The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘One,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘If any of the journalists seem to know about this new letter, how will you handle it?’

  Jonnerblad considered this for a moment. ‘We’ll play it right down,’ he said.

  ‘Low profile,’ confirmed Tallin.

  ‘Best of luck,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘It’s going to be a bit tricky interviewing that Göran Persson,’ predicted Astor Nilsson. ‘Whatever happens.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Tallin.

  ‘Because every single word will instantly find its way into print. There’ll be no easy way of keeping him quiet, and trying to make him reveal his source isn’t exactly going to be a hit . . . as my grandchildren say.’

  Has he got grandchildren? Barbarotti found himself thinking in confusion. And old enough to be talking about hits?

  ‘I am aware of that particular problem,’ Jonnerblad replied irritably. ‘And I’ve no great respect for the tabloid press. But the idea of them deliberately shielding a murderer just to sell some extra copies, well, I hope they draw the line there.’

  Once the door had closed behind the two officers from the National CID, Astor Nilsson cleared his throat, looking from Barbarotti to Backman and then back again. ‘I’ve got an admission to make,’ he said. ‘I might almost say I’m finding this interesting. I must just have a perverted mind.’

  ‘Interesting?’ said Eva Backman. ‘You men never cease to amaze me. I enjoy a bit of murder, that’s why I joined the police! Just remember not to tell Expressen, that’s all, or it might be misconstrued.’

  Astor Nilsson nodded and managed to look a bit embarrassed for a moment. Inspector Backman gestured to Barbarotti to come with her and they went down two floors to enlist the help of Inspector Borgsen, alias Sorrysen, and his well-documented computer skills.

  It took less than twenty minutes to locate Henrik and Katarina Malmgren.

  Or at any rate, their preliminary judgement was that they had found the right people. Admittedly there were some fifty Henrik Malmgrens and sixty Katarina Malmgrens in the country, and presumably some of these were related to one another in various ways – but there was only one married couple with the right names, and for some reason all three detectives believed it stunningly likely that these were the two individuals the murderer had in mind.

  ‘Why?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Why am I so sure it’s them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eva Backman. ‘But I feel the same. After all, we’ve really only got three possible constellations to choose between: siblings, parent–child and husband–wife. Haven’t we?’

  ‘Well I suppose they could be cousins, too,’ Sorrysen pointed out. ‘Or aunt and nephew or I don’t know what. They needn’t even be related.’

  ‘Now you’re just being difficult,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sorrysen. ‘My vote’s on the married couple. Or at any rate, we ought to look at them first of all.’ He donned his minimalist glasses and studied the list he had just printed out. ‘Especially as there happens to be neither a Henrik nor a Katarina Malmgren in Kymlinge.’

  ‘We’ll focus on them for starters,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Then we can broaden it out if necessary. So, what’s their address?’

  Eva Backman took the list and read aloud. ‘Henrik and Katarina Malmgren. Number 24 Berberisstigen, in Gothenburg. I’ve an idea it’s out in Mölndal – Ville’s sister lives somewhere round that way. Pretty fashionable – upper middle class, anyway.’

  Barbarotti looked over her shoulder. ‘They’ve got three phone numbers,’ he said. ‘Landline and two mobiles. What do we do?’

  Sorrysen checked the time. ‘We’ve got a good half hour before the end of the press conference,’ he said.

  ‘No point wasting time,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Dereliction of duty to just twiddle our thumbs,’ said Backman.

  ‘Pass me that phone, Gerald,’ said Barbarotti.

  He drew three blanks. He listened to three different recordings – Mr Malmgren twice, his wife once – and was politely asked to leave messages or try one of the other numbers, and when he ended the third call and observed his colleagues’ grim faces, he felt the cold shiver of confirmation creeping down his spine.

  It’s them. It has to be them.

