On the way back into town from Svartö, Inspector Eva Backman reflected on two things.
Firstly, what actually made a woman like Red Cow tick.
Or to be more accurate, she brooded on how anyone could relate to their own nickname that way. Particularly a nickname like that. The woman’s real name was Elisabet Rödko, and she was of Hungarian or possibly Transylvanian stock, it hadn’t been altogether clear – and when one of the bright sparks at Wrigman’s Electrical had hit on the idea of giving her name an American touch, she had gone along with it. Not just by accepting the name, but also by dyeing her naturally mousy hair a vivid red.
Today, fourteen years later, it was still bright red and she had confided to Backman that even her husband and children called her Red Cow.
A cow, thought Eva Backman. Tarting it up with a bit of English and a touch of colour didn’t really help, did it?
But the name was significant in terms of her credibility – and that was the second, and considerably more important question Eva Backman was struggling to answer as she sat at the steering wheel.
Could her word be relied on, or more specifically, her judgement of Valdemar Roos?
Backman hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone else at Wrigman’s, so it would be a good thing if she could make up her mind on that point. At least for now; they could always revisit the question later, if it proved necessary.
Though why should it prove necessary? she thought. Why on earth? Her decision to go out to Svartö had been a last-minute one, after she failed to get hold of Alice Ekman-Roos. Perhaps she had done it mainly to surprise Barbarotti, but her own curiosity had been piqued as well, truth be told.
But Red Cow had provided nothing to still her curiosity whatsoever.
‘A lover?’ she’d snorted derisively. ‘Valdemar Roos? You’re kidding.’
‘He seems to have pulled the wool over his wife’s eyes,’ Backman pointed out.
That may be true, thought Red Cow. But the very idea of a younger woman choosing Valdemar was as unthinkable as Madonna falling into bed with some pot-bellied neo-Nazi. If you get my drift, Inspector?
Backman thought about it and said she did. Then she asked whether Red Cow had any kind of theory to explain why Roos had decided to leave Wrigman’s Electrical so abruptly after more than twenty years, and why he hadn’t said a word about it to his family.
Red Cow declared she hadn’t the faintest idea about either of those things. There’d been a fair amount of talk about it in the staff room, of course, especially in the past few days, once it came out that Valdemar had been keeping his wife in the dark. And had gone missing, to top it all.
But none of them had come up with any halfway plausible explanation. Neither Red Cow herself nor anybody else.
Perhaps, she concluded with barely concealed relish, Tapanen had come closest to the truth in maintaining that the ape-brain Roos had blown his last fuse and couldn’t tell the difference between his arse and a hole in the ground.
This was a quote, admittedly, but it was Red Cow who delivered it, with every appearance of finding it piquant, witty and accurate.
Which was something else to be weighed in the balance when assessing her credibility, thought Eva Backman, braking as she came up behind an articulated lorry. She glanced at the clock.
It was twenty past four. She still had some way to go to the Rocksta roundabout and she decided on the spur of the moment to head straight for home rather than going back to the police station to do her duty for the last ten or fifteen minutes.
I’ll have to take it up with Barbarotti tomorrow, she decided. There’s something fishy going on here, just as he said. Possibly there’s a woman involved as well – in some way or other – but definitely a fish.
Curiosity was like an itch, she thought, not for the first time. Hard to ignore.
Gunnar Barbarotti immediately recognized the man who opened the mahogany-veneered door, but it took him a few seconds to place him.
The man was short and stocky, one of those people with greater specific gravity than his surroundings, and he did not look happy.
Nor had he done the last time Barbarotti encountered him. He tried to work out how many years ago that had been. A parents’ meeting to talk about plans for a class trip when Sara was in Year 8 . . . it must have been December 2002, a year after his divorce from Helena. He remembered it had been hard to cope with.
The meeting and life in general.
Kent Blomgren had clearly been finding the parents’ meeting hard to cope with, too. He had sat in dogged silence throughout the meeting, voting neither yes or no to all the points that came up in the course of the discussion, and when it was eventually decided that the class would go on a trip to London the coming May, he resolutely pushed back his chair, got to his feet and declared that his Jimmy bloody well wasn’t going on any luxury trip to London. The middle-class kids and their parents were welcome to it if they thought it was so important.
Having clarified this he’d left the classroom, slamming the door behind him and making the walls shake.
