The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  He exchanged looks with Backman and saw she was thinking the same as he was.

  The method. The murderer hadn’t used the same method.

  That was unusual. Perpetrators tended to decide on an MO and then stick to it. Firearm or knife or bare hands, depending on disposition and taste. But in this case he had swapped. Why, wondered Barbarotti. Or . . . or could they really be certain it was the same murderer?

  He was aware that these technicalities bubbling up in his head were doing so to afford him some sort of protection from the grotesque sight of the woman on the floor.

  For there had surely seldom been an investigation in which one could be that certain? But the question still had to be asked. Two murderers or one? Rash conclusions were the most dangerous of traps.

  Bullshit, he thought, averting his eyes from the victim. Of course it was the same goddamned perpetrator. How likely was it that there were two entirely separate letter writers with identical handwriting? Or one wholly separate letter writer and two different perpetrators? No, forget it.

  ‘How long?’ he asked Santesson the pathologist, who was just stretching his back and adjusting his glasses. ‘Roughly.’

  Santesson glowered at him. ‘At least twenty-four hours. Probably longer. I assume you’ve noticed the smell?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ confirmed Barbarotti. ‘So it wouldn’t be impossible for her to have been lying here since Tuesday, for example?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Santesson. ‘But nothing’s impossible.’

  Smart alec, thought Barbarotti, and cast Backman a quizzical glance. Hadn’t she seen enough, as he had?

  Apparently she had. They left the flat together, and as they emerged onto the pavement they stopped short for a moment in the sunshine, blinking sleepily – as if they needed a few seconds to orientate themselves in reality again. Then Backman remembered where they’d parked the car and gestured to Barbarotti to get a move on.

  They had plenty to keep them busy.

  Rounding off the week had turned into the start of a long working weekend.

  It was quarter past ten when Barbarotti left the police station. He had spent three hours discussing deployments and division of duties – he had talked to the press for an hour. News of the murder in Skolgatan had found its way to the journalists via unknown channels without any police intervention, which was the usual pattern, and the impromptu press conference had been well attended. After a quick consultation they had decided not to reveal the murderer’s letter-writing habit; Barbarotti was far from convinced this was the right decision, but if you had doubts it was best to be cautious as a rule. Sorrysen, prosecutor Sylvenius and Astor Nilsson – over the phone from Gothenburg – had all taken the same view, and if they came to a different decision tomorrow, they would be able to broach the matter in a press release scheduled for three in the afternoon.

  Throughout all these negotiations, Chief Inspector Asunander had adopted his customary low profile and advisory role, but as no one had sought his advice, he had not been required to strain his false teeth.

  When Barbarotti finally got home, he sat on the same chair on the same balcony as the previous evening, and surveyed the lingering traces of the same sunset.

  Or a sunset a day older, if you wanted to split hairs, the whole universe having grown a day older, of course, but for his part, Barbarotti felt he had aged a good deal more. About a couple of decades. The jackdaws had already gone to roost, he noted; the shrieks reaching his fourth-floor balcony came instead from young people enjoying the start of the weekend, making the most of the nice weather in parks and outdoor cafes.

  He opened a beer of his own, poured it into a glass and downed it in four or five gulps. Almost instantly he felt the extreme tension easing and exhaustion slowly spreading through him.

  What is all this, he asked himself.

  What sort of lunatic have we got on our hands?

  Lazy, sterile questions born of his powerlessness, he knew that. And dangerous. Demonizing the enemy was one of the commonest, and always the cheapest, of mistakes. It was the linchpin in all racism, for instance, all xenophobia. Towards the end of the evening, Asunander had come into his room and hinted that there was a chance of reinforcements; the question was to be decided on Saturday, and Barbarotti realized he would welcome the backup. Generally you were keen to deal with things yourself, locally; if there was one thing people cared about in the police force it was territorial boundaries.

  But not with this case, thought Barbarotti. Call in people from Gothenburg and the National CID, that’s fine by me. I’ll sell my prestige for a pittance.

  He was well aware it was the siren voices of fatigue talking, but after three twelve-hour days, which should really have been the last three days of his holiday, he reckoned his feelings had some legitimacy.

  He had scarcely had time to think about Marianne all day and it was only now, at almost eleven o’clock, that he remembered what she had said about going into Visby to buy a phone.

  Dear God, he thought. Let her call. One point, OK?

  But our Lord was not inclined to improve his ranking that evening, and Detective Inspector Barbarotti – uncomforted, unloved, forgotten, rejected by God and without cleaning his teeth – finally fell asleep some time after midnight.

  11

  As soon as he got in the car on Saturday morning, he started brooding about parenthood. Perhaps it was a hangover from his reflections on Eva Backman’s relationship with her three children and how it compared with his own, but there was more to it than that.

  The fact that it could be so different, for example. That people were so bloody different, and that basically anybody at all could become a parent. Anna Eriksson’s mother was allegedly in touch with her daughter by phone at least once a week, but she hadn’t time to come and identify her body until Sunday. Because she was too busy on Saturday.

  On the other hand, she could squeeze in an hour with Inspector Barbarotti, she’d promised that.