  But the voice of calm deliberation sounded in his head at the same time. Don’t jump to conclusions. It was twenty to three in the afternoon. A Monday. If Henrik and Katarina Malmgren were at work, say, wherever that happened to be, it was only to be expected that neither of them answered their phones. Half past seven in the evening would be another matter. He could see that Backman and Sorrysen were hoping to leave the next decision to him, but he suddenly felt uncertain. Was it right just to leave a message and ask the unknown couple to contact the police in Kymlinge?

  It only took him a few seconds to understand where that uncertainty emanated from; it wasn’t the possibility of Superintendent Jonnerblad’s criticisms and rebukes that was preying on his mind, but something to do with the murderer.

  With the simple fact, to be more precise, that this was exactly the step they might be expected to take. The most obvious course of action. Barbarotti felt with a sudden flare of anger; he had no desire to play into their opponent’s hands any more. Better to do something unexpected for once, but the only question was what.

  ‘He could be bluffing this time, too,’ said Eva Backman, as if she had been thinking along the same lines. ‘Maybe he only ever intended to kill the first two and now he’s just stringing us along.’

  ‘But why?’ said Sorrysen.

  Eva Backman shrugged. ‘Don’t know. I don’t think there’s any point hunting for motives in this case, anyway.’

  ‘I thought that was exactly what we were going to do?’ objected Barbarotti. ‘Have you forgotten what Lillieskog said?’

  ‘Not forgotten,’ said Backman. ‘I’m just a bit suspicious of certain kinds of expert, that’s all. And just a bit sceptical that I’m really going to get away on my holiday on Wednesday.’

  ‘Where the latter’s concerned, I’m afraid you could be right,’ said Sorrysen, starting to straighten the piles of paper on his desk. ‘Looks like we’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of us. It would be really handy if we could find some link between this couple and our two victims, it would make things easier.’

  ‘Certainly would,’ agreed Eva Backman with a look at the clock. ‘OK, so what do we do? More thumb twiddling until the press conference is over?’

  Inspector Barbarotti shook his head and felt in his jacket pocket. ‘Can I have a bit of quiet,’ he said. ‘I’ll give them my mobile number. It can’t hurt, I won’t say I’m a police officer, but if they call back at least it means they’re still alive. I’m tired of not being allowed to make any decisions.’

  ‘Nobody’s said you mustn’t,’ said Inspector Backman. ‘Off you go.’

  Barbarotti nodded, rang the three phone numbers again and left three more or less identical and deliberately nonspecific messages. He pocketed his mobile and regarded his colleagues.

  ‘Shall we take a bet on it?’ he said.

  ‘On what?’ asked Eva Backman.

  ‘On a house in Berberisstigen in Mölndal coming on the market this autumn.’

  Inspector Gerald Borgsen pointed out that, practically speaking, it was autumn already, but neither he nor Backman accepted the challenge.

  By the time Gunnar Barbarotti left the building around half past seven on Monday evening, his mobile had rung thirteen times since three o’clock. In every single case it was some journalist digging for the truth and eager to ask an urgent, pertinent question, but he politely declined on each of the thirteen occasions.

  There was no word from Henrik or Katarina Malmgren, however, and when he paused for thought, he could not remember ever having felt so frustrated. With the possible exception of when Helena announced she was leaving him, six years before.

  But at work? Never. The whole investigation felt like a
brain hijack; at various points in that disconsolate afternoon, Bo Bergman’s poem ‘The Marionettes’ had come to mind, which was clearly no coincidence. The murderer pulled the strings and his police puppets pirouetted in comic obedience; he fed them a name or two and they immediately set about taking the steps anybody could have expected them to take. The murderer above all. The puppet master.

  But why? Was there any point to his behaviour beyond messing them about? Was the letter writing part of a plan, a bigger pattern that Barbarotti and the rest of them could not see?

  He had asked himself these questions a thousand times this past week, and they remained as rhetorically unanswered as ever.

