‘What did you say his name was?’ Bäckström said. What a bloody name, he thought.
‘Septimus Akofeli,’ Annika Carlsson replied. ‘One of the reasons I haven’t let him go yet is that I thought you might want to talk to him.’
‘No,’ Bäckström said, shaking his head. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can send him home. But I thought I might take a look at our crime scene, on the other hand. If those wannabe academics from forensics are going to be finished anytime soon.’
‘Peter Niemi and Jorge Hernandez, known as Chico,’ Annika Carlsson said with a nod. ‘They’re part of our forensics team out here in Solna, and we couldn’t ask for better, if you ask me.’
‘Hernandez? Where have I heard that name before?’ Bäckström said.
‘He’s got a younger sister, Magdalena Hernandez; she’s one of our uniforms. You’ve probably seen her about, maybe it’s her name you’re thinking of.’ Annika Carlsson smiled broadly for some reason.
‘Why do you say that?’ Bäckström wondered.
‘Sweden’s most attractive female police officer, according to the majority of her colleagues. And from my own point of view, I reckon she’s a great girl,’ Carlsson said with a smile.
‘You don’t say,’ Bäckström said. I daresay you’ve been there already, he thought.
Inside the flat, things were just as bad as Bäckström had imagined. First a little cloakroom and narrow hall. On the left a small bathroom and toilet, followed by a small bedroom. On the right a kitchen with a dining table, and straight ahead a living room. All in all, about fifty square meters, and it wasn’t exactly clear when the occupant had last done any cleaning. Not this side of the new year, at any rate.
The furnishings were shabby and worn, and the décor likewise. Everything from the unmade bed with the pillow with no pillowcase to the filthy kitchen table and the sagging sofa and armchair in the living room. Yet the things in there bore witness to the fact that the murder victim, Karl Danielsson, had seen better days. A few worn Persian rugs. A sturdy old-fashioned mahogany writing desk with a decorative inlay of some lighter wood. A twenty-year-old television, but it was still a Bang & Olufsen television. And the armchair in front of it was an English leather wing chair with matching footstool.
Drink, Bäckström thought. Drink and loneliness, and he himself had never felt worse since those Neanderthals in the National Rapid-Response Unit had thrown a shock grenade at him some six months ago. He hadn’t regained his senses until the next day, and by then they had already had time to shut him away in the psychiatric unit of Huddinge Hospital.
‘Anything else you want, Bäckström?’ Annika Carlsson asked, and for some reason she looked almost worried as she did so.
A couple large shorts and a pint, Bäckström thought. And if you let your hair grow and put a skirt on, then maybe you can give me a blowjob. But don’t start thinking you can get any more than that, he thought, since only twenty-four hours ago he was having serious doubts about earthly desires and spiritual love.
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘See you back at the station.’
There’s something that doesn’t make sense, Bäckström thought, as he walked slowly back to the police station. But what was it? And how was he supposed to work it out with a brain that was suffering acute dehydration and was probably already damaged beyond repair? I’m going to kill that fucking witch doctor, he thought.
7.
By three o’clock that afternoon Bäckström had already held his first meeting with the team investigating his new murder case. It wasn’t exactly the sharpest team he had led in his twenty-five years in violent crime. Nor the largest either, come to that. Eight people in total, if you counted him and the two forensics officers, who would soon move on to other cases as soon as they had finished the most important work on Karl Danielsson. Which left one plus five, and considering everything he had seen and heard of his colleagues so far, it all boiled down to just one man, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström himself. Who else, really? That was what usually happened, after all. Bäckström left standing alone as the last hope of the grieving family. Even if it was most likely that the state-run alcohol monopoly was closer than anyone to Danielsson.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘Well, welcome to this investigation, and for the time being that goes for all of you. If there any changes on that score, I promise to let you know. Does anyone want to kick things off?’
‘We do, my colleague and I,’ the older of the two forensics experts, Peter Niemi, said. ‘We’ve hardly had a chance to get started on the flat, so we’ve got loads to be getting on with.’
Peter Niemi had been with the police for twenty-five years or so and had worked in forensics for fifteen of them. He was over fifty but looked considerably younger than he was. Fair, in good shape, slightly above average height. He had been born and raised in the Torne Valley in the far north of Sweden. He had lived in Stockholm more than half his life but still had his regional dialect. He smiled easily and his blue eyes expressed both friendliness and reserve at the same time. You didn’t have to be an idiot to see what he did for a job, and the fact that he hadn’t worn a uniform for the past fifteen years was completely irrelevant. It was the message his eyes gave off that made all the difference. Peter Niemi was a police officer, and he was nice and kind as long as you behaved. If you didn’t, then Niemi wasn’t the sort of man to back down, and there was more than one person who had come to realize that in a rather painful way.
‘Fine,’ Bäckström said. ‘I’m listening.’ A fucking Lapp, a bastard Finn, sounds like he’s just tumbled off the bus from Haparanda, and the sooner I don’t have to listen to him, the better, he thought.
‘Well, then,’ Niemi said, leafing through his papers.
The victim’s name was Karl Danielsson. Retired, sixty-eight years old. According to the passport that the forensics officers had found in his flat, he was 188 centimeters tall and weighed something like 120 kilos.
‘Heavily built and badly overweight, I’d guess maybe thirty kilos too much,’ said Niemi, who had himself grabbed the body by the arms when it was loaded onto a cart. ‘You’ll get the exact figures from the medical report.’
Whatever the fuck we might need them for, Bäckström thought sourly. We’re hardly going to mince him down and make sausages out of our murder victim, he thought.
‘The crime scene,’ Niemi went on. ‘The victim’s own apartment. To be precise, the hall. My hunch is that he’d been to the toilet and received the first blow as he was coming out, still doing up his fly. That matches both the splatter pattern and his half-closed zip, in case anyone’s wondering. Then he was struck several times in quick succession, and the decisive blows were struck when he was already lying on the hall floor.’
‘What was he hit with?’ Bäckström asked.
‘A blue enameled cast-iron saucepan lid,’ Niemi said. ‘It was on the floor beside the body. The saucepan is on the stove in the kitchen, no more than three meters away.
‘As well as that,’ he went on, ‘the perpetrator also seems to have used an upholstery hammer with a wooden handle. The handle broke off right by the head, and both parts were found on the hall floor. Alongside the victim’s head.’
‘Our perpetrator’s a thorough little bastard.’ Bäckström sighed, shaking his big round head.
‘I don’t think he’s that little. Not to judge by the angle of the blows, at any rate. But he was certainly thorough, even if it was hard to see at first because Danielsson’s face and chest were so covered in blood,’ Niemi said. ‘He was actually strangled as well. With his own tie. When he was lying on the floor, and by then he must have been unconscious and pretty close to death, the perpetrator tightened his tie and finished the job with a reef knot. Completely unnecessary, if you ask me. But I suppose it’s better to err on the side of caution, if you want to be absolutely sure.’ Niemi shrugged.