Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon

by Leif Gw Persson

  The week after his close encounter with the hot-dog kiosk on Solnavägen, soon after his thirty-second birthday, he was appointed deputy managing director and given a permanent seat on the board. A couple years after that he had taken over the whole company and renamed it Karl Danielsson Consultants Ltd. According to the company’s articles of association, the business was involved in “financial, accounting, and auditing consultancy, tax and investment advice,” and also “management of property and capital investment,” which must have been quite an achievement, since throughout this age of greatness the company never seemed to have had more than four employees. One female secretary and three men with the title of consultant and rather vague duties. Karl Danielsson himself was the owner of the company, its managing director, and the chairman of its board.

  As such, he had acquitted himself considerably better than he had as Karl Danielsson, the possessor of a driving license and pedestrian. Over a period of twenty-three years, between 1972 and 1995, he had been investigated for various financial crimes on a total of ten occasions. Four cases of complicity in tax evasion and serious tax fraud, two cases of currency offenses, two cases of so-called money laundering, one case of aggravated receipt of stolen goods, and one case of dishonest dealing. In every instance the charges had been dropped. The suspicions against Karl Danielsson could never be proven, and every time, Danielsson had gone on the counterattack and reported his adversaries to the parliamentary ombudsman and the chancellor of justice, or both, just to be on the safe side.

  In this he had also been more successful than his opponents. One of the investigating officers of the financial crime unit of the Stockholm Police had been picked up by the ethics committee of the National Police Board and had received a formal warning and been docked fourteen days’ pay. The parliamentary ombudsman had arrested one public prosecutor and one of the Tax Office’s auditors. The chancellor of justice had prosecuted one of the evening papers and secured a conviction for grave defamation of character.

  After 1995 things had calmed down. Karl Danielsson Consultants Ltd. had changed its name to Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. There didn’t seem to have been much activity, and the company had never had any employees. Nadja Högberg had requested copies of the most recent annual accounts from the company records division of the Patent and Registration Office, and was planning to spend the weekend going through them.

  He did not appear ever to have had a particularly remarkable income. Nadja Högberg had dug out his self-certified income declarations for the past five years, and his taxable income had hovered around 170,000 kronor per year. His state pension and a smaller private pension from Skandia. The apartment he lived in cost 4,500 kronor per month, and after tax and rent there were approximately 5,000 kronor left for other things.

  If a person’s success can be measured by the titles he or she garners, then Karl Danielsson had lived a successful life and had left this world at the top. At the age of twenty he had started his career by working as an assistant in a firm of accountants with thirty-five employees. Forty-eight years later an as-yet-unknown perpetrator had put an end to it by smashing in his skull with the help of a cast-iron saucepan lid, by which time the company in which he had spent all his adult life had been for all intents and purposes dormant for almost fifteen years. In the phone book he was listed as a director, and according to the business cards the forensics experts had found in his otherwise empty wallet, the victim was both managing director and chairman of the board of Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd.

  A pisshead, a serial litigant, and a pathological fantasist, Bäckström thought.

  “You’ve spoken to his sister,” Annika Carlsson said as soon as Nadja Högberg had finished. “What does she have to say about what you’ve just told us?”

  Nadja Högberg said that she had confirmed all the main points. As a young man her brother had been “very fond of girls” and “far too keen on partying.” But things had gone well for him until he was approaching forty, after which time the drink seemed to have more or less taken over his life. She had also made it clear that they had never been particularly close. During the past ten years they hadn’t even spoken on the phone, and the last time they met had been around the time of their mother’s funeral twelve years ago.

  “How did she take it when you told her that her brother had been murdered?” Annika asked.

  For fuck’s sake, Bäckström thought, groaning silently to himself. Maybe we should have a minute’s silence?

  “Fine,” Nadja said. “She was fine about it. She works as a staff nurse at Huddinge Hospital and seems pretty sensible, stable. She said it didn’t exactly come as much of a surprise. She’d been worried about something like this happening for years. Considering the life he led, I mean—”

  “We’ll just have to try to deal with our grief somehow,” Bäckström interrupted. “So what do we think about all this?”

  Then they had started throwing ideas around. Or one single idea that Bäckström, just to be on the safe side, threw out there all on his own.

  “Well, then,” Bäckström said, since the others for once seemed to have the good manners to keep their mouths shut and let him start.

  “One pisshead has been murdered by another pisshead. If there’s anyone here who has any other suggestion, now’s the time to pipe up,” he went on, leaning forward and resting his elbows heavily on the table, glowering at his colleagues.

  No one seemed to have any objections, to judge by the unanimous head shaking.

  “Good,” Bäckström said. “That’s enough suggestions. All that’s left is to work out where we are and how to smoke out Danielsson’s dinner guest from last night.

  “How’s the door-to-door going with the neighbors?” Bäckström went on.

  “Pretty much done,” Annika Carlsson said. “There are a couple of them we haven’t got hold of yet, and a few more asked if we could talk to them this evening, since they had to get to work. And there was one who had a doctor’s appointment at nine o’clock and didn’t have time to talk to us. It should all be done by tomorrow.”

