The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Fine,’ said Sara. ‘Everything’s fine. You’re not worrying about me, are you?’

  ‘Should I be?’ he countered slyly.

  ‘Not in the least,’ maintained Sara, and laughed. ‘But I know what an old mother hen you are. I’m glad you rang though, because it gives me a chance to tell you I’ve got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’ queried Gunnar Barbarotti, gripping his beer glass so hard he almost broke it.

  ‘Yes. His name’s Richard. He’s really nice.’

  I don’t believe that for a second, thought Barbarotti. He’s just trying to lead you on and exploit you, can’t you see?

  ‘Richard, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, well. And what does he do?’

  ‘He’s a musician.’

  Musician! bellowed a voice inside Gunnar Barbarotti. Sara, are you out of your mind? Music and drugs and AIDS, the full works, now go home and lock yourself in, and I’ll come and fetch you tomorrow!

  ‘Hello, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes . . . I’m still here. Are you quite sure about this . . . I mean, what kind of musician?’

  He fired off a quick existential prayer to Our Lord. Say he’s a cellist in the London Philharmonic! Three points, God! Anything at all except . . .

  ‘He plays bass in a band that does gigs here in the pub.’

  Jesus, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. I knew it. Nose ring and tattoos and three kilos of dirty hair.

  ‘The pub?’

  ‘Dad, I gave up my other job. I only work at the pub now, but it’s really nice. Everyone’s great and you needn’t worry for a single second.’

  ‘You’re nineteen, Sara.’

  ‘I know how old I am, Dad. What were you doing when you were nineteen?’

  ‘That’s exactly what worries me,’ he said in a strangled voice, and was rewarded with another laugh.

  ‘You know what, Dad, I do love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Sara. But you’ve got to look after yourself. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish now, compared to when I was young, and it’s much worse for a girl. If you’d seen a fraction of what—’

  ‘I know all that, Dad. I’m not a complete idiot. You can trust me and if you met Richard I promise you’d like him.’

  I’d interrogate him for fourteen hours without so much as a break for a pee, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Then I’d banish him to Outer Mongolia.

  ‘Why did you give up the shop job?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think a pub is a suitable working environment for a girl of nineteen.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Sara with a patient sigh. ‘Just think about it. There are girls of nineteen serving behind the bar in every pub in the whole world. I only work four evenings a week and I earn twice as much as I did in that snotty boutique. I’m doing just fine. I don’t smoke, I never have unprotected sex and I don’t drink even half as much as you do.’

  ‘All right,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, sensing it was time to throw in the towel. ‘I just want everything to be all right where you’re concerned, you know that, don’t you? How’s Malin getting on, by the way?’

  Malin was the friend Sara had gone over to London with. They shared a flat up in Camden.

  ‘Oh, Malin’s fine too,’ Sara assured him. ‘But she hasn’t got a boyfriend yet.’

  ‘Wise girl,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’ll be over to see you in September, like we said. If I’m still welcome, that is?’

  ‘My heart belongs to Daddy,’ said Sara in English, and as this was the best thing she had said in this entire phone call they ended it on a high note, promising to be in touch again in a week.

  He lingered on the balcony as the sky slowly faded to evening blue over the rooftops and over the elms along the river. In a year’s time, I’ll be sitting on another balcony looking out over the Öresund, he suddenly thought. Seeing Helsingör and the Louisiana gallery and so on.

  Just imagine that really happening.

  Or imagine it not happening. Imagine me sitting here on this three-square-metre patch for all the summer nights of the rest of my life. On this particular evening it didn’t look bad at all, to be fair, but still. But still?

  The worst of it was that he didn’t find it particularly hard to paint that picture in his mind’s unclouded eye. As time passed, the inertia inside him increased, and it was stupid to try persuading himself he would feel more open to change in five or eight years.

  If you’re not keen when you’re forty-seven, you’re not going to be keen when you’re fifty-seven, either, he thought. Unless you make a real effort to change things.

  But in actual fact, he was keen now. As keen as anyone could be. On Wednesday he would ring Marianne and tell her so. Then he could only hope she hadn’t fallen prey to doubts. In a way, it was surprising that he had such confidence in her, bearing in mind that they had known each other less than a year and not met each other more than eight or ten times; but maybe the simple explanation was that loneliness was prodding him into action. At my age, he thought, one certainly hasn’t got all the time in the world to pick and choose.

  To act or to wither away.

  Again, it struck him that this sounded crass and pragmatic, really pushing the point, especially as he found it hard to identify any kind of hesitation in his feelings for Marianne. He loved her, he was ready to give up his job and move in with her in Helsingborg, it was as simple as that. Or anywhere else, if she preferred it. Berlin or Fjugesta or any bloody where.

  I would have chosen her over everyone else, even if I’d had all the women of the world to choose from, he thought. That’s the truth, I’m not lying. Let the sunset be my witness.

  Then a memory came into his head. One might well wonder why.

