“What does he have to say, then?” Bäckström asked.
“That he saw Stålhammar come in through the door of the building they both live in at approximately quarter to eleven on Wednesday evening. He’s certain it was Stålhammar he saw, but because he doesn’t like him very much and usually avoids talking to him, he waited for a minute or so before going inside himself.
“Okay,” Bäckström said. “How the hell can he be so sure, and what was he doing out in the middle of the night? How can he be so sure it was quarter to eleven? And was he even sober?” Bäckström said. “It’s probably the same old story. He’s got his days mixed up. Or got the time wrong by an hour or so. Or seen someone else entirely. Or he’s just making the whole thing up because he wants to seem important, or because he wants to fuck up Stålhammar.”
“Let’s not get carried away, Bäckström,” Alm said, loving every second of this. “If what the witness says is true, then Stålhammar could hardly have murdered Danielsson. At the very least, things can’t have happened the way we’ve been assuming. Not immediately after half past ten that evening.
“To work through this in order,” Alm went on. “Every evening after the late news on TV Four, the one that ends with the weather at half past ten in the evening, Englund takes his dachshund out. He always goes for the same walk round the block, and it always takes him and the dog about quarter of an hour. But not that evening, because when he is about to turn right, up onto the esplanade, he gets stopped by a uniformed police officer who more or less shoos him back the way he came. So back he goes. Reluctantly, because he is as curious as the next man. But when nothing happens, he stops again down on Järnvägsgatan and listens for a few minutes, then carries on walking home. When he reaches the block next to his, some twenty meters from his own door, he sees Stålhammar go inside the building.”
“What were our uniformed colleagues up to there, then?” Bäckström asked.
“They’d cordoned off the esplanade because they were preparing a raid on a flat a hundred meters down the road. The result of a tip-off about someone who was suspected of involvement in the shootings and armed robbery out at Bromma a couple days before.”
“The timings,” Bäckström said. “What does this tell us about the timings?”
“To start with, it must have been after half past ten in the evening of Wednesday, May fourteenth. There’s no other possibility. The raid started then, with our uniformed colleagues trying to shut the area off.”
“He could have stood there gawping with his dog for half an hour,” Bäckström said. “How the hell can you be so certain that he didn’t?”
“You can never be entirely certain,” Alm said. “I just know what he says, and I sat for two hours questioning him about this.”
“So what else has he got to say?” Bäckström said. “It would be useful to know.” Preferably before Christmas, he thought.
“He says he waited a few minutes, then he went home, saw Stålhammar going in the door—he waited a couple minutes so that he wouldn’t have to talk to him, then he went in himself and took the lift up to his flat. As soon as he got through the door he calls his son. Calls from his cell to his son’s cell. Simply out of curiosity, and his son is already up on the esplanade when his dad calls, because the paper had received a tip-off about what was going on.
“By then it was ten minutes to eleven, according to the phone records that we checked out this morning,” Alm concluded.
“So you say,” Bäckström said, glowering crossly at his colleague. “Hasn’t the old goat got a landline in his flat?”
“Yes,” Alm said, “and I know what you’re thinking, Bäckström. I’m only telling you what he told me.”
“You can’t help wondering why he called on his cell phone,” Bäckström said. “A mean old prick like that. Why use his cell?”
“Because he already had it in his hand when he walked into his apartment. That’s what he says,” Alm said.
“I’m sorry, Bäckström,” Alm went on, but didn’t seem the slightest bit sorry. “Pretty much everything backs up what Iron Man says. That he left Danielsson at half past ten, went straight home, and was in his apartment at quarter to eleven.”
Bäckström suggested taking a break. The forensics experts had to leave. Had important things to get on with. And Toivonen had also taken the opportunity to go. For some reason he seemed considerably more cheerful than he had when he arrived. He even nodded encouragingly to Bäckström as he left.
“Congratulations, Bäckström,” Toivonen said. “Good to see that you’re back to your old self again.”
22.
