The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘He worked at a school in Borås back then, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but only for three terms. And none of his colleagues there who we’ve been able to locate can remember Anna Eriksson.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t take her to staff parties?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he did.’

  They passed Hova and the rain stopped.

  ‘I have this dream,’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘Do you?’ said Eva Backman. ‘I thought you weren’t sleeping?’

  ‘It’s a daydream,’ Astor Nilsson explained patiently. ‘Anyway, in it he’s alive, this teacher Mr Öhrnberg, and we can sit down for a four-hour chat with him this afternoon and get to the bottom of everything.’

  ‘I’m with you on that one,’ said Barbarotti. ‘What time is it? I forgot to take my watch off when I went for my swim this morning and it’s stopped.’

  ‘Twenty past nine,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘We’ll be at Hallsberg half an hour early. What do you say, shall we stop for a coffee and see what Expressen’s writing about us today?’

  ‘Just a coffee for me,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

  ‘The satnav’s not working,’ observed Astor Nilsson once they had turned off the E20 and were coming into the once-important railway hub. ‘But if I remember rightly, there’s only one street.’

  This turned out to be not quite the truth. Admittedly the high street ran through the whole place, alongside the railway tracks, but there was another road parallel to it, and various others intersecting it. Astor Nilsson pulled up outside Stig’s Bookshop, went in and was immediately taken under the wing of an enthusiastic, moustachioed gentleman of around sixty. At five past eleven they parked outside a smallish block of flats at 4 Tulpangatan. A tall man with a shaven head came hurrying over to meet them.

  ‘Ström. How was the journey?’

  They shook hands and introduced themselves. Astor Nilsson assured them the journey had been a piece of cake. Inspector Ström waved a hand towards two younger men who were just getting out of a blue Volvo. ‘I brought two forensic technicians, as we arranged. Just in case. Jönsson and Fjärnemyr.’

  They shook hands with the new arrivals as well. Jönsson had half his right index finger missing, Barbarotti noticed, but it was clearly no barrier to his work as a crime scene technician.

  ‘The caretaker’s already been in and unlocked the door,’ Fjärnemyr informed them. ‘We can go straight in.’

  Ström took the lead as they went up the stairs. It was a three-storey block with a typical sixties layout, but it all looked very spruce and had presumably had a facelift quite recently. Two flats on each landing, and Öhrnberg’s was on the top floor. Inspector Ström stopped outside the door and waited for the rest of them.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Eva Backman, ‘but I think I’d like to go in first. No point us all tramping in together.’

  Barbarotti saw Ström wince. Aha, he thought. An old-school type. He could scarcely be above forty, but it evidently threw him to have the only woman in the group of six taking command.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, holding the door open.

  Eva Backman took a big step over the drift of post and newspapers on the hall floor. She opened doors to the right and left, and straight ahead of her, and went round the flat for a good minute before returning to the others.

  ‘Nix,’ she said. ‘No body, no nothing. The slightly off smell is just the bin bag in the kitchen. He hasn’t been home for over a week and the weather’s been warm.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ said Inspector Ström, his eyes moving from Astor Nilsson to Barbarotti and back again. To make a point presumably, whether consciously or not.

  ‘How about this?’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘You leave us to get on with things here for a couple of hours and we’ll see what we find. No need for us all to get in each other’s way. If you’re back here with the caretaker –’ he looked at his watch, then at Ström – ‘shall we say one thirty? Then we can show you what we’re taking with us and close up the flat. OK?’

  Inspector Ström nodded. Technicians Jönsson and Fjärnemyr nodded.

  ‘Right then,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Bye for now.’

  Gunnar Öhrnberg had been – or possibly still was – quite an orderly and methodical man, that was one of their conclusions after they had spent an hour and a half going through his flat. All the rooms were clean and neat. He had well-stocked bookshelves, with books mainly from his own subject areas – history, social studies and civics – but also a fair bit of fiction. The desk in his study had a computer and multifunction printer and every last detail was meticulously arranged. Shelves of folders and box files, all carefully labelled. Though one had to bear in mind, Barbarotti thought, that term hadn’t yet started.

  And perhaps it never would start again for Gunnar Öhrnberg, but it was too early to be certain on that score. Far too early. After all, he could just have shoved off on some last-minute holiday deal and forgotten he was due at work. Or got lost when he was out hiking in the fells. Or . . . well, what? Barbarotti asked himself as he closed the door of the impeccably stocked linen cupboard. Been kidnapped? Had a stroke when he was out picking mushrooms in the forest and lost his memory?

  There were some framed photographs lined up on an oak sideboard in the living room. Six unfamiliar faces, of which two were elderly – his parents, at a guess – and two were children. A boy and a girl, both of them dark-haired. And a bridal couple; the man looked a bit like Gunnar Öhrnberg, so Barbarotti thought it was probably his brother, and that the two children were his niece and nephew. In a cupboard in the sideboard he found no less than ten bottles of whisky, all single malts, seven of them open. Something of a connoisseur, it seemed. There was a humidor with six cigars in it as well.

