32
Bäckström was little, fat, and primitive, but if necessary he could be both sly and slow to forget.
Of the country’s seventeen thousand police officers he was also the one who had the largest professionally adapted vocabulary, with hundreds of crude names for everyone he didn’t like: immigrants, homosexuals, criminals, and regular Joes regardless of gender. In brief, everyone who wasn’t like him, of which there were extremely few. Taken together these human qualities had made him famous within the corps he had served for thirty years. Detective Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström was a “legendary murder investigator” who, in contrast to most other legends, was active in one thing or another.
A year earlier he had been exiled from his natural habitat at the National Homicide Commission to the Stockholm police department’s property investigation squad. Or the police lost-and-found warehouse as all real policemen, including Bäckström himself, called this final storage place for stolen bicycles, lost wallets, and strayed police souls.
Bäckström was a victim. Of unfortunate circumstances in general and evil plots in particular. But most of all of the Royal Swedish Envy. His former chief, Lars Martin Johansson, simply could not cope with Bäckström’s successful battle against the constantly increasing and ever more serious criminality. When Bäckström solved an unusually complicated murder case of a young female police candidate from Växjö, Johansson wove a rope from all the strands of slander, put the noose around Bäckström’s neck, and personally gave him the final kick.
Despite an unsympathetic, grudging, and flat-out destructive environment, Bäckström tried to make the best of his situation. Work as a property investigator offered interesting opportunities for anyone sufficiently alert to seize opportunity in flight. That wouldn’t include his new colleagues, who were a deplorable congregation of unimaginative pietists who did not even realize that they were sitting with the whole bunch of keys to the gigantic treasure chest that contained “stolen,” “misplaced,” or simply “ownerless” goods. Something that Bäckström of course realized as soon as he crossed the threshold to his new place of work.
The most deplorable colleague at his new job was an old acquaintance from the time when Bäckström worked at the homicide squad in Stockholm, Detective Inspector Göran Wiijnbladh. Wiijnbladh had worked at the Stockholm police technical squad until 1990, when he took partial retirement and was moved over to what was then the lost property warehouse. He was a technician from the old tribe, and apart from six years of elementary school, less than a year at the old police academy, and a few weeklong courses for crime technicians, he had carefully avoided all theoretical digressions, firmly convinced as he was that the only knowledge worth the name was what had been obtained through practical work. It was this attitude that would prove to be his misfortune.
Wiijnbladh’s major problem at that time was that his wife had betrayed him. This was relatively simple, in that she made up approximately ninety-nine percent of his total quantity of problems. It was worse that she did it quite openly, which considering the nature of the operation also conflicted with its fundamental idea. Worst of all, however, was that she preferred to do it with other police officers, and because this had been going on since the day after their wedding, there wasn’t a department in the Stockholm police where one or more co-workers hadn’t put horns on fellow officer Wiijnbladh.
In the autumn of 1989 Wiijnbladh decided to do something about this by poisoning her with thallium he had come across at work. During his preparations he happened to poison himself. He handled his thallium the same way he was accustomed to dealing with fingerprint powder. He got microscopic quantities on his fingers and hands, suffered acute poisoning, and almost died to boot. When he came back from the hospital a few months later, he was only a splinter of his former self. Though he hadn’t been particularly imposing to begin with.
The whole thing had been hushed up by police leadership. With assistance from the police officers union the event was transformed into a tragic workplace accident, which the parties then resolved on the best of terms. Wiijnbladh was given a half-time pension and a decent one-time compensation for employment injury, and the half of him that remained was moved to the unit that later that same year changed its name from Stockholm police lost property warehouse to the Stockholm police property investigation squad.
There he’d been for the past fifteen years, occupied with stolen art and stolen antiques. Why this area in particular, no one understood. He did not seem to possess any particular expertise in the subject, but because it seemed harmless enough he’d been allowed to stay there. In the very smallest room at the end of the corridor sat Wiijnbladh, browsing through all his binders of stolen and misplaced artworks. He would drink his coffee in solitude in the same room, and none of his co-workers really had any idea when he came and went. No one cared, and soon he would take retirement.
It’ll be nice to be rid of that little half-fairy, thought Bäckström in his sympathetic way the few times he’d seen him sneak past in the corridors.
Although to start with he’d had some benefit from him.
About the same time Bäckström arrived at his new workplace, the squad got one of its biggest cases in many years. An eccentric Swedish billionaire, who’d had his official and actual residence in Geneva for ages, had a break-in in his “overnight apartment” in Stockholm. An ordinary, simple, ten-room apartment on Strandvägen where, according to information from the Swedish tax authorities, he stayed at the most a few times a year. “It’s usually a week around Christmas and New Year’s, and perhaps another week when I’m home to celebrate Midsummer or visit my children,” the man had said. Probably this was also the reason that it took almost a month before the Stockholm police became aware of the extent of the crime.
On Pentecost Eve, Saturday the third of June, the police command center received an alarm from Securitas of a crime in progress on Strandvägen. The reason that help was being requested from their government-financed competitor was that their own response vehicle happened to run into a bicyclist in Östermalm, approximately half a mile from the scene of the crime. In addition this was urgent, because the frightfully advanced alarm system that had been installed a few years earlier was completely convinced that the thief was still at the crime scene-according to the same system he appeared to be alone.
The police seldom got such an opportunity to rap their private-sector competitors on the knuckles, and in the general delirium unfortunately the officers in the radio car that arrived first forgot to turn off both the blue lights and the siren as they braked outside the entryway. The perpetrator had been scared off, and when the apartment was finally entered it was empty. The thief had sneaked out through the kitchen entry, across the back courtyard, and out to the street on the other side of the block. No one was arrested, but the outcome was good enough because it appeared that he hadn’t managed to make off with anything from the overnight apartment, which could best be described as an “art museum” according to the technicians and experts from the property investigation squad who were called to the scene. This was also the information that the security company gave the customer when he was called at home in Switzerland.
Break-in at the apartment. Now taken care of by additional protective measures. Break-in interrupted. The thief had departed from the scene and it seemed that he hadn’t taken anything with him. No technical clues had been secured. Perpetrator unknown. Only three weeks later, when the crime victim showed up to celebrate Midsummer-“have some pickled herring, a shot or two of aquavit, listen to Evert Taube, and watch the sun go down behind the dear old outhouse”-had they realized the extent of what had happened.