“Hernandez? Where have I heard that name before?” Bäckström said.
“He’s got a younger sister, Magdalena Hernandez; she’s one of our uniforms. You’ve probably seen her about, maybe it’s her name you’re thinking of.” Annika Carlsson smiled broadly for some reason.
“Why do you say that?” Bäckström wondered.
“Sweden’s most attractive female police officer, according to the majority of her colleagues. And from my own point of view, I reckon she’s a great girl,” Carlsson said with a smile.
“You don’t say,” Bäckström said. I daresay you’ve been there already, he thought.
Inside the flat, things were just as bad as Bäckström had imagined. First a little cloakroom and narrow hall. On the left a small bathroom and toilet, followed by a small bedroom. On the right a kitchen with a dining table, and straight ahead a living room. All in all, about fifty square meters, and it wasn’t exactly clear when the occupant had last done any cleaning. Not this side of the new year, at any rate.
The furnishings were shabby and worn, and the décor likewise. Everything from the unmade bed with the pillow with no pillowcase to the filthy kitchen table and the sagging sofa and armchair in the living room. Yet the things in there bore witness to the fact that the murder victim, Karl Danielsson, had seen better days. A few worn Persian rugs. A sturdy old-fashioned mahogany writing desk with a decorative inlay of some lighter wood. A twenty-year-old television, but it was still a Bang & Olufsen television. And the armchair in front of it was an English leather wing chair with matching footstool.
Drink, Bäckström thought. Drink and loneliness, and he himself had never felt worse since those Neanderthals in the National Rapid-Response Unit had thrown a shock grenade at him some six months ago. He hadn’t regained his senses until the next day, and by then they had already had time to shut him away in the psychiatric unit of Huddinge Hospital.
“Anything else you want, Bäckström?” Annika Carlsson asked, and for some reason she looked almost worried as she did so.
A couple large shorts and a pint, Bäckström thought. And if you let your hair grow and put a skirt on, then maybe you can give me a blowjob. But don’t start thinking you can get any more than that, he thought, since only twenty-four hours ago he was having serious doubts about earthly desires and spiritual love.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “See you back at the station.”
There’s something that doesn’t make sense, Bäckström thought, as he walked slowly back to the police station. But what was it? And how was he supposed to work it out with a brain that was suffering acute dehydration and was probably already damaged beyond repair? I’m going to kill that fucking witch doctor, he thought.
7.
By three o’clock that afternoon Bäckström had already held his first meeting with the team investigating his new murder case. It wasn’t exactly the sharpest team he had led in his twenty-five years in violent crime. Nor the largest either, come to that. Eight people in total, if you counted him and the two forensics officers, who would soon move on to other cases as soon as they had finished the most important work on Karl Danielsson. Which left one plus five, and considering everything he had seen and heard of his colleagues so far, it all boiled down to just one man, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström himself. Who else, really? That was what usually happened, after all. Bäckström left standing alone as the last hope of the grieving family. Even if it was most likely that the state-run alcohol monopoly was closer than anyone to Danielsson.
“Okay,” Bäckström said. “Well, welcome to this investigation, and for the time being that goes for all of you. If there any changes on that score, I promise to let you know. Does anyone want to kick things off?”
“We do, my colleague and I,” the older of the two forensics experts, Peter Niemi, said. “We’ve hardly had a chance to get started on the flat, so we’ve got loads to be getting on with.”
Peter Niemi had been with the police for twenty-five years or so and had worked in forensics for fifteen of them. He was over fifty but looked considerably younger than he was. Fair, in good shape, slightly above average height. He had been born and raised in the Torne Valley in the far north of Sweden. He had lived in Stockholm more than half his life but still had his regional dialect. He smiled easily and his blue eyes expressed both friendliness and reserve at the same time. You didn’t have to be an idiot to see what he did for a job, and the fact that he hadn’t worn a uniform for the past fifteen years was completely irrelevant. It was the message his eyes gave off that made all the difference. Peter Niemi was a police officer, and he was nice and kind as long as you behaved. If you didn’t, then Niemi wasn’t the sort of man to back down, and there was more than one person who had come to realize that in a rather painful way.
“Fine,” Bäckström said. “I’m listening.” A fucking Lapp, a bastard Finn, sounds like he’s just tumbled off the bus from Haparanda, and the sooner I don’t have to listen to him, the better, he thought.
“Well, then,” Niemi said, leafing through his papers.
The victim’s name was Karl Danielsson. Retired, sixty-eight years old. According to the passport that the forensics officers had found in his flat, he was 188 centimeters tall and weighed something like 120 kilos.
“Heavily built and badly overweight, I’d guess maybe thirty kilos too much,” said Niemi, who had himself grabbed the body by the arms when it was loaded onto a cart. “You’ll get the exact figures from the medical report.”
Whatever the fuck we might need them for, Bäckström thought sourly. We’re hardly going to mince him down and make sausages out of our murder victim, he thought.