  A case, about ten years ago. A woman called the station in the middle of the night to tell them she had killed her husband. She gave the address, one of the new blocks of flats down in Pampas. He attended the scene with a female colleague, who later moved to Stockholm, and they verified that it was just as the woman had said. The man was leaning forward over the kitchen table, head resting on his folded arms, and but for the carving knife protruding from between his shoulder blades, you might have thought he was asleep there.

  ‘Why?’ Barbarotti asked.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ the woman replied. ‘He said he was going to leave me. What would have become of me then?’

  He regarded her in bewilderment. A somewhat overweight, careworn woman of around fifty-five. ‘What’s to become of you both now?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to be taken into custody,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t have coped with living alone. Not for a single day. And Arne’s going into the ground.’

  When he interviewed her subsequently, she had stuck to this line as if it went without saying. Nothing that needed to be queried or further explained; her husband had promised to love her and look after her all her life, and when he broke that promise, there was only one logical solution to the problem: sticking a knife in his back. And indeed, the forensic psychiatrist who eventually examined her over a number of days reached the conclusion that she was in full possession of her faculties, and she consequently received a life sentence for murder.

  Barbarotti would think back to this case from time to time. Or rather, it would come sailing into his mind at regular intervals. Like now. And he could do nothing to stop it. It was always accompanied by those questions he couldn’t really put into words. And certainly couldn’t answer.

  Where did her guilt actually lie?

  Why did he find it so hard to accept that she had committed a crime at all?

  Had he been an autocratic judge in the legal system of some utopian state, he would presumably have acquitted her – against her own will. Because she would never again in her life be in a situation in which she needed to commit such an act to defend . . . well, whatever it was she had defended. He couldn’t really get to the nub of it, but then nor did it feel important to put it into words.

  The more important thing,
he assumed, was the extent to which going round with such notions of crime and punishment in his head was compatible with his own role as a police officer.

  The answer eluded him on this beautiful August evening, as it had on every other occasion. When it got to twelve and the jackdaws had fallen silent, he decided to go to bed, but he was scarcely out of his deckchair when his mobile phone rang.

  Christ, he thought. Sara. Something’s happened to her.

  But it was Göran Persson.

  For one puzzled second, Barbarotti really did believe it was the former prime minister calling him on some tricky matter of political import – before realizing he was only talking to a namesake.

  Göran Persson was a reporter at the tabloid Expressen and his reason for ringing was as plain as a pikestaff.

  ‘It’s about the two murders in Kymlinge. I’ve been told the murderer wrote to you in advance to tell you what he was going to do. What’s your comment on that?’

  ‘What?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Göran Persson repeated his assertion and his question in exactly the same words.

  ‘I’ve no comment at all,’ declared Barbarotti. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where did you get that information?’

  ‘Don’t you know it’s illegal to try to trace a source?’ retorted Persson. ‘But I suppose I could overlook it. Suffice it to say that I know this information to be true. That you knew Erik Bergman and Anna Eriksson were going to be murdered. We’ll be writing about the letters in Monday’s edition, and it won’t reflect particularly well on the police if you try to deny the facts.’

  ‘I don’t believe—’

  ‘I’m in the car on my way down to you right now,’ said the reporter. ‘Shall we say we’ll meet for breakfast at Kymlinge Hotel tomorrow morning? Then we can talk it over in peace and quiet. I reckon it’s just as well for us both to play on the same team in this case. The letters are addressed to you personally, as I understand it. Handwritten, in block capitals. Is that right?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti thought it over for three seconds.

  ‘What time?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ said Persson. ‘I’ve still got two hundred kilometres to go and it’s Sunday tomorrow, after all.’

  We’ve got a leak, thought Detective Inspector Barbarotti as he cleaned his teeth and regarded his unusually clouded eyes in the bathroom mirror.

  Who?

  16

  He was reluctant to do it, extremely reluctant, but an hour before his rendezvous with Göran Persson, he called Superintendent Jonnerblad to explain the situation.

  ‘Damn, that’s all we need,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘I think it’s best if I see him in your place.’

  ‘That’s really not a good idea,’ said Barbarotti. ‘He seems to know the letters are addressed to me, so I’m the one he wants to talk to.’

  Jonnerblad considered this for a moment and switched off a radio.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But we’ll devise a strategy and then you’ll stick to it.’

  ‘Happily,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Do you have anything specific in mind?’

  ‘How much we ought to give away, of course,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘That’s what this is all about.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure he already knows it all,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Might not be such a bright idea to tangle ourselves up in lies.’

  ‘Who said anything about lies?’ demanded Jonnerblad.

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Who the hell let the cat out of the bag?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But quite a few of us are in on the information.’

  ‘Perhaps it was just a question of time,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘But if you see any of our colleagues strolling round town in an Armani suit, you could tip me a wink.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Barbarotti. ‘So what about this strategy, then?’

  Jonnerblad said nothing but his breathing was heavy. As if he had a fat mistress sitting on his chest or something like that, thought Barbarotti.

  Why did these gratuitous thoughts and images keep popping up? They were nearly always disturbing and . . . what was the word . . . counterproductive? They made him lose the thread, you might say. Why the hell should there be a fat whor—?

