26

‘Wrigman’s. Hold the line, please.’

It was Wednesday afternoon. Admittedly he had promised to ring Wrigman’s that morning, but events had intervened. Conversations with doctors. Advice and instructions for his coming convalescence. Testing out crutches and learning to negotiate visits to the toilet, the latter a lot more tricky than he had anticipated.

Marianne had been to see him twice, as well. She worked in maternity so it only took her three minutes to pop over to the orthopaedic ward.

They would keep him in until the next day, he had been told. They wanted to do an X-ray before sending him home. Or was it something else? He had a tendency to switch off when faced with medical science. For some reason.

‘Can you really manage without me for another night?’ he had asked Marianne.

‘I’ll just have to grin and bear it,’ she had replied.

He’d been having some pain, too, on and off. The leg inside the lump of plaster felt like something that belonged to him and yet did not. Sometimes it itched, and the itchiness definitely belonged to him.

So it was half past two by the time he decided to make his enquiry about the missing bastard.

‘Yes, Wrigman’s Electrical. I’m sorry for the wait.’

‘I’d like to speak to Valdemar Roos.’

‘Valdemar?’

‘Yes please, Valdemar Roos.’

The woman at the other end gave a laugh. A slightly throaty, vaguely waspish laugh.

‘But he’s not with us any more.’

‘Not with you any more?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Barbarotti. ‘You’re saying Valdemar Roos doesn’t work there any longer?’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said the woman. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name’s Barbarotti,’ explained Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘But in fact I’m ringing on behalf of a good friend of mine. Tell, me, when did Valdemar Roos leave the firm?’

The woman coughed and considered the matter.

‘Well it must have been about a month ago,’ she said. ‘He handed in his notice, just like that. No warning at all. And Wrigman let him go.’

‘I see,’ said Barbarotti, feeling at the same time that he didn’t see at all. ‘Do you know if he got a job somewhere else?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ said the woman. ‘He worked here for twenty years, then he left. That’s all.’

Gunnar Barbarotti thought quickly.

‘Do you know where I can get hold of him?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t happen to have his mobile number?’

‘Er, yes, I think it’s here somewhere. Hang on.’

He waited, listening to the click of her fingers on a computer keyboard. Then she gave him Valdemar Roos’s mobile number and they ended the call. It was evident to him that Wrigman’s Electrical wasn’t the sort of company that sends its employees to charm school.

He adjusted the pillows behind his back and stared at his leg for a while.

He’d given up work?

A month ago?

His wife hadn’t said a word about it. Why not?

On impulse he rang the number he’d been given by the woman at Wrigman’s. After all, it might only be his wife the man was refusing to talk to.

No answer.

Gunnar Barbarotti shook his head and brought Alice Ekman-Roos’s number up on his screen instead.

Twenty minutes later she was sitting at his bedside again.

‘What on earth are you saying? He doesn’t work there any more?’

He could see that she had been crying. Her large, smooth face was slightly swollen and a little flushed. If she had felt embarrassed the day before, it was presumably seven times worse now, thought Barbarotti, deciding his conclusion that Valdemar Roos was a bastard had probably been entirely correct. Not only had he found himself another woman, he had pulled the wool over his wife’s eyes in the most appalling way by leaving his job without a word to her.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He went off there every single morning as usual . . . and came home in the evening.’

‘They claim he left a month ago,’ said Barbarotti.

‘But that’s . . . that’s not possible. If he didn’t go to Wrigman’s, where did he go?’

‘He takes his own car there and back?’ asked Barbarotti.

‘Oh yes. He always has done . . . even before we met. He’s worked there for . . . well, I don’t know, at least twenty years.’

‘And he didn’t car share with anybody?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think anybody wanted to get a lift with Valdemar.’

Barbarotti pondered this as he scratched his plaster cast.

‘He never mentioned any plans to give up his job?’

‘Never,’ said Alice Ekman-Roos, staring at him with big, helpless eyes. As if she had encountered some hair-raising supernatural phenomenon and didn’t know how to react. ‘He never said a word about anything like that. Oh my God, what can have happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Do the two of you – or did he – have any close friends who might possibly know something?’

She thought for a moment but then shook her head.

‘Anyone who he knows and might have confided in?’ he added.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said eventually. ‘Valdemar’s got hardly any friends. He’s the uncommunicative type. So you think, then, that he . . . that he . . .’

‘Yes?’ Gunnar Barbarotti prompted her cautiously and ventured an encouraging smile, which unfortunately came out as more of a grimace. Alice Ekman-Roos took a deep breath and pulled herself together. Five seconds passed.

‘So you’re saying,’ she went on, ‘that he pretended to go off to work every morning for a whole month? Why . . . I mean, what would make a grown man behave like that?’

You’re the one married to him, not me, thought Barbarotti as he tried to unobtrusively pick out some of the plaster that had got stuck under his nails, and wondered what to say to her.

‘Maybe it would be best for you to contact the police after all,’ he suggested finally. ‘Unless you happen to think of anybody who might know where he is.’

