Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Leif Gw Persson

  “That’s true enough, Bäckström,” the former television executive said. “I’ll give you five thousand for the lot,” he said, throwing out an arm in a gesture that was so generous that it almost made him topple over backward.

  The poor sod must have double vision at this time of day, Bäckström thought, since he had estimated the value of the drink at about half of that. Well, at least he won’t have to get a taxi to go and get more drink for a few days, he thought.

  “Done,” Bäckström said, holding out his hand as a sign that the deal was concluded.

  He had been paid in cash. Not that he had any idea what he was going to use it for, since he no longer ate or drank and couldn’t be bothered to think about women.

  In the absence of any better options, he had looked at the DVD that his ever-thoughtful doctor had given him as a sort of extra lifeline. A bit of help in his efforts to strive for a better life. The doctor knew from long, painful experience that people like Bäckström were the most difficult patients of all. Your average heavy drug user, forced to inject himself in his feet in a desperate effort to find a functioning vein, was actually nothing compared to a food-and-alcohol abuser like Bäckström. Bäckström and his ilk were practically incurable and it was all because they didn’t give a flying fuck about what they were doing. They just ate and ate and ate. And drank and drank and drank. And felt on top of the world.

  In an American medical journal the doctor had happened upon an extremely interesting article about attempts in a private clinic in Arizona to use electroshock therapy on people like Bäckström. The doctor had applied for funding from the state authorities, had been given more than he had asked for, and had set off for the United States to spend several months studying how they managed to alter the behavior of people who were eating and drinking themselves to death.

  It had been extremely interesting, and when he came home he brought with him a load of visual material. Including the DVD that he had shown Bäckström and told him to take home with him.

  Bäckström had put the disc in the DVD player. He had taken three deep breaths, his heart thudding like a jackhammer in his chest, then had pressed play. He had already seen it once, of course, and if it got too bad he could always cover his eyes. Just like the time when he was four and his crazy dad, a sergeant in the Maria district of central Stockholm, had dragged him along to a matinee at one of the cinemas near their home on Södermalm, and the big bad wolf had spent a whole hour hunting and trying to eat the three little pigs. Little Evert had howled like a banshee the whole time, and it wasn’t until he wet himself that he was released from his torment.

  “This little crybaby will never make a decent officer,” his dad had said when he returned his only begotten son to his gentle mother and her tender ministrations—hot chocolate with whipped cream and freshly baked cinnamon buns.

  And now it was time. A thirty-minute report from a rehabilitation clinic in the Southwest for patients suffering from relatively mild strokes and blockages in their hearts and brains, where they were going to be brought back to life.

  Most of them were very similar to Bäckström. Apart from the fact that they needed walkers to get around and had drooling mouths, dead eyes, and slurred speech. One of them—who was so like Bäckström that they could have been identical twins—was heading away from the camera when his already low-slung trousers slid down to his ankles to reveal the huge blue diaper that he was wearing underneath. Then he had turned to face the camera, smiling happily with wet lips, grabbed the diaper, and summarized what had happened to him.

  “No panties,” the patient slurred, then the soft voice of the narrator took over and talked about this particular patient, who was apparently only forty-five in spite of the way he looked. He had abused high-cholesterol food for many years and had also drunk large quantities of beer and bourbon, out of some absurd notion that the latter counteracted the effects of the former. The patient had suffered a relatively benign stroke a couple months ago. That was the way it was, but Bäckström already had his eyes closed and had a good deal of trouble locating the off switch.

  After that he had quickly pulled on an old tracksuit bearing the force’s logo. He had been given it when he attended a course together with all the Neanderthals because some bright spark in management had decided that they needed to learn to cooperate in case something really serious happened.

  Who the fuck would turn to people like them? Bäckström thought, as he tied the laces on his freshly bought sneakers with some difficulty, fully intending to walk right round Kungsholmen.

  Two hours later he was back, and just as he was putting the key in the lock he had a revelation.

  I’ve worked it out, Bäckström thought. That bright spark in the white coat had got it all wrong, and if there was any justice in the world he ought to hang himself with his own intestines. Only drink, no grub. Then his blood vessels would get rinsed through like a mountain stream in spring, he thought. You didn’t have to be a doctor to work that out. Every single intelligent person knew perfectly well that alcohol was the best solvent that had ever been discovered.

  No sooner said than done, and two minutes later he was knocking on his neighbor’s door, the former television executive.

  “I thought you were going on holiday, Bäckström,” his neighbor slurred as he gestured defensively with a glass of Bäckström’s excellent malt whiskey.

  “I’ve had to postpone it for a few days,” Bäckström lied, “so I was wondering if I could buy back some of the drink I sold you the other day. One bottle will do fine. Ideally some malt whiskey, if you’ve got any left,” he said, glancing at the glass in the man’s hand.

  “You can’t go back on a deal,” the television executive slurred, shaking his head. “You don’t get back what you’ve sold.” And he had abruptly shut the door and turned the safety lock.

  Bäckström had tried to make him see sense through his mail slot but only succeeded in getting his neighbor to slam the internal door as well.