“The crime scene,” Niemi went on. “The victim’s own apartment. To be precise, the hall. My hunch is that he’d been to the toilet and received the first blow as he was coming out, still doing up his fly. That matches both the splatter pattern and his half-closed zip, in case anyone’s wondering. Then he was struck several times in quick succession, and the decisive blows were struck when he was already lying on the hall floor.”
“What was he hit with?” Bäckström asked.
“A blue enameled cast-iron saucepan lid,” Niemi said. “It was on the floor beside the body. The saucepan is on the stove in the kitchen, no more than three meters away.
“As well as that,” he went on, “the perpetrator also seems to have used an upholstery hammer with a wooden handle. The handle broke off right by the head, and both parts were found on the hall floor. Alongside the victim’s head.”
“Our perpetrator’s a thorough little bastard.” Bäckström sighed, shaking his big round head.
“I don’t think he’s that little. Not to judge by the angle of the blows, at any rate. But he was certainly thorough, even if it was hard to see at first because Danielsson’s face and chest were so covered in blood,” Niemi said. “He was actually strangled as well. With his own tie. When he was lying on the floor, and by then he must have been unconscious and pretty close to death, the perpetrator tightened his tie and finished the job with a reef knot. Completely unnecessary, if you ask me. But I suppose it’s better to err on the side of caution, if you want to be absolutely sure.” Niemi shrugged.
“Do you have any ideas about who might have done it, then?” Bäckström asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“A typical pisshead murder, if you ask me, Bäckström,” Niemi said, smiling amiably. “But it’s worth bearing in mind, Bäckström, that you’re asking someone from the Torne Valley.”
“What about the timing, then?” Bäckström said. So he wasn’t entirely thick after all, he thought.
“I’m getting to that. All in good time, Bäckström,” Niemi said.
“Before the victim was killed, he and another individual, someone who left his fingerprints at the scene but who we haven’t yet been able to identify, sat in the living room eating pork chops with kidney beans. The host probably sat in the only armchair, his guest on th
e sofa. They had the meal on the coffee table but had time to clear it away. We’ve found a number of prints from both of them, if you’re wondering, and we should have the answers sometime tomorrow. If we’re lucky, the perpetrator will be in the fingerprint register already. With their meal they drank five half-liter cans of export-strength lager and more than a bottle of vodka. We’ve got one empty bottle and one just started. The usual size, seventy centiliters, and it’s probably worth pointing out that they were that esteemed brand, Explorer. Both bottles were found on the floor in front of the television, where they had been sitting and eating, and the evidence suggests that the bottles were unopened when they started. For one thing, the seals are still there. You know, the perforated bit at the bottom of the bottle top. The bit that makes that nice cracking sound when you unscrew it.”
Every now and then this bastard Lapp sounds completely normal, Bäckström thought, even though he could feel a great vacuum in his chest. Almost like a near-death experience. Where had that come from?
“Anything else? About the perpetrator, and what happened before the murder?”
“I think the man who did this was physically strong,” Niemi said, nodding thoughtfully. “That business with the necktie takes a lot of strength. And he turned the body over as well, because to start with, the victim was on his side, or possibly his stomach—we can tell that because of the way the blood spread—but when we found him, he was lying on his back. I think he turned the victim onto his back when he decided to strangle him.”
“And when would that have been?” Annika Carlsson asked suddenly, before Bäckström had a chance to ask that very question.
“If you’re asking a medical layman like me—the postmortem on the body won’t be done until this evening—I’d probably guess at yesterday evening,” Niemi said. “Chico and I got there at almost exactly seven o’clock this morning, and by then the victim had developed complete rigor mortis, but of course we’ll know much more about this and a lot more besides tomorrow.” Niemi nodded, looked at the others in the room, and made a move to get up from his chair. “We’ve already sent a whole load of material for analysis to the National Forensics Lab in Linköping, but it’ll probably be a few weeks before we get any answers. But I’m not sure it will make too much difference in a case like this. Having to wait, I mean. This perpetrator isn’t going anywhere. Our forensics colleagues in the county crime unit have promised to help with the fingerprints, so with a bit of luck that’ll be done by the weekend.
“We need the weekend,” Niemi repeated as he stood up. “On Monday I think we should be able to give you a decent description of what happened inside the flat.”
“Thanks,” Bäckström said, nodding to Niemi and his younger colleague. As soon as we lay our hands on Danielsson’s dinner partner, this one’s done and dusted, he thought. One pisshead killing another pisshead, there’s no more to it than that.
As soon as the forensics experts had left the room his lazy and inadequate investigating team started making a fuss about needing to stretch their legs and have a cigarette break. If he’d been his usual self he would have told them to shut up, but Bäckström felt strangely apathetic and merely nodded his consent. More than anything he would have liked to walk out, but in the absence of better options he had headed straight for the toilets and must have drunk at least five liters of cold water.
8.
“Okay,” Bäckström said when they had all returned to the meeting room and could finally get going again so that this wretched business might come to an end sometime soon. “Let’s look at the victim. Then we can throw some ideas around, and before we leave we’ll work out a list of what we’ve done and what we’re going to do tomorrow. Today is Thursday, May fifteenth, and I think we could be finished by the weekend so that we can devote next week to more important cases than Mr. Danielsson.
