55
The reporter from the top evening paper was a punctual man. He arrived on the dot, parked in front of Ara’s taxi, got into the passenger seat beside him and opened negotiations by pulling out a bundle of five-hundred-kronor notes.
‘I’ve got the dough here,’ the reporter said, showing Ara the money before tucking the bundle into his inside pocket. ‘I’ve brought the pictures you looked at when we last met,’ he went on, handing Ara a plastic folder containing the photographs.
‘Okay,’ Ara said. He pulled them out and quickly leafed through to the largest picture of the man he had seen. ‘This is the guy,’ Ara said, putting his finger on the man’s forehead.
‘How sure are you, then?’
‘Hundred per cent,’ Ara said. ‘It’s him. No question.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ the reporter said. ‘Why couldn’t you have said that the last time we met?’
‘The circumstances weren’t right for a deal,’ Ara said, shaking his head. ‘Wrong time, wrong place, and you didn’t have any money to show me. It just didn’t feel right, that’s all. Check out the guy in the picture and you’ll see what I mean.’
‘So you haven’t spoken to anyone else in the meantime?’ the reporter asked.
‘No,’ Ara said. ‘I thought I’d give you a second chance first. Besides, that’s not my style.’
‘But you must have spoken to the cops?’ the reporter persisted. ‘I seem to remember you telling me that when we last met. So there’s a good chance you saw a picture of this bloke then.’
‘Yes,’ Ara said. ‘I’ve seen several pictures of him. I’ve met the local sheriff four times now, if you’re wondering. Might as well move into that police station out in Solna. Have I identified him? Negative. Why haven’t I identified him? No reward,’ Ara said with a grin. ‘And I’m not exactly keen to end up in court as a witness, like I said. But I did help them put together a photofit picture.’
‘I can understand all that,’ the reporter said, grinning back. ‘One more question. That photofit picture, how good is it?’
‘Okay,’ Ara said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Your picture’s much better, and there’s absolutely no doubt that he’s the man I saw.’
‘Sounds good,’ the reporter said. ‘Half now, like we agreed,’ and he handed over the bundle of notes.
‘I’ve got a question as well,’ Ara said, putting the money in his pocket without counting it, then nodding towards the man in the picture. ‘Who is he? Should I get out of the country, or what?’
‘Definitely time to lie low,’ the reporter replied. ‘I’m assuming you won’t be talking to anyone but me. If you stick to that, there’s no need to worry.’
‘Who is he?’ Ara repeated, nodding once more towards the picture of the man he’d identified. ‘Has he got a name, or what?’
‘He’s a proper crazy bastard,’ the reporter said with a shrug. ‘What his name is doesn’t matter right now. If you keep quiet and lie low, and talk to no one but me, things will be fine. He won’t have any idea of how we managed to get hold of his name.’
Then they parted, with a promise from the reporter that he’d be in touch as soon as he’d completed the checks they always had to carry out in his line of work before anything ended up in the paper. Ara spent the rest of the afternoon driving his taxi, until he handed the car over to the colleague who was going to do the evening shift. Then he took the underground home to Kista, picked up some food on the way, then walked quickly back to the house where he lived.
Time to lie low, he thought, and the lowest option was actually his flat, seeing as it was a sublet and he wasn’t even registered as living there. He leaned forward to key in the door code, and at that moment someone came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
Shit! Ara thought, spinning round with the bag of groceries held up to his chest as protection, in the absence of anything better.
‘Ara, Ara Dosti, it’s been a while,’ said the man who had appeared out of nowhere and practically scared the life out of him, even though his whole face was beaming. Ara recognized him at once.
‘Omar!’ Ara said, having trouble concealing both his surprise and his relief. ‘You scared the shit out of me, man!’
‘Long time, no see,’ Omar said. He grinned, then gave Ara a bear hug. ‘Must be ten years? More maybe, now I come to think about it.’
