The Root of Evil

by Håkan Nesser

  Yes, thought Barbarotti. And she’s not the only woman in the world with that ability.

  ‘But you haven’t seen Gunnar since the morning of the fifth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Spoken to him on the phone?’

  ‘Once,’ said Tomas Wallin. ‘On Monday.’

  ‘What was the call about?’

  ‘Nothing, really. He rang to thank us for inviting him round . . . oh hang on, he said he might be going fishing with a colleague of his for a couple of days.’

  ‘Some fellow member of staff?’

  ‘That was how I understood it.’

  ‘Did he mention a name?’

  ‘No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti glanced out of the window and saw an X 2000 express pulling in at platform one. Well at least they still stop here, he thought. A few of them, at any rate.

  ‘When did you realize Gunnar was missing?’ he asked.

  ‘On Tuesday. The school rang to ask me if I’d seen him.’

  ‘So they know at the school that you’re good friends?’

  Tomas Wallin shrugged. ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea where he might have gone?’

  ‘None at all. It seems completely incomprehensible to my wife and me.’

  Barbarotti pondered. ‘I think that’s it for now,’ he said. ‘Can I ring you if anything else crops up that I need to ask?’

  ‘Of course,’ exclaimed Tomas Wallin. ‘There’s nothing I want more than . . .’

  He couldn’t find the right words to go on. Perhaps because there weren’t any, thought Barbarotti grimly, switching off the tape.

  ‘And you’ll get in touch if you think of anything else?’

  ‘Of course,’ repeated Wallin, starting to get up.

  ‘Especially that summer . . . 2002.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Tomas Wallin, and they parted.

  They were in the car again.

  Eva Backman had reported back on her chat with the single mother who lived next to Gunnar Öhrnberg in Tulpangatan. A lot of people on their own these days, Backman observed. Two in this group alone, Astor Nilsson added.

  The woman’s name was Gunnel Pekkari. She was thirty-five, divorced and lived with her five-year-old daughter and cat. She was quite a looker, Inspector Backman said by way of introduction, at least by today’s standards: big breasts, doe eyes and newly enhanced lips. Backman thought it wasn’t impossible that she’d had a fling with Öhrnberg. Or that they’d been to bed together a few times, at any rate. What with them living wall to wall with each other like that, it would have been a practical arrangement.

  But there had been nothing like that of late, unfortunately. Gunnel Pekkari had had nothing to tell her. Oh, except one small detail: she had met her neighbour on the stairs around seven on Tuesday evening, the seventh, that was, and she could swear he was alive at the time. But he’d been in a hurry and they’d just exchanged a quick greeting, he on his way out, she coming in.

  Incidentally, she thought Gunnar Öhrnberg was good-looking, carried himself well, but maybe had a slightly big nose; as for his inner qualities, she had had no opinion to offer.

  ‘Great,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘He was alive on the evening of the seventh, anyway. At least we know that.’

  Then he told them about his visit to Ms Manner-Lind, Director of Studies at Avenue School. Since Tuesday, when she had begun to suspect something was amiss, she really had been doing her best to track down Gunnar Öhrnberg. It quite often happened that one teacher or other missed the first planning day, she said – but not two, they generally didn’t dare, and particularly not a teacher of Öhrnberg’s calibre.

  Not that he wouldn’t dare, but because he was who he was. Hardly ever off sick and a rock in all weathers. Popular with pupils, colleagues and parents alike. And with the school management. If they ever needed a stand-in, he always volunteered. Overtime? No problem. Someone to supervise a school trip? Öhrnberg immediately stepped forward.

  So Ms Manner-Lind had had a word with various people. With Josefsson and Pärman, with whom she knew Öhrnberg sometimes socialized out of school. With Rosander, who had been due to go char fishing on Lake Vättern with Gunnar Öhrnberg, but they had had to cancel because Rosander’s wife was admitted for a hip operation. With Öhrnberg’s brother in Östersund and with his parents in Kramfors.