She said nothing and looked down at her clasped hands for a while. Then she gave a deep sigh and straightened her back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s with that woman, of course. That’s where he’s been going every day.’

‘It’s possible.’ Barbarotti agreed.

‘I knew there was something,’ she went on. ‘He hasn’t been himself this past month . . . I could tell things weren’t right. He’s found someone else and now he’s gone.’

Yes, thought Inspector Barbarotti. That’s the most likely explanation of the situation when it comes down to it. He expected her to get up from her seat and leave him – her bearing and her last remark both indicated it – but instead she crumpled a little, shifted her eyes to the view through the window and chewed her lower lip. She sat there in silence.

‘But such a young woman?’ she said at last, her voice filled with doubt. ‘What in heaven’s name could a young woman see in someone like Valdemar?’

Barbarotti shrugged his shoulders but said nothing.

‘And why did he resign from his job? No, there’s something else that doesn’t fit here. There must be more to it.’

‘I don’t think there’s a great deal of point in—’ began Barbarotti, but she interrupted him.

‘That woman can’t have been more than twenty-five according to Karin, my friend who saw them. Valdemar’s nearly sixty. He’s got a son of thirty-seven or thirty-eight.’

‘A son?’ said Barbarotti. ‘Maybe he knows something?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Alice Ekman-Roos said firmly. ‘They have scarcely any contact with each other. He lives in Maardam.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But even so, my recommendation is that you get in touch with the police. If you don’t hear from him in the next few days, at any rate. It could still be that something’s happened to him, we mustn’t forget that.’

She shook her head. ‘I doubt it,’ she said, getting to her feet in a rather ungainly fashion. ‘Valdemar isn’t the type things happen to. He’s more . . . well, more like a piece of furniture, you might say.’

‘Piece of furniture?’ said Barbarotti.

‘Yes, a sofa or something. He falls asleep in front of the TV every evening and he never says a word unless you speak to him first.’

Having offered him these insights, she thanked him for his help and left the room.

Good, thought Inspector Barbarotti. That’s the last I have to hear about Valdemar Roos. The man with the charisma of a sofa.

His surmise, however, was not to prove entirely correct.

Eva Backman extracted her bicycle from the rack by the police station entrance and thought how lovely it would be to get home. How absolutely lovely. She’d been working solidly at her desk for two days, as the bright autumn sun progressed scornfully across her window from east to west, going completely to waste.

She hadn’t even had access to Barbarotti, the blockhead having fallen into a wheelbarrow and broken his leg.

This wasn’t my purpose in life, she thought as she turned into Kvarngatan. I should have been a forester or an architect or a fashion model instead.

Or any other damn job. At least a police officer with the sense to opt for outdoor duties when the most beautiful month of the year was in full swing.

These weren’t new thoughts; in fact they barely qualified as thoughts at all. Hackneyed old phrases, rather, which woke up and buzzed around in her head as soon as she turned off her brain.

Things didn’t go as they should have done, they turned out this way instead, these pseudo-thoughts nagged on. At twenty, Eva Backman – attractive, ambitious, well-read, long-legged and as smart as a whip – had had every opportunity to do what she wanted with her life; twelve years later she was married with three children, police training and a house in the Haga district of town, which she secretly loathed. The district, that is. The house was tolerable.

Shit happens, but it could have been worse.

Twelve years after that she was forty-four, still in the same house with the same family, and with a bit of luck she still had half her life left to live. Almost half, anyway; only bitter bitches complained.

And on this day in particular, she was really looking forward to getting home. Her husband Wilhelm, commonly known as Ville, and their three unihockey-playing sons had gone off to a training camp somewhere near Jönköping. It was new-season preparation time for the Kymlinge Unihockey Tigers, and she would have the house to herself until Sunday evening.

Today was Wednesday, so there wouldn’t be a single hockey stick to trip over for four whole days.

Yes, it could be worse. She pedalled faster, weighing up the likelihood of Ville really having fixed the whirlpool bath as he’d promised.

She had been home for ten minutes when her father rang. She saw his number on the display and after a brief inner struggle she decided to answer.

‘Eva, I’ve had the most dreadful experience,’ he began. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

I don’t suppose I am, she thought grimly.

‘Eva, I think I’ve seen a murder.’

‘Oh Dad, I’m sure—’

‘I know I sometimes imagine things. My head’s just like that these days, it’s getting old that does it, Eva. You’ll be the same one day.’

He lapsed into silence. Was he already losing the thread, she wondered. But then he cleared his throat and continued from where he had left off.

‘It wasn’t today. It was a day or two ago, but it’s been on my mind and then it came to me that you’re in the police, Eva. It was silly of me, I should have thought straight away, I know, but I sometimes get a bit confused, like I’ve told you. And I was in a terrible state, of course, which didn’t make things any easier, but I had a little sleep this afternoon . . . and when I woke up I felt completely clear in the head, and that was when I realized I’d got to ring you, Eva.’

