Starts to sound more and more like a typical Bäckström, thought Holt.
“A completely different matter,” said her old colleague. “Just a question out of curiosity. What I’m wondering-”
“I know exactly what you’re wondering,” Holt interrupted. “Before you ask, I wish I knew what this was about. I don’t have a clue. Let me put it like this. I was given the task of following up a tip.”
“I didn’t think police superintendents dealt with such things.”
“Neither did I,” said Holt. Wonder if I can quote you, she thought.
What am I really up to? thought Holt as she hung up.
If there’s something you’re brooding about, something that bothers you, something that worries you, then you have to talk about it. Share with someone you trust. Over and over again his female psychiatrist had repeated this. Like a mantra. If there’s something that…It’ll have to be Anna, thought Lewin.
“There’s something that’s bothering me,” said Jan Lewin with a cautious throat clearing and an apologetic smile.
“Then you should talk about it. You know that perfectly well,” said Holt, smiling at him.
“I thought so,” said Jan Lewin. Then he told the-to say the least-strange story about Waltin’s parking ticket.
“I understand exactly,” said Holt. “I have something that’s bothering me too.”
“I’m listening,” said Jan Lewin.
“So what do you think about this?” said Anna Holt. Then she told the hopefully not-so-strange story about the scrapped Magnum revolver.
“I know what those marksmen types are like,” said Holt with unexpected emphasis. “I was married to one myself. They spend more time tinkering with their weapons than playing with their children.”
“I get the idea that your ex-husband, our esteemed colleague with the uniformed police, is one of the agency’s more distinguished marksmen,” said Lewin.
“Exactly,” said Holt. “Although there are more reasons than that, which we can talk about some other time. But you have to admit the whole thing is a bit mysterious.”
“There must be an investigation,” said Lewin, whose thoughts seemed elsewhere.
“Certainly,” said Holt. “How are we helped by a lot of papers?”
“This was 1983,” said Lewin, shaking his head. “It was another time then. When you were done with a major investigation, you would pack it up in a box and carry it down to the archive. It wasn’t just papers that ended up in those boxes. It could be anything imaginable, like the victim’s old diaries, photographs, threatening letters from the perpetrator, even the sort of thing the tech squad wanted to get rid of.”
“You don’t say,” said Holt. “Personally I was a trainee with the uniformed police at that time, and it was papers that all the older officers warned me about. Whatever you do, see to it that you don’t stir up a lot of papers you will have to fill out.”
“I’ll find the investigation,” said Lewin, nodding and getting out of his chair. “As long as it’s still there, I’ll find it.”
Of course he found it. It was there among all the papers. A bullet from a revolver that apparently had been scrapped twenty years ago. Shining like a gold nugget in a little plastic bag from the tech squad.
47
The box with the investigation was in a basement storeroom in the building where the old homicide squad in Stockholm had its offices during the eighties. Lewin himself had been in the building for a number of years and this was not the first time he’d gone down to the squad’s basement storeroom to put away papers or search for them.
He had no recollection of the double murder from 1983. It had been much too simple a case for him and his associates at the first squad. Not even a murder investigation. Cleared up from the start. If it had been a murder investigation, he would have remembered it, even though during his almost thirty years as a murder investigator he had been involved in more than a hundred.
At the top of the box was a plastic sleeve with a number of newspaper clippings from the day after the murder. “Tragic Double Murder,” “Family Tragedy,” “Three Dead in Family Drama in Spånga.” Toned-down descriptions of how a middle-aged man shot his teenage daughter and her boyfriend and then took his own life. Nothing about his motives. A family tragedy, quite simply.
In the binder with the preliminary investigation was the answer.
The perpetrator was a painting contractor. Together with a partner he ran a small painting company with five employees, with an office and workshop in Vällingby. Three years previously he had become a widower. After a long illness his wife had died of cancer. Remaining were the husband and a then thirteen-year-old daughter who soon after her mother’s death began to have problems. Skipped school, ended up in bad company, started using drugs, was taken to a treatment center several times. That was how she met her boyfriend, seven years older, who was a known petty criminal and drug addict and already had several short prison terms on his record.
It appeared from the technical investigation at the father’s house in Spånga that she and her boyfriend were evidently there to steal when the father suddenly came home and surprised them. In the hall by the front door there were a couple of paper bags. In the bags were, among other things, the mother’s jewelry box, a pair of silver candlesticks, a few of the father’s shooting trophies, a new toaster, and a couple of small paintings. In the stairway up to the second floor someone had dropped a TV and a video player. Farther down the hall, at the foot of the stairs, the boyfriend was lying flat on his face, shot through the head with one shot. The bullet was in the wall halfway up the stairs.
The technician in charge was an older colleague whom Lewin remembered well. A very meticulous man, known as a real nitpicker. With the help of various clues he had given a highly probable picture of the course of events.
The father comes home. Hears someone rummaging around on the second floor. Sneaks down into the basement. Retrieves his revolver from the gun case. Sneaks back up to the hall. The boyfriend is on his way down from the second floor, carrying the TV and the VCR from the father’s bedroom. Tumult.
Most likely the boyfriend threw the TV and VCR at the father. When he tried to force his way past him in the hall, the father shot him in the head from a distance of about three feet. Basically, the boyfriend was killed instantly.
The daughter comes running from the kitchen on the first floor. Throws herself at her father, hitting out like a fury. The father drags her into the living room. Bloody tracks from his shoes, the boyfriend’s blood. Throws her on the couch. Tries to hold her down. Another shot goes off. A contact shot that hits the daughter level with her left breast, passes through the heart and out, ends up in the back support of the couch. The daughter expires within the course of a minute or two in the arms of her father. Evidently he has squeezed her so hard that she had cracks and breaks in several ribs.
Then the father goes out into the kitchen, blood dripping from his shirt. The daughter’s blood. Sits down on the floor with his back against the refrigerator and shoots himself through the head. Entry hole through the palate in the upper jaw. Exit hole in the back of the head. The bullet stops in the refrigerator door. The father dies instantly.
An elderly female neighbor in the house next door helped the police with the time-related course of events. The first shot. A woman who screams. The next shot, a minute or so after the first one. The neighbor who calls the police emergency number. The call that is taken at 14:25. Then the third shot. Five minutes after the second one. Only seconds before the first patrol car turns onto the street and stops fifty yards from the house.
The three dead who will soon have company of twenty or so police officers from the uniformed police, the detective bureau, and the tech squad. “Three Dead in Family Drama in Spånga.”