  The press conference had gone well, Jonnerblad and Tallin assured them, almost with one voice, which was no more than Barbarotti had expected. The views of the assembled media – an audience of more than eighty, apparently – would doubtless be there for all to see in the next day’s papers, or to be imbibed from the TV and radio news that night.

  Or online. None of the journalists present had asked any questions about Henrik or Katarina, so at least their fears that the murderer was communicating with the police and the press more or less simultaneously had proved unfounded. This time, at any rate.

  Whether it really was the murderer who had fed information to Göran Persson was a question that remained far from resolved. Six hours after the insight had struck with such clarity, Gunnar Barbarotti was no longer quite so inclined to believe it as he had been at the time.

  And there lay the nub of his frustration, he thought once he had turned down from Grevgatan and was cycling along the riverside. A clutter of question marks, catching on each other as casually and randomly as bent metal coat hangers in the bottom of a musty wardrobe. (Again he wondered where all those images came from.) Were the married couple in Berberisstigen in Mölndal really the people referred to in the murderer’s latest letter, for example? And if so, was he actually planning to kill them? Hans Andersson – whichever of them had been the actual one, if any – was evidently to be let off the hook. Why? Had that been the intention all along or had something happened along the way to make the murderer change his mind?

  And above all: where were the Malmgrens? Despite an intense afternoon’s work, with the willing assistance of half a dozen colleagues in the Gothenburg police, they had found neither hide nor hair of them. On the other hand, they each still had a fortnight of their annual leave left – he from the University of Gothenburg, she from Sahlgrenska hospital – so the chances of them being on their travels somewhere in the big wide world, their mobiles left in the desk drawer at home, were judged by the entire team to be fairly high. More and more people seemed to favour that kind of escape nowadays, for whatever reason.

  The other alternative, namely that they weren’t answering because they were already dead, met with a variety of assessments in the group, but since none of their hypotheses were built on anything but pure speculation and guesswork, it made little difference. Further phone calls with family and friends were scheduled for that evening and the following day, so they would presumably have a clearer picture sooner or later. Barbarotti himself had spoken on the phone to a half-sister of Katarina Malmgren’s, and she had told him it wasn’t unusual for the couple to go off the radar from time to time. A week or a few days, a kind of lifestyle choice, or so she gathered. Some modern idea. She thought they generally told someone in advance by email or phone, though she had very little contact with them herself. There was a seven-year age difference between her and Katarina and they weren’t exactly on the same wavelength.

  Barbarotti did not enquire any more deeply on that score, but thanked her and said he would be back in touch. Then he called the next person on his list and learnt even less. And then the next. The team – including its temporary reinforcements in Gothenburg – had spoken to a total of a hundred people in four hours, many of them so loosely linked to the Malmgrens that it had felt like looking for snowballs in a desert – to quote Astor Nilsson – and the sum of their combined efforts was that by 7 p.m. they were in possession of a huge jumble of information of no use whatsoever.

  And anything that might conceivably be of use – in the most optimistic scenario – would effectively be hidden by all the dross. This phenomenon was of course nothing new in the context of any investigation, but it felt particularly conspicuous in the Malmgren case.

  And perhaps they hadn’t even identified the right people. Perhaps it was a Katarina Malmgren in Lycksele and a Henrik Malmgren in Stockholm who would, in the not too distant future, shuffle off this mortal coil. Or had already done so. Christ Almighty, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, what puppets we are.

  Don’t suppose a man like you is going to stop me?

  That was what today’s epistle had said. Addressing him personally, not the police in general. The letter writer was still opting to communicate directly with him, Detective Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, and nobody else. Why?

  Why, why? Could it really be that there was some kind of personal connection between him and the murderer after all, as Jonnerblad had suggested? He had added eight names to his existing list of potentially suspicious acquaintances from the past, but this had failed to ring any bells and the method felt more pointless the more he thought about it.

  And what was the intention this time? The letter writer’s intention?