  ‘Protection measures,’ Jonnerblad said at last. ‘He’ll ask us about our protection measures.’

  ‘We’ve no need to protect those who’ve already been murdered,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I’m not sure he—’

  ‘Hans Andersson,’ interrupted Jonnerblad. ‘Did he know about Hans Andersson as well?’

  ‘That’s what I was about to tell you,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I couldn’t tell. We didn’t discuss it.’

  ‘If he doesn’t mention him, you needn’t either,’ decided Jonnerblad.

  ‘And if he does mention him?’

  ‘You make it clear that we’ve implemented protection measures as fully as circumstances permit.’

  ‘As circumstances permit?’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He presumably wants to keep this bit of news to himself,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘That gives you a bit of bargaining room. There’s nothing to stop us making this public at a press conference this afternoon.’

  ‘I know,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I thought about that, too. I don’t get why they didn’t make a big splash with this today.’

  ‘And what’s your conclusion?’ asked Jonnerblad. ‘Having thought about it?’

  ‘That he must have received the tip-off just before he rang me. It was past midnight, so they simply wouldn’t have had time to put it in any sooner.’

  ‘Very possibly,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘But why is he getting in touch with us at all?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Because he didn’t believe it, maybe?’

  ‘They don’t usually let that get in their way,’ said Jonnerblad. ‘But you could be right in this case. So you didn’t get the impression it took the chat with you to convince him, then?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Were you sober?’

  Inspector Barbarotti didn’t reply.

  ‘Call me as soon as you’re through with him,’ summarized Jonnerblad. ‘Employ a police officer’s common sense, this isn’t your first time, is it? And if you happen to winkle the name of his source out of him, that’s fine by me.’

  ‘I doubt I’ll be able to,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Journalists generally take good care of their moles.’

  ‘I bet they bloody do,’ muttered Jonnerblad, and with that, the strategic planning call was over.

  Göran Persson didn’t exactly look at ease at Kymlinge Hotel. In Gunnar Barbarotti’s estimation, he would probably have preferred a dining room in New York or Rome, but they were where they were. The reporter had evidently finished his breakfast; he had got through more china than the average family of six, and mangled remains of meat, cheese and fish, flakes of Danish pastry and crumbs of egg were strewn all over the table, while the morning paper had ended up as a drift of crumpled pages on the floor.

  Looks like a burnt-out reality TV star, Barbarotti thought grimly. On the way downhill. Three days’ growth of beard, hair still spiky from the shower, and a black T-shirt under a fringed-leather waistcoat. Fortyish, give or take five either way.

  Though maybe it’s not as bad as it looks, he thought as he sat down opposite the reporter. Maybe his main job is infiltrating motorbike gangs. Investigative journalism and all that, and we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Glad I’m not prejudiced about these things.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Persson. ‘You’re Barbarotti?’

  Barbarotti admitted that this was correct. Persson tucked a pouch of snus under his lip.

  ‘We’re going with a four-page feature,’ he said. ‘Two double-page spreads. It’s a bloody fascinating story, this one.’

  ‘You reckon?’ said Barbarotti.

 
‘We really want to include those letters. Exactly the way they look, that is. It’s bound to help you lot catch the bugger.’

  ‘I’m not so sure we want to release them,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘Of course you fucking do,’ said Göran Persson. ‘Don’t suppose you want us to write a load of shite about the force, eh? There’s a photographer due any minute now, thought you could take us round to the police station afterwards. You want anything to eat or drink?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti nodded. He went over to the buffet and furnished himself with a cup of coffee and a fistful of hard little biscuits. He tried to steel himself against pouring the coffee into the reporter’s hair and felt a pang of regret at not having left Jonnerblad to deal with the whole caboodle.

  But let himself be bossed around? The hell he would.

  ‘All right,’ he said, once he was back in his seat, ‘I’ll have to discuss it with my colleagues. But if I might just point something out, I think you’ve got the wrong ends of various sticks, which isn’t exactly unusual in your line of work. Can you tell me a bit about how you received the tip-off? I haven’t looked through your paper for fourteen years and don’t intend to do so tomorrow, either.’

  Göran Persson looked at him for a long time, one corner of his mouth giving a slight twitch. The corner of his snus peeped out. Then he pulled himself up straighter in his chair and cleared his throat.

  Then he recited, from memory, the murderer’s communications. Slowly and emphatically, word for word. Including the third, the one about Hans Andersson.

  ‘Which stick is it you think I’ve got the wrong end of?’ he added.

  Blast, thought Barbarotti. What kind of cretin would . . . ? Hang on a minute, could it be . . . ?

  But at that instant a photoflash went off, and it was to take him more than twenty-four hours to get back to this particular train of thought.

  ‘Nisse Lundman,’ said the photographer. ‘Thought I’d take a few shots while you two were talking, if that’s OK?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Göran Persson, winking at Barbarotti. ‘So, why is this psychopath writing specifically to you?’