The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘We’ll meet here at the same time,’ said Tallin.

  The Superintendent leant back and looked pleased with himself. ‘So that’s agreed,’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Barbarotti.

  Was he expecting me to object? he thought, once he was out in the corridor. I’ve overestimated him.

  But he simply couldn’t lie on his bed and think, not on a day like this. He knew it as soon as he got home. The weather admittedly looked grey and overcast, and there was a possibility of rain showers in the afternoon, but there was no wind and the temperature was around twenty.

  The sort of weather made for a long walk, in other words. Smart cop seizes the day; he armed himself with a rolled-up raincoat, a little rucksack, water and fruit, a pen and a notepad, drove out to Kymmensudde and set off on foot along the northern shore of Kymmen. Paths for walkers criss-crossed the forest that extended along the ridge towards Kerran and Rimminge.

  If there really was a murderer in his head, as Superintendent Jonnerblad and Chief Inspector Tallin from the National CID clearly believed, then a couple of undisturbed hours spent on a leisurely walk through this peaceful landscape might well be the ideal way of bringing him to light. Mightn’t it?

  Thus thought Inspector Barbarotti – with the sort of optimism that he didn’t normally subscribe to, but felt could usefully serve as a theoretical starting point. To set the tone.

  Though in fact he started with a call to Gotland. So he could switch off his phone with a clear conscience afterwards, or anyway, that was the justification he invented.

  She sounded a bit mournful. She claimed it was because it was their last day at Gustabo – she and the kids were going home to Skåne the next morning – but he didn’t believe her. Not entirely, there was something else, too. First he asked her if it was to do with having to go back to work on Monday, and she admitted that was a factor.

  ‘I’ve got to leave paradise tomorrow, my holiday ends in three days’ time and I’m waiting for my period. None of it’s much fun, that’s all. I feel . . .’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Lonely.’

  ‘You’ve got two children with you and a policeman who loves you, how can you feel lonely?’

  ‘Well that’s just it . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That policeman.’

  ‘Aha.’

  He didn’t know what made him say ‘aha’. It definitely didn’t signal any sudden insight on his part. Just the opposite, in fact; it was more like a dark curtain falling, and for a moment he felt so drained that he had to stop and lean against a tree trunk. A few seconds passed in silence.

  ‘What . . . what’s wrong?’ he managed to say.

  He heard her give a sob.

  ‘I’m forty-two,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived on my own for four years. I don’t want it to be like this for another year. I enjoy seeing you when we meet the way we do, but it . . . well, it isn’t enough.’

  He thought for a second. Possibly a second and a half.

  ‘Then let’s get married,’ he said.

  ‘If you want, that is,’ he added.

  She said nothing but he could hear her breathing at the other end of the line. It sounded a little laboured, as if she was out on a walk as well, and sure enough, listening more carefully, he could actually make out the crunch of her footsteps.

  ‘I don’t want you saying it because you feel you have to.’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘I don’t want to put pressure on you.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘If we move in together and it doesn’t work, I shall die. I can’t go through all that business again.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, ‘you don’t have to tell me. I’m forty-seven; you think I fancy having another four wives to get along with in my old age?’

  She gave a laugh. I can make her laugh, he thought. That’s not a bad thing.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘You don’t sound serious.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Do you want to stay in Helsingborg?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Because I don’t mind moving down to Skåne.’

  She started to cry. I can make her cry, too, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, and felt a stab of panic. But why? Doesn’t she want me? Or is she . . . overcome?

  ‘You don’t want us to,’ he said.

  ‘Yes I do,’ said Marianne. ‘But I don’t know if you really do. I might not be as easy to live with as you imagine. We’ve only met in the most favourable of settings, and maybe you don’t . . .’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I love you. I hate being away from you.’

  He heard her blowing her nose. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I’ll give you a week to cool off, in case you change your mind. Ring me next Wednesday, and if you’re still saying the same thing, then there’s no way back, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘You can start looking out for a bigger flat when you get home.’

  Once they had ended the call he turned off the phone. He realized his pulse was hammering like a machine gun. A hundred or a hundred and ten, probably.

  Christ almighty, he thought. That’s done it.

  And now I’ve got to start fishing up a murderer from my memory. What a day.

  He tripped over a root and almost fell into a blackthorn thicket.

  He did as Jonnerblad and Tallin said and started at the beginning. He wrote the names one after another on his notepad, and found it a strange occupation, almost a kind of penance, or a final reckoning as if for St Peter at the Last Judgement.

  I hurt him, and him, in my journey on this earth. I never got on with him, or him, and perhaps they’ve had a grudge against me ever since . . . well, ever since we were teenagers. Or students in Lund. Or at police training college. Or at work . . . That fiddle-playing body builder over in Pampas, that drug pusher, that fascist rapist . . .

  Strange indeed, but individuals kept occurring to him, their faces, names and circumstances popping into his mind, one after another. Upper-secondary school alone, that rowdy social science group at Cathedral School, yielded six names – and two teachers as well, not that he could seriously imagine either of them losing their marbles to the extent that they were now writing him letters and indulging in production-line killing. But the method – Jonnerblad and Tallin’s method – meant that he initially had to include everybody he felt might have disliked him in any way. Not only those he had overtly clashed with, but also all the others, those individuals for whom he suspected – in certain maximally perverted circumstances – that the possibility could exist.

