Another Time, Another Life: The Story of a Crime

by Leif Gw Persson

  Fucking nice guy, thought Bäckström, who almost forgot to ask the customary routine question about Tischler’s alibi until Tischler himself reminded him.

  “Well then,” said Tischler, looking at his watch. “It was nice to meet you, even if the reason is sad to say the least.… So if you don’t have anything else, I have a few things to take care of. There’s a lot of money out there that I have to place in the right hands,” said Tischler, winking.

  A purely formal matter, and Bäckström truly hoped that Tischler would not take offense. What kind of alibi did he have for Thursday evening the thirtieth of November?

  “That was when those damned hooligans tried to tear down the city,” Tischler declared. “I read about it in the newspapers the following day. I was in London the whole day. I flew home the morning after. If you speak with my secretary she can give you the details.”

  At the meeting of the investigation group that afternoon Holt reported what she, Jarnebring, and the meritorious Gunsan had produced about the victim Kjell Eriksson’s background. For the sake of simplicity Holt had compiled half a page with the most important information, which she handed out to all those present.

  Eriksson, Kjell Göran, born 1944, single, no children, father unknown, grew up in Hjorthagen in Stockholm with a single mother who died in the mid-1980s, no siblings. The mother worked as a cleaning lady, building manager, etc.

  E. completed secondary school in 1961 and then began university-track high school studies, which however were interrupted in 1962. Completed military service ’62–’63, so-called fatigue duty with the air force with placement in the Barkaby wing. Started working as a substitute mail carrier in 1964 and was hired permanently a few years later as a mail carrier.

  Began adult studies at night school in 1965, finished his degree in 1967. Politically involved in the Swedish Communist Party (SCP) and the so-called NLF movement at the end of the 1960s. Took part in the occupation of the student union building in 1968.

  Studied sociology, pedagogy, and criminology at the university. Received his degree in 1974. While studying at the university he met Sten Welander, who was his instructor in sociology. Through Sten Welander he also got to know Welander’s schoolmate Theo Tischler in the early 1970s.

  In the fall of 1975 he applied to and was given work as an assistant statistician at the Central Bureau of Statistics where he worked with labor market statistics. In 1984 he was given the position of assistant director at the Bureau.

  At the end of the 1970s, exact time not known, Eriksson left the SCP to join the Social Democratic Party, and had been a member since the spring of 1979. Eriksson had been active in the union at his place of employment since he started there and held several union positions, including safety representative on TCO’s behalf.

  Apart from the above-mentioned Welander and Tischler, Eriksson seems to have had few friends and for the most part lacked private social interaction. According to what several of his coworkers have reported, he was not especially popular at his place of employment. He is described as antisocial, conceited, unreliable, gossipy, etc.

  Eriksson had very good private finances considering his income. A preliminary calculation indicates that during the last ten years he built up a fortune of about four million kronor. The apartment on Rådmansgatan where he lived is a condominium that he purchased about ten years ago and that currently is estimated to have a market value of over a million kronor. Other assets consist primarily of stocks plus bank balances of about 300,000 kronor.

  All of these assets seem to originate from extensive stock market investment activity, in which according to reports he received advice and help from his acquaintance Theo Tischler. These transactions he has also conducted at the latter’s brokerage firm.

  “Well then,” said Holt, looking around. “This is in brief what Gun, Bo, and I have been able to produce about Eriksson’s background. If anyone has any questions I will gladly answer them.”

  No one had any particular questions, so Bäckström took over and started developing his homo lead, which had been confirmed for him by “two sources independent of each other,” namely Welander and Tischler, who were also the only acquaintances worth the name that Holt and her coworkers had managed to produce.

  “To me this is fucking simple,” said Bäckström. “The guy was a closet fairy—there’s not the least doubt on that point. What we have to do is to find the little boyfriend he was drinking with that evening, before they started fighting with each other and his bum boy stuck the knife in him. Am I right or am I right?”

  At first no one said anything. Not even Jarnebring, who only sighed and looked at the ceiling.

  Finally Holt spoke up. Clearly no one else intended to do so, she thought.

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said.

  “It doesn’t seem to have been that fucking simple,” snorted Bäckström. “I’m still waiting for you all to give me a name.”

  “Do both of his buddies confirm that he had that disposition?” asked Jarnebring, who naturally enough had not read the as yet unwritten interview reports.

  “Of course they do,” said Bäckström with a certain vehemence. “In the way those sort of people talk. Welander spoke in tongues, but between the lines at least I understood what he was muttering about.” For some reason Bäckström glowered sourly at Alm at the far end of the table.

  “And what does Tischler say?” asked Jarnebring.

  “He talks almost like a normal person,” said Bäckström. “Sure enough he thought Eriksson was a queer, one of those secretive types that mostly stay in the closet.”

  “And they themselves have alibis?” asked Jarnebring for some reason.

  “Of course, and they’re chiseled in stone, so to me this whole thing is fucking simple and has been all along.” Bäckström glowered at Holt and Jarnebring in succession, and thus they were no further along on this particular Monday in the middle of December.