  He wondered if he’d ever experienced such a thing before. Someone attaching no priority at all to the identification of their murdered child. Or at any rate putting it off because there were more important things to do first.

  Though she hadn’t sounded particularly odd on the phone, thought Barbarotti. She had cried and given voice to her despair. At a rather unusually high volume, perhaps, but otherwise she had seemed pretty normal. Anna had been something of a favourite daughter, she had explained, and when he asked how many she had, she told him she had five. Plus four sons.

  Maybe that was it. If you had nine children, you had to be prepared to lose one. He had not tried to find out how many different fathers were involved, but reading between the lines he was pretty sure it was more than two.

  Fewer than nine? I do hope so, thought Gunnar Barbarotti.

  As for him, he had had one father and one mother. His father was called Giuseppe Barbarotti, and the only thing he’d ever had from him was his surname; he had never met him and did not know if he was alive or dead. His mother had impressed upon him throughout his childhood that Giuseppe was a handsome bastard, and that it was best to keep away from him. For some reason, he had followed that recommendation. When his mother died twelve years before, he had toyed with the idea of going to Italy to look for his father, but the project had come to nothing. He had been so busy with his own family at the time, with two children and a third on the way, that there somehow hadn’t been any scope for delving down into the generations of the family tree.

  But now he didn’t have that excuse any longer, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. What was stopping him from going to Italy and finding his father? Or his father’s grave, if that turned out to be the case.

  He knew that for the time being this amounted to no more than a thought he could toy with as he drove along on a sunny Saturday morning – but also that it was a question which might very well stay with him and grow more profound.

  He would let time tell, he decided. But it seeme
d manifestly clear that children were not of equal importance to all parents. And vice versa. He made a mental note to ring Sara that evening, or perhaps on his way home. He had got into the habit of doing that: giving her a call at the weekend, to hear how his darling daughter was getting on in London, amidst the swarming hordes and deadly dangers of the metropolis.

  And she was always able to put his mind at rest. She knew that was what the calls were basically all about, and this made him uneasy. Sara could be at death’s door but keep it quiet so as not to worry him.

  So he had to try to listen between the lines. He wasn’t sure how well he had mastered that art; it was now seven weeks since she had left, and so far he had not been able to detect any dark signs. Beyond his suspicion that she worked in a pub, not a boutique as she claimed. She was living in Camden Town, and he planned to go over and see her for the weekend in late August or early September, at which point he would of course get a clearer picture of how things stood.

  And then that chilling image of her lying murdered under a bed somewhere ran throught his consciousness, and he gripped the steering wheel harder. He had dreamt precisely that. In his dream it was not Anna Eriksson concealed in those bin bags, but his own daughter.

  Life is so damn fragile, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. And so bloody normal until that second when everything shatters.

  That’s how it is. Like walking across the thinnest of ice, those are the terms. And now his mobile was ringing.

  ‘It works! Good morning, my love.’

  Simply hearing her voice was enough to make him almost drive into a German juggernaut in front of him. There’s something seriously wrong with my mind these days, he thought. It’s as unfocused as a fourteen year old’s.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Have you . . . ?’

  ‘Yes I have. I’m just coming out of the shop. It’s yellow, I got it for virtually nothing because it’s an old model.’

  For one bemused second he didn’t know what she was talking about, but then he realized. ‘I don’t care what colour it is,’ he said. ‘But I want the number.’

  She gave it to him, twice, and to be on the safe side she promised to text it to him as well, though wouldn’t it already be stored in his phone now she’d called? Then she asked him what he was up to. He told her he was on his way to Jönköping to meet the mother of a woman who had just been murdered. It all went quiet at the other end of the line for a few moments and he realized he had been unnecessarily frank.

  ‘The letter writer?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Good God,’ she said. ‘He’s killed two, then?’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, as if it was somehow his fault – as a detective and as the recipient of the letters – that Erik Bergman and Anna Eriksson had lost their lives, and he wanted to ask Marianne’s forgiveness for it. That was a warped sort of idea, but somehow he felt he ought to have kept the truth to himself.

  Though she would have found out about it sooner or later, of course. She read newspapers, presumably, and listened to the radio. Just as well to get it from him.

  ‘It’s all a bit much at the moment,’ he said. ‘I honestly wish I’d never left Gotland.’

  ‘We’re going to play throwing the varpa on the lawn this afternoon,’ she said. ‘You’d be welcome to join us . . . sorry, it’s dreadful news, of course. Is there anything about it in the papers today?’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I haven’t actually checked.’

  ‘I’ll buy an evening paper,’ Marianne declared. ‘I want to keep up with what you’re doing, you know. But this investigation, is it . . . I mean, it isn’t standard fare for you, is it?’

  Why’s she asking that? The question flashed into Gunnar Barbarotti’s mind. Is it because she can’t contemplate living with a man with a job like mine?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t standard fare. I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything like it. Wondering whether to change jobs, in fact.’

  He said the last sentence without running the words past his brain first – a shot in the dark to let her know he was not scared of changes, presumably – but when they ended the call ten minutes later, he was aware of them still suspended in his mind. The words, that was. And they had that same irate, bright-red glare as the warning lights on his dashboard. Fuel within 50km! Top up oil!

