The Axe Woman, page 5
But a weekend in Stockholm? Just him and Sara? Why not?
He decided to give the idea serious thought and then re-immersed himself in his work.
In actual fact DI Backman stuck her head round DI Barbarotti’s door twice on that slow-moving Wednesday. The second time, at about 3.15, he was oblivious to the visit because he was slumped back in his desk chair, fast asleep with his mouth wide open. His head on one side and a thin trickle of saliva running down his cheek and chin. Eva Backman gently closed the door again, knowing that was precisely what he needed.
For the moment, at any rate. What he might require in the longer term and on another level remained far from clear to her.
As did the role she would play herself. What was to be done? How could you look after a man like Barbarotti? She was sure there was no human being on the planet who knew him better than she did – now that Marianne was gone. They had been colleagues and good friends for twenty years, and she had been close to Marianne as well, so if Barbarotti was now drowning in sorrow, it could reasonably be seen as Backman’s responsibility to pull him out.
I could do with a good sleep in my desk chair, too, thought Eva, returning to her room where a slew of political speculations lay waiting for her. Or a nice little nap, at any rate.
The opportunity did not present itself, of course. It was just work, work and more work – until she noticed it was a quarter to six and high time to pull down the shutters.
8
It took Barbarotti until Thursday to make contact with Ellen Bjarnebo. She was at a small mountain guest house near Vilhelmina and the mobile-phone reception up there was pretty poor. He didn’t ask what took her so far north and tried to conceal his reason for ringing, but he was naturally obliged to tell her he was from the Kymlinge police. Ellen Bjarnebo received the information with a simple, ‘Ah, I see,’ and said she would be back in Kymlinge the following week. Barbarotti asked if it would be all right to call her again then, but before she had time to answer they were cut off. Possibly she ended the call, and he understood her completely if that was the case.
He had four other people on his little list, and he made slightly better headway with those. But only slightly.
His conversation with Laura Westerbrook took five minutes. She was English by birth, but was still living in Sweden, now in Slite on the island of Gotland, and was married with three children. She worked part-time at a school and had very little to say about her misguided marriage to Morinder. She had only been twenty-four when they divorced and she described the whole thing as a youthful indiscretion. If Barbarotti was interested in digging around in such pointless history, he was naturally warmly welcome to come to Slite.
Yes, she had replied to a number of questions at the time of Morinder’s disappearance, and she had nothing new to add on the subject now. She was certain of that; time passes and memory fades.
Barbarotti thanked her and rang off. His mind went for a moment to the house Marianne and her sister owned in Hogrän on the same magical island, but he pushed the thought away. He put in a call to Alfons Söderberg instead.
From the sound of him, Alfons Söderberg had been a smoker all his life. He was now retired, having owned and run the company Söderberg’s Electrical for more than thirty years. One of his employees – for ten years, until they fell out – was Arnold Morinder. From 1975 to 1985, to put it in round numbers. Arnold Söderberg had also been what might charitably be described as Morinder’s friend. For at least part of that period, anyway. He had, for example, been among the wedding guests when Morinder married that thin but rather attractive English girl, and he was one of the few people who had ever set foot – and even spent the night – in Fisherman’s Cottage.
These were facts that Barbarotti already knew, and he listened to them again between the wheezy breaths and fits of coughing. And gobs of spit – it actually sounded as though Söderberg had a spittoon beside him. Barbarotti decided it might be worth taking a closer look at various things and arranged a visit for Friday morning. Since what he termed his fall from grace – June 2001, when he got divorced from his wife, a real harridan, now dead and buried – Söderberg had been a resident of Fabriksgatan in central Kymlinge.
The other two names on Barbarotti’s list were linked not to Arnold Morinder but to Ellen Bjarnebo. The first was a woman called Lisbeth Mattson. Once upon a time she had shared the name of Bjarnebo, because she was married to Ellen’s brother Gunder, six years her senior. At the time of the murder trial in 1989 they had both changed their names to Mattson, Lisbeth’s maiden name. They had also taken pity on Billy Helgesson, who was only twelve at the time and very much needed to be in someone’s official care, as his father had been butchered and his mother faced the prospect of at least ten years in Hinseberg prison.
Gunder and Lisbeth Mattson had no children of their own and they had stepped in without any fuss to look after Billy – the boy hadn’t needed to change his name because Helgesson was not considered tainted, unlike Bjarnebo; for some reason the axe woman herself had reverted to her maiden name before the trial had even begun, so that was the name that had appeared in all the newspapers. Billy had shared a home with his new parents until 1999, when he was called up for military service and sent to Stockholm. Gunder Mattson had died about a year ago – a blood clot on the brain that ended his life in August 2011 – but Lisbeth was still living in the house on Kvarngatan in Hallsberg.
As for Billy Helgesson himself, he was the fifth and final person on the list and had an address, wife and child in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. When Barbarotti phoned it was Billy’s wife who answered; she said he was at work but would be back that evening. Barbarotti thanked her for the information and said he would ring back.