Barbarotti did not know if it was as a result of Kent Blomgren’s demonstrative behaviour or for some other reason, but instead of the proposed week in London, Sara and her class spent three rainy days in Copenhagen. Blomgren junior did not go with them.
And now here was Blomgren senior, scowling at Barbarotti and his crutches. He seemed to be weighing up whether to slam this door as well, but Barbarotti anticipated him.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I think we had kids in the same class. I’d forgotten that when I rang you.’
‘Oh?’ said Kent Blomgren.
‘What was his name, your lad? Jimmy?’
‘Jimmy and Billy,’ said Kent Blomgren. ‘I’ve got two.’
Barbarotti nodded and stepped into the hall, plastered foot first. Kent Blomgren closed the door behind him, rather than slamming it.
‘I had to bring them up myself, too,’ he added. ‘The wife shoved off with someone else when they were little. Just as well, and all.’
Surprised to find the man confiding in him, Barbarotti cleared his throat and hesitated.
‘That’s the way things go,’ he said. ‘I don’t live with my children’s mother, either. Life doesn’t always turn out how we expected.’
Why am I jawing on about life with this human battering ram? he asked himself. Wasn’t I meant to be talking about graffiti?
‘You’d like coffee, yeah?’ said Kent Blomgren, going ahead of him into a cramped kitchen. ‘It’s all ready, it’s no bother.’
They sat down on opposite sides of a blue-painted wooden table. A diminutive potted cactus stood between them. A plate of four cinnamon buns defrosted in the microwave and two mugs bearing the club badge of the football team IFK Gothenburg sat on the table.
‘As I told you,’ said Barbarotti, ‘I’m looking into the graffiti problem.’
‘You’re working even though you’re in plaster,’ said Kent Blomgren, nodding in the direction of Barbarotti’s foot, which the latter had cautiously raised onto a chair. The chair was yellow. There were only three chairs in the kitchen. One yellow, one red and one green.
‘I don’t like being stuck at home,’ said Barbarotti.
Kent Blomgren pulled a face that was hard to read, poured the coffee and sat down on the green chair.
‘You see a good deal of the stuff, I assume?’ said Barbarotti. ‘Graffiti, I mean.’
Kent Blomgren took a slurp of coffee, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and seemed to be thinking. Or groping for the right word.
‘Too fucking right I do,’ he said, slowly and emphatically. ‘If I got my hands on a single one of those bastards, I’d wring his neck and throw him to the pigs.’
‘Just so,’ said Barbarotti. ‘No beating about the bush. How long have you had this cleaning company?’
‘Ten years,’ said Kent Blomgren. ‘I worked at Brink’s before that, but then I set up on my own.’
‘There’s one graffiti merchant causing us particular trouble,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Or possibly two? The PIZ and ZIP tags, I expect you’ve come across them often enough?’
Kent Blomgren took a bite of cinnamon bun and chewed it at length, staring deep into Barbarotti’s eyes.
‘I’ve power-hosed more PIZ and ZIP than you’ve had hot dinners,’ he said at last through gritted teeth, stressing every word. ‘It’s a fucking nightmare. How hard can it be to stop this hooligan?’
‘I’m new to this,’ Gunnar Barbarotti told him cautiously. ‘Not quite on top of all the details of the case yet. But he’s clearly a problem.’
Kent Blomgren was still glaring at him and munching the bun.
‘You haven’t any theories?’
‘Theories?’
‘As to who might be behind this wilful damage? One person or several. You’ve been in this business quite a while, after all.’
‘Far too long,’ said Kent Blomgren.
But he was unable to come up with any theories. ‘I deal with the mess,’ he observed laconically. ‘I never see the people who make it.’
A door opened, somewhere in the flat, and a long-haired young man came into the kitchen. He was wearing underpants and a T-shirt with Homer Simpson on it.
‘Jimmy?’ said Barbarotti.
‘Billy,’ said the young man and held out a hand. Barbarotti took it. Kent Blomgren looked at the clock and muttered something.
‘Don’t panic,’ said Billy Blomgren. ‘They said to get there after lunch.’
He opened the fridge door, drank some juice straight from the carton and went out again.
‘It’s tough,’ said Kent Blomgren. ‘Tough for them to find jobs these days. This country’s going down the drain.’
Gunnar Barbarotti realized he was sitting opposite someone from the same school of thought as Brother-in-law Roger, and decided not to stay much longer. He didn’t really know why he had come here, but he had happened on Kent Blomgren’s name in the fourth of Sturegård’s files and had decided it couldn’t do any harm.
