There was an ongoing pattern in what Mattei heard. An expected pattern. You believed in what you had worked with or in any event what you’d worked with the most. On the other hand, you seldom set much store by anything you hadn’t been involved in investigating. On one point, however, with one very surprising exception, they were in agreement. All except one of those asked categorically rejected the so-called police track, and the one who believed in it the least was the investigator who at various times had devoted five years of his life as a police officer to trying to find out what his colleagues had actually been up to when Palme was murdered.
“I promise and assure you,” he said, nodding seriously at his visitor. “All those leads that the media inflated all those years. Once you sit down and figure out what it’s really about, at best it’s pure nonsense. I say at best because far too often there was real ill will on the part of a lot of extremists and criminals who fingered our colleagues.”
There’s still a certain something about old murder investigators, thought Mattei as she got into her service vehicle to leave the little red-painted Sörmland cottage where the last of her interview victims now enjoyed his rural retirement. Where she had been offered coffee and rolls and juice and cookies. Especially the retired ones, she thought. Retirement loosened the tongue and gave them both the time and the desire to talk about how things really were. Especially when they could do so for a younger female colleague who seemed both “quick-witted and humble.”
If they only knew, Mattei thought. Although it was mostly pretty harmless, and most of them were good storytellers at least. There was only one she dreaded meeting, and during that meeting she mostly sat gritting her teeth while her small tape recorder whirled and her interview subject expounded about Olof Palme and everything else under the sun.
Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström, “legendary murder investigator with thirty years in the profession and considered by many the foremost of them all,” according to the anonymous source that was frequently quoted in Dagens Nyheter’s most recent article about mismanagement at the national crime bureau. This in combination with the Swedish Envy was also, according to the same source, the only explanation for why just over a year ago the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had banished said Bäckström from the National Homicide Commission to the Stockholm police department’s property investigation squad.
“So that genius from Lappland needs help clearing up Palme,” said Bäckström, while leaning back in his chair and scratching his belly button through the biggest gap in the Hawaiian shirt that stretched across his stomach.
“No, that’s not how it is,” said Mattei. “We’ve been given the task of doing an overview of the registration of the material in the Palme investigation, and he was interested in your viewpoints. How the various parts of the material should be prioritized.”
“Sure, sure, like I believe that,” said Bäckström with a crafty look behind half-closed eyelids. “Imagine that, look over the registration.”
“I understand you were involved in the initial stage and that it was you, among others, who ferreted out the thirty-three-year-old, Åke Victor Gunnarsson.”
“That’s right,” said Bäckström. “I was the one who found that little piece of shit, and if I’d just been allowed to run the case, then I would have seen to it that we got to the bottom of it. Instead some older so-called colleague came in and took over. Someone who’d licked his tongue brown up the backside of the so-called police leadership. If you’re wondering about all the question marks that still remain around Gunnarsson, then he’s the one you should go to. Not me.”
“Is there any particular track you think ought to be prioritized?” said Mattei to change the subject.
“Paper and pen,” said Bäckström, nodding encouragingly. “So you have something to take notes with,” he explained as he put his own ballpoint pen in his right ear to remove some irritating deposits of wax.
“In the material there’s quite a bit you can carry down to the basement,” said Bäckström, viewing the outcome of his hygienic efforts and wiping the pen on the desk blotter. “Start by taking out all the old ladies. Motive, modus operandi, and all conceivable perpetrators that are old ladies, whether or not they wear trousers. I won’t go into what I thought about the so-called victim, but an old lady would never have managed to take the wrapping off Palme in that way. Not even an old lady like Palme,” he clarified. “It was a competent bastard who was holding the ax-handle that time.”
After that Bäckström talked for almost an hour without letting himself be interrupted. About conceivable perpetrators, motives, and methods.
According to Chief Inspector Bäckström, for the most part everyone, that is to say completely normal Swedish men like himself, had a motive to assassinate the prime minister. The driving force-according to his definitive, professional experience-also would be stronger the more you had to do with the victim. At the same time the good thing about that was that the frequency of old ladies, regardless of whether they wore pants or skirts, was especially high around someone like Palme, which in turn provided more opportunities to do a thorough cleanup in all those papers.
“Tell me who you associate with, I’ll tell you who you are,” Bäckström summarized. “There’s a lot worth considering in our old Bible.”
“I interpret this to mean that you don’t believe in the often stated hypothesis of a solitary madman who by chance happened to catch sight of Olof Palme outside the Grand cinema,” Mattei alertly interjected.
Pure nonsense, according to Bäckström. First, you didn’t need to be crazy to have good reason to shoot Palme. On the other hand, secondly, you had to have “a fucking lot of spine,” and thirdly, it would naturally be the very best if you were sitting on a little inside information about what someone like Palme was up to.
“Forget about Christer Pettersson and all the other drunks,” Bäckström snorted. “Gooks, drunks, and common hoods. Why should they attack Palme? He was the type who supported them. What we’re talking about is a guy with first-class knowledge of the situation, primo sense of locale, handy with the rectifier, and a fucking lot of ice in his belly.”
“You mean, for example, a police officer or military man or someone with that background?” asked Mattei.
“Yes, or some old marksman or hunter. Or maybe that Gilljo even. Only author in this country who’s worth the name, if you ask me,” said Bäckström. “Besides, he’s actually there on the lists of conceivable suspects. We got a fucking lot of tips about him. So take a look at Johnny Gilljo if you don’t have anything better to do. I believe more in someone like him, or a military man, than in another police officer,” Bäckström summarized, nodding. “I mean, me and the other cops could always hope we would get the chance to arrest him when he was drunk,” he clarified. “Small consolation is still consolation, even when the general misery is at its greatest. As it was while Palme was alive.”