The night between April thirtieth and the first of May 1968, the twenty-three-year-old law student Claes Waltin had, according to the report, shoved a wooden candlestick into the vagina of a twenty-five-year-old woman who was a doctoral candidate in Nordic languages and supported herself working as a substitute teacher at a high school in the southern suburbs. They had met earlier in the evening at the Hasselbacken restaurant on Djurgården in connection with the students’ traditional celebration of Walpurgis Eve.
Assuming that you believed her, the following was said to have happened.
Waltin had gone home with her to her residence on Södermalm. There he had first assaulted her sexually by forcing her to have anal intercourse. Then he bound her, put a muzzle on her, and inserted the candlestick into her genital area. When he was done with that he left.
An hour later the woman suffered severe bleeding, called for an ambulance herself, and was taken to the Söder hospital. There she remained for over a week. A female social worker visited her, got her to talk, and saw to it that she filed a police report.
A forensic examination had been made and damage to the entry to her vagina, vaginal walls, and portio vaginalis had been observed. In conclusion the forensic doctor observed in his statement: “that the observed injuries appear to have arisen through physical impact from a hard, oblong object inserted into the vagina”; “that the insertion of this object probably required considerable force”; “that the injuries do not contradict the description the patient has given”; “that at the same time it may have arisen in some other way through comparable physical impact”; “that it cannot be ruled out either that they are self-inflicted.”
Not until a few weeks later was the young Waltin called for an interview with the police. He denied any form of assault against the plaintiff. They had met at the Hasselbacken restaurant, he had gone home with her, and it was on her own suggestion that they had had normal intercourse in which moreover she had taken the initiative.
An hour or so later he left her and walked home to his student apartment on Östermalm, because he would be getting up early the next morning. He had promised to visit his mother, who was sickly and needed regular checking by her only son.
In conclusion he also said that he was shocked and shaken by the horrible accusations he was being subjected to. He could never even imagine doing something like that and did not understand why the plaintiff said what she had.
A week later the plaintiff had been called to another interview. She never appeared. Instead she called the police and said that she wanted to withdraw her report. She never provided any more detailed explanation for this turnabout. A month later the prosecutor had written off the report. “The reported incident is not to be considered a crime.”
Typical police chief candidate, thought Bäckström, rolling up the file and putting it in his jacket pocket. Much simpler than wasting your precious time at that copy machine that never worked. Gold, Bäckström, he thought, patting his jacket pocket as he came out onto the street again, and because it was both simplest and safest he went straight home.
For lunch he took a few things out of his own refrigerator, where these days there were a number of delicacies, had a cold pilsner, even allowed himself a little drop of liquor. Then he lay down on the couch so he could think in peace and quiet about an ordinary leather boy’s motives for murdering a prime minister.
It must have been something sexual, thought Bäckström. The same motive, although a different modus operandi, so to speak. What remained was to link Waltin to his latest known victim. Perhaps they belonged to the same secret society of leather boys? Was it an ordinary little internal settling of accounts because they had a falling out over some little ass-whipping subject? It was about time that inspector Bäckström started smoothing out the perpetrator profile, he thought.
In the midst of these pleasant musings he must have fallen asleep, because when he woke up it was time for dinner.
One thing I know that never dies, and that is the reputation of a dead man, thought Bäckström when a while later he was walking at a slow pace to his usual place. That was straight talk. Not that liberal drivel about never speaking ill of the dead. It’s enough if it’s true, damn it, he thought.
46
For the second day in a row Anna Holt called her old colleague from the bureau who was now head of the tech squad.
“It’s me again, Holt,” said Anna Holt. “At the risk of being tedious, do you have two minutes?”
Holt was not the least bit tedious. She could call every day if she wanted. What could he help her with?
“This is about another revolver. The murder weapon in a murder-suicide that happened on March 27, 1983. A man who shot his daughter and her fiancé before he shot himself. Happened out in Spånga. The revolver was confiscated and is said to have ended up with you. You couldn’t pull out a more detailed description of it, could you? It doesn’t appear in the extract I got from our own CIS.”
“Sure,” said the head of the tech squad. “You don’t have a number on the case?”
“Of course,” said Holt. “I’ll e-mail it.”
“Just give me an hour,” said her old colleague.
What am I really up to? thought Holt as she hung up.
This time it had taken only forty-five minutes. The weapon she was wondering about ended up at the tech squad the day after the murder/suicide. It had been test fired and compared with the bullets the forensic doctor had plucked out of the three victims. The results confirmed what had already been figured out. The murder weapon.
“Also a Ruger.357 caliber Magnum. The same as that revolver Bäckström was raving about. Although a somewhat older model.”
“Would it be possible to take a look at it?” asked Holt.
“Unfortunately not,” replied the head of the tech squad. “It’s not here anymore.”
“So where is it?”
“Nowhere, I’m afraid. According to our papers, it was here until October 1988. Then it was turned over, along with twenty or so other weapons, to the Swedish Defense Factories for scrapping. There are papers on that too.”
“Scrapping,” said Holt. “I thought you kept all the weapons you got in?”
Far from it, according to her colleague. They kept those weapons that were interesting from an investigative standpoint. Besides that they kept those that were interesting for ballistic comparisons in general.
“As you perhaps know we have a little weapons library up here at the squad. Over twelve hundred weapons, actually. Various types of weapons. Different brands in various calibers and models.”
“So which ones do you send to scrap?”
Those that were in poor shape. Assuming they wouldn’t be needed for any crime investigation.
“Mostly old rejects, actually. Sawed-off shotguns, drilled-out starter guns, all sorts of home-made contraptions. On the other hand, if we have several copies of the same weapon in good condition we usually don’t scrap them. We apportion those out to colleagues around the country. Most tech squads have their own weapons libraries, and in Stockholm we confiscate more weapons than any other police authority in the country.”
“So this one was in poor condition then,” asked Holt.
“Ought to have been, answer yes. Although in itself it sounds a bit strange considering that the person who used it was evidently a marksman and had a license for it. They’re usually very careful about their weapons. To say the least, if you understand what I mean.”
“You test fired it,” said Holt. “Are the bullets from the test firing still around?”
“Nope. I checked that. Probably due to the fact that we had a solved case right from the start. By now it would have almost turned twenty-five, so they probably threw it out in a spring cleaning. The copy of the report from the test firing should still be around, on the other hand.”