Another crazy witness, Bäckström thought, a quarter of an hour later, when the investigating team had reconvened. At worst, it just meant that Stålhammar had gone back to Hasselstigen later that night to kill and rob Karl Danielsson. Just what you’d expect from someone like Iron Man. Sitting there thinking at home in Järnvägsgatan as he drank the last few drops, then suddenly the alcoholic haze inside his head lifted and it dawned on him that twenty thousand is twice as much as ten thousand. Whereupon he rolled back to Danielsson’s and suggested that they carry on partying. He dressed himself up in the raincoat, slippers, and washing-up gloves, then whacked him with his own saucepan lid. That could very easily have been what happened, he thought.
“Thoughts?” Bäckström said, looking round at the other five people in the room. Five mental cases, if you asked him. One Russian, one pretty little darkie, one attack dyke, one retarded folk dancer, and one Woodentop. The curse of being in charge, he thought.
“Well, I for one am not prepared to let go of Stålhammar,” Annika Carlsson said, smiling encouragingly at her boss.
And it takes a dyke to say it, Bäckström thought.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Wouldn’t it be a bit weird if someone entirely new just appeared in Danielsson’s flat right after Stålhammar left?” Carlsson said, looking at Alm.
“Maybe he stood and waited for him to go,” Alm said. “So that he could be alone with his victim.”
“And he was let in too,” Detective Inspector Carlsson persisted. “Which surely suggests that it must have been another of Danielsson’s old friends? Have we had time to go through them all yet, by the way?” she asked, nodding toward Alm.
“Still working on it,” Alm said, shrugging uncomfortably.
“I’m probably inclined to agree with Bäckström and Annika,” Nadja Högberg said. “If you grew up in the old Soviet Union like I did, you stop believing in coincidence, and we’ve got no information that suggests that anyone was watching Danielsson’s flat. And I’m not really too keen on our witness either. How can he be so sure that it was Stålhammar he saw? A man he seems to dislike so intensely. Can we really rule out that he was seeing what he wanted to see? And the fact that he called his son just before eleven doesn’t have to have anything at all to do with our case. It might well be that he was just curious about all the police he saw up on the esplanade. Maybe he just wanted to tip off his son that something was going on. Considering the son works as a photographer on a newspaper, I mean. And whyever would he phone him on his cell if he was inside his flat? We mustn’t forget that. This witness doesn’t feel sound.”
One dyke plus one Russian, Bäckström thought. Mind you, she’s shrewd for a Russian.
“I don’t think we’re going to get any further with this. Not right now, anyway,” Bäckström said. “Was there anything else?”
“That would be Danielsson’s other old friends, I guess,” Alm said. “Like you were wondering, Annika.” Alm nodded toward Annika Carlsson.
“So what do we know about them, then?” Bäckström said.
There were some ten or so “Solna boys,” according to Alm. Who had grown up, gone to school, and worked in Solna and Sundbyberg. The same age as Danielsson or even a bit older, and hardly your typical murderers in light of their age.
“We shouldn’t forget that a murderer over the a
ge of sixty is extremely unusual,” Alm said. “And that applies to the murder of so-called pissheads as well.”
“Well, on that point I have no problem at all with Stålhammar,” Bäckström said.
“Granted,” Alm said. “In a purely statistical and criminological sense, he feels like the best fit.”
Coward, Bäckström thought.
“I’m a police officer,” he said. “Not a statistician or a criminologist.”
“Old men, lonely, drinking too much, their wives have left them, their children never get in touch, some of them have got criminal records, mainly drunk driving or drunk and disorderly, but one of them caused a scene in a bar and was found guilty of actual bodily harm even though he was over seventy when it happened.” Alm sighed. He sounded like he was thinking out loud.
“A real firecracker,” Bäckström said. “What’s that one’s name, then?”