‘For ever,’ Ara agreed, even though he’d seen a picture of his old schoolmate just two days before in Solna police station.
56
After the meeting and his customary lunch, Bäckström had returned to work, closed the door and tried to come up with a suitable reason to go home for a much needed and well-deserved nap. He felt tired, a bit listless, unable to think of anything. He also felt a bit bloated, and it was when he tried to remedy this that things took a turn for the worse. When he attempted to ease the pressure by unleashing a thunderclap, he found himself the victim of a treacherous and rather loose surprise. Matters were made worse by the fact that he was wearing an ivory-coloured linen suit that day, so some sort of active intervention was now urgently required.
First, he barricaded the door with the visitor’s chair, closed the blinds and pulled his trousers off so as to be able to ascertain the extent of the calamity that had befallen him. Not good, not good at all, he thought as he inspected the dark skid-marks on the pale linen at the rear of his well-tailored trousers. There was no question of attempting to sneak to the toilet in that outfit.
Seeing as he had neither water nor paper towels in his office, he was obliged to sacrifice both some of his fine Russian vodka and the silk handkerchief he’d tucked into his top pocket when he left home that morning. Fortunately, he also had a bottle of aftershave in his capacious desk and, with a little help from that, he was able to conceal the olfactory aspect of his devious assassin.
Ten minutes later he was able to pull his trousers back on and stand at his window to air them as he called for a taxi and checked that everything was in order before leaving the office. If you find yourself in an acute situation, you mustn’t just rush into things, Bäckström thought, discreetly making his way sideways through the main office where most of his investigative team was based, and, as he made sure to hold his mobile close to his ear the whole time, all he had to do was nod and grunt at the colleagues he passed on the way out.
In the taxi on his way home he had attempted to restore his sense of inner calm, while his driver – who, to judge by his skin-colour and sense of direction, appeared to have arrived from Mogadishu that morning – tried to find Kungsholmen and Inedalsgatan, where Bäckström lived, and by the time he was finally able to close his front door behind him it was already half past three in the afternoon.
Once he was safe, he was at last able to get to grips with the unfortunate situation in which fate had landed him. First, he took off all his clothes and dropped them into the laundry basket, then showered and put on his dressing-gown, poured himself a stiff Fernet-Branca to settle his stomach, and settled down in front of his computer to see if he had received any serious offers for Isak’s final abode.
Naturally, he hadn’t. Not that he could expect anything else on a day like this, he thought, glowering malevolently at the gilded cage in front of the window, taking up unnecessary space now that its former occupant was hopefully halfway to the pet cemetery. Even though he and Isak had spent only six weeks together, from late March to early May, he had been one of the great disappointments in Bäckström’s life. A very grave disappointment, to put it mildly.
Isak had not only shown himself to be largely beyond education, but was also filthy, to an almost unbelievable extent. He ate constantly, enough for a small horse, and shat like an elephant the whole time he was eating. After that, he would conclude each meal by spraying leftover seeds, nuts, shells, assorted bird treats and his own excrement all around him. Most of this ended up on the floor outside his cage, and even Bäckström’s Finnish cleaner and fa
vourite waitress, his very own White Tornado, had complained about Isak and suggested that Bäckström ought to get rid of the bastard.
‘Any suggestions?’ Bäckström had asked, as he had been thinking along the same lines himself, and had even considered trying to flush him down the toilet, though Isak was a bit on the large side for that sort of intervention and there was a considerable risk that he’d get caught in the U-bend on the way down. In the worst case scenario, he might be able to hack his way out using that lethal hooked beak and cause a flood in the building Bäckström lived in.
The Finnish woman had offered to wring Isak’s neck with her bare hands, but Bäckström had thought better of it, rejected her offer and instead went back to the pet shop to have a serious word with the useless salesman who had landed him in this wretched situation. He had even offered the rogue the chance to buy Isak back at a drastically reduced price. His efforts failed, however, because of a downturn in the market for used parrots.