  “The coroner?”

  “He’s promised to conduct the postmortem this evening and give us at least an oral report early next week. Our colleague Hernandez will be attending the postmortem, so we should know the basics first thing tomorrow morning,” Annika Carlsson said.

  “Have we spoken to the taxi companies, have we had any tip-offs that are worth looking at, what about the search of the area round the building, and his social network, how did he spend his last few hours, have we spoken to—”

  “Calm down, Bäckström,” Annika Carlsson interrupted with a broad smile. “It’s all under control. We’re well on top of this one, so you can relax.”

  I don’t feel remotely relaxed, Bäckström thought, but he would never have dreamed of saying so out loud. Instead he merely nodded. Gathered together his papers and stood up.

  “See you tomorrow,” Bäckström said. “One more thing before we go. About the paperboy who made the call. What’s his name, Sooty Akofeli.”

  “Septimus,” Annika Carlsson corrected, without the slightest trace of a smile. “His name’s Septimus Akofeli. We’ve checked him out. Our colleagues have already compared the fingerprints they took off him at Hasselstigen with the ones he had to give the Migration Board when he first arrived twelve years ago. He is who he says he is, and, in case you’re wondering, he’s never been in any trouble.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Bäckström said, “but there’s something about that bastard that isn’t right.”

  “What might that be?” Annika Carlsson said, shaking her cropped head.

  “I don’t know,” Bäckström said. “I’m working on it, so the rest of you can at least spare it a moment’s thought.”

  As soon as he had left the meeting room he had gone straight to his new boss, police chief Anna Holt, and explained the situation to her. Pisshead victim. Perpetrator—with almost absolute certainty—also a piss
head. Case completely under control. It would be concluded by Monday at the latest, and he had finished in three minutes even though he could have taken five. Holt seemed almost relieved when he left. She had another matter to think about, and, compared to that, Bäckström’s murder seemed like a gift from above.

  That gave the scrawny bitch something to think about, Bäckström thought, as he finally stepped out through the door of his new gulag.

  9.

  Jerzty Sarniecki, twenty-seven, was a Polish carpenter. Born and raised in Lodz, for the past few years he had formed part of the Swedish migrant workforce. And for the past month he and his workmates had been employed on the complete renovation of a small block of rented flats on Ekensbergsvägen in Solna, about one kilometer from the crime scene at number 1 Hasselstigen. Eighty kronor an hour, straight in his pocket, and free to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week if he felt like it. They bought food in a nearby ICA supermarket, they slept in the building they were working on, and everything else could perfectly well wait until they returned to civilization back home in Poland.

  Around the time Bäckström was leaving the Solna police station, Sarniecki had made his discovery when he dragged a large plastic sack of rubble from the building to throw it into the trash bin out on the street. He clambered up an unsteady ladder and discovered another bag on top of the pile of rubble that neither he nor any of his workmates had thrown there. In itself, this was nothing unusual, the fact that Swedes in the neighborhood made the most of the opportunity to get rid of their own rubbish, but because experience had already taught him that they often threw away things that were still perfectly usable, he had leaned over and fished out the bag.

  An ordinary plastic bag. Neatly tied at the top and full of something that looked like clothes.

  Sarniecki had climbed down from the ladder. Opened the bag and taken out the contents. A black synthetic raincoat of the longer variety. It looked almost new. A pair of red washing-up gloves. Intact, scarcely used. A pair of dark leather slippers, which also looked practically new.

  Why would anyone throw things like this away? Sarniecki wondered in surprise; then a moment later he discovered the blood on what he had just found. Loads of blood splattered over the raincoat, and the pale soles of the slippers were more or less dripping with it. The gloves were stained with blood even though someone had obviously made an attempt to rinse them off.

  He had heard about the murder in Hasselstigen that morning, when their Swedish foreman showed up and told them over coffee. Some poor retiree, evidently, and normal, decent folk hardly dared leave their homes any longer. Think about what you’re saying, he had thought, as he’d listened with half an ear. Don’t curse the paradise that you Swedes actually live in, because it might be taken away from you, he thought. His Catholic priest back home in Lodz had taught him to think like that.

  In spite of this he had wrestled with his conscience for several hours before calling the police. I wonder how many hours this is going to take? he wondered, as he stood and waited for the car the police had promised to send. How many hours at eighty kronor would they take from him and his fiancée and the child they were expecting back home in Poland?

  A quarter of an hour later a patrol car had arrived carrying two uniformed officers. They seemed strangely uninterested. They had put what he had found, including the bag it had been in, inside another bag. They had made a note of his name and cell number. Then they had left. But before they went one of them asked if he had a business card. He and his father-in-law were thinking of building a sauna out at the summer cottage they shared out on Adelsö Island and might be needing some help at a reasonable price. Jerzty had given him the card that their Swedish foreman had told them to hand out whenever they received queries of this nature. Then they had left.

