by Leif Persson
‘Växjö Men Against Violence to Women,’ Olsson said. ‘Ordinary men, fellow human beings, fellow menfolk, if I can put it like that . . . someone in the group suggested that phrase, “fellow menfolk” . . . a fellow citizen, who happens to be a man, patrolling the streets in the evening and at night, whose very presence in the urban environment would raise the level of security. For instance, they could offer to escort single women home from a nightclub . . .’
What a fucking brilliant pick-up technique, Bäckström thought. Even Lo herself could probably find a short-sighted fellow manfolk that she could lure up into her bedroom and give an unsatisfactory ride.
‘What do you think, Bäckström?’
‘Sounds like a great idea,’ Bäckström said. Christ, how stupid can you get? he thought.
‘You don’t think there’s a risk that it could be seen as some sort of vigilante group?’ Olsson said, suddenly seeming rather worried. ‘Or, even worse, that frivolous individuals might exploit the plan to their own advantage?’
‘I don’t think there’s much risk of that,’ Bäckström said. ‘Providing you have adequate supervision of those taking part, I mean.’ And take care not to let in men like our colleagues Randy Karlsson and the flasher.
‘Really,’ Olsson said, looking both relieved and happy. ‘I don’t suppose you could let us have your thoughts when our little group holds its next meeting?’
‘Of course I’d be happy to share my opinion. Goes without saying,’ Bäckström said. ‘If you think I might have something to contribute,’ he added modestly. I can hardly wait, he thought.
Adolfsson and von Essen’s investigation of Erik Roland Löfgren had evidently continued apace over the weekend. A number of troubling details were starting to pile up around the trainee police officer. According to what he himself had told several of his male classmates, he had been having sex with Linda all spring, right up to the end of term in the middle of June, but because he was the sort of young man who valued his freedom he had chosen to keep their relationship secret. According to Löfgren, Linda had started to get a bit too clingy and demanding for his taste. But there hadn’t been any dramatic scenes, nothing of that sort; he had simply explained to her in a friendly way that in future she would have to take her place in the long queue of interested young women. How she reacted to this was unknown. Apparently she hadn’t said a word about it to her girlfriends, and she didn’t seem to have acquired a new boyfriend or lover, if that was what he had actually been.
‘So what he told Sandberg during the interview wasn’t true?’ Bäckström said.
‘No,’ Adolfsson said, shaking his head. ‘And it’s not just idle boasting either. That young man seems to have gone through the women of this town like a bulldozer. We’ve spoken to several of them. He seems to have slept with half of Småland.’
‘Her last known sexual partner,’ von Essen said. ‘Doesn’t that usually give some sort of clue to the perpetrator in cases like this?’
‘Good,’ Bäckström exclaimed. ‘This is better than good, this is serious shit.’ That aristocratic poof obviously isn’t a complete cretin after all, he thought. ‘Good work, boys. If we’re in luck, then it’s no more complicated than this. So what do the women say? Does he normally fuck about with them?’
‘What, the cosy smell of leather, latex and restraints? That’s not the sort of thing people talk about in a town like this,’ von Essen said, even though he too was born and bred in the Småland countryside. ‘But he doesn’t seem to carry the necessary equipment round with him when he’s out having fun. If I can put it like that.’
Löfgren was young, well built, in good shape, charming and extremely attractive. Considering that he was only twenty-five years old, he also seemed to have accumulated a great deal of experience and considerable talent in the area of sex. According to one of their female informants, he was also as well-endowed as the myth about black men demanded. And an obvious central protagonist in the nightmares of white men.
‘Ronaldo’s a proper sex machine,’ she had said, smiling fondly. ‘If you really want to fuck your brains out, you couldn’t do any better. It’s big. And very thick.’
Like a good shotgun, Adolfsson had thought when he spoke to her. It takes practice, talent, and a good stock of ammunition.
‘A bit like you, Patrik,’ the informant had suddenly said. ‘But the problem with you is that you’re very likeable as well. Do you remember the time you wanted to show me the hunting tower you were in when you shot your first elk?’
‘If we could stick to the subject,’ Adolfsson had said. Ideally to things I can actually include in my report, he had thought.
Unusual sex? Deviant sex? Kinky sex? Bondage? Sadomasochism?
‘Not with me, at any rate,’ the informant had said with a shrug. ‘Mind you, if I’d wanted to do anything like that, I’m pretty sure he would have agreed. He certainly wouldn’t have backed down. I don’t think I would even have had to ask. He’d have worked it out anyway. Sex is his thing, after all.’
They hadn’t got much further than that.
‘I’d put money on him being a sick, sadistic bastard,’ Bäckström said greedily. And it’ll be obvious when we go through his wardrobe, he thought. The familiar tingling was much stronger now.
Bäckström had started to settle into his new existence at the Town Hotel in Växjö. The worst of his grief for Egon had subsided unexpectedly quickly, and in recent days he’d hardly spared him a thought. His hotel room was always freshly cleaned and his bed freshly made when he returned from his arduous daily activities at the police station. All he needed to remember before he left each morning was to throw the towels in a heap on the bathroom floor so the environmental extremists among the staff didn’t get the idea that they could just hang them up again, and actually had to replace them with nice clean ones. It was probably high time to hand all his used clothes in again to be washed and ironed. Which was entirely in order this time, seeing as he had got them all sweaty in the course of his duties.