‘It usually picks up over the summer,’ the assistant had said, shrugging his thin shoulders apologetically. ‘When people are about to go off on holiday with the kids, there’s usually an increase in sales of second-hand birds – parakeets, for instance,’ he explained.
Over the summer, Bäckström thought, shaking his head. I’ll probably be dead by summer, he reasoned. Because Isak wasn’t only filthy – he was also a noisy bastard. After just one week he had ruined Bäckström’s usually untroubled sleep, even though he had done exactly as the parrot expert had told him. He turned all the lights off in the room and covered the cage with a thick blanket so that even little Isak realized it was night, time to go off to the feathered equivalent of the land of Nod, and, more specifically, time to keep his beak shut until it was morning and the blanket was removed for another day.
Isak hadn’t shared this opinion, and at any moment – and preferably during the early hours of the morning – he would wake Bäckström with his hoarse cackle, which cut like a knife through an open eye, through the silence and the night and his spiritual peace. What the fuck am I going to do now? Bäckström wondered. Towards the end of their time together he was spending most of his waking hours trying to figure out a way to get rid of his tormentor.
Selling him online was out of the question after Anchor Carlsson had paid her little home visit and nearly finished off both Bäckström and his super-salami. Not just filthy and noisy, but also an unusually malicious slanderer. Rocket fuel for vicious tongues the moment Isak opened his beak in front of his new owners, who by then would be well aware of his former owner’s identity. The thought of the rumours that might spread once Isak ended up with a new owner was enough to bring Bäckström out in a cold sweat. The same applied to the idea of taking him to the vet to be put down, while he and all the other pet-owners sat in the waiting room listening to Isak’s final words.
Taking out his old friend Siggy and shooting his head off was out of the question as well, certainly in his own home, anyway, considering all that had happened the last time gunsmoke filled his apartment. It would be even worse to follow the Finnish woman’s advice and strangle the fucker. Potentially life-threatening, Bäckström thought, seeing as he had almost lost a finger when he tried to give him a peanut and tickle his neck on the first day of their acquaintance.
Bäckström had sunk into dark rumination and had spent a whole week pondering the matter until his neighbour, little Edvin, had solved the problem for him. Even though he was only ten years old and looked like a bespectacled lizard.
57
After a restorative afternoon nap Bäckström felt considerably brighter and took the opportunity to have dinner with his tame reporter from the main evening paper. It was now more than twenty-four hours since the police press conference, and it was high time he made himself aware of how much the fourth estate knew.
They met in their usual bar over on Östermalm, where even a national celebrity like Bäckström would be left in peace, and, as soon as they had had a few drinks before eating, Bäckström’s host had got straight to the point.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked, raising his scotch on the rocks. ‘Have you found that silver Merc yet?’
‘My colleagues are grappling with that,’ Bäckström replied, downing half his Russian vodka and chasing it down with a few swigs of cold Czech pilsner.
‘What about your witness?’ the reporter went on. ‘How’s he doing? Has he identified that character you’ve shown him pictures of?’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ Bäckström said. ‘We’ve shown pictures to lots of people.’ He must have talked to that taxi-driver, he thought.
‘I was thinking of the witness who saw the perpetrator jump in that Merc when he left Eriksson’s house out in Bromma,’ the reporter clarified.
‘I still don’t know who you’re talking about,’ Bäckström persisted. ‘We’ve got several witnesses who saw both the car and its occupants. Tell me who you’ve been talking to instead. Then maybe I can help you.’ That gave you something to suck on, he thought.
His host contented himself with a thoughtful murmur before beckoning the waiter over to take their order.
‘What can I get you?’ he asked. ‘I was thinking of having the stuffed chicken breast. What do you think?’
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Bäckström said with a shrug. ‘I’m going to have the salt beef with root vegetables, another lager and a little more vodka,’ he went on, nodding to the waiter.
