I don’t suppose I can even think about opening the window on a day like this, sighed Anna Holt, glancing at the sunshine behind the drawn blinds. She could also forget about a couch of her own. In any event Johansson hadn’t implemented any concrete measures in that direction, and he was the only one at the entire bureau, of course, who had a sufficiently large, comfortable couch. According to well-informed sources he used it exclusively for his regular midday slumber. So far no one had seen him reading on it.
That man is like a large child, thought Holt. She sighed again and started reading the papers on Palme assassin Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her.
Christer Pettersson was born on April 23, 1947, in Solna. He had passed away less than three years ago at the age of fifty-seven, on September 29, 2004. He showed up for the first time in the Palme investigation’s material on Sunday the second of March 1986, less than two days after the assassination of the prime minister.
By then Jan Lewin and his colleagues who were responsible for the internal investigation were done with their first compilations of previous violent crimes that had occurred in the vicinity of the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan, where the prime minister was shot. It was an extensive list that included thousands of crimes and more than a thousand persons. One of them was Christer Pettersson, who sixteen years earlier, in December 1970, had gotten into a quarrel with a man unknown to him down in the subway, only fifty yards from the place where the prime minister was murdered. Pettersson chased the man up to the street, where he finished the discussion by stabbing his victim through the heart with a bayonet he was carrying. Within the course of a week the police had arrested him, and in June the following year he was convicted of homicide and sentenced to a closed psychiatric ward.
To be sure, it was not the first time he’d run afoul of the Swedish legal system. In the court records there were notations on several hundred crimes, from the first time in 1964, when he was seventeen years old, and up to his death. The final notations were made in the crime registry during the summer of the year he died. Pettersson had spent almost half of his adult life in prisons, mental hospitals, and rehabilitation centers for addicts. Based on what was known about his criminal activity there was a strong element of violence. At the same time there were no notes indicating that he made use of a firearm, either before or after the murder of the prime minister. No signs either of any political or ideological motives. Pettersson’s violence seemed to have been vented on persons in the same social situation as himself or who were expected to maintain control of people like him. Men he’d argued with or robbed of money and drugs, women he’d known or lived with, whom he’d also assaulted. Plus police officers, watchmen, store security guards.
Ordinary theft and shoplifting charges dominated his criminality in terms of numbers, and the particular crime victim who appeared most often as the complainant in his record was the state liquor store. That was also how he acquired three of the four nicknames that the police had noted, “Hit-and-Run,” “Dasher,” and “Half Bend.”
Pettersson would go into the liquor store, order a bottle of vodka, schnapps, or cream liqueur, snatch the bottle as soon as the clerk set it down on the counter between them, and without further ado “run” or “dash” out of the store. A “half bend” was the body movement the liquor store employee was expected to execute when he pulled out the half-bottle of aquavit that for practical reasons was often stored under the counter near the cash register and that seemed to be one of the most common orders in Pettersson’s life.
Against this background his fourth alias was even more astonishing. Pettersson was also known as “the Count.” A title he often emphasized to his acquaintances. A real “count.”
Why he was called that did not appear in the police papers, but for Holt the mystery was already solved by the precise Lisa Mattei. Under an asterisk in the margin she’d made the following note in her neat handwriting: “CP born and grew up in Bromma. Middle-class home. Father self-employed. Mother a housewife. Dropped out of high school. Went to drama school for a few years. In his association with like-minded in the same situation often presented himself and his background as considerably finer than was actually the case.”
Heavy drug user, professional criminal of the simplest type-all these were known facts, thought Holt, but it wasn’t what she knew that made her feel less comfortable after the introductory reading. Already on day three, Sunday, March 2, 1986, he ended up on a list among thousands of similar types because of a knife murder that had happened sixteen years earlier. After that none of her colleagues seemed to have given a thought to either him or his doings for more than two years. Only during the summer of 1988 did they start to investigate him, and in December the same year he was arrested.
Why just then? thought Holt. And why in the name of God did it take so long?
8
Without lowering the level of either her precision or her objectivity, Mattei nonetheless tried to facilitate her task. Using her computer, she pulled out all the summaries and analyses in the Palme material. Then she organized them in chronological order to get an easy understanding of what information was deemed so important at a certain point in time that it required special consideration.
Because the material was a bit thin for her taste, she then used the various registries in the investigation to extract a selection of documents that she pulled out and leafed through to see what they were about. Approximately every tenth document couldn’t be located, because it had ended up in the wrong binder, the whole binder had gone astray, or the document had simply been lost.
Wonder if Johansson is aware of that? thought Mattei.
Then she carried out a number of simple, volume-related estimates of how much work her previous colleagues had expended on various working hypotheses or investigation leads. All those “tracks” as the first investigation leader, police chief in Stockholm Hans Holmér, had chosen to call them, even though the word had a completely different, very specific criminological meaning.
There were lots of Holmér’s tracks, thought Mattei. But almost none of the usual clues. No foot- or fingerprints, no fibers, bodily fluids, or abandoned belongings that might lead to a perpetrator. Obviously no DNA, for that didn’t even exist in the material world of the police when the prime minister was assassinated. All they had were the two revolver bullets that had been put to use the night of the murder, and the circumstance that it was ordinary people who found them at the crime scene and turned them over to the police had not made the burden easier to bear.
By means of a number of documents that could be ascribed to the various tracks, within a day Mattei had already formed a reasonable understanding of what her fellow officers had been doing for twenty years. The various tracks had appeared and vanished. As in a winter landscape, where certain track marks are more common than others.
First in and first out was the person who to start with was called the “thirty-three-year-old” in the media, but shortly thereafter appeared under his given name, Åke Victor Gunnarsson. In the first days after the murder the police received a number of tips about Gunnarsson. He possessed a reasonable likeness to the description of the perpetrator, was said to own a revolver of the type the perpetrator had used, to have contacts with an organization hostile to Palme, and to have expressed himself hatefully about the murder victim on several occasions. Last but not least he had been in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene at the time of the murder, and in the hours afterward he had been running around in the area, behaving strangely to say the least.