  Change job!

  I’ll have to mull this over in peace and quiet some day, thought Inspector Barbarotti. My life is at a crossroads.

  Viveka Hall Eriksson received him in the kitchen of her beautifully situated house in the Bymarken area of Jönköping. Lake Vättern lay like a mirror just a few hundred metres below the generous picture window, and Barbarotti could see that although she had lived a varied sort of life with many different partners, she had clearly not emerged empty-handed from it in financial terms.

  And all her children seemed to have flown the nest. Her men, too.

  She was sixty-four years old, he had checked that, and was doing her best to look forty-four. It was a few minutes to eleven when they sat down at the table she had laid for coffee, and he guessed she had spent a good part of the morning bringing her appearance to a decent level. She might have fitted in the hairdresser and beauty salon too; her hair was as blonde and beautifully waved as a field of ripe rye, her cheeks were powdered and rouged, her nails freshly polished; she did not look remotely like a woman who has borne nine children.

  Nor like a mother who had received news of her daughter’s murder the previous day.

  ‘My dear inspector, I didn’t sleep a wink all night,’ she nonetheless declared in a very loud voice, running a hand over her shiny mauve blouse to make it even smoother and glossier. ‘I’m so devastated I don’t know what to do with myself. Have you caught him?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I’m afraid not. We don’t know who could have done it. That’s why I’d appreciate a few words with you.’

  ‘With me?’ exclaimed Viveka Hall Eriksson. ‘Oh my God, I hope you don’t think I know anything about this . . . I don’t understand what . . . oh my God?’

  She spoke as if addressing someone twenty to thirty metres away; Barbarotti wondered if this was her normal volume or whether it was some kind of acute hysteria manifesting itself, after all. She hadn’t really sounded like that on the phone.

  ‘We’re just going to have a little chat,’ he said, as slowly and understatedly as he could. ‘Of course you can’t know anything about the background to this tragic event, but we’ve got to approach this in a thorough way, I’m sure you understand that. We very much want to get our hands on whoever killed Anna.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘You’ve got to do that. That bastard mustn’t get away with it. She was as good as gold, my Anna, she was.’

  ‘I’m sure she was,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Now, do you happen to know whether she’d been going out with anybody recently?’

  ‘Going out?’ said Viveka Hall Eriksson, as if she did not really understand the meaning of the phrase. ‘She didn’t have a man, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Had she been in a relationship which had just ended?’

  ‘God yes, I expect so,’ affirmed Viveka Hall Eriksson. ‘Men just fell into that girl’s lap, I can tell you. They were like leeches, but she kept them in their place, I made sure all my daughters knew how to do that.’

  ‘Conny Härnlind?’ ventured Barbarotti, starting to feel slightly desperate. ‘Is that a name you’re familiar with?’

  She gave a snort. ‘I don’t keep up with their names. But I know Anna could take care of herself, and whoever killed her, it can’t have been someone she was with, you’ve got to understand that. She made sure she had real men. Not these violent types.’

  ‘Erik Bergman?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Is that name familiar?’

  ‘Erik Bergman? No, I never heard that one.’

  Barbarotti drank some of his coffee and changed tack.r />
  ‘The last time you spoke to her was on Sunday, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Viveka Hall Eriksson. ‘We speak on the phone once a week. About all sorts of bits and bobs. If she wants advice, she gets it, and if she doesn’t, I don’t give it. That’s my way with her, and with the rest of them as well.’

  ‘Do you remember what you talked about?’

  ‘Of course I do. We talked about her going to Gotland, which was meant to be yesterday. I gave her a few tips. I’ve been to Visby seventeen times in my life, it’s a real summer paradise and of course I wanted to share what I’d found out.’

  Naturally, thought Barbarotti. Manners and morals have to be passed down. ‘Was she going on her own or with a friend?’ he asked.

  ‘A girlfriend, but I can’t remember her name. Lisbeth or something. Yes, two of them were going. I told her they ought to try for a holiday let over at Gustavsvik, that’s the best and cheapest place. Near town and near all the beach life at Snäck, you can’t beat it. Have you been to Gotland?’

  Barbarotti nodded. ‘A couple of times. Yes, it’s a beautiful island.’

  ‘Visby’s the place to be,’ said Viveka Hall Eriksson. ‘Otherwise it’s all the middle of nowhere and crap. And it has to be summer of course, who’d bloody want to live there all year round?’

  ‘She didn’t mention feeling threatened or anything, when you were talking on the phone?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Threatened? No, she didn’t feel threatened. Why should she?’

  Barbarotti sipped his coffee and helped himself to a Singoalla biscuit while he wondered how to make any headway at all. ‘Because she was murdered a couple of days later, maybe?’ he said. ‘You haven’t forgotten that?’

  ‘Forgotten?’ she cried, her eyes opening very wide. ‘How could I forget that my daughter’s been murdered? Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you go and catch the man who did this instead of sitting here insi . . . insu . . . what’s the damn word?’