The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Psychopath?’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Don’t split hairs,’ said Persson.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Are you sure about that? Or are you just trying to keep information from me?’

  Inspector Barbarotti did not reply. He ate a couple of biscuits and looked out of the window. The photographer took a couple of pictures.

  ‘All right,’ said Göran Persson. ‘But the police didn’t release any of this to the public. The warning letters. I’m going to talk to a couple of the victims’ relatives later today. We’ll see what they’ve got to say about that.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we will,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘And this third man, Hans Andersson . . . you haven’t found him yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But I promise I’ll ring you as soon as we do, so you can get on with tormenting his friends and family, too.’

  ‘Let’s not be so petty,’ said the reporter, showing his snus again. ‘Shall we take a little trip to the police station now?’

  ‘I need to make a call first,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘I’ll take a leak while you do it,’ announced Göran Persson. ‘God-awful coffee in this place.’

  Jonnerblad answered after half a ring. Barbarotti described the state of play in half a minute.

  ‘Damn,’ said Jonnerblad.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Barbarotti. ‘What should we do, then?’

  ‘Do we have any choice?’ asked Jonnerblad.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Barbarotti.

  Jonnerblad went quiet at the other end of the line for a few moments.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘If you come with him to the police station, I’ll take over. I can be there in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Right, we’ll do that,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’ll try not to hack his ears off in the meantime.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ asked Jonnerblad.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Barbarotti.

  It was ten past eleven when Inspector Barbarotti delivered Expressen reporter Göran Persson to Superintendent Jonnerblad on the third floor of police HQ. Chief Inspector Tallin was also on hand, so it was deemed unnecessary for Barbarotti to stay.

  Barbarotti was grateful for it. He hurried out of the building, got in his car and set off home. But the reporter was still nagging away like an inflamed tooth in his skull, and he thought that if it really were Our Lord’s intention that the day of rest be used for recovery and recreation, this particular Sunday had got off to a bad start.

  And that if Our Lord meant people to read newspapers, he would have to have a serious talk to Him about that, next time he had Him on the line.

  Turning into Baldersgatan, he also realized he didn’t want to go home. Purely objectively speaking, it was a glorious summer’s day; why should he sit in his doleful little flat, the frustration gnawing at him as he waited for death? He had no reason to. There must be more meaningful recreation to engage in. Significantly more meaningful.

  Thus thought Inspector Barbarotti as his car took him slowly past facades the shade of pale urine to his own peeling apartment block, and before he reached the traffic lights at Drottninggatan, Axel Wallman’s name had floated to the surface of his mind.

  He took out his mobile and rang the number.

  Axel Wallman had taken early retirement and lived in an old summer cottage on the northern shore of Lake Kymmen.

  The role of pensioner was still relatively new to him. Thirty years before, he and Gunnar Barbarotti had been at upper-secondary school together; Wallman performed better than anyone else in the school when they took their university matriculation – top grades in all subjects, apart from PE, where he made do with the lowest score – and a brilliant academic career was predicted for him. Socially, however, he was a loner: round-shouldered, stand-offish, difficult. Barbarotti hadn’t had a great deal to do with him at school, despite them being in the same form in all three years – but he had got to know him when they were studying at Lund.

  He probably wouldn’t have got close to him there, either, had it not been for their living arrangements. For three years they had shared a basic two-roomed flat in Prennegatan. Barbarotti was studying law, Wallman, linguistics. And a whole series of languages. Latin and Greek, of course, then some of the Slav languages, and ending up in the realms of Finnish. Or Finno-Ugric, to be more accurate. His doctoral thesis was a comparative study of external local locative cases in the Vepsian, Cheremis and Votyak languages, a volume which Barbarotti still had in his bookcase, the pages cut but the contents unread.

  Though by that point, of course, he had left jurisprudence behind him. He had graduated from police training college and become a detective. Wallman presumably wasn’t easy to work with, Barbarotti could see that; cut out for research maybe, but certainly not for teaching. And things had changed in the ivory towers of academe; they used to have a considerable function as a cover and a kind of sheltered workshop for brilliant if introverted minds, but in Sweden towards the end of the 1980s, teaching was expected as well.