  And yes, most certainly with his friend Wallin in Örebro, but nobody had any information, nor could they offer even the slightest clue to where the missing teacher might have gone.

  So in the end, she had contacted the police.

  ‘I had an uncomfortable feeling after we rang off,’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘Did you?’ said Barbarotti, who had opted for the back seat for the homeward leg, too. ‘What sort of feeling?’

  ‘Well,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘If not even Ms Manner-Lind manages to winkle you out, there’s a pretty good chance you’re lying dead somewhere.’

  ‘I think most of this points us towards—’ began Barbarotti, but he was interrupted by the ringtone of Backman’s mobile.

  She answered. She said ‘Yes’ a few times, then looked out of the window and said ‘Laxå, I think,’ then she swore, nodded, and alternated uncertainly between affirmative and negative answers for a while. She rounded off with a ‘Yes, of course’ and ended the call.

  ‘What the heck was all that?’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘It was Jonnerblad,’ said Backman. ‘Turn in at this petrol station. We’ve got to go back.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Because they’ve found the body of a man in a field of wheat outside Kumla. There are various indications that it’s Gunnar Öhrnberg.’

  ‘What did I say?’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘A field of wheat?’ queried Barbarotti.

  Backman nodded. ‘The farmer found him when he was out on the combine harvester. He’s a bit mangled, apparently.’

  29

  Gunnar Öhrnberg certainly was a bit mangled.

  That was putting it mildly. The field of wheat in question was in a place called Örsta. On a dirt track leading from a slightly wider tarmac road, there was a row of parked cars. Four police cars, four others, plus a number of people, a motorbike and an eagerly barking dog. Thirty metres into the field, a green combine harvester stood at rest, with another bunch of people around it. The sun had just set when Barbarotti, Backman and Astor Nilsson arrived. The town of Kumla was silhouetted to the west, with the cemetery and church in the foreground, and behind it a settlement clambering up a ridge, outlined against an orange-tinted evening sky. Barbarotti automatically scanned the scene for anything that could be the wall of Kumla prison, but his gaze alighted instead on a lovely old water tower with a beautifully rounded shape.

  ‘I wonder why Ström didn’t ring us direct,’ he said once they were out of the car. ‘Seems a bit unnecessary to go via Jonnerblad.’

  ‘You know what,’ said Astor Nilsson, ‘I almost get the feeling he doesn’t like us, that inspector.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Eva Backman.

  They were escorted out into the field by a Chief Inspector Schwerin, and when they were finally confronted with what remained of schoolteacher Gunnar Öhrnberg, Barbarotti felt for one critical moment that he was about to throw up. But the two hot dogs and mash he had bolted down before they left Hallsberg stopped halfway and decided to stay in his stomach.

  The farmer’s name was Mattsson and he hadn’t really been able to stop his huge combine in time. Hence the mangling. In the olden days they talked about the grim reaper, thought Gunnar Barbarotti; maybe this was emblematic of the modern age. Death with his harvesting machine.

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit of a mess,’ said Chief Inspector Schwerin. ‘But there’s a bullet hole in his head, too. He was as dead as a doornail when the farmer mowed him down.’

  ‘Bullet hole?’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Inspector Ström, who had
joined them. ‘Right through his skull. Entry point left temple, exit point right temple.’

  Eva Backman checked her watch. ‘It’s half past eight,’ she said. ‘What time did he . . . was he found?’

  ‘About quarter to six,’ said Schwerin. ‘Mattsson was in shock. Had his mobile with him but wasn’t able to make a call. It was his wife who rang, at ten past six.’

  ‘Eleven minutes past six,’ clarified Ström.

  ‘Ström, could you go and see how Bengtsson and Linder are getting on?’ said Schwerin.

  Inspector Ström nodded and left them. Gunnar Barbarotti surveyed the macabre scene. About half the field was still unharvested. The farmer had been working inwards from the edge, and the combine was stranded like some huge prehistoric animal that had suddenly run out of stamina. On a rectangle the size of a football pitch, the wheat still waved in the mild autumn breeze. It was waist high and ripe for harvest. The police had cordoned off a small area with blue and white plastic tape; a team of pathologists and assorted technicians and photographers were crawling around the combine harvester and Öhrnberg’s mangled body, and there were more people gathered outside the tape barrier, a good thirty of them.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ asked Gunnar Barbarotti.