He had established his evening routine fairly quickly. First a cold beer as soon as he got in the door. Then a short nap, another beer in his room, then a bit of food. Before going to bed and falling asleep, a bit of instructional conversation with his colleague, Rogersson, a few more beers, and possibly one or two discreet little snifters. And, as a bit of spice to everyday life, the now regular conversations with his very own reporter from local radio. So that she got the chance to complain that he never seemed to have time to meet her, even though she had sworn blind that they wouldn’t talk shop.
Like this evening, for instance.
‘I’ve got a lot on at the moment,’ Bäckström said.
‘Promises, promises, Bäckström,’ Carin sighed.
She must have heard about the super-salami, she’s so damn keen, Bäckström thought, as he heard a familiar knock at his door. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to deal with. Speak soon.’
Rogersson was carrying a whole six-pack of chilled lager, and was apparently in an extremely good mood.
‘I’ve just been talking to our colleagues up in Stockholm,’ he said, grinning with the whole of his skinny, pock-marked face. ‘They told me an incredible story about Chinny that I think my dear colleague Superintendent Åström would appreciate a very great deal.’
‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said. Just watch yourself, you old drunk, he thought.
The story that Rogersson told him included all the usual additional material that stories accumulate as soon as they get passed from one mouth to another. This particular story had passed through several mouths on its way from the bathroom mirror of the Grand Hotel in Lund to Rogersson’s keen ears.
‘Absolute carnage. Apparently he shot up half the hotel,’ he concluded with a cheery grin five minutes later.
‘He must have got his chin caught in the trigger guard when he was cleaning his gun,’ Bäckström suggested. ‘If it had been you or me, we’d be sitting i
n a cell down in Malmö by now.’
‘Who says life’s fair?’ Rogersson said, shaking his head and pouring the last drops from the first can into his glass.
‘Does Dolly Parton sleep on her stomach?’ Bäckström agreed.
‘Funny that there hasn’t been a word about it in the papers,’ Rogersson said.
‘I’m sure that can be arranged,’ Bäckström said with a grin. ‘I’ll have a word with our good colleague Åström and see if he can mention it to some of our more obliging vermin.’
35
THE FOLLOWING MORNING the Småland Post ran a long article about a serious cultural argument that had broken out in town. Jan Lewin had immediately decided to cut it out and add it to his scrapbook.
The chief prosecutor and current member of parliament for the Christian Democrats, Ulf G. Grimtorp, had gone into battle against the populist and ultimately morally corrupting ideas that appeared to dominate the activities of the cultural department of Växjö Council.
One project in particular had incurred his wrath. It was designed to appeal to the town’s migrant women. It was called the cycle-swimming programme, and was basically intended to teach young immigrant women to ride bicycles and swim. A three-week residential summer school had been arranged, in relaxing rural surroundings, with a private lake, instructors, bicycles and swimming aids. All fourteen participants had learned to both ride a bike and swim, and had graduated with top marks.
Three of them had been interviewed by the paper, and declared unanimously that the physical accomplishments they had acquired would also help them to advance in life in a purely intellectual sense. Freeing themselves from the usual patriarchal chains that restricted their lives and those of their fellow women. Gaining strength, freedom and self-respect, and therefore being able to fulfil the most basic requirements for being able to apply themselves to more traditional cultural interests and values.
The official from the council’s cultural department, Bengt A. Månsson, who was responsible for this and other so-called special projects, described the cycle-swimming project as an almost unprecedented success.
‘If you assume that this has nothing to do with culture, you haven’t understood the first thing about what culture actually is,’ project leader Månsson declared. They were planning to follow up this initiative during the winter with a project to teach women to ski and skate, the ski-skating project.
According to Mr Grimtorp, MP, this was utter rubbish. A feeble and transparent excuse for various radical left-wing male cultural elitists to go sunbathing in the company of young women at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.
‘Two hundred thousand kronor,’ Grimtorp thundered. ‘And what does this have to do with culture?’
Money which in Grimtorp’s decided opinion ought to have been earmarked for the work of Växjö Town Theatre, the local chamber orchestra, the library, and associated activities. Not to mention the fact that the project was also threatening the number of grants given to the many promising young glass-blowers, artists and sculptors in and around Växjö.
That Grimtorp seems a miserable sort, Jan Lewin thought, and for some reason he started thinking about the summer almost fifty years before when he had been given his first proper bicycle. A red Crescent Valiant. Probably the same Valiant as in the cartoon about Prince Valiant. He had asked his dad, and his dad had told him all about the noble knight Prince Valiant.
Prince Valiant had lived a very long time ago, in the days when there weren’t any bicycles. So instead, Valiant had a horse. A powerful red stallion that seemed as obstinate and difficult to control as Jan’s first bicycle. The horse was called Arvak, Jan’s dad told him, and he was given that name in honour of another horse, Arvakr, from Norse mythology, the horse that pulled the sun across the sky, and must have had its work cut out during that summer almost fifty years ago when Jan learned to ride a bike.