“Halvar Söderman, seventy-two this autumn. It was at his local bar, and it looks like he got into a fight with the owner about some food he had there the week before. He claimed they were trying to poison him. Söderman’s an old car salesman, known as Halfy. The bar owner was Yugoslavian, twenty years younger, but that evidently didn’t stop Söderman from breaking his jaw. Halfy Söderman is a legendary figure among the old Solna drinkers, according to our older colleagues here at the station. He used to be a rocker, sold cars, had a removal company, traded in white goods and pretty much everything else between heaven and earth. He appears in the criminal record register several times. He’s been found guilty of most things, from fraud to ABH. I went back in the records, and he’s been cropping up in our files for the past fifty years. He’s served five stretches in prison. The longest was two and a half years. That was in the mid-sixties when he was found guilty of bodily harm, serious fraud, drunk driving, and a few other things besides. But over the past twenty-five years he’s calmed down a lot. Age seems to have mellowed him. Well, apart from the Yugoslavian, that is.”
“Well, you see?” Bäckström said with a benevolent look on his face. “If you put a saucepan lid in the hands of someone like Halfy, he could probably bring down a whole riot squad on his own. Just curious: Has he got an alibi for the evening of Wednesday, May fourteenth?”
“He says he has,” Alm said. “I’ve only spoken to him over the phone, but he says he’s got an alibi.”
“What is it, then?” Annika Carlsson asked, apparently out of genuine curiosity.
“He didn’t want to go into it, he said,” Alm said. “He told me to go to hell and hung up on me.”
“And what were you thinking of doing about that?” Bäckström grinned.
“I was thinking of going round to see him and interview him officially,” Alm said, not showing much enthusiasm at the prospect.
“Let me know when, and I’ll come along,” Annika Carlsson said with a frown.
Poor Halfy, Bäckström thought.
“Anything else?” he asked, mostly to change the subject.
“Most of them have alibis,” Alm said. “Gunnar Gustafsson and Björn Johansson, or Jockey Gunnar and Flash, as they’re known to their friends, have an alibi, for instance. They were sitting in the restaurant out at Valla until eleven o’clock. Then they went to the home of a third friend and played poker. He lives in a villa out in Spånga.”
“Does he have a name?” Bäckström said. “The one who lives in Spånga?”
“Jonte Ågren. Known as Bällsta Jonte. Former metalworker, seems to have had a small business down by the Bällsta River. Seventy years old. No criminal record, but a well-known tough guy. Used to be one of those guys who set about pieces of pipe and sheet metal with his bare hands when he was younger. He’s also one of the few who are still married, but on the evening that they were playing poker his wife was away, apparently. Visiting her sister down in Nynäshamn. I’m guessing she’s learned from past experience, if you ask me, Bäckström.”
“Any others?” Bäckström said, starting to get interested against his own will.
“Mario Grimaldi, sixty-five,” Alm said. “An Italian immigrant. Came here in the sixties when he worked for Saab down in Södertälje. Ended up best friends with Halfy Söderman, the car salesman, and with his ten-years-older brother, also a car salesman, for that matter. Mind you, he’s been dead for the past ten years, so I think we can rule him out. But Mario’s still alive. He left Saab a few years later and opened a pizza restaurant. According to what I’ve heard, he’s still got a couple pizzerias and a bar out here in Solna and Sundbyberg, but if that’s true, then his name isn’t on any official paperwork.”
“Has he got a nickname, then?” Bäckström wondered.
“Apparently his friends call him the Godfather.” Alm shook his head miserably. “I haven’t managed to get hold of him yet, but we’ll track him down.”
“There, you see?” Bäckström said cheerfully. “There are plenty of gray panthers for us to sink our teeth into, and speaking personally, I’m still putting my money on our former colleague, Stålhammar. Anything else?” he added, glancing at the time.
“I’ve found Danielsson’s bank box,” Nadja said. “It wasn’t easy, but I’ve found it.”
“Well done,” Bäckström said. She was a shrewd old thing. Typical Russian. They could be almost uncannily shrewd, those Russian bastards.