  Chief Inspector Schwerin gave a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Word got round. Neighbours and other interested parties. The newspapers are here as well. This sort of thing doesn’t often happen in our neck of the woods.’

  ‘Have you asked them to move on?’

  ‘Oh yes. But most of them were already here when we arrived. We have right of public access in our country, after all, and a free press.’

  Barbarotti looked at the chief inspector. An undemonstrative little man in his sixties. He seemed to be taking the whole thing very serenely, and maybe that was the right approach, when all was said and done. He didn’t feel particularly inclined to start trying to shoo the spectators off home. No doubt they had already trampled over any potential clues in the fertile soil of Närke.

  ‘Have you found a bullet?’ asked Astor Nilsson.

  ‘No, but we’re looking. Though I don’t think we’re going to find one.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Schwerin smiled gently. ‘Because he was presumably shot elsewhere. It’s hard to imagine the perpetrator bringing the victim with him, taking a walk into the middle of a wheat field and doing the deed there. Much easier to visualize him being shot somewhere else and then dumped here.’

  Barbarotti mulled this over. He’s right, he thought. Of course that’s what happened. ‘And your people are sure it’s Öhrnberg?’ he asked. He was far from convinced himself. The head was in such a bad state that it could basically have been anybody.

  ‘We’re pretty sure,’ said Schwerin. ‘He had his wallet and ID on him.’

  Barbarotti nodded.

  ‘Can they give us an estimate of how long he’s been lying here?’ asked Astor Nilsson.

  ‘The pathologist reckons at least a week,’ said Schwerin. ‘Well, I expect this one’s going to land on your desk. Might be a good idea for us to send the body to Gothenburg?’

  ‘Yes, do that,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘But make sure you collect up all the bits first.’

  Backman’s mobile rang. She withdrew a few steps. Coming back a minute later, she said ‘Jonnerblad. Yes, he wants him sent to Gothenburg. And he also wants us to stay on here tomorrow . . .’

  She nodded to the chief inspector. ‘So we can gather slightly more of the bigger picture to take back with us, as it were.’

  A gathered picture and a gathered body, thought Barbarotti. Schwerin gave another of his benign smiles. ‘I’d planned to play golf tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But it’ll keep. I’m not actually that keen on golf, it’s mainly my wife, in fact . . . still, I suppose there’ll be one or two interviews to get through, and so on?’

  ‘One or two,’ confirmed Astor Nilsson. ‘How about the farmer, is he up to talking to us?’

  ‘You can always try,’ said Schwerin, pointing across the field. ‘He’s over there. Ran over a deer last year, but I imagine this was a whole lot worse.’

  ‘Smart thinking,’ said Eva Backman, ‘leaving him in a field of wheat.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Barbarotti.

  The two of them were waiting together for Astor Nilsson to finish talking to Mattsson the farmer as the August sky turned dusky blue on its way to black. Barbarotti was chewing on a grain of wheat.

  ‘Well, if he wants somewhere to hide him where he can be sure he’ll be found eventually. He’s got a guaranteed hiding place until harvest time.’

  Barbarotti took another grain of wheat from the ear and popped it into his mouth. ‘You’re right. But wouldn’t you leave tracks when you went out into the field?’

  ‘Not very visible ones,’ said Backman. ‘If you take things gently, I think most of it pops up again fairly quickly. Like after rain. I can’t help thinking that was a pretty smart move.’

  ‘Yes it was,’ said Barbarotti. ‘And we’ve got various other things pointing to our man being just that, haven’t we? Pretty smart.’

  Eva Backman nodded and looked out over the darkening field. ‘Five people, can you take it in? He’s killed five people in one summer and we haven’t done a damn thing to stop him. He sends us letters and tips us off, and the papers too. What are we getting paid for, when the chips are down?’