  At that point even Bäckström had been forced to give up. He had lumbered back to his own apartment. Showered once more, brushed his teeth, and took three of the pills that the crazy doctor had prescribed for him, one brown, one blue, and one pink. Then he had crept into bed. Turning out the light, with no intention of writing a farewell letter, he fell asleep as if someone had whacked him over the head with a saucepan lid.

  When Bäckström woke up it was four o’clock in the morning. A merciless sun was shining in the clear blue sky, and he felt even more wretched than he had when he’d gone to bed the previous evening.

  Bäckström had made some black coffee and drank three cups in quick succession, standing in the kitchen. He gulped down what remained of the vegetables and polished off another bottle of mineral water. Then he had set out and walked all the way to the Solna police station.

  The same hellish weather as the day before, and the fact that the temperature wasn’t registering as more than twenty must be because it was still the middle of the night. He staggered into work just after six o’clock. Dizzy with tiredness and mad from the lack of sleep and food. Alone in the entire building, since all his lazy and incompetent colleagues were at home snoring in their beds.

  I’ve got to find somewhere to sleep, Bäckström thought. In his aimless wandering he finally found his way down to the garage in the basement.

  “God, you look wide awake, Bäckström,” the garage attendant said, clearly already at his post, as he rubbed his fingers on his overalls and held out a greasy palm.

  “Murder investigation,” Bäckström snarled. “Haven’t had a wink of sleep in days.”

  “No problem, Bäckström,” the garage attendant said. “You can borrow the mobile cabin I put together for the drug surveillance squad last winter.”

  Then he had opened the doors to a perfectly ordinary blue transit van, and inside was everything that a man in Bäckström’s situation required. Among other things, a proper bed.

  Two ho
urs later he started to stir because he could smell freshly brewed coffee in his nostrils. As well as something else that had to be a hallucination. The smell of fresh rolls with cheese and butter.

  “Sorry to have to disturb you, Bäckström,” the garage attendant said, as he put a large tray down on the floor and sat down on the chair opposite the bed, “but those eager little buggers in surveillance are saying they need their van. Apparently they’re going to sit and stare at some old junkies out in Rissne. I’ve brought you some coffee and some rolls in case you’re hungry.”

  Two large cups of coffee with lots of milk, two cheese rolls, all without his even realizing how it had happened. Then he had thanked his savior, perilously close to giving him a hug but coming to his senses just in time, and making do with a manly handshake and a slap on the back.

  Then he had gone down to the gym and showered, put on a fresh Hawaiian shirt that he kept in his office, and by half past nine in the morning Superintendent Bäckström was sitting behind his desk in the crime division of the Solna police station. For the first time in two days he felt somewhere close to half human.

  11.

  At ten o’clock on Friday morning Bäckström had a visitor in his office. It was Niemi’s colleague, Jorge “Chico” Hernandez, who asked for an audience with the head of the investigation.

  Darkies, darkies, darkies, Bäckström thought, sighing heavily somewhere deep inside. He would never dream of saying it out loud. Not after all the stories he had heard about Peter Niemi, who was also a foreigner, a bastard Finn, and a northern foreigner, to be more precise, and evidently best friends with the twenty-years-younger Hernandez.

  “Sit yourself down, Chico,” Bäckström said, nodding toward the chair on the other side of the desk as he leaned back in his own chair and knotted his hands over the sad remnants of his stomach. He must have lost at least ten kilos, he thought, as he experienced a certain vague anxiety about what was happening to the body that had always been his temple.

  “I’m listening,” he went on, smiling and nodding encouragingly to his visitor. Even though darkies shouldn’t be allowed to become police officers. Maybe it was because of those cheese rolls, he thought.

  Hernandez had a fair amount to report. During the previous evening he had been present when the coroner conducted the postmortem on their murder victim, and he began by confirming his colleague Niemi’s estimate of the body’s height and weight.

  “One hundred and eighty-eight tall, and one hundred and twenty-two kilos,” Hernandez said. “Peter’s good at that sort of thing.”

  Why the hell would I want to know that? Bäckström thought.

  “Which might be worth bearing in mind when we’re thinking about what our perpetrator is capable of,” Hernandez concluded. “It takes a fair amount of strength to handle a body that large and that heavy.”

  Apart from being overweight and having an impressively large liver, Danielsson had been in surprisingly good shape. No significant comments from the coroner about either his heart and lungs or his circulatory system. Normal prostate enlargement and all the other things that come with age. Otherwise not much, considering the life he had led.

  “If only he’d stopped drinking for a couple months each year and given his liver a chance to recover in between binges, he’d probably have lived past eighty,” Hernandez said.

  Like a mountain stream in spring, Bäckström thought, nodding in agreement. Maybe we ought to make sausages out of the bastard after all. Maybe cognac sausages, considering the number of years Director Danielsson had been marinating.

  “But we want to amend what we said about the upholstery hammer,” Hernandez said. “Judging from the X-rays of the skull, there are no injuries matching the hammer, and that goes for both the head of the hammer and the other side, the curved bit with a split in it that you use to pull out nails. Not only that, but the break in the shaft is on the wrong side. Not on the side you use to hit nails in with. The break’s on the other side, the same side as the claw, and that suggests to us that the perpetrator managed to break the shaft when he was trying to pull something out using the claw. The problem is that we can’t find any evidence of this inside the flat.”

