Nothing strange about those either, thought Lewin as he put the bundles back in the box. The colleague out in Lidingö, for example. He lived in Lidingö, worked with the Lidingö police department, and his car had been illegally parked the whole weekend. According to information from his co-workers, this was because he had the flu and was in bed from Thursday evening until Monday morning.
Nothing strange about that either. When Lewin talked with one of the bedridden illegal parker’s colleagues twenty years ago, he remembered that he’d called down to the station as early as Friday morning and asked one of the other officers to move his car. They could get the keys in his apartment up on Torsviksvägen. But it never happened. Suddenly there were more important things to do than deal with illegally parked vehicles.
There was a clear pattern in Mattei’s material about more qualified crazies. The origin of the information was almost always a tip from various individual informants. Extremely few of the conceivable Palme assassins had ended up in the files on the basis of information the police had produced through their own detective work. The constantly recurring reason they ended up in the Palme investigation was that they all hated Olof Palme and had also talked about it to individuals in their vicinity. These individuals had then contacted the police, as a rule pretty soon after the prime minister had been murdered, and told about their strange friend, acquaintance, neighbor, co-worker, ex-spouse, partner, and so on, who had promised to kill him. Conspicuously often by shooting him, and always with a weapon to which they had legal access. Hunters, marksmen, reservists, gun collectors.
Their qualifications were not impressive either. To start with Mattei sorted out the cases of pure psychosis, known addicts, and professional criminals. What remained were several hundred odd, single men, often extremists, almost always with broken relationships, and usually with a bad name in their own neighborhoods. Almost exclusively men of Swedish origin. Immigrants-for example the “gook” who according to Witness Three supposedly ran into her on David Bagares gata-were a clear minority. This was about Swedish men. The kind you talked to only if you had to, so as not to rile them up unnecessarily.
“I’m a hundred percent convinced that it’s Tore Andersson who murdered Olof Palme. On several occasions he’s shown me a black attaché case with a revolver in it and said he was going to shoot Palme. The most recent time this happened was only a week before the murder, and I know he was in Stockholm visiting an acquaintance who lives on Söder, the same weekend Palme was murdered. And besides, he had definite information that Palme was spying on behalf of the Russians. Tore also corresponds well with the description of the perpetrator. He’s rugged, about six feet tall, dark, and forty-four years old. Tore is something of a loner…”
“It was Stefan Nilsson who murdered Olof Palme. He has a definite radical right-wing image and is a very eccentric and exhibitionistic person. At the same time he’s a so-called lone wolf, and as far as I know he’s never been involved with a woman. He’s forty-one years old, and in the hall to his apartment there’s a closet where he stores a number of firearms. When Palme was here at a conference less than a year ago I know Nilsson visited the hotel where Palme was staying to try to find out which room he was in…”
“After much consideration I want to convey the following. I have a former boyfriend who, after being trained as a security guard, moved to Stockholm and got a job at a security company there. For the past several years he’s said to have lived in Old Town right in the vicinity of the street where Palme lived…”
Mattei had a simple matrix she held them up against-about forty years old, about six feet tall, dark-colored hair without streaks of blond or gray, relatively sturdy body build, familiar with the area, familiar with the use of firearms, access to legal weapons-and at a rate of ten per hour she then put them aside.
In nine cases out of ten the lead file that her colleagues had prepared consisted exclusively of the tips they’d received. A letter, often anonymous, a telephone call, or even a personal visit to the police. Often a courier was used because the informant himself dared not risk appearing because the perpetrator would then immediately realize who had told on him. In nine cases out of ten it had never been more than that.
In one case out of ten things had happened. The police had done searches on the person pointed out in various registries, interviews had been held with him and persons who knew him. On several occasions he had even been tailed. It was unclear why, because these individuals were oddly similar to a number of others on whom nothing more had been done than receive the tip, give it a serial number, open a new lead file, put the papers in a binder, and put the binder on a shelf.
What’s the use of this? thought Lisa Mattei and sighed. The only consolation was that none of them seemed especially like the perpetrator that Lars Martin Johansson or Anna Holt had talked about. No acuity, no presence of mind or merciless capacity for practical action; not familiar with the area; no interesting contacts. What remained were chance encounters with the victim, where the probability was so slight that it could scarcely be calculated. The same chance that both Johansson and Holt had dismissed early on. Why in the name of heaven should a person who had lived his entire life in a small community in northern Värmland suddenly get in the car and drive four hundred miles one way to Stockholm, wander around the city, and quite unexpectedly run into the person he hated more than anyone in the world?
He’d been away that weekend. No one had talked with him before he left. When he came back on Sunday evening he was a different person. He made hints to people around him…he’d shown one of them his gun…
But you leave me cold, thought Mattei, putting him back in the same binder where he’d been the whole time.
27
Already by Thursday evening Bäckström had used up the grace Johansson had measured out to him. A quickly escalating activity in which Bäckström sounded more and more like Bäckström with every new call and expressed himself downright offensively in the last one. Pure telephone terror, and Johansson’s secretary was not only sick and tired of him; she hated him deeply and heartily.
Now you’ve had it, you little butterball, she thought as she knocked on Johansson’s door.
Now you’ll get yours, you fat little slob, thought Lars Martin Johansson five minutes later. Then he called Holt and told her he wanted to meet with her immediately.
“So you mean to say he called Helena cunt-lips?” asked Holt ten minutes later.
“Sure,” said Johansson. “We have it on tape. Along with all the other indecencies he spewed out.”
“If he did that he’ll be immediately removed from duty,” said Holt.
“Sure,” said Johansson, shrugging his shoulders. “Talk with our attorney if you need to. Do what you want with him. Boil the bastard for glue, if you want. But before you do it, I want to know what he wants, and when I know that I want him to stop calling.”
“I’ll arrange it,” said Holt. “But before I do that there’s another thing I have to talk with you about.”
“I’m listening,” said Johansson. “With excitement,” he added.
“I talked with an old acquaintance of yours. Officer Berg who works with the uniformed police in Västerort.”
“Depends on what you mean by acquaintance,” said Johansson, who no longer seemed pleased. “The only Berg I know is dead. Erik Berg, his uncle. My predecessor at SePo and an excellent policeman. Not the least like that neo-Nazi he’s unfortunately related to.”
“I’ve read his file in the Palme material,” said Holt. “But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.”