  ‘I know,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But we’ll get him. And I don’t think those tip-offs were worth having.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Eva Backman, blowing her nose. ‘Would you bloody believe it, I think I’m getting hay fever now, too. Can’t cope with traipsing around newly harvested fields.’

  ‘There’s no end to all these torments,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Anyway, I think Öhrnberg must have been killed long before I got that letter about Dead Man Gunnar. The tip-offs aren’t even coming in the right order. The Malmgrens caught the ferry on Sunday, but he shot Öhrnberg several days before that, didn’t he?’

  Eva Backman thought about this. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ve drawn up a timeline for all this, it’s in my office. We’ll have to check it out when we get back.’

  Barbarotti’s mobile rang.

  It was a journalist from Aftonbladet. A young woman, and she’d heard they had found another body in a field of rye outside Karlskoga.

  ‘Wheat,’ said Barbarotti. ‘And Kumla. But I don’t know anything about a body.’

  He cut her off. Got to get this mobile number changed asap, he reminded himself.

  Chief Inspector Schwerin had recommended the venerable Stora Hotellet in Örebro and they had taken his advice. They each bought a beer in reception and sat at a table in the dining room, looking out over the Svartån river and the castle. Dinner service had ended and they were alone in the large room, where only half the lights were still on.

  ‘There you have the second most beautiful castle in Sweden,’ said Astor Nilsson, gesturing out of the window.

  Barbarotti and Backman looked at the old stone castle as they sipped their beer.

  ‘Which is the most beautiful, then?’ asked Barbarotti.

  ‘Kalmar,’ said Astor Nilsson.

  ‘You get about a bit, don’t you?’ said Backman.

  ‘I told you,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘My boss would send me to Paris if it meant he could avoid seeing me. OK, shall we sum up this pile of crap?’

  ‘We can try,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Shall I?’

  ‘Fire away,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Thank you. So Gunnar Öhrnberg was shot through the head with a large-bore gun. Something like a Pinchmann or a Berenger. Most likely on Wednesday of last week. Most likely somewhere in Närke. Well that’s about it, I think.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘Then manhandled into some kind of vehicle, the boot of a car for example. Driven off to a wheat field in the lovely but godforsaken location of Örsta, just outside the former shoemaking town of Kumla. Dragged into the middle
of said field to be harvested in due course by farmer Henrik Mattsson. Clever idea to put him in the middle of a field of crops, by the way.’

  ‘Clever?’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘We’ve already discussed that,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘Right then,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘Do you know what we’re going to find in tomorrow’s papers about one thing and another?’

  ‘I had a word with Schwerin about that,’ said Barbarotti. ‘We can expect masses of coverage, especially in Nerikes Allehanda. We’re making a public appeal for information in there. Any suspicious vehicles seen in the Örsta area, and so on. And in the vicinity of Tulpangatan in Hallsberg, too. Yes, the lines to our colleagues are going to be busy, I think. There are a couple of hotlines for anyone with information, I gather. We’ll just have to see what comes in.’

  ‘Good,’ said Eva Backman. ‘The whole country must have read about the case by now. It’s about time someone owned up to having seen something, too.’

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ said Astor Nilsson. ‘But if you shoot your victim in the forest at three o’clock in the morning and dump him in a field an hour later, it’s not all that likely there’ll be many witnesses.’

  ‘Bloody pessimist,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Well, I suggest we drink up and get to bed.’

  Gunnar Barbarotti looked at his watch. It had stopped.

  Just as he emerged from the shower on Saturday morning, Marianne rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ was her opening question, the same one asked in every single phone call nowadays. In the global era immediately preceding Armageddon, he had read in some reactionary opinion piece recently. Now that people had turned into a rootless swarm of locusts flying aimlessly about the world.

  ‘Örebro,’ he conceded. ‘I’m looking out over the second most beautiful castle in Sweden.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen it. But Kalmar’s actually even better.’

  Is that some kind of universally acknowledged truth then, wondered Barbarotti in surprise. ‘Yes, I think so too,’ he said.