Five minutes later they had dropped Bäckström off outside the door of number 1 Hasselstigen, and Holm had wished him luck. He and Hernandez were heading off to the station to write up their reports, but if there was anything else they could help with, Bäckström was more than welcome to get in touch.
And what the fuck would I want to do that for? Bäckström thought, as the car pulled away, not bothering to thank them for the lift.
6.
Same as usual, Bäckström thought. Beyond the cordons that had been set up in front of the building crowded the usual collection of journalists and photographers, neighbors, and the generally curious who had nothing better to do. Plus the usual rabble, of course, who had probably ended up there without even wondering how it had happened. Among them were three suntanned youths who took the opportunity to comment on Bäckström’s clothing and appearance as he squeezed under the cordon with a certain amount of difficulty.
Bäckström had turned back and glared at them, to register their appearance in his memory for the day when they eventually met in his own place of work. It was only a matter of time, and, when the day finally arrived, he intended to make it a memorable experience for the little shits.
As he passed the young uniformed officer standing by the door of the building, he had given his first order in connection with this new murder investigation:
‘Call surveillance and get them to send a couple guys to take some nice pictures of our charming audience,’ Bäckström said.
‘It’s already done,’ his colleague informed him. ‘That was the first thing the Anchor said to me when she arrived. Our colleagues from surveillance must have been here taking pictures for a couple hours now,’ he added, for some reason.
‘Anchor? What bloody anchor?’
‘Annika Carlsson. You know, our tall brunette colleague, used to work in robbery. Nicknamed the Anchor.’
‘You mean that fucking virago?’ Bäckström said.
‘I wouldn’t like to comment, Bäckström,’ his colleague said with a grin. ‘But obviously, you can’t help hearing things.’
‘Such as?’ Bäckström said suspiciously.
‘Well, it’s probably best to avoid getting into an arm-wrestling contest with her,’ his colleague said.
Bäckström had contented himself with a shake of the head. Where the hell are we heading? he wondered as he stepped inside the door of the building at number 1 Hasselstigen. What the hell is happening to the Swedish Police? Faggots, dykes, darkies, and the usual yes-men. Not a single ordinary police constable as far as the eye can see.
At the crime scene everything looked the way it usually did when someone had beaten an old pisshead to death in his own flat. In short, things looked even worse than they usually did in the home of an old pisshead. This particular example was lying on his back on the hall rug just inside the door, with his feet facing the door, his legs apart, and his arms stretched out above his crushed skull, almost like he was praying. To judge by the smell, his gray gabardine trousers had filled up with excrement and urine when he died. There was a meter-wide pool of blood on the floor. The walls on both sides of the narrow hallway were splattered with blood from floor to ceiling, and there were even traces of blood on the center of the ceiling.
Bloody hell, Bäckström thought, shaking his head. Really, he ought to call Beautiful Homes with a tip-off so all those interior designer queers could finally get something serious to chew on, something with the real common touch. A little My-Lovely-Home report from social group seventeen, Bäckström thought. Then his thoughts were interrupted by someone tapping on his shoulder.
‘Hello, Bäckström. Good to see you,’ Detective Inspector Annika Carlsson, thirty-three, said with a friendly nod.
‘Hello,’ Bäckström said, making an effort to sound less rough than he felt.
A woman who was half a head taller than him, even though he was a tall, well-built man in the prime of life. Long legs, narrow waist, irritatingly fit, and with everything in the right place. If she just let her hair grow a bit and put on a short skirt, she could even pass for a completely normal woman. Apart from her height, of course, but it was presumably too late to do anything about that, and with a bit of luck she might have stopped growing by now, even though she was still wet behind the ears.
‘Have you got any particular instructions, Bäckström? The forensics team are done with their preliminary checks, and as soon as they’ve got the body off to the forensics lab you can take a look at our crime scene.’
‘Later,’ Bäckström said, shaking his head. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ he asked, nodding toward a slight, dark-skinned figure sitting crouched against a wall at the far end of the shared landing. With a closed, melancholy expression on his face and a cloth bag with newspapers sticking out of it over his shoulder.
‘That’s our paperboy, the one who made the call,’ Carlsson said.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Bäckström said. ‘So that’ll be why he’s got a bag of newspapers hanging from his shoulder.’
‘No flies on you,’ Carlsson said with a smile. ‘To be more precise, he’s got five Dagens Nyheter and four Svenska Dagbladet. The victim’s copy of Svenska is lying over there by the door,’ she went on, nodding toward a folded newspaper on the floor by the entrance to the victim’s flat. ‘He’d already delivered one copy of Dagens Nyheter to an old woman on the ground floor.’
‘What do we know about him, then? The paperboy?’
‘Well, to start with it looks like he’s completely clean,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘Forensics have checked him out and they didn’t find any traces at all on his body or clothes. Considering the state of things in there, he’d have been completely drenched in blood if he was the one who attacked our victim. He told us himself that he felt the victim’s face, his cheek, to be more accurate, and when he realized he was completely stiff, he knew that the victim was dead.’
‘So he’s studying medicine, is he?’ Bloody hell, Bäckström mused. The little sooty clearly wasn’t lacking ambition.
‘I believe he saw a lot of dead bodies in his former homeland,’ Carlsson said, this time without smiling.
‘Did he take the opportunity to slip anything into his pockets?’ Bäckström asked, falling back on old instincts as far as sooties like that were concerned.
‘He’s been searched. That was the first thing the patrol did when they got here. In his pockets he was carrying a folder containing his driving license, an ID card from the paper that handles distribution of the papers out here, a small amount of money in coins and notes — about a hundred kronor, I think, mostly coins. And a cell phone that belongs to him. And we’ve made a note of the number, in case you’re wondering. If he did take anything, he didn’t have it on him, and we’ve already searched the communal areas of the building, so he didn’t hide anything there.’
Fucking hell. They’re lazy bastards as well, Bäckström thought, not ready to give up.
‘Did he make any calls, then?’
‘According to what he says, he only made one call. Emergency services, 112. They put him through to our colleagues in the pit. He says the only person he spoke to was the operator there, but obviously we’re going to check that out. He’s on the list of phone numbers we’ll have to investigate.’
‘Has he got a name, then?’ Bäckström said.
‘Septimus Akofeli, twenty-five years old, a refugee from Somalia, Swedish citizenship, lives in Rinkeby. We’ve taken fingerprints and a DNA sample, but we haven’t had time to check them yet. But I’m pretty sure he is who he says he is.’