  But no photo albums anywhere. And no obvious gaps in the bookshelf where they might have been, either.

  ‘Another one who doesn’t seem to have been a photographer,’ said Eva Backman. ‘No sign of a camera anywhere.’

  ‘We can have a go with his computer,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘There could be pictures on there. And goodness knows what else besides.’

  ‘Handwritten address book, at any rate,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Anna Eriksson’s in there, but none of the others.’

  ‘Is Hans Andersson in it?’ asked Astor Nilsson.

  Barbarotti shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But let’s take it with us anyway.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Astor Nilsson, pulling up the blinds on the balcony door.

  The TV set and the sound system were both Bang & Olufsen. The CDs, probably about a hundred of them, were kept in modern storage towers – lots of jazz but plenty of rubbish too, Astor Nilsson noted – while the DVDs that they found behind yet another door of the roomy oak sideboard were no more than thirty in number. About half of those were porn.

  ‘Once a bachelor always a bachelor,’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘Are you saying that from experience?’ asked Eva Backman.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘Only wish I could get a bit turned on by that crap, but it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Backman. ‘I didn’t mean to snoop into your private life.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘I’m an open book, me. Anyhow, he seems to be a well-organized devil, this schoolmaster of ours. He should have taken the bin bag out, but maybe he didn’t twig that he was going to be murdered.’

  ‘No one can keep tabs on everything,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But he wasn’t murdered here at home, at any rate. I think we can allow ourselves that conclusion.’

  ‘It would be good to know that he was murdered before we start talking about where he wasn’t,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘That sounded complicated,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘But can we say we’re done here now? We need to talk to a few people as well, after all.’

  ‘The basement storage area,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Shall we go down and take a look? While we’ve go
t the key.’

  Backman nodded. ‘Yes, you do that. Meanwhile, we’ll start lugging out what we want to take away. We’ll wait for Ström and Co. downstairs. It might be a good idea to grab a bite of lunch too, don’t you think?’

  ‘Absolutely vital,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘When I’m hungry I’m the worst police officer in the whole of Sweden. I just don’t hear what people say.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Barbarotti, making Backman smile.

  28

  ‘You didn’t find anything I assume?’ asked Astor Nilsson. ‘In the basement, that is.’

  Barbarotti shook his head. ‘Loads of diving equipment. And skis. And cross-country skis. Walking boots and rucksacks, so he was quite sporty, it seems, didn’t just lounge about drinking whisky and smoking cigars.’

  ‘I don’t like you talking about him in the past tense,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I know it sounds silly, but it makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘You’re doing the same,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘I know,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I don’t like that, either.’

  ‘There’s a Chinese,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘Will that do, my Lord and Lady?’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Barbarotti. ‘We can be sure of quick service, if nothing else.’

  And so it proved. Gunnar Barbarotti even had time to pop into a jeweller’s and get himself a new wristwatch. It only cost 249 kronor but the shop assistant promised him in an impenetrable Närke accent that it was made to last forever.

  ‘No rubbish just ’cause it’s cheap. You’ll be wearin’ that ’un for your funeral.’

  Barbarotti paid and thanked him. There was a police station in Västra Storgatan in Hallsberg, but he had arranged to meet Tomas Wallin in the railway station cafe. An interrogation room rarely proved more than an interrogation room.

  Tomas Wallin looked tanned and healthy, but he opened the conversation by saying how terribly worried he was.

  ‘Something must have happened to him. Gunnar would never just stay away like that.’

  Barbarotti shot him a glance. A shortish, heavily built man, somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Sandy, close-cropped hair and honest blue eyes.

  ‘I’m going to record this,’ said Barbarotti, switching on the tape recorder. ‘So we don’t miss anything important.’

  ‘Oh. Er, OK,’ said Tomas Wallin, and gulped some water.

  ‘So your name is Tomas Wallin and you’re a good friend of Gunnar Öhrnberg’s. Can you say your full address and telephone number?’

  Wallin did so.

  ‘Örebro, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Can you tell me how long you’ve known Gunnar Öhrnberg?’

  ‘Seventeen or eighteen years. We met on military service up in Arvidsjaur.’

  ‘Lapland Ranger regiment?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’ve stayed in touch ever since?’

  ‘On and off. Mostly these past few years, actually, since Gunnar moved to Hallsberg.’

  ‘But you’ve been living in Örebro the whole time?’

  Wallin shook his head. ‘For about ten years. Born and raised in Gävle, then I lived up in Umeå for a while.’

  ‘What line of work are you in?’

  ‘I’m a dentist.’

  Barbarotti swallowed his surprise. If he’d had to guess it would have been gym manager or something of the kind. He found it hard to connect Tomas Wallin’s stocky figure with the nimble dexterity of a dentist.

  ‘So you see each other a fair bit?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wallin. ‘We’ve got similar hobbies, as well.’

  ‘And what are they?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Well, diving is the main one. We’re both instructors. We sometimes work a week or two at a diving centre down near Kungshamn. We’ve been on a few foreign trips too, of course. The Red Sea, the Philippines, that sort of thing. And we go hiking in the mountains.’