  He and Backman both tended to think – as possibly the others in the group did, too, but Backman was the one he had mainly discussed it with – that in reality, the deed had already been done. If the Malmgrens were going to be murdered, it would have happened by now. But if they were located alive, that probably meant they were in with a good chance of staying that way. With the two earlier murders, definitely in the second case and possibly in the first as well, the tip-off letters had arrived far too late for the police to have any chance of reacting, and in the case of Hans Andersson there was still no victim at all. It seemed scarcely likely that the murderer would attempt to kill two people who were under strict police surveillance – and if he did it anyway, it would prove either that he was stark staring mad or that he wanted to be caught. If not both.

  And in that case, they would soon have him under lock and key and be able to wind up the investigation.

  But the Malmgrens had not been located alive, that was the problem. Maybe their dead bodies were already awaiting discovery? Maybe the murderer was safe and sound elsewhere, waiting to read the news in the morning papers?

  Maybe that was what turned him on and made him do it, thought Barbarotti with an air of resignation, turning up Hagendalsvägen. Could it be as banal as that?

  At any event, the geographical perspective appeared to have widened; there was neither a Katarina nor a Henrik Malmgren registered in Kymlinge. It was hard to speculate what that might signify, and all the harder when one had just spent ten solid hours speculating. For a moment, Barbarotti caught himself wishing he could exchange his life for Axel Wallman’s.

  The academic rubbish heap? Perhaps there was an equivalent rubbish heap for superannuated policemen? Yes, he realized, there almost certainly was something like that. The only question was whether he had attained sufficient maturity to qualify for it.

  It didn’t bloody well matter, anyway, because the day after tomorrow he was going to ring Marianne, and the direction of his life would be decided forever.

  Thus thought Inspector Barbarotti, employing a restrained amount of violence to force his bike between two child-sized saddles in the bicycle rack in the yard.

  He unlocked the door of his flat, went into the hall and was suddenly aware of feeling hungry – despite the ten or so cups of coffee he’d consumed that afternoon, along with probably twice that number of Singoalla biscuits. He took a rapid inventory of the contents of fridge and larder and decided to do his signature dish: spaghetti with pesto, capers, olives and flakes of parmesan cheese. A glass of red wine, if he had a bottle in the flat, and a slice or two of fresh pear – he had just fin
ished all his preparations when there was a ring at the door.

  For a few seconds he debated whether to bother answering, and afterwards – when what happened next had already happened – he wondered why on earth he hadn’t had the sense to listen to his first, well-founded impulse.

  It was Göran Persson, with a photographer in a red baseball cap.

  ‘Glad to find you in,’ said Göran Persson, and the photographer’s flash went off.

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Excuse me.’

  He tried to shut the door but the reporter had planted his solid, size-ten foot right across the threshold. ‘Just thought we ought to have a little chat,’ he said. ‘A friendly word. People are interested in this case, you know.’

  ‘Get your foot out of my door,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I have no comment to make.’

  The photographer took another picture.

  ‘No comment?’ said Göran Persson. ‘Oh come on, I’m sure you have. How about this: we sit down at your kitchen table and exchange a few thoughts for ten minutes. Then I write up the conversation and you can either approve it, or not.’

  ‘Not,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘You want the police to come across as bloody-minded and dictatorial?’

  ‘Bloody mi— What the hell are you raving on about? We’re in the middle of a murder enquiry here, and you’re doing us no favours by running around the place and writing a load of sensationalist crap. Your newspaper is a disgrace to the free word.’

  Anger was growing inside him like a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Hang on, could you just repeat that?’ said the reporter, fishing a pen and notepad out of his jacket pocket. The camera flashes continued.

  ‘For the last time,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I’ve no intention of talking to you. Move your bloody foot or I’ll punch you in the face.’

  Göran Persson grinned. ‘Now now, constable, I think you need to think a bit more about what you’re saying. Let us in and stop being so stubborn. I’ve talked to that boss of yours . . . Jonnerblatt or whatever the fuck he’s called, for over an hour. I’m a bit tired of self-important cops.’