They spent the following hour eating, drinking and talking of other matters, and it was only over coffee and cognac that they returned to the matter in hand.
‘What do you think about a bit of tit-for-tat? Regarding our deceased lawyer, Mr Eriksson, I mean,’ the reporter suggested.
‘You start,’ Bäckström said. ‘Make me an offer.’
‘I’ve got the name of your perpetrator, the man who got into the silver Merc. At two o’clock in the morning when he’d just left Eriksson’s home. What can you give me in return?’
Definitely our little taxi-driver, Bäckström thought. Who chose lots of money over Bäckström’s own cretinous colleagues.
‘I’ll give you a piece of advice,’ Bäckström said. ‘Whoever tipped you off got the wrong guy. So unless you want to throw a load of money away on an unnecessary slander charge and all sorts of other crap, I’d be very careful before you publish that.’
‘What makes you think that?’ the reporter asked. ‘I interpret that to mean that you’re saying we’re on the wrong track. How can you be so sure?’
‘Because it isn’t him,’ Bäckström said. He had a fairly good idea of who their witness, the taxi-driver, had chosen not to identify ever since he saw the photofit picture that the very same taxi-driver had helped Ek put together.
‘But how can you be so sure?’ the reporter persisted. ‘How can you even know we’re talking about the same bloke?’
‘Well, I’m talking about Angel García Gomez,’ Bäckström said with a shrug. ‘But, naturally, if you’ve got another suggestion, I’d be happy to swap names.’
To judge by his expression, he didn’t, Bäckström thought.
‘How can you be so sure it isn’t him, then?’
‘Because he’s got an alibi for the time of the crime and, just for once, it hasn’t been provided by one of his associates in that club for middle-aged motorcycle enthusiasts.’
‘You’ve had him under surveillance,’ the reporter said, more as a statement than a question.
‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that point, as I’m sure you can appreciate. He’s got an alibi. End of story.’
‘Why is it so impossible ever to be properly happy?’ his host said with a sigh.
An hour later, after another cognac and one last nightcap to welcome in the coming summer, Bäckström and his host had gone their separate ways on the best of terms. Even if no business had actually been conducted.
‘Thanks, Bäckström, thanks for the tip-off, and even more s
o for the warning,’ the reporter said, even though he hadn’t managed to get anything out of Bäckström other than a well-meant warning to stay out of things that really weren’t his or his colleagues’ business.
‘What can I do for you in return?’
‘The usual,’ Bäckström said, shrugging his shoulders. Many a mickle, he thought.
58
After his meeting with his tame contact within the fourth estate, Bäckström had gone straight home and to bed. He hadn’t even had to mix a last little nightcap before he fell asleep. Instead he had lain down on his nice big Hästens bed with his hands folded over his stomach and, while he waited for sleep to come, he thought about little Edvin, who had helped him get rid of Isak the Terrible.
Edvin was small and skinny. Thin as dental floss, and shorter than the length Bäckström himself used each morning and night to floss the crown jewels with which he, as a result of his increasing wealth, had been able to replace his original adornment. Little Edvin had round, horn-rimmed glasses, with lenses as thick as bottle-bottoms, and he spoke like a book with very small print. A little, well-read, bespectacled lizard who had moved into the building a few years before with his mum and dad, and the only good thing about that was that he had been brought up the old-fashioned way, and was the only child both in his own family and in the building where he and Bäckström lived.
But Edvin was also very useful when it came to running small errands, such as fetching newspapers, mixers for drinks, and various titbits from the crooks who ran the delicatessen in the arcade up on Sankt Eriksgatan. But it would still be a few years before Bäckström could send him off on more serious missions to buy drink. But that time would come, and Bäckström was already rather fond of him. In fact, in his more sensitive moments, he used to think of little Edvin with the same warmth with which he still remembered his prematurely departed friend Egon.
The Sword of Justice Page 21