  ‘Every year?’

  ‘For the last three years we have.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti considered this. ‘2002,’ he said. ‘Do you remember what happened in 2002?’

  ‘You mean did we go hiking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tomas Wallin thought for a few seconds. ‘No, not that year. We went a couple of times in the early nineties . . . and then in more recent summers. As I say.’

  ‘But not this year?’

  ‘We’re thinking of four days in September.’

  Optimist, thought Barbarotti. ‘And the diving job?’

  ‘How often, you mean?’

  ‘Yes please. And which years, if you can recall.’

  Wallin thought a bit more. ‘Well, we were there this July, of course. And last year and the one bef—’

  ‘2002?’

  ‘Yes, we were there in 2002 as well. I think we only missed one year in the noughties, and that was 2001.’

  ‘What time of the summer do you usually go there?’

  ‘It’s always the last week in July,’ Wallin replied at once. ‘Sometimes the first week in August too.’

  Barbarotti felt a sudden little quiver of anticipation. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk a bit more about this summer in a minute, but first I’d like us to concentrate on summer 2002. Do you think you can remember back that far?’

  Tomas Wallin shrugged. ‘If you mean the diving week, I’m not sure. Was there something unusual about 2002, then?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Gunnar was in a relationship with a woman called Anna Eriksson. They went to France together that summer, just before he met up with you at the diving centre.’

  Tomas Wallin frowned. ‘I don’t remember any Anna. Though you’re right about him being in France. It was Brittany, I think; he brought back a bottle of Calvados and I pointed out to him that they make Calvados in Normandy, not Brittany . . . but anyway, we had a glass or two after a night dive, I remember that.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Did the two of you talk about what he’d been up to in Brittany?’

  Wallin made a ‘Search me’ gesture with his hands.

  ‘I expect so. But I can’t remember anything particular.’

  ‘People he’d met, that sort of thing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I ask you to take your time and have a good hard think about this. It could be important.’

  Tomas Wallin drank some more of his water. He sat there for a while saying nothing, looking out of the window. ‘Why could it be important?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at the moment,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘It isn’t anything to do with . . . ?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With these murders down your way. Dead Man Gunnar and all that . . . I mean, a person can’t help putting two and two together even if they’re not a detective.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti nodded. ‘I can understand you doing that,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure you realize there are things I can’t talk to you about.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tomas Wallin. ‘Sorry, it’s just that I’m so worried about Gunnar.’

  I’ll have to ask him if he’s married, thought Barbarotti. Hope he won’t take it the wrong way.

  ‘And you, have you got family?’

  ‘Wife and two daughters,’ said Tomas Wallin. ‘The youngest has just turned one.’

  Good, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Just healthy male friendship, then.

  I’m as stuffed with prejudice as usual, was his next thought. And maybe envious, too, because I haven’t got a friend like Tomas Wallin?

  He checked the tape recorder and focused again. Gave Wallin his card. ‘In case anything else occurs to you about 2002,’ he said. ‘You can call me direct if you do. The slightest thing, if it’s about France or this Anna.’

  Wallin nodded and put the card in his wallet.

  ‘Right then,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Let’s go over to the present, so to speak. When did you last
see Gunnar Öhrnberg?’

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ Wallin replied at once. ‘The Saturday before last. He came over to our place in town and we had a bite to eat. He stayed the night and went home on the Sunday morning.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti looked in his diary. ‘That would have been Saturday the fourth of August?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Tomas Wallin. ‘We got back from Scorpius the Monday before, and that was when we invited him.’

  ‘We?’ said Barbarotti. ‘Scorpius?’

  ‘Emma and me. She’s my wife. I took the whole family to Scorpius this time. That’s the diving centre I told you about – it’s on a little island between Kungshamn and Smögen. My wife took Advanced.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti presumed this was some kind of diving certificate, but he didn’t bother to enquire. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Did you notice anything special about Gunnar? On the diving week or when he was at your place on the Saturday?’

  ‘Not a thing. He was just the same as usual.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wasn’t worried about anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t seem jittery?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘And, thinking back, you don’t feel he might have been hiding anything from you? Having known him for so long, you ought to be able to tell that kind of thing.’

  He was prepared for another emphatic denial, but in fact Tomas Wallin hesitated for a moment, and scratched his neck nervously. They were small signs, but Barbarotti could tell something was coming.

  ‘We-ell,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s got any bearing on this, but I think he was seeing some new woman.’

  ‘Some new woman?’ said Barbarotti, hardly able to conceal his disappointment. ‘He hadn’t been in a relationship before that, then?’

  Wallin shook his head and assumed an expression that was presumably intended to excuse his friend. ‘No, it was somehow never the real thing where Gunnar and women were concerned. Confirmed bachelor and all that. Since he moved up to Hallsberg I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been anyone. He didn’t say anything about it, at any rate.’

  ‘But you didn’t ask him?’

  ‘My wife did. When he was at ours. He sort of avoided the question and Emma reckons that’s because he was trying to keep it secret. Because she’s a married woman . . . well, she’s good at seeing that kind of thing, my wife.’