“What have we got on our victim, Nadja?” Bäckström went on, nodding toward a short, plump woman in her fifties who was sitting at the end of the table and had already surrounded herself with an impressive pile of paperwork.
“Quite a lot, actually,” Nadja Högberg said. “I’ve looked up the usual information, and there are some juicy details in there. And I’ve spoken to his younger sister—she’s his only close relative—and she was able to contribute a fair few extra facts as well.”
“I’m listening,” Bäckström said, even though his mind was somewhere else entirely and even though the comforting sound of the seal on a bottle top being broken was echoing round his head.
Karl Danielsson had been born in Solna in February 1940 and was therefore sixty-eight years old when he was murdered. His father had worked as a typesetter and foreman at a printer’s in Solna. His mother had been a housewife. Both parents long since dead. His closest relative was a sister who was ten years younger than him and lived in Huddinge, south of Stockholm.
Karl Danielsson was single. He had never married and had no children. Or rather, no children according to the various registers the police had access to. He had spent four years in elementary school in Solna, then five years in junior secondary, where he passed his exams and got into Påhlmans Business College in Stockholm, where he spent three years. By the time he was nineteen he had completed a sixth-form economics course. Then he did his military service at Barkarby Airbase. He came out ten months later and got his first job as an assistant in a firm of accountants in Solna, in the summer of 1960, aged twenty.
That same summer he made his first appearance in police records. Karl Danielsson had been apprehended driving while in an intoxicated state and was fined sixty days’ wages for drunk driving and lost his driving license for six months. Five years later the same thing happened again. Drunk driving, fined sixty days’ wages. Driving license withdrawn for a year. Then seven years passed before his third offense, this time considerably more serious.
Danielsson had been drunk as a skunk. He’d driven into a hot-dog kiosk on Solnavägen and absconded from the scene. In Solna District Court he was found guilty of drunk driving and leaving the scene of a crime, and was sentenced to three months in prison and had his driving license revoked. Danielsson had got hold of a hotshot lawyer and went to the Court of Appeal, where he presented two different medical certificates regarding his problems with alcohol. He managed to get his conviction for absconding overturned, and the prison sentence was commuted to probation. But he didn’t manage to get his license back, and he evidently wasn’t bothered enough by this to apply for a new license when the sentence expired. For the last thirty-six years of his life Karl Danielsson had gone without a driving license, so there were no more convictions for drunk driving.
But even as a pedestrian he continued to attract the attention of the police. During this period the police had locked him up on five occasions, under the Act on Taking Intoxicated Persons into Custody, and it had probably happened more often than that. Danielsson always used to refuse to give his name, which he was under no obligation to supply. The last time he had been taken into custody, things had gone badly wrong.
It had happened on the day of the Elitloppet trotting race at Solvalla racecourse, in May five years before he died. Danielsson had been drunk and rowdy, and when he was being helped into the police van he had started fighting and flailing about. Resisting arrest and violent conduct against a public official, and merely being taken into custody turned into getting arrested, even if it ended the same as usual, with his being put in a cell in the Solna police station to sober up. By the time he was released six hours later, Danielsson had accused both the arresting officers and the staff at the station of physical abuse, in total three police officers and two custody officers. Another hotshot lawyer turned up, new medical certificates were submitted, and then everything spiraled into a big circus. More than a year passed before the first case went to court, and it had to be adjourned immediately when the prosecutor’s two witnesses for some reason failed to appear.
Because Danielsson’s lawyer was an extremely busy ma
n, another year passed before time could be found for new proceedings. Once again they had to be postponed because the prosecutor’s witnesses failed to appear. The prosecutor lost patience and dismissed the case. Karl Danielsson was an innocent man, at least for that part of his life.
“Considering the fact that the chances of being taken into custody and arrested for crimes of this nature are minimal, he must have been drunk pretty much the whole time,” Nadja Högberg said, and she knew what she was talking about. She had been a civilian employed by the police in the Western District for ten years, after being born Nadjesta Ivanova and gaining a doctorate in physics and applied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University. In the bad old days as well, when Saint Petersburg was called Leningrad and when academic requirements had been considerably stricter than they were in the new, liberated Russia.
“What other fuckups has he made, then? Apart from rolling around when he’s been on the bottle, I mean,” Bäckström asked, nodding toward Nadja Högberg.
Not that he was remotely interested in the murder victim’s dealings with his more or less retarded colleagues in the regular force and traffic division, but mainly to rein her in so that he could put a stop to this interminable meeting. So that he could finally drag himself home to Inedalsgatan and the remnants of what had until yesterday been his home. Get in the shower and put a stop to all the noise in his head. Gulp down a few more liters of ice-cold water. Gorge himself on raw vegetables and then do all the things that remained in a life that had been stripped of all meaning the day before.
Why can’t you ever learn to hold your tongue, Bäckström? Bäckström thought five minutes later.
Nadja Högberg had taken him at his word and was giving a detailed account of Danielsson’s various financial activities and the interactions with the judicial system that these had, in turn, led to.
Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original) Page 3