His telephoning duties done, he took out a map and registered that Sweden, famously a long, narrow land, was not in fact all that narrow from one side to the other, either. He could speak to Söderberg and Ellen Bjarnebo in Kymlinge – hopefully tomorrow and next week respectively – but Hallsberg, Stockholm and Slite would require longer journeys and probably overnight accommodation.
He scratched his head, thought for three seconds and crossed out Slite.
But if he timed his train departure from Gothenburg right, he could break his journey for a few hours in Hallsberg and then take another train to the royal capital. In said capital, he would find not only the Helgesson family in Blekingegatan in Söder, but also Sara. In Vikingagatan in the Vasastan district, to be exact, and that was what clinched it, without a doubt.
That’s what I’ll do, thought DI Barbarotti, closing his notepad. At the end of next week – if nothing unexpected comes up before then.
Genuine investigative work or occupational rehabilitation: that remained the question.
He checked the time. Ten past eleven. Thursday 24 May. The sun was beginning to break through the cloud in the sky outside his window.
Marianne! cried a voice inside him.
He guessed it must be his own.
9
‘How’s it going?’
The question was Backman’s. They were having lunch at the King’s Grill. Everything could have been just as usual, and he wondered what it really meant, that simple expression. As usual.
Was it something to aspire to or escape from?
That was an idiotic question. Of course. It depended on the circumstances and on what the usual actually comprised. It certainly wasn’t anything to sit there brooding about and he could see that Eva Backman was regarding him with a worried frown. Was he losing control, was that what she could see?
‘What? What did you say?’
‘I asked how it was going. The Morinder case, that is.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, I haven’t really got very far. I’m seeing Söderberg tomorrow.’
‘Who’s Söderberg?’
‘Somebody who knew him a bit. Well, I hope so, anyway.’
‘And the axe woman?’
‘At a guest house.’
‘Guest house?’
‘Yes. Up in Vilhelmina. She’ll be back next week and then I’ll be able to speak to her on the phone. How are you getting on with Fängström?’
‘Poisoned,’ said Eva Backman, cutting a meatball in half with her fork. ‘It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but everything points in that direction. What are you doing tonight?’
Barbarotti considered the matter. ‘Making dinner. Seeing my therapist.’
‘Is he any good? What’s his name?’
‘Rönn. His name’s Rönn. Yes, he’s pretty good. He’s from Norrland.’
‘Sounds reassuring.’
‘Yes, he is . . . reassuring. I suppose that’s what they’re meant to be. So, he was poisoned?’
‘Yes. We’re working on that assumption.’
‘Why haven’t you had the results back yet?’
Eva Backman sighed. ‘There was some mix-up at the lab. We’ve just got to wait.’
‘But the suspicion remains that it was a criminal act?’
‘For now.’
She hesitated for a moment. Then she rested her knife and fork on her plate and leant forward over the table. ‘Why don’t you want to talk to me, Gunnar? About Marianne, I mean.’
He offered no answer because he had none. She gave him a hard stare.
‘We human beings do actually exist for each other,’ she declared in a tone verging on the teacherly. ‘I don’t want to force you, of course, but I find it odd that you’re so bloody buttoned up.’
‘Buttoned up?’
‘Yes. I know it’s a male thing, and that you’re going through a horribly hard time and everything, but even so . . .’
He stared for a while at his own meatballs and Eva Backman’s.
‘But we have talked. We’ve talked every day since she died, haven’t we?’
She nodded. Took a deep breath and let her shoulders drop. ‘Oh yes. Masses and masses of words. But maybe . . .?’
‘Yes?’
‘What I mean is that I need to talk, too, Gunnar. It’s hard for me, as well.’
‘Mmm?’
‘Marianne wasn’t only yours. And you have to admit, don’t you, that you’re . . . you’ve deliberately avoided sitting down with me to talk about this? Why does it have to be so goddamned complicated? She was your wife, but she was my friend. I miss her too. Perhaps we could . . . be of some help to each other?’
‘You don’t need to tell me that. I’m not a complete idiot, Eva. Just give me a bit more time. I think—’
He broke off and knotted his brow in thought. Eva Backman leant her elbows on the table, clasped her hands and rested her chin on her knuckles. She said nothing.
‘I don’t think she likes to see us falling out over her.’
Eva Backman sighed. Or snorted. Perhaps there was a fleeting smile in the mix, too, and he felt that in that pitiful fraction of a moment he caught a glimpse of something.
Was it her?
Was that how it worked? Could it . . .?
It surely couldn’t be possible?
What sort of questions am I asking here? was his next thought. If I don’t even understand the questions, how can I get anywhere near the answers?
‘You’re a long way away now, aren’t you?’ said Eva Backman.
‘These meatballs are nothing to write home about,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.
‘They’re exactly the same as usual,’ said Eva Backman.
Rönn had agreed to late-evening appointments, and as Barbarotti emerged into the street he saw that it was twenty past ten.
Over an hour then, as they had started on the dot of nine. He couldn’t remember what they had talked about for the first half hour, but then Rönn had asked Barbarotti if he had any kind of faith. To be more precise, he had asked if he thought Marianne still existed in some way. Although it was their third session, they had not broached that topic before.