‘It’s never been easy to be young,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I shall carry on working on this. We’ll find some way of stopping PIZ and ZIP. Could I ask you to do something?’
‘What?’ said Kent Blomgren, after draining his coffee mug. Barbarotti struggled to his feet and took up his crutches.
‘Next time you get the order to clean up a ZIP or a PIZ, give me a call so I can take a look first.’
Kent Blomgren raised an eyebrow, but then nodded.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Expect they’ll go for Olympia again, so it’ll be in the paper. That moron Brahmin doesn’t seem to have much to write about.’
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ said Barbarotti, and made his exit from the Blomgren establishment.
I forgot to ask why on earth he called his company Cerberus, Barbarotti thought once he was out in the street. If he remembered rightly, Cerberus was a dog that guarded the crossing to Hell, and he found it hard to imagine what possible link it could have to cleaning off graffiti.
But he didn’t really feel on home ground out here in the sticks of petty criminality.
I’m better at murderers than graffiti merchants, he thought as he inserted himself awkwardly into the car.
Good job it’s an automatic, he reflected. And good job it wasn’t my right foot I broke. He wasn’t entirely sure it was legal to drive with your foot in plaster, but there were things one didn’t need to investigate too deeply.
Perhaps the Cerberus Cleaning Company Ltd was another of them.
‘I think I’m starting to get somewhere,’ said Eva Backman.
‘With what?’ asked Barbarotti.
‘With Alice Ekman-Roos,’ said Backman.
It was quarter to one. It was Tuesday, they were sitting in King’s Grill and their order had just arrived. Two portions of the dish of the day: beef stew with beetroot and charcoal dumplings.
‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Would you care to elaborate?’
‘I think she’s willing to come in and report him missing,’ said Backman. ‘I talked to her this morning.’
‘About time too,’ said Barbarotti. ‘He’s been missing for ten days now. It’s a scandal that we haven’t started looking into it seriously.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call it a scandal,’ said Backman. ‘But I agree it’s a strange business. Do you think he had it all planned, vanishing into thin air like that?’
Barbarotti pondered. ‘It could seem like a tempting option to a lot of people, but in that case, I can’t see why he didn’t do it straight away. Why bother pretending he was going off to work for a month first, and then vanish? It seems crazy.’
‘Maybe he needed that month in some way,’ suggested Backman.
‘What for?’ said Barbarotti, scratching his plaster.
‘What’s the point of scratching your plaster?’ said Eva Backman. ‘I’ve noticed you do it quite a lot.’
‘It’s a symbolic act,’ said Barbarotti. ‘When you can’t take some action you really want to take for some reason, then you resort to a symbolic act.’
‘Like burning flags?’ said Backman.
‘Burning flags?’ said Barbarotti. ‘No, I don’t think that counts as a symbolic act – but never mind that. Why would Valdemar Roos need a month before he could bring things to a head and escape once and for all?’
‘I haven’t worked that out yet,’ said Backman. ‘But maybe he needed a bit of time for planning. Or getting money. Robbing a bank, say?’
‘I don’t think we’ve had any bank robberies since January,’ said Barbarotti.
‘Maybe he went somewhere else.’
‘Crafty devil,’ said Barbarotti.
‘A criminal genius,’ said Backman. ‘Do you believe any of this?’
‘No,’ said Barbarotti.
‘So what do you think?’
Gunnar Barbarotti set down his knife and fork and leant back. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘But if we can now consider this a police matter, I presume we’re also allowed to start talking to people. Who do you want to take first?’
‘That friend,’ said Eva Backman. ‘The one who claims she saw him coming out of Ljungman’s with a young woman.’
‘Bingo,’ said Barbarotti. ‘The lover theory hinges entirely on her.’
‘It would be useful to have a proper description sent out, too,’ said Eva Backman. ‘It could well be that he’s popped up here and there. It’s only his wife who’s missed him so far . . . so to speak.’
‘So to speak,’ agreed Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘I’m with you on issuing the description. You get that sorted, will you? I think it’s best if I steer clear of Asunander. Oh, and by the way, don’t you want to hear how my hunt for the elusive graffiti master’s going?’
‘Not at the moment,’ said Eva Backman. ‘If you don’t mind. Let’s pay and get back to our desks. But I’ll keep you updated on Roos.’
‘Thanks,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Could you pass me my crutches, please?’