  Leif Barrander, with whom he’d had fights in Year 4.

  Henrik Lofting, who had spat in his face in Year 5 because he’d slipped the ball between the boy’s legs and humiliated him when they were playing football in PE.

  Johan Karlsson, who’d been bullied in Years 7 and 8 and tried to take his revenge on his tormentors (Barbarotti hadn’t been one of them, but part of the silent, timid majority) by setting fire to himself. He hadn’t managed to kill himself that way, but the scars on his face would never go away.

  Oliver Casares, whose girlfriend – Madeleine – he had pinched on a school skiing trip in the mountains. That was what Oliver believed, at any rate, though in fact Madeleine had swapped partners very much of her own accord.

  And all the rest. Who would have thought they had that many potential enemies? mused Gunnar Barbarotti. And surely he hadn’t been that bloody awful? No worse than anybody else? Had he?

  Reaching the old Ulme mill after about an hour, he took a break and counted up his gallery. Thirty-two names. Half a chessboard, and he still had fifteen years as an active police officer to go. He would have no trouble getting up to the fifty that Jonnerblad and Tallin had set him as a target.

  He ate an apple and drank half a litre of water. Then he sat there for a while, resting back against the rough wall
of the mill and listening to the splash of water; there wasn’t much of a flow after a long dry summer, little more than a trickle, but he could still hear it. And then it came back to him, all of a sudden. I’m going to marry Marianne. Good grief.

  But he wondered who the week’s cooling-off period was really for. Was she buying time for herself, in fact? Would she have some kind of excuse ready and try to stall when he rang next Wednesday?

  Considering it in these terms makes the whole thing feel a bit like buying a new car, he thought. Or a flat; he was contemplating a commitment of many years’ duration and the seller still wasn’t sure if she had really found the right buyer. This was naturally an idea that was both absurd and over-pragmatic, but he persisted in trying to take a sober view.

  Visualize them living together. Waking up each morning in the same bed and going off to their respective jobs. Sitting down to dinner with her children. Doing a big shop and inviting people round. Planning holidays together and watching films on TV.

  He tried to identify any seeds of doubt. Would they start getting on each other’s nerves when it was too late to change their minds? Would she stop loving him after two and a half months? What would Sara say about it? What would Eva Backman say when he told her he was planning to leave her alone with Sorrysen and Asunander and move to Skåne? Were there even any job vacancies with the Helsingborg police?

  Wasn’t he afraid of taking the step, when it came to the crunch? He hadn’t hesitated for a second before he proposed but words were cheap, after all.

  Afraid? The hell I am, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. This is the best decision I’ve made for five and a half years.

  He tried to think of any other significant decisions he’d made in the same space of time, but couldn’t recall a single one.

  Except maybe that holiday to Greece and Thasos.

  He looked at his watch and decided to go on a bit further before turning back towards the town. A forest would be the place to live, he thought. Have a dog and spend two hours walking every day. What sort of forests did they have round Helsingborg? Pålsjö forest, wasn’t there one called that? It ought to be a beech forest really, that far south. Why not?

  He shouldered his rucksack again and turned to a new page in his notebook.

  Half an hour later, he was up to fifty-five names. Forty-six men and just nine women. I’m evidently a gentleman after all, noted Gunnar Barbarotti, seeing as I’ve got hardly any female enemies.

  But he was starting to feel he’d had enough of all this cataloguing. What was the point of it? Did Jonnerblad and Tallin really think they were going to find the murderer’s name leaping out from amongst all these people he’d jotted down more or less at random on his walk in the forest? He couldn’t remember ever having seen this particular method described in all those criminology textbooks he had read, back at the dawn of time. No, it wasn’t the name that was the most tantalizing thing, thought Barbarotti. It was . . . well, it was the profile, clearly.

  What sort of person were they dealing with, to put it at its simplest? What were his motives? Did he even have any? Was there any point trying to understand him in logical, rational terms?

  Was there a reason, in short?

  The question had been floating to and fro through Barbarotti’s head ever since the body of Erik Bergman had been discovered but it dawned on him now, out here in the pleasantly whispering, temperate, well-oxygenated forest, that he had not given himself adequate time to scrutinize the problem properly.

  How did it go again? Well, if it was an irrational madman who had killed Bergman and Eriksson, it was hard to speculate. Or rather, that was all one could do. Speculate. Guess. Perhaps, deep down, a perpetrator like that really just wanted to get caught, as Lillieskog had suggested, and in that case he would presumably expose himself sooner or later to risks that were too great. Grow bold and reckless and take his game with the police a bit too far. Things would come to a head. They would be able to trap him simply by waiting for him to make his first mistake. And they could only hope he wouldn’t kill too many more people in the meantime.

  But if he wasn’t an irrational madman, what then? thought Gunnar Barbarotti just as he reached the birdwatching tower up on the rise at Vreten and stopped to drink the rest of his water. Yes, where would that leave them?