  Especially in the case of languages, which were viewed as constituting some kind of means of communication between human beings.

  This was where Wallman had run into a brick wall. True, he did get a lectureship at the University of Copenhagen, but was then transferred to similar ones in Umeå, Uppsala and Åbo Academy in Turku. This whole sideways career was also punctuated by extended periods of sick leave and – if Barbarotti had understood it correctly – ongoing disputes with colleagues and students, plus the odd scandal or two. Wallman had been off his radar for the whole of this period, roughly 1985–2000, and when they ran into each other by sheer chance a few weeks after the millennium, the former genius had already been winnowed out of the academic machine and thrown on the rubbish heap.

  As he put it himself.

  But – to use his own words again – it served those petty ink-shitters right. ‘I have a fluent command of twenty-one languages, but now only Saarikoski and the birds will get to hear them.’

  Saarikoski was Wallman’s dog, a placid, seventy-kilo Leonberger and, according to its owner, an incarnation of the Finnish poet himself. As for the birds, he met them when he and Saarikoski were out for walks together through the forest round the lake. Or when he was just sitting on the dilapidated verandah overlooking the shore, drinking beer.

  Or writing something, though it was hard to tell what. Since they had resumed contact – in some sense this went hand in hand with Barbarotti’s own career as a divorcee, of course – they had met roughly once a year; no more than four or five times in all, and there was still a great deal about Axel Wallman that remained unexplained.

  He didn’t answer the first time Barbarotti called, but then he never did. The second time, he picked up the receiver. He didn’t say anything, and that was another of his rules; if it was somebody wanting something, it was up to the person in question to make the first chess move. Introduce themselves, for example.

  Gunnar Barbarotti did just that.

  ‘Barbarotti here. I’m thinking of paying you a visit. I’ve had a hell of a morning and I could do with spending an afternoon in brainy company.’

  ‘I’ll ask Saarikoski if he’s free,’ growled Axel Wallman.

  He evidently was. Wallman said his detective friend was welcome as long as he didn’t cause too much bother and brought a bag of supplies along. Barbarotti promised to see to it and to be there within the hour.

  The patch of land round Axel Wallman’s summer cottage bore a striking resemblance to Wallman’s own face. Overgrown and irregular; beard stubble and stinging nettles; piles of old junk and neglected pimples; a bloody plaster possibly indicating an attempt to shave at some point in the last month and piles of planks under tarpaulins, possibly indicating someone had planned to carry out repairs sometime in the past decade.

  Though presumably not Wallman himself. His hair was grey, thinning and shoulder length, his cloth
ing comprised a dirty, lime-green T-shirt, a shabby pair of dungarees and black shoes with no socks. It struck Barbarotti that a reasonably observant witness would be more likely to assess his age as a good sixty rather than the not yet fifty that was actually the case.

  And if there really were such a thing as an academic rubbish heap, as Wallman claimed, he undeniably appeared to belong in such a place.

  This one, for example. But there was still just about a lake view, observed Gunnar Barbarotti, even if the undergrowth of nettles, alder, aspen and birch had shot up by half a metre since last year.

  Just like last year, Axel Wallman was sitting on a plastic chair on the verandah. The table beside him was cluttered with all sorts of stuff: books, old newspapers, pens, pads of paper, tobacco, matches, a paraffin lamp and some empty beer cans. He didn’t get up as Barbarotti came into his line of sight, but he did look up, and Saarikoski, lying in the shade at his feet, went so far as to thump his tail twice.

  ‘Hello Axel,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Thanks for letting me come and see you.’

  ‘There’s a ghost stalking through history,’ replied Axel Wallman. ‘Her name is Femina.’

  ‘Never a truer word spoken,’ said Barbarotti, setting the supermarket bags down on the verandah floor. One contained beer, the other pasta and the ingredients for a Bolognese sauce.