  Later that evening a tall, fair-haired man, who was obviously a policeman even though he was dressed in a leather jacket and ordinary blue jeans, had knocked at the door of the building where Jerzty was working. He had opened the door to him, since he was working in the entrance hall, nailing up new plasterboard while his workmates were having a late supper a couple floors up in the room where they had set up their makeshift kitchen. The fair-haired man gave him a friendly smile and held out a sinewy hand.

  “My name is Peter Niemi,” Niemi said in English. “I am a police officer. Do you know where I can find Jerry Sarniecki?”

  “That’s me,” Jerzty Sarniecki said, before continuing in Swedish. “I speak a little Swedish because I’ve worked over here for several years now.”

  “Then you’re in the same position as me,” Niemi said with a broad smile. “Is there anywhere we could talk undisturbed? I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  10.

  Bäckström had walked all the way home. All the way from the police station on Sundbybergsvägen in Solna to his home on Inedalsgatan on Kungsholmen. It was as if his feet and legs had suddenly taken on a life of their own, with his body and head merely tagging along. Entirely involuntarily, and when he shut the door behind him he had hardly any idea of what he had spent the past few hours doing. The inside of his sweaty head was completely blank. Had he met anyone? Had he spoken to anyone? Someone he knew and who had been able to see him in all his misery? Evidently he must have stopped and done some shopping somewhere, because he was carrying a bag full of bottles of mineral water and a plastic pack containing a mass of mysterious vegetables.

  What the fuck is this? Bäckström thought, holding up the pack. Those little red things must be tomatoes. He recognized them, and he had even eaten one or two when he was a lad. All that green stuff must be lettuce? But all the other stuff? A mass of weird black-and-brown balls of varying sizes. Hare shit? Elk shit? And something that mostly looked like maggots but which must be something else, since they didn’t wriggle when he prodded them.

  What the fuck is going on? Bäckström wondered as he headed toward the shower, dropping his clothes on the floor as he went.

  To begin with, he had just stood in the shower for a quarter of an hour or so, letting the water run over his well-upholstered and harmoniously proportioned body. The same body that had always been his temple and which a crazy police doctor had now decided to lay to ruin.

  Afterward he had carefully toweled himself, put on his dressing gown, and prepared a meal with the pack of vegetables and a bottle of mineral water. Just to make sure, he had first taken a quick look in the fridge to see if there wasn’t something nice that had survived the previous day’s food massacre when he had followed the doctor’s list and cleared out all the dangerous and unnecessary things that had been in there. Bäckström’s pantry and fridge had been sparklingly clean, and they were still sparklingly clean.

  Bäckström had set about the pack of vegetables. He tried to disconnect both his brain and his taste buds as his jaw chewed and chewed, but even so, he had given up after just half the pack. The only edible bits were actually those little things that looked like maggots.

  Bound to be maggots, Bäckström thought, as he put the remnants of his vegetable orgy in his empty fridge. If I’m lucky, they’re maggots, he thought. Then at least I’ve actually consumed a bit of protein over the past few days.

  Then he had drunk the bottle of mineral water. One and a half liters. Down in one. That had to be a new world record, Bäckström thought, throwing the empty plastic bottle in the bin under the sink. What the fuck am I going to do now, since it’s only seven o’clock? he thought, checking his recently purchased Swiss watch.

  There was no point looking for any hidden drink. He had got rid of that as well the previous evening, and on that point in particular the doctor had been absolutely immovable. No spirits, no wine, no beer. Nothing, in fact, that contained the merest whiff of alcohol, like cider, or ordinary juice that just happened to have started to ferment, or an old bottle of cough medicine that had evidently also fallen foul of the splendid doctor and his colleagues.

  It had amounted to a fair bit, since B�
�ckström had been pretty well-off for some time now. Several unopened bottles of malt whiskey and vodka. An entirely untouched liter of French cognac. Almost a whole tray of Czech lager. Even more open bottles containing various quantities. Obviously not a single drop of wine, because only ass bandits and carpet munchers drank that. Certainly not Bäckström, who was a perfectly normal Swedish male in the prime of his life. As well as a legendary murder detective and the obvious answer to every woman’s secret dreams.

  Bäckström had put all of it in a box and knocked on one of his neighbor’s doors. A serious alcoholic who used to be a boss at TV3 before he tumbled over the edge while they were recording a series of Survivor somewhere in the Philippines. He was given a golden handshake of several million kronor so that he could drink himself to death before he had time to write a book about his time on the channel and all the years before that when he had hopped between various companies within the same media empire. Considering the life he led these days, it looked as if his erstwhile employers were going to be proved right.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of goodies, Bäckström,” the presumptive buyer said after a quick inspection of the box’s contents. “Are you moving, or what? Don’t tell me things are so bad that your liver’s packed up?”

  “Not at all,” Bäckström said, smiling amiably even though someone was trying to wrench his heart out of his body. “I’m going away on a long trip and it seemed a shame to offer those thieving bastards a load of drink as well when they break in. They pump enough crap into themselves as it is.”