  A murderer with good cause for behaving exactly as he was? Who had a plan and fully reasoned motives for killing the individuals he first named in the letters he sent to DI Gunnar Barbarotti of the Kymlinge police? What did such a scenario look like? What on earth was the point of behaving like that?

  He sat down on a moss-covered rock and left the question hanging in his mind without attacking it any further – giving the answer the space to develop spontaneously, which was a method that sometimes worked – but the tiny fraction of explanation that finally came to him after eight or ten minutes was the same as ever: to confuse the police as much as possible.

  Create problems. Oblige them to put in more resources. Divide their forces and distract them from what was basic and important.

  So, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, what is it that’s fundamental and crucial here?

  If we ignore the letters entirely for now.

  There was only one answer.

  The link between the victims.

  There had to be a link. Assuming the murderer had a reason for his actions, but then that was the basic premise for this line of argument. Somewhere, Erik Bergman and Anna Eriksson’s paths must have crossed and that intersection was where the murderer was also to be found.

  Presumably also someone called Hans Andersson.

  And Barbarotti felt a sudden conviction that if Hans Andersson’s name had happened to be, say, Leopold Bernhagen, then there would have been no third letter. Because they would have been able to track down Leopold Bernhagen straight away.

  Where had that particular name come from? Bernhagen? It sounded familiar, yet he couldn’t place it.

  He shook his head. But that’s surely exactly what we’re working on, he thought. Looking for links between the two victims. We’re not going in the wrong direction. We’re on the right road.

  Though it couldn’t be denied that a not insignificant part of the force was also employed in keeping an eye on a bunch of people called Hans Andersson.

  And that one part of the force was taking a forest walk and thinking. It seemed pretty absurd when you came to think about it.

  Change job? He had suggested as much to Marianne. Why not? If he was going to get married and move to Skåne, he might as well go the whole hog. The summer of change, he thought.

  A time of transition. Time to shed his old skin.

  He checked his watch again. It was twenty past one, a chillier wind was blowing through the trees and he realized it was about to rain. He got his jacket out of his rucksack and put away his pen and notepad.

  But then – the thought struck him just as he was taking a somewhat ungainly leap over Rimminge Beck – but then there was still the question of how employable a forty-seven-year-old former detective really was in the current job market.

  I presume I’m not exactly worth my weight in gold, thought Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Not in any context.

  14

  Superintendent Jonnerblad leant so far back in the armchair that it creaked.

  ‘All present and correct,’ he declared. ‘Glad you could join us, Lillieskog.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti looked round the table. The man was right. There were eight people there: Barbarotti himself, Eva Backman and Sorrysen represented the resident force, and Jonnerblad, Tallin and Astor Nilsson the reinforcements.

  Chief Inspector Asunander represented himself, or so it appeared; he was not sitting at the table but a little to one side, in some kind of listening pose. Lillieskog also had to be considered part of the reinforcements, thought Barbarotti; to the extent that he represented anything, he could be described as the voice of psychology and science. ‘I’ll be happy to go first,’ Lillieskog
said. ‘I’ve got a train at three thirty.’

  Jonnerblad nodded. Barbarotti looked at the clock. Just after two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and it was as plain as a pikestaff that Lillieskog was eager to get home to his nearest and dearest.

  Or his goldfish, or whatever his domestic arrangements were.

  That’s a bit churlish of me, he thought on reflection, and decided to adopt a different attitude. He’d no call to feel superior; after all, he hadn’t even got a goldfish.

  ‘I’ve been discussing this with a few colleagues,’ began Lillieskog. ‘The fact of the matter is that we’re faced with a rather unusual situation here. A rather unusual . . . perpetrator, we can assume.’

  ‘Unusual?’ queried Jonnerblad.

  ‘Just so,’ said Lillieskog. ‘Unusual, however we look at it. If we imagine sketching out a worst-case scenario, we’re probably dealing with an extremely intelligent murderer. One who . . . well, I don’t want to overdramatize, but . . . who belongs in the world of literature rather than reality. Or the world of film. A perpetrator who really does have a well-studied plan and carries it out in every particular, without scruples . . . as you all know, that’s not exactly common amongst our criminal friends.’

  ‘Frustrated piss-artists who lose their rag and resort to violence,’ prompted Astor Nilsson.

  ‘Yes, more or less. That’s the usual picture. Or underworld score-settling. But our man isn’t like that. Our guarantee of catching him eventually, even so, is that he has a motive; that’s the only way we’re going to get to him. His aim is to kill a specific number of people . . . and it has to be those particular people, nobody else.’

  ‘It’s not inconceivable that it’s a random—’ Eva Backman started to object, but Lillieskog held up a hand to stop her.

  ‘In my judgement, he does not select his victims randomly. If he does that, then we’re talking about an irrational madman. No, this person has a strategy for getting rid of a number of people he feels have done him harm in some way. My guess, and this is generally the way in such cases, would be that he’s quite a reserved and defensive individual. Probably a touch handicapped on the social side, but intelligent, judging by everything we know so far. Maybe even extremely so.’