  ‘I’m forty-eight and a virgin,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘Does that interest you?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I can’t honestly say it does.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother Saarikoski either,’ said Axel Wallman gloomily, starting to roll a cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘But then he was castrated even before I got him. What have you got to tell me about the current state of things, and is it beer you’ve got in that bag?’

  Gunnar Barbarotti moved a few items of clothing off another plastic chair and sat down. He passed a can of beer to his host and opened one himself. Looking out over the lake, he thought that when Axel Wallman died in his chair one day, nobody would discover the fact; nature would continue to devour both him and the house; Saarikoski would probably just lie there, draw his last breath at his owner’s feet, and be buried in the same fashion.

  Overgrown and consigned to oblivion. Maybe not such a bad way to go, when all was said and done.

  But it was not to discuss the brevity and vanity of life that he was here. He didn’t think so, at any rate; the precise reason still escaped him. His old comrade in misfortune had popped into his head and he had simply felt the urge to see him; there was no need for more complicated motivation than that. Not on a gorgeous August Sunday like this one.

  They supped their beer and sat in silence for half a minute.

  ‘What do you make of a murderer who sends letters to the police telling them who he plans to kill?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti eventually.

  There was no need to let Axel Wallman steer the course of the conversation. If he did, they would soon end up in some incomprehensible labyrinth or other. Strindberg’s French verb forms or encrypted codes in the Second World War.

  ‘Is that the current state of things?’ asked Axel Wallman. ‘Murderers writing letters?’

  ‘For the moment,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘And he murders them as well? Doesn’t just write letters?’

  ‘He murders them as well.’

  ‘I’ve never had a lot of time for the current state of things,’ said Axel Wallman, lighting up his rustic cigarette. ‘Is it a male or a female?’

  ‘Male, I think,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Good,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘I’m not very good with females, as I may have mentioned. I find them essentially incomprehensible. But if you let me look at what the murderer wrote, I’m prepared to have a go at linguistic analysis.’

  ‘I haven’t brought them with me,’ admitted Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘Haven’t brought them with you? What the hell are you doing here then, wasting my precious time?’

  ‘Bringing you beer and food,’ Barbarotti pointed out. ‘And anyway, I know them off by heart.’

  ‘You never could learn things off by heart,’ muttered Axel Wallman. ‘But fire away if you like.’

  Inspector Barbarotti drank some more of his beer, considered for a moment and recited from memory the three messages the murderer had sent him. Axel Wallman sat quietly, scratching his beard.

  ‘Again.’

  Barbarotti wasn’t sure whether it was strictly necessary for the analysis or whether Wallman was just trying to catch him out on memory function. He cleared his throat and repeated what he had said. Once he had finished, Wallman sat back and looked pleased with himself.

  ‘In my judgement, we’re dealing here with a thirty-eight-year-old Smålander,’ he said, and gulped some beer.

  ‘What?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘A thirty-eight-year-old Smålander,’ repeated Axel Wallman, and belched. ‘Are you going deaf, too?’

  ‘A thirty-eight-year-old Smålander. How the hell can you claim that?’

  ‘Not claim,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘I’m not claiming anything. But the only hypothesis one can possibly propose on linguistic grounds is the one I just gave you. What sort of people is he murdering?’

  ‘Oh, a mixture,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But what’s it based on then, your analysis?’

  ‘The expression “this next time”,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘Admittedly its use is spreading, but it was originally southern Swedish, though not from Skåne.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Not impossible,’ said Wallman. ‘I’m sure fingerprints are generally a more reliable method than attention to modern Swedish-language usage when it comes to fighting crime. But it could also be that the murderer’s pulling your leg. He could be a Norrlander trying to sound like a Smålander.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘And age thirty-eight, what are you basing that on?’