  Soon it would be eleven whole days since the death and still no perpetrator. This is going down the toilet, Jarnebring thought gloomily. As far as he was concerned Bäckström could stick his so-called homo lead up his own fat ass. But you didn’t say that sort of thing. Not even to someone like Bäckström, not when there were other colleagues present. It was the sort of thing you said face-to-face to the person it concerned. At least Jarnebring would do it that way.

  15

  Tuesday, December 12, 1989

  On Tuesday Jarnebring and Holt concluded their careful search of Eriksson’s residence. The results were thin, bordering on nil. In the desk in the office a telephone book had been found, including even the number for his old mother, although she had been dead for several years. Also Welander’s and Tischler’s numbers obviously, but otherwise basically nothing.

  In the desk and bookcase there were also twenty or so pages and scraps of paper with notes written in Eriksson’s finicky handwriting. Mostly he seemed to have devoted time to calculating how many kronor and öre he had earned on one stock trade or another. Why he did this was unclear. The same information would arrive with the sales note from his broker the next day.

  Seems to have been extremely anxious, thought Holt. A very lonely person struggling all the time to have absolute control of those sorts of things over which control was possible, she thought.

  In the desk they also found a photo album bound in a pair of simple green covers of stiff cardboard. It contained a total of twenty-one photos. Eriksson’s mother when she was young, middle-aged, and old. A picture of the house in Hjorthagen where they had lived when he was growing up. Mostly pictures of Eriksson himself. As a little baby who didn’t smile, from first grade in school, in the back row and at the far end, without a smile and with a shy look toward the camera, surrounded by happy classmates. Group photos and a portrait when he got his high school diploma, the same from his college graduation, in which he actually smiled for the first time. A pasted-in official letter from the Central Bureau of Statistics, whi
ch stated that Eriksson, Kjell Göran, had been given a position as temporary assistant director at the agency. And basically that was all.

  Poor thing, Holt thought gloomily. He doesn’t seem to have had it easy.

  But there was one photo that stood out from the others. It was not even pasted into the album, just loosely inserted between two pages in the middle. It was a summer picture of three young men about twenty-five years of age and a little girl who seemed to be ten years old at the most. Green grass and glistening water in the background. The three men were in short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sandals. Two of them smiled openly at the camera, one seemed more reserved. The pluckiest was the little girl. She had her hair put up in Pippi Longstocking braids and stuck her tongue out happily at the photographer.

  Swedish archipelago, late sixties or early seventies, thought Holt. Welander, Tischler, and Eriksson, she thought, and was reasonably confident. The little girl held Tischler by the hand, and despite the differences in size and age there was a striking resemblance between them. Something in the posture itself, the self-assured expression in body and face.

  That could hardly be his child, thought Holt. Probably a sibling, or half sibling perhaps, and in the back of her head she had a vague memory that Gunsan had said something about Theo Tischler having inherited not only the brokerage firm but also his view of marriage from his long-dead father.

  On the back side someone had written in a childish handwriting, “The gang of four. Sten, Theo, Kjell, and me.”

  “You know what we’re going to do now?” said Jarnebring as he sealed the door to Eriksson’s apartment.

  “I’m listening,” said Holt, looking almost as plucky as the little girl in the photo.

  “We’re going to go back to the office, unplug the phone, lock the door, and sit down in peace and quiet and try to work out what the hell this is really about.”

  “Sounds good,” said Holt. “Only I get to make coffee first.”

  First they discussed Bäckström’s so-called homo lead in detail. On that they had somewhat different ideas. Holt simply didn’t believe in it. She was convinced that the murder was not about sex at all, regardless of what orientation anyone wanted to ascribe to their victim. Jarnebring was in agreement with her “in principle,” while at the same time he had a hard time letting go of the idea that Eriksson could have been completely uninterested in sexual matters.

  “Personally I have a very hard time understanding that,” said Jarnebring. Despite what that Polish woman said, he thought.

  “I can very well imagine that,” said Holt cheerfully. “But if you disregard yourself—”

  “Wait now,” said Jarnebring. “Don’t interrupt me. I’ll buy what you’re saying about Eriksson being a disagreeable bastard who was snooping around all the time to try to get power over people—you only have to listen to his coworkers—but the one thing doesn’t rule out the other, does it?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Holt. “I guess I’m not particularly good at guys.”

  “You’ll just have to work on that,” said Jarnebring unperturbed. “Where was I … yes … there’s something about the act itself that I have a hard time letting go of. It’s completely obvious that the person who stabbed Eriksson was someone he both knew and trusted. Or in any case was not the least bit afraid of. But that can hardly have been Welander, Tischler, or his cleaning woman. Who was it then? We haven’t found anyone.”

  “Some neighbor that we’ve missed,” Holt suggested. “Some casual acquaintance that we’ve also missed.”