She checked her watch. It was quarter to six. All right, she thought, I’ll give him ten minutes, that’s the least anyone can expect. If nothing else, it’ll help to assuage my guilty conscience.

It ebbed and flowed, her sense of guilt about her father. Or her brother, to be exact; he was the one to whom she owed a debt of gratitude. Erik and his wife Ellen made sure Sture Backman could live a life of some dignity even though his mental faculties were starting to desert him. Even though he was slowly but inexorably journeying towards the final darkness.

For the past two and a half years, he had been living with Erik and his wife. That had been the only alternative to some form of institution, and Eva knew it hadn’t been an easy decision for them. Erik was five years older than her; he and Ellen hadn’t had any children of their own but they had adopted a boy and a girl from Vietnam. They were now twelve and ten, and the family lived out in the country. Erik and Ellen were part-time farmers, you might say, both doing other jobs on the side and somehow making ends meet.

In fact much more than that, when she came to think about it. They had just bought two new horses and the big SUV had looked conspicuously well-polished last time Eva had seen it. Their farm, Rödmossen, was about forty kilometres west of Kymlinge and every time she went to visit she told herself this was the way to live. Exactly this way. In harmony with one’s family, one’s surroundings and oneself. Neither Erik nor Ellen had ever dropped even the slightest hint that Sture was any kind of burden to them.

And perhaps he wasn’t, Eva would think. The house was big enough to accommodate him, he still coped with showering and so on, and as far as she knew he kept himself to himself most of the time. He would lie in his room, thinking, or go out for strolls through the forest around Rödmossen. Twice he hadn’t been able to find his way back home, but now he was equipped with a small transmitter, which meant they could locate him even if he got lost on his walks.

These days, Sture Backman’s thoughts came and went. Old and new blended seamlessly, and meaningful conversation with him was only ever piecemeal and sporadic.

But who decides what’s meaningful or not? she thought. Something that’s meaningful for Andersson and Pettersson naturally needn’t necessarily be so for Lundström.

Or Backman. Who was now clearing his throat at length before launching himself back into his account.

‘It was over by that crofter’s cottage. The first one, not the other one. I go past there sometimes and they sort of came running out, her and then him. It was evening time, it felt so unreal, Eva, as if . . . well, it felt as if I was watching a film or the television, but I wasn’t. I swear it wasn’t a film, Eva, are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m listening. So what happened then?’

‘I was so scared, Eva. Can you understand how scared I was? And how red the blood was . . . I mean bright red, I’ve always thought it would be darker. A lot darker, but maybe that’s because we always see it when it’s started to congeal. When it’s not so fresh. Though I’ll never forget when you cut yourself on that dreadful carving knife when you were little, do you remember that? My God, you bled so much. We’d borrowed it from the Lundins for some reason, and that . . . well, that was bright red, too. And your mother fainted, she was so frightened, thought you were going to bleed to death I suppose, well of course she fainted, she was always prone to . . .’

He started chuckling and she realized he was a long way back in the past.

‘How are Erik and Ellen?’ she asked in an effort to bring him back into the present. ‘And the children?’

But he ignored her. ‘There was that time we went to visit Margit and Olle,’ he went on with sudden enthusiasm, ‘and one of their kids, I think it was that Staffan, he was always a proper little monkey, though they made him headmaster of a folk high school later on, isn’t it odd the way things can turn out? He’d climbed down into a well, no idea what he thought he was doing there . . . but perhaps he was hiding in it to give us a scare, what a prank, eh? You agree with me on that, don’t you . . . Eva?’

She detected the tone in his voice that meant he couldn’t quite remember who he was talking to.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember Staffan.’

‘Staffan?’ said her father. ‘Who the heck is Staffan? I can’t say I really . . . he’s not some new man you’ve found, is he? Aren’t you married to that Viktor any longer?’

‘Dad,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I think we’ve been chatting for long enough. It was nice of you to call.’

‘Yes . . .?’ he said. ‘Thank you, there’s always so much happening all the time, I think I need to go for a little lie-down.’

‘You do that,’ she said. ‘And give my love to Erik and Ellen and the children.’

‘Of course I will,’ he said. ‘They live here too, you know, so I’ll be able to do that in a jiffy.’

‘Bye bye Dad,’ she said, and they hung up.

She devoted the rest of the evening entirely to herself.

She did her usual five kilometres on the forest jogging trail and along by the river. Heated a risotto in the microwave and had it with a bit of cheese and a glass of red wine. Luxuriated in the whirlpool bath for forty-five minutes – contrary to her expectations, Ville had got it working – and then climbed into bed to watch an old Hitchcock film she found in their DVD collection.

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

My father, she thought. He was young when they made this. Maybe only half the age I am now.

Why do people have to age so much quicker than the imprints they leave behind them?

It was a good question, she decided. Time rushing away from us. Could be a suitable topic for a chat with Barbarotti? Over a beer at the Elk, why not?

As soon as he could manage to drag his damned leg back.