  ‘The median man in this country is probably thirty-nine,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘I subtracted a year because perpetrators of violent crime are usually a little younger than the average. It’s to do with the testosterone.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and started to giggle. Gunnar Barbarotti leant back and studied him. Axel Wallman seldom laughed in Barbarotti’s presence, but on the rare occasions when he did, he resembled nothing so much as a young teenage girl, her merriment leaking out in intermittent gusts through slightly flaring nostrils. Bearing in mind Wallman’s appearance and general profile, this created a rather curious impression. He’s crazy, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. So am I, for that matter. Why am I sitting here drivelling on about the investigation to Axel Wallman? Didn’t I come here to get away from work? Definitely time to change the subject.

  ‘Here’s to you, Axel,’ he said, raising his beer can. ‘That’s enough of my problems. What are you keeping busy with at the moment?’

  Axel Wallman took a gulp of his beer and allowed himself a belch. He started to roll another cigarette and appeared to be thinking. ‘A Hallander,’ he said. ‘He could be from Halland, too. What did you say?’

  ‘What are you keeping busy with?’

  ‘Keeping busy?’ said Axel Wallman. ‘I don’t know if that’s quite how I’d express the process, but I’ve been translating a few of Barin’s poems. Do you want to hear?’

  Barbarotti kicked off his shoes and nodded. ‘Why not?’

  Axel Wallman picked up a spiral-bound pad, flicked to and fro in it for a while, hawked noisily and spat a gob of phlegm over the verandah rail. ‘This one here,’ he said, suddenly looking like a little boy about to tell a riddle at a kids’ party, ‘it’s not too bad, this one here, in fact I’m damned if it isn’t better than the original. I suppose I’ll have to make it worse in a few places, you have to be sure to do justice to the flaws when you translate, and not everybody accepts that rule, but I do . . . well, it isn’t anything I expect you to have the capacity to understand, but I’d still like—’

  ‘Ju
st read it, Axel,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Cut out the damn preliminaries and analysis, I’m all ears.’

  ‘All right, you cretin,’ said Axel Wallman. ‘Listen up now, because this is great poetry.’

  He took another gulp of beer, scratched Saarikoski under the chin and began:

  ‘My beloved, you are the fat child that fell over in the mud when the war came,

  you are the impression the warrior’s foot left on the floor beside the blonde plait of the thirteen-year-old girl,

  you are the salt in the salt-cellar the girl’s mother had in her cardigan pocket the day she was thrown into the mass grave on the far side of the ridge,

  that place where nobody goes any more – but you are not the water purling in the brook near there

  and not the bird singing at twilight

  nor the sweet shade in the grove of green.

  Thus it is, my beloved, nor could not be arranged in any other way.’

  He nodded reflectively a couple of times and closed his pad. Gunnar Barbarotti drained his beer and shut his eyes. A fly buzzed through the air and landed on his wrist. Why am I here? he wondered again. How is it that I have ended up in this particular company on this particular Sunday in my forty-eighth year?

  This question struck him as both a touch frightening and highly pertinent, and he sat there contemplating it for a while without finding any pithy answers. Then Axel Wallman spoke up and said how stimulated he felt by reading such a bloody good poem to his old mate, and asked to read a few dozen more.

  So he did, and that was how they passed the afternoon. Axel Wallman read his translations of Mihail Barin’s late poems, which were by turns seemingly simple and darkly convoluted. They drank more beer, cooked a dinner of pasta with Bolognese sauce, took a dip in the lake, and as evening came, Gunnar Barbarotti realized that he had too high a concentration of alcohol in his blood to be in a fit state to drive himself home and would consequently have to stay the night.

  This met with no objection. At eleven, Axel Wallman announced that he had now completed his allotted share of this godforsaken Sunday, read out a short and fiery appeal for poetic freedom, unfortunately incomprehensible because it was in Hungarian, took Saarikoski with him and retired to bed. Barbarotti set up his solitary camp on the leather sofa with the aid of a blanket and a cushion smelling pungently of mould and ingrained tobacco smoke. That question from Ecclesiastes came back into his mind – but how can one be warm alone? – and he lay there trying to come up with an appropriate prayer to the currently extant God.