Chief Inspector Asunander looked sceptical.
He generally did, but today it was even more obvious than usual.
‘A man who’s run off with some woman he loves?’ he said. ‘And you’re telling me it’s something worth spending our valuable time on?’
‘Things may not be as simple as they initially appear,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I thought it might be worth taking further . . . a bit further, anyway.’
‘Has his wife reported it?’
‘No.’
‘Are there any other theories besides this lover hypothesis?’
‘Not really,’ said Barbarotti, squirming slightly. It isn’t very easy to squirm when you’re in plaster, so this one was more the internal variety.
‘You suspect some sort of crime?’
‘I can’t rule it out,’ said Barbarotti.
‘It isn’t by any chance that you think you can do what you like, just because you’ve shown up here with that club foot?’
‘Perish the thought.’
Chief Inspector Asunander gave a snort. He’s grown eloquent since he got those false teeth of his to stay in place, thought Barbarotti. Annoyingly eloquent, in fact – things were better before.
‘As it happens,’ continued Chief Inspector Asunander, ‘I have a task that’s pretty much tailor-made for an eager inspector with a club foot.’
‘Oh really?’ said Barbarotti.
‘I think we’ll do it like this: you solve my little spot of bother first and once that’s done you can turn your attention to this runaway. What did you say his name was?’
‘Roos,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Ante Valdemar Roos.’
‘Interesting name,’ said the chief inspector. ‘But presumably that’s the only interesting aspect of the whole thing.’
‘What spot of bother did you have in mind?’ asked Barbarotti, suppressing a sigh.
‘The graffiti problem,’ said Asunander, and Barbarotti could have sworn he saw a smile tug at the corner of the chief inspector’s mouth for a fraction of a second. For his own part, he felt a surge of pain in his leg.
‘The graffiti problem?’ he said, trying not to sound as though he felt like throwing up. ‘I don’t think I—?’
‘It’s time to put an end to the whole saga now,’ the chief inspector interrupted as he lifted a corner of his desk blotter and fished out a sheet of paper. ‘We’ve been after this bastard – or these bastards – for nearly two years now, and with Inspector Sturegård going on maternity leave for at least eight months, I need someone to take over.’
This time Barbarotti couldn’t hold back the sigh. He was well aware of how things stood with the Graffiti Master. Or Masters, as the case might be. Or Those goddamned petty hooligans who deserve to be burnt at the stake. They (or he, but scarcely a she) had been on the rampage in Kymlinge for at least two and a half years, but not much attention had been paid to the problem until the editor of the local paper, one Lars-Lennart Brahmin, had moved into Olympia, one of the old fin-de-siècle buildings on the east side of the river. He had immediately been elected chairman of the residents’ association, and it so happened that the pale-cream-coloured facade of Olympia was one of the Graffiti Master’s favourite locations for his offensive tags.
Then each time he had been in action, about once a month for the past year, the subject got an airing in the local paper. A very prominent airing.
‘That bloody Brahmin’s been ringing me seven times a week,’ said Asunander. ‘I’ve cancelled my subscription to the paper – its editor brings me out in a rash.’
‘I see,’ said Barbarotti.
‘I thought Sturegård would get it sorted out in no time, but something’s gone awry, apparently.’
‘Clearly,’ said Barbarotti.
He didn’t know Inspector Malin Sturegård very well, but he knew she had been put in sole charge of putting a stop to the vandalism. He also knew she had got nowhere, despite dogged efforts over an extended period of time – and he seemed to remember hearing a rumour that she had got pregnant just to escape the whole mess. She was over forty and already had three or four children, so he felt there could be a grain of truth in such speculations.
These dismal facts ran through Inspector Barbarotti’s mind as Chief Inspector Asunander clasped his hands on the desk and regarded his officer with an expression that . . . well, it was hard to say. And that was rare with Asunander. But it was plain in any case that it did not contain any sympathy for a subordinate who had fallen off a roof and broken his foot on a wheelbarrow.
