and threw the cash around. Lived alone in a seven-room detached house with genuine works of art on the walls, a billiard table and jacuzzi . . . wine cellar and two cars.’

  ‘Sleazy,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘The type who could aggravate a person, in other words?’

  ‘Could well be.’

  ‘To the extent that they felt like sticking a knife in him a few times.’

  ‘Not impossible,’ said Eva Backman. ‘It could be as simple as that.’

  ‘This Grimle, is he the same type?’

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Very nice, actually. But then he’s got a wife and two kids, as well.’

  Someone came into Backman’s office, and she asked him to hang on, which gave him a minute’s thinking time. But the only thing that came into his head was a song title he recollected from the late eighties or early nineties . . . and even that he couldn’t remember properly. A man without a woman is like a . . . well, what? It wouldn’t come back to him. But the group was called Vay
a Con Dios, wasn’t it? And the title presumably fitted in with what Inspector Backman had just been saying.

  Go with God? That was another kind of synaptic link, of course – hooking onto this morning’s conversation at Gustabo. There are times, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, there are times when I think the human brain is nothing but an arena for a higher power to play patience in. That’s the sort of brain they’ve given me, at any rate.

  Now this was a new and rather surprising image. But after all, there were many possible combinations in a pack of cards, so the theory was, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Sometimes I really nail it, he noted with bemusement.

  And sometimes a game of patience goes out.

  ‘Mobile phone traffic?’ he asked when Backman was back on the line. ‘Has Sorrysen started on that yet?’

  ‘Sorrysen’s on holiday,’ Backman told him. ‘But he’ll be in on Monday. Fredrikssen and Toivonen are handling the phone list for now. He had three, but I don’t know what they’ve found out at this point. Nothing sensational, anyway, or they’d have told us.’

  Three mobile phones, thought Barbarotti. Rather different from my paradise.

  ‘The letter?’ he asked. ‘Anything to report on that?’

  ‘No fingerprints,’ said Backman with a sigh. ‘Only yours and Marianne’s . . . well, we assume they’re hers. Standard envelope, standard paper, the sort you find in any printer. The pen was probably a Pilot . . . black gel . . . 0.7 millimetres. Available in roughly a hundred and forty-five thousand different retail outlets all over Europe.’

  ‘The text, then? The way he wrote and so on.’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I think somebody claimed it was a right-handed person writing in block letters with their left hand, but I’m not sure. We sent it for further analysis today . . . when matters came to a head, so to speak.’

  ‘OK,’ said Barbarotti, and thought for a moment.

  ‘I’m a bit tired,’ said Backman. ‘Maybe we can save the rest for tomorrow?’

  ‘Good idea,’ agreed Barbarotti. ‘I expect I’ll be sitting on my arse reading paperwork all morning. But . . .’

  ‘Yes?’