He had read all about this and much more in the cartoon about Prince Valiant in Allers Weekly Journal. Jan and his dad had spent a whole evening going through a load of boxes and crates in the loft above the old cowshed at their place out in the country. They must have found a hundred old magazines, each containing a story about the noble knight Prince Valiant, and before Jan went to bed he and his dad would read one or sometimes two cartoons about his exciting adventures.
Mind you, it was all a bit odd, Jan thought. His dad had told him his bicycle was called a Crescent Valiant after Prince Valiant. But Prince Valiant had had a red horse called Arvak, seeing as there weren’t any bicycles in those days, so why wasn’t his bike called an Arvak Valiant instead of a Crescent Valiant? And who was Crescent?
Maybe Crescent was the prince’s first name, Jan thought. Prince Crescent Valiant. He’d ask his dad in the morning, because he knew a lot about most things, but then he had fallen asleep and as far as he could remember almost fifty years later he had never got round to asking the question.
36
THE SAME MORNING that the cultural argument was raging in the pages of the Småland Post, the CP group had emailed their analysis of the murder of Linda Wallin, with a profile of the perpetrator. And the head of the group, Detective Superintendent Per Jönsson, had announced that he and one of his colleagues would be arriving in Växjö just after lunch the following day in order to discuss their findings in person with the members of the investigating team.
Bäckström spent Wednesday morning reading through the twenty-page report, groaning and sighing in turn. But as far as the actual crime itself was concerned, they did seem to have worked out what every intelligent police officer could work out for himself, Bäckström thought.
That the perpetrator hadn’t broken into the flat by force, that he already knew the victim, that intercourse appeared to have been initiated in a relatively straightforward way, particularly considering what happened later. That it started with the victim and the perpetrator having sex on the sofa in the living room, without any indication that it was forced intercourse on the part of the victim. Then they had moved into the bedroom, where the level of both violence and sexual activity had escalated rapidly, that the perpetrator had strangled her during or after the final anal assault, that he had gone into the shower, masturbated and washed himself off, and finally left the crime scene through the bedroom window.
After that it was time for the usual reservations that no murder detective worthy of the title had any use for, except for saving them up for nightmares. Such as the fact that it couldn’t be ruled out that Linda might have forgotten to lock the door, or that the perpetrator had snuck into the flat or tricked her into letting him in. That he might have used force from the start by holding a knife to her throat – for instance, the knife that had been found at the crime scene – and had forced her to take off her jewellery, watch and clothes, and used threats to get her to take part in various sexual activities, from the sofa in the living room to the bed in the bedroom where she was strangled. Nor was it impossible that the perpetrator, in the worst-case scenario, could be someone she had never met before.
In light of the accompanying profile, and considering who the victim was, this seemed the most likely explanation. According to the profile, the perpetrator was a man between twenty and thirty years of age. He lived close to the crime scene, or used to live there, or had close links to it somehow. He probably lived alone; his previous relationships had been difficult; those around him thought him odd; he had difficulty maintaining social relationships, or even long-term friendships; he was unemployed or got short contracts doing some sort of simple work.
He was also seriously psychologically disturbed. His personality demonstrated clear chaotic and irrational elements. He had problems with his attitude to women. Based upon traumatic childhood experiences, he actually hated women, without either him or anyone around him necessarily being aware of the fact. But he most definitely wasn’t an ordinary sexual sadist with well-developed sexual fantasies.
He had an explosive temper. Faced with the slightes
t problem he could completely lose control of himself, and he was quick to resort to violence. These characteristics were bound to have manifested themselves before, and strongly suggested that he already had a police record, with reference to various violent incidents, but also drug-related crimes. Last but not least, he was physically strong. Strong enough to overpower and strangle a twenty-year-old woman who was training to join the police, and in better shape than most people her age of either sex. He was capable of lifting twenty kilos more than his own weight when he was in the gym. And he was also agile enough to jump out of a window four metres above the ground.
He also leaves his shoes on the rack in the hall. Neatly placed together. And no one saw him creeping away, even though he wears size 55 shoes, Bäckström thought with a deep sigh.
In spite of this, Superintendent Per Jönsson appeared to have made a deep impression on the qualified majority of his audience when, after spending an hour presenting his findings, he opened the floor to questions.
‘I dare say you have a number of questions,’ Jönsson said, smiling warmly at the gathering. ‘Please, go ahead. Feel free to ask about anything that’s on your minds.’
Excellent, Bäckström thought. Maybe you could start by explaining why all the proper officers in National Crime think you’re a bit of a worm.
‘Well, if no one else wants to jump in, perhaps I could go first,’ Olsson said, glancing imperiously round the table.
Great, Olsson, Bäckström thought. Start by asking the bastard why his colleagues at National Crime call the CP group the X-Files.
‘I’d like to start by thanking you for taking the time to visit us down here,’ Olsson began. ‘But mostly for your extremely interesting presentation. No doubt many of my colleagues around the table would agree with me when I say that I’m quite sure that the analysis that you and your colleagues have provided will be of decisive importance in our investigative work.’