Nor had Gunnar Barbarotti expected any sympathy of that kind. He cleared his throat, fumbled with his crutches and hauled himself to his feet.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure to get Sturegård’s material sent to my office.’
‘I’ve already given the order,’ said Asunander. ‘I expect the files are there by now. Just get this damn nuisance sorted out once and for all.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Barbarotti as he hobbled out of the chief inspector’s office.
‘Then you’ll have your hands free to get to grips with that Roos,’ Asunander reminded him, just as he was closing the door.
Thanks boss, thought Barbarotti. Very nice of you. I’m not so bloody sure the prize pest wouldn’t have been a better bet after all.
‘How did it go?’ said Eva Backman. ‘What are these files?’
‘Graffiti,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Inspector Sturegård’s one-woman investigation.’
‘What are they doing in your room?’
‘I needed something to prop my leg on,’ said Barbarotti.
‘Don’t think I’ll fall for that,’ said Eva Backman, and her face suddenly broke into a smile. ‘You don’t mean to say . . .?’
‘Yep,’ said Barbarotti, ‘and if you laugh I shall clout you with this crutch.’
‘Sturegård?’ said Backman. ‘Oh my God, of course, she went off on maternity leave last week.’
Barbarotti tossed two pieces of chewing gum into his mouth and started to chew.
‘So you’re going to take over and sort out that scumbag?’
‘Did you come in for anything in particular?’ said Barbarotti.
‘Hm,’ said Backman. ‘I thought you were going to spend your time on that runaway bloke.’
‘Asunander thinks differently,’ said Barbarotti.
‘Is that so?’ said Backman, installing herself on the visitors’ chair of tubular steel and hard yellow plastic. She crossed her legs with an expression of worried scepticism.
Or whatever it was she was trying to convey.
‘There’s something fishy going on there,’ said Barbarotti.
‘Where?’ said Eva Backman. ‘With . . . what’s his name? Ante Valdemar Roos?’
‘Precisely,’ said Barbarotti.
‘Explain,’ said Backman.
‘With pleasure. Though there isn’t much to explain. He’s been missing for over a week now. Of course he might just have run away with his lover, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel plausible, frankly.’
‘Oh?’ said Eva Backman. ‘I thought that was every man’s dream. Just leaving everything without explanation. Moaning wife, kids and a lousy job. What’s to say this Roos didn’t finally take the plunge? Frankly, as you put it.’
Barbarotti scratched his plaster. ‘The drive to act,’ he said. ‘It takes a heck of a lot of drive to take that kind of initiative. His wife says he hasn’t had a new thought since 1975.’
‘When did you last speak to her?’
‘On Saturday.’
‘And she’d nothing new to tell you?’
‘Nothing at all. But she didn’t want to report him missing formally. And for as long as that remains the case, Asunander thinks we should keep a low profile.’
‘But you don’t?’
‘Correct,’ said Barbarotti, cautiously lifting his leg up onto the desk. ‘I don’t.’
‘Do you need any kind of help with that?’ asked Backman.
‘Not at all,’ said Barbarotti.
Backman sat there in silence for a while.
‘I’ve got a bit of slack in my schedule at the moment,’ she said eventually. ‘What do you say to me having another chat with that place where he worked? You might have missed something. His wife might ring in again, too, and perhaps she’d find it easier to talk to a woman.’
‘She decided to open up to me because she trusted me,’ Barbarotti reminded her. ‘Has done since we were at school together.’
‘What exactly are you trying to tell me?’ said Backman.
‘Nothing,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But yes, why not, you put out some feelers and we’ll see what happens. Perhaps we can catch up over lunch later? How about the King’s Grill?’
‘Fine by me,’ said Backman. ‘Right, I can’t stand here chatting to you all day. Good luck with your graffiti artist.’
‘Thanks, Inspector,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Close the door properly behind you, if you wouldn’t mind.’
It took no fewer than six ring binders to accommodate the paperwork in the Graffiti Master case. Three were yellow and three were red. Gunnar Barbarotti looked at the clock and saw it was twenty-five past nine.