  “It doesn’t appear to be so,” said Jarnebring, shaking himself uncomfortably. “Eriksson seems to have been one highly suspicious bastard, not to mention anxious as hell. Here he sits on the couch drinking a highball in peace and quiet while our perpetrator calmly and quietly stabs him from behind, and then he crawls around on the floor and raises holy hell—if we’re to believe his neighbor—before he folds up and dies. Who the hell would he let get that close to him?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Holt, “but aren’t so-called gay murders usually dreadful stories? With a lot of aggravated assault, lots of emotions and hatred?”

  “Yes,” said Jarnebring. “As a rule it’s like that but far from always. They’re just like all other stoned, jealous, crazy people. But it wasn’t like that here.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Holt.

  “The whole thing seems both cowardly and random. Just a stab from behind … normally he wouldn’t even have died from it. And then the perpetrator darts into the bathroom and vomits, making a nice little mess. Doesn’t seem to be one of our motorcycle-riding friends exactly.”

  “No,” said Holt, who had been thinking along the same lines.

  “So what have we got?” Jarnebring continued.

  A lonely person, a scared and suspicious person, a dissatisfied person, a person who felt unjustly treated by life, a person who should have had considerably more if there had been any justice in this world and if he himself had been the one to decide.

  “A snoop,” said Jarnebring.

  “Someone who wanted to acquire power through snooping, to get emotional power over people around him by ferreting out their weaknesses,” Holt continued.

  “Who exploited the friendship and feelings of others, who even profited from them if he got the chance,” Jarnebring added.

  “It’s certainly not out of the question that he extorted money from them if he felt sufficiently confident,” Holt concluded.

  “Snoop, profiteer, extortionist,” Jarnebring summarized. Not the type I’d want to share an office with, he thought.

  “I have a buddy,” said Jarnebring, sounding pretty much as if he was thinking out loud. “He’s also my best friend. We shared a front seat here on the squad a helluva lot of years ago … and a lot of other things for that matter, but we can leave that aside.”

  “I can almost guess who it is,” said Holt. “What is it our colleagues at the riot squad call him? The Butcher from Ådalen? Police superintendent at the National Police Board, Lars Martin Johansson.”

  “People here in the building talk too much shit,” said Jarnebring. “Do you know what’s remarkable about Lars Martin?”

  “No,” said Holt. “Tell me. I’m listening.”

  “He’s downright fiendish at figuring out how things stand,” said Jarnebring. “Sometimes it’s uncanny.”

  “What are we waiting for?” said Holt, nodding toward the telephone. “Call him and get him over here.” It’s never too late to meet God, she thought, and if only half of what she had heard about Johansson were true then it was high time.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. Even if it would be fun to see Bäckström’s face, he thought. “One thing that Lars Martin always used to nag about where murder investigations are concerned is that you should forget about the motive.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about the motive?” Holt was surprised.

  “Nope,” said Jarnebring. “According to Lars Martin, the motive is either something obvious or else some out-and-out craziness that you would never figure out in a million years no matter how much you thought about it, and uninteresting in any event. Johansson used to say that it’s like the cherry on the cake, and the court can put it there if it’s really necessary once the cake is baked and ready. It doesn’t help us police officers. Other than in thrillers and TV series and that kind of shit.”

  “Sounds maybe a little too simple,” Holt objected, being seriously fond of at least two police series that were showing on TV.

  “Lars Martin is a very simple man,” said Jarnebring, smiling contentedly. “That is what’s so strange about the whole thing. I mean with the head that he has. Lars Martin is almost always right,” said Jarnebring. “We’ve talked through dozens of these kinds of cases over the years and I cannot think of a single time when he was wrong.”

  “But,” said Holt noncommittally.

  “But this time it seems to me that he actually
is wrong,” said Jarnebring.

  “What do you mean?” said Holt.

  “What I mean is that just this once it suddenly seems to me that if we can only figure out why Eriksson was murdered then we’re also going to find who did it,” said Jarnebring. “Simple and obvious and in the twinkling of an eye we just go pick him up.”

  “You think so,” said Holt.

  “Yes,” Jarnebring repeated. “And do you know what’s even more annoying?”

  “No,” said Holt. “Tell me.”

  “I’m convinced we’ve already stumbled across our perpetrator, but we’ve simply missed him,” said Jarnebring.

  “But there isn’t anyone,” said Holt with surprise. “Not Welander, Tischler, or Eriksson’s cleaning woman or—”

  “Of course’s there’s someone,” Jarnebring interrupted. “It’s just that we haven’t seen him. It’s no more difficult than that.”

  16

  Wednesday, December 13, 1989

  Up at the homicide squad they celebrated Lucia Day according to ancient custom, and during the rest of the day, also according to custom, not much was accomplished. With the exception of Gunsan, who was diligently active at her computer, most of the staff seemed to have sought isolation in their offices.

  The flame of diligence was not shining with any marked intensity among the detective squad either. True, Jarnebring had seemed chipper enough when he arrived in the morning, but then he excused himself with a “I have to help the guys with something” and that’s the way it was.

  Which left a somewhat listless Holt, who even before lunch was starting to feel the effects of the Lucia celebration at Nicke’s day care, and mostly for lack of anything better was going through the box with Eriksson’s telephone book, photo album, and other private notes.