Which did seem – he thought in retrospect, as he walked through the gentle drizzle to Norra torg where he had parked the car – a little strange. Fancy there being so much scope for general conversation about death. On the other hand, death was an extremely general occurrence, undeniably, and maybe that was what this counselling aimed to achieve? To adapt to the client – no, rather, to adapt the client to the ubiquity – so naturally it had to be quite general to start with. But still?
Of course, he had replied. I have a faith and I believe Marianne still exists. The problem is, I haven’t made contact with her yet.
And you count on being able to? Rönn wanted to know.
Well, I wouldn’t exactly say count on, he answered. How do you stand on that yourself?
And Rönn responded with an uh-huh, well yes, actually, and Barbarotti wondered what the hell he meant. The whole believer thing was really all or nothing. But there were also diverse shades in between; like the Sami names for snow, or like feminism. Or like the many names for the Almighty, with only the camel knowing the hundredth and last: why not? Diverse and equivocal, anyway. A tangle of words and human meddling around with something that ought to be simple and clear.
Either you believed or you didn’t.
Of course, he reiterated once Rönn had sat in silence for some time. She’ll be in touch, I’m sure of it.
One has to be patient, was Rönn’s advice on the matter, and then he had talked about the Norrland author Torgny Lindgren and the art of slowness. Lindgren had written that we should try to live at the same pace as the bearded lichen. Growing a millimetre or so per year. At most.
And then, finally, they did actually spend the last half hour talking about those things. Trust and hope and unnecessary haste, and Barbarotti found himself thinking that if he’d had a real father instead of a runaway Italian papa, he wouldn’t have minded him being something like Rönn. Or an older brother, at least; he couldn’t be much more than sixty.
Though it wasn’t easy to say exactly what conclusions they had arrived at, and maybe it didn’t matter. There was no need to nail everything down with proper words; there was valuable knowledge beyond language, too. Barbarotti climbed into his car on Norra torg, inserted another fado CD into the player and set off towards Kymmens udde.
He put his hand on the seat beside him and tried to imagine she was there.
And as he sat there like that, he heard her voice at last.
I’ve written you a letter, she said. You’ll get it in a few days’ time.
He was a hair’s breadth from crashing into a lamp post.
10
2 June 1989
The moment she got off the bus she saw that her bike had a puncture. It was propped against the bus shelter, where she had left it that morning, and there was absolutely no doubt about it.
The back tyre. As flat as a pancake. A slow puncture, most likely, and she hadn’t brought a pump with her. There were at least two at the farm, but that was a fat lot of use to her. There was nothing for it but to hook her bags over the handlebars and start walking; it was typical, in fact she had almost expected it, and she had no space inside her to fit any sense of surprise.
She jammed the bag from the off-licence into the basket on the parcel carrier. Six hundred metres of dirt track, a slight uphill slope, it wasn’t the end of the world. Fine drizzle came blowing in across the fields, and that wasn’t the end of the world, either.
Great Burma came first. The farm was in a beautiful elevated location on the left; it had a view out over the fields from the main farmhouse, over the long, wide valley that ran from south to north, stretching all the way from the main road to the forest beyond Little Burma. Their farm. Their home.
Little Burma was in a less attractive location. It had the forest at its back, and there was nothing wrong with that, but its outlook was limited by the rise on which Great Burma stood. It left you in the shade, as it were. It was a more or less automatic thought – the sunny side and the shady side – and so appropriate for the situation generally, and for relations between the farms and between the cousins. Göran Helgesson was an only son and the sole heir to Great Burma; Harry Helgesson, the cousin four years his junior, was also an only son, and was likewise master of Little Burma. A freeholder and yeoman farmer, to be sure, but beyond that the contrast was glaring. Big Claus and Little Claus: she had heard people refer to them by those names more than once.
She could have gone up to the big farm and borrowed a pump, but she chose not to. It wouldn’t have saved any time and she had no wish to see either Göran or Ingvor. Especially Göran, considering the agreement. No need to shine a light in dark corners. Better to leave them dark and undisturbed.
She didn’t want to see the children, either. They were so annoyingly well behaved, all three of them. Clean, perfect and rosy. She made do with a quick glance up the well-raked gravel path to the flowering chestnuts and the arbour of lilacs, thinking how long it was since she had walked its challenging fifty metres. But that was how things stood now; there was nothing to do but suck it up. If things weren’t right between the cousins, it followed that they weren’t right between the cousins’ families, either. Between the wives and children.
Envy or whatever. Bitterness.
She shrugged her shoulders at the familiar thoughts and carried on down the short slope between the cowshed and the machinery store, turning to cast a sideways glance at where building work was in progress behind the hedge; it was going to be a swimming pool, or so she had heard. Unusually the builders were still at work, even though it was six o’clock on a Friday evening. Two workmen’s vans were parked beside the farm-vehicle store; presumably there was some detail that couldn’t wait until after the weekend. Something that had to be isolated or covered before they could finish for the day. Yes, Göran knew how to handle people, she thought, when he wanted to. He could be persuasive when it was something really important, and it wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to her. To be honest.