All right then, he thought. Two and a half hours until lunchtime, so let’s see what an alert pair of eyes and a bunch of potent brain cells can achieve.
By quarter to twelve he still had no satisfactory answer to that question. There was absolutely no doubt that Inspector Malin Sturegård had put tremendous effort into identifying the elusive vandal. She had been working on the case for just over eleven months, as the dates on the files confirmed. Along the way a number of spray-can artists had been apprehended and issued with a variety of well-deserved fines, but she had made no progress towards her main target, the worst miscreant of all.
Or could there in fact be two of them at it? There were evidently two so-called tags in use, and in almost all cases the police were aware of, both occurred together, in the same place. When they were discovered the next morning, some ten properties had often been targeted, always in the centre of town – and in nine out of ten cases, over the past year at least, the stately Olympia building on the east bank of the river was one of them.
The tags were also fully legible and pronounceable, which was not always the case with this sort of vandalism, so Barbarotti learnt as he read. According to Inspector Sturegård’s conscientious summary, the two had first made their appearance at the same time, about three years before. They were generally sprayed in red or blue paint – often one in each colour on each wall – but black and dark green had also featured a few times.
One was PIZ.
The other was ZIP.
It was unusual for a tag to have a lifespan of three years. The perpetrators were almost always teenagers, and male, and the few studies that had been done on the subject found that most practitioners soon tired of the activity and moved on to new interests. Artistic or criminal, predominantly the latter.
To a layman, putting away one or two graffiti artists might seem like child’s play – and if more serious crimes were being committed, the police would presumably have got to the bottom of the problem in a considerably more effective way. It could, for example, ‘be assumed with some certainty that the Olympia apartment block would be defaced at some point (i.e. some night) in any given thirty-day period in the coming year’ (wrote Inspector Sturegård in two different places, as she vainly requested a slight boost to resources), but putting the place under police surveillance to catch the perpetrator(s) red-handed when he (they) next struck . . . well, that was as financially unthinkable in Kymlinge as in any other town or city in Sweden. And presumably in any other country, too.
There had been some surveillance, in fact, initiated by Brahmin the newspaper editor, though his fellow members of the residents’ association soon grew tired of it. Lurking behind a curtain for two or three hours, two nights a week, staring out at a sluggishly flowing river and a deserted street in the company of a few other slightly tipsy – but otherwise irreproachable – citizens was not something the average residents’ association member found particularly rewarding.
So ZIP and PIZ were left in peace to continue their infuriating activities. He (or they) presumably had no idea there was a full-time inspector at police HQ devoting all her technical knowledge and investigative zeal to stopping his (their) campaign.
And even if he (they) did know, it did not appear to bother him (them) particularly. Quite the contrary, in fact; he (they) would presumably have died laughing.
Inspector Barbarotti sighed, closed file number three and decided to have lunch before he tackled number four, the first of the yellow ones.
I wonder why she changed colour, he thought.
And would she have gone for yet another colour if she had embarked on a seventh file? Was that when she decided pregnancy was the solution? Time for a break, there was no doubt about it. He lifted his leg down from the desk and picked up his crutches.
Inspector Eva Backman was not in her office.
At the front desk they said they didn’t know where she was.
She wasn’t in the King’s Grill. And she wasn’t answering her mobile. Gunnar Barbarotti gave another sigh and ordered the dish of the day – beef with fried potatoes and onion sauce – and sat down at one of the tables that looked out on Riddargatan.
So I can see her when she comes, he thought. It was only ten past twelve. They had not arranged a time, and it was possible she would turn up nearer half past, if some task had come up.
He sat there until five to one. He called her mobile again, got no answer, and left a message asking her to get in touch, and telling her he had no beef with the beef, it had been delicious.
Then he limped crookedly over Riddargatan, crookedly over Fredsgatan, crookedly over the level crossing and by eight minutes past one he was back in his office with Sturegård’s graffiti files.
And a big cup of black coffee. Plus an almond tart he ferreted out of a packet in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, registering that he must have bought it sometime in Easter week. It was now September.
ZIP and PIZ, he thought. Chasing the wind?