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?

  29

  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.