  “Something he took away with him?” Bäckström suggested. “A cash box, maybe?” Containing Danielsson’s old milk teeth and a two-kronor coin he was left by the kind tooth fairy, he thought.

  “Something like that, yes,” Hernandez agreed with a nod. “For the time being we’re thinking it was probably one of those leather briefcases with a brass lock, hinges, and bolts, or some other gold-colored metal. There are traces on the claw of the hammer that suggest that. A small flake, maybe a millimeter long, that we’re pretty sure is leather. Light-brown leather. There’s a fragment of something that we think might be brass on the sharpened edge of the claw. It might have got there when the claw scratched the lock. We’ve sent it to the National Lab, since we don’t have the right equipment here to determine exactly what it is.”

  “But you didn’t find the briefcase itself?”

  “No,” Hernandez said. “If we’re right, he probably took it with him to open it in peace and quiet.”

  “Noted,” Bäckström said, making a note in his little black book, just to be on the safe side. “Anything else?”

  “To go back to the saucepan lid,” Hernandez said. “It’s cast-iron, and the outside is covered with blue enamel. It matches a pan found on the stove in the flat. Twenty-eight centimeters in diameter, with a handle in the middle. It weighs almost two kilos. The victim received at least six heavy blows with the lid. The first one hit him high up on the right side of his head. It was administered from behind him, off to one side, and we believe the victim received the blow as he stepped out of the toilet door. Danielsson falls forward with his head toward the living room, his feet toward the front door, ending up on his stomach or possibly his side. Then he receives another two blows to the back of the head. Then the perpetrator must have turned him over and finished him off with three blows to the face—”

  “How can you be so sure of the order?” Bäckström interrupted.

  “You can never be absolutely certain, but this is the picture that best matches the fractures on his skull and other observations of the part of the hall where it happened. The way the hall looks, the splatter pattern and so on. There are also blood, strands of hair, and fragments of bone on the saucepan lid. And the fact that the lid fits the injuries on the victim’s head. Our perpetrator isn’t just strong. To judge by the angle of the blows, he’s tall as well. And we think he was seriously upset with the victim. The first blow on its own was fatal. He may have administered the two to the back of the head and neck just to be sure, so to speak, so we’re prepared to let him get away with those. But the three to the face, at least three blows, just seem to be over the top. Especially as he must have put the saucepan lid down to roll the body over, and then picked it up once more before he started hitting him again.”

  “So how tall was he?” Bäckström said.

  “Danielsson was one meter eighty-six. So at a guess, at least one meter eighty. If you ask me, another ten centimeters on that. One meter ninety.”

  “Assuming he wasn’t a professional basketball player,” Bäckström teased. “He could have gone for him with his arm raised above his head, you know, the way they throw the ball? Or a tennis player. Serving a blow with a saucepan lid.”

  “The concentration of professional basketball players in the immediate vicinity is presumably relatively low,” Hernandez stated without the slightest trace of a smile. “The same is probably true of tennis players,” he added, puckering his lips slightly.

  Funny lad, Bäckström thought. Finally, a darkie with a sense of humor.

  Hernandez changed the subject. He started to talk about the Polish carpenter’s discovery in the trash bin.

  “We’re waiting to hear from the National Forensics Lab if the blood matches that of the victim. If it does, then the find is undoubtedly very i
nteresting indeed. But we didn’t manage to find any prints. Not on the raincoat, the washing-up gloves, or the slippers. The size of the raincoat and slippers fits Danielsson. Large, broad across the chest, size-forty-four shoes.”

  “How many months do you think it’ll be before we hear back from the lab, then?” Bäckström wondered.

  “We’ve managed to nag them into making this a priority,” Hernandez said. “After the weekend, is the latest our colleagues in Linköping have told us. To summarize what we’ve got so far,” Hernandez went on, “we’re probably talking about a perpetrator who is physically strong, well above average height, with a serious dislike of his victim. If the clothes turn out to match, and if they belonged to Danielsson like the saucepan lid and the upholstery hammer, he seems to be pretty experienced. He puts on the victim’s raincoat to avoid getting blood on his clothes. He takes off his own shoes and puts on the victim’s slippers for the same reason. He puts on the victim’s washing-up gloves so that he doesn’t leave fingerprints. The only thing that bothers us is the behavior of the victim’s dinner guest, because at an earlier stage of the evening he left a mass of prints all over bits of crockery, glasses, cutlery. And he doesn’t seem to have made any effort to get rid of those at all.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. Not in the slightest,” Bäckström said, shaking his head. “Because that’s what pissheads are like. First he sits and has a drink with Danielsson. Then he suddenly turns on him and when Danielsson goes to the toilet he kicks off his shoes; grabs a pair of slippers, a raincoat, and washing-up gloves; picks up the saucepan lid; and sets to work as soon as Danielsson steps out of the bathroom and is standing there swaying and trying to do up his fly. He’s probably already forgotten everything that went before.”