“I’ve left a key to the box on your desk,” Nadja said.
“Excellent,” Bäckström said, seeing before him a little trip into the city and a nice pint of beer.
23.
On Bäckström’s desk lay a safe-deposit box key, a copy of the prosecutor’s decision, and a handwritten note from Nadja. Name and telephone number of the female employee at the bank who could help with the practical details.
That was all he needed, but because Bäckström was by nature a curious person, he had taken a stroll past Nadja’s office on the way out.
“Tell me how you did it, Nadja,” Bäckström said.
It was nothing special, according to Nadja. First she had got hold of a list of customers who had safe-deposit boxes at the branch of Handelsbanken at the corner of Valhallavägen and Erik Dahlbergsgatan in Stockholm. Mostly private customers, and she had chosen to ignore them for the time being, as well as a hundred or so organizations. Private companies, trading companies, limited partnerships, limited companies, a few associations, and a couple estates. She had started with the largest group, the limited companies.
Then she had pulled out the details of people who were on the boards, or in management, or who owned shares—anyone who could be linked to the various companies. No trace whatsoever of a Karl Danielsson.
“But I did find a limited company in which Mario Grimaldi and Roland Stålhammar are on the board and Seppo Laurén, you know, Danielsson’s young neighbor at Hasselstigen, is the managing director. Which seemed a bit too strange for my liking,” Nadja Högberg said, shaking her head.
“Yes, well, he’s retarded, isn’t he? Laurén, I mean?”
“Possibly,” Nadja said. “Alm suggested that he was, and I haven’t met him myself, but he hasn’t been declared legally incapable and he’s never gone bankrupt, so there are no formal reasons why he shouldn’t be a managing director. And that was presumably the whole point for Danielsson.”
“This is phenomenal,” Bäckström said. Fuck, this Russian ought to be head of the Security Police, he thought. Get the old boys there moving a bit.
“It’s a small private company. Dormant for the past ten years or so, so it isn’t actually doing anything. And it doesn’t seem to have any assets either. It’s called the Writer’s Cottage Ltd. According to the articles of association, it offers writing help to private individuals and companies. Everything from advertising brochures to birthday speeches. The two women who set up the business evidently worked as secretaries in some advertising agency, and presumably they thought this would make them some extra money. It looks like they never got enough customers, so it was sold after a couple years to the the
n detective inspector Roland Stålhammar.”
“Who’d have thought it?” Bäckström said, looking almost as sly as he sounded.
“If you ask me, I think Stålhammar and Grimaldi were used as fronts by Danielsson. If there’s any truth in what I’ve heard about Stålhammar, I doubt he knows anything about this.”
“So what was Danielsson using it for? The Writer’s Cottage Ltd., I mean.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering too,” Nadja said. “Because it doesn’t seem to have been active at all. But on the other hand, it did have a safe-deposit box.
“I called the bank,” Nadja went on, “and after a bit of reluctant digging in their customer files they found an old power of attorney giving Karl Danielsson access to the company’s deposit box. It turns out that the last time he visited the box was the same day he was murdered, the afternoon of Wednesday, May fourteenth. The last time before that was in the middle of December last year.”
“Who’d have thought it?” Bäckström said. “What does he have in the box, then?”
“It’s the smallest box you can get,” Nadja said. “Thirty-six centimeters long, twenty-seven wide, and about eight centimeters deep. So it can’t be very much. What do you think?”
“Considering Danielsson’s character, I’d guess at some betting slips and old receipts,” Bäckström said. “What about you, Nadja?”
“Maybe a pot of gold,” Nadja said with a broad smile.
“Now, where would he have got that from?” Bäckström said, shaking his head.
“When I was a child back home in Russia … no … When I was a child back in the Soviet Union, and everything was miserable and poor and dull for the most part, and completely terrible far too often, my old father used to try to cheer me up. Never forget, Nadja, he used to say, at the end of the rainbow there’s a pot full of gold.”
Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original) Page 11