‘Do you have any ideas about who might have done it, then?’ Bäckström asked, even though he already knew the answer.
‘A typical pisshead murder, if you ask me, Bäckström,’ Niemi said, smiling amiably. ‘But it’s worth bearing in mind, Bäckström, that you’re asking someone from the Torne Valley.’
‘What about the timing, then?’ Bäckström said. So he wasn’t entirely thick after all, he thought.
‘I’m getting to that. All in good time, Bäckström,’ Niemi said.
‘Before the victim was killed, he and another individual, someone who left his fingerprints at the scene but who we haven’t yet been able to identify, sat in the living room eating pork chops with kidney beans. The host probably sat in the only armchair, his guest on the sofa. They had the meal on the coffee table but had time to clear it away. We’ve found a number of prints from both of them, if you’re wondering, and we should have the answers sometime tomorrow. If we’re lucky, the perpetrator will be in the fingerprint register already. With their meal they drank five half-liter cans of export-strength lager and more than a bottle of vodka. We’ve got one empty bottle and one just started. The usual size, seventy centiliters, and it’s probably worth pointing out that they were that esteemed brand, Explorer. Both bottles were found on the floor in front of the television, where they had been sitting and eating, and the evidence suggests that the bottles were unopened when they started. For one thing, the seals are still there. You know, the perforated bit at the bottom of the bottle top. The bit that makes that nice cracking sound when you unscrew it.’
Every now and then this bastard Lapp sounds completely normal, Bäckström thought, even though he could feel a great vacuum in his chest. Almost like a near-death experience. Where had that come from?
‘Anything else? About the perpetrator, and what happened before the murder?’
‘I think the man who did this was physically strong,’ Niemi said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That business with the necktie takes a lot of strength. And he turned the body over as well, because to start with, the victim was on his side, or possibly his stomach — we can tell that because of the way the blood spread — but when we found him, he was lying on his back. I think he turned the victim onto his back when he decided to strangle him.’
‘And when would that have been?’ Annika Carlsson asked suddenly, before Bäckström had a chance to ask that very question.
‘If you’re asking a medical layman like me — the postmortem on the body won’t be done until this evening — I’d probably guess at yesterday evening,’ Niemi said. ‘Chico and I got there at almost exactly seven o’clock this morning, and by then the victim had developed complete rigor mortis, but of course we’ll know much more about this and a lot more besides tomorrow.’ Niemi nodded, looked at the others in the room, and made a move to get up from his chair. ‘We’ve already sent a whole load of material for analysis to the National Forensics Lab in Linköping, but it’ll probably be a few weeks before we get any answers. But I’m not sure it will make too much difference in a case like this. Having to wait, I mean. This perpetrator isn’t going anywhere. Our forensics colleagues in the county crime unit have promised to help with the fingerprints, so with a bit of luck that’ll be done by the weekend.
‘We need the weekend,’ Niemi repeated as he stood up. ‘On Monday I think we should be able to give you a decent description of what happened inside the flat.’
‘Thanks,’ Bäckström said, nodding to Niemi and his younger colleague. As soon as we lay our hands on Danielsson’s dinner partner, this one’s done and dusted, he thought. One pisshead killing another pisshead, there’s no more to it than that.
As soon as the forensics experts had left the room his lazy and inadequate investigating team started making a fuss about needing to stretch their legs and have a cigarette break. If he’d been his usual self he would have told them to shut up, but Bäckström felt strangely apathetic and merely nodded his consent. More than anything he would have liked to walk out, but in the absence of better options he had headed straight for the toilets and must have drunk at least five liters of cold water.
8.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said when they had all returned to the meeting room and could finally get going again so that this wretched business might come to an end sometime soon. ‘Let’s look at the victim. Then we can throw some ideas around, and before we leave we’ll work out a list of what we’ve done and what we’re going to do tomorrow. Today is Thursday, May fifteenth, and I think we could be finished by the weekend so that we can devote next week to more important cases than Mr. Danielsson.
‘What have we got on our victim, Nadja?’ Bäckström went on, nodding toward a short, plump woman in her fifties who was sitting at the end of the table and had already surrounded herself with an impressive pile of paperwork.
‘Quite a lot, actually,’ Nadja Högberg said. ‘I’ve looked up the usual information, and there are some juicy details in there. And I’ve spoken to his younger sister — she’s his only close relative — and she was able to contribute a fair few extra facts as well.’
‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said, even though his mind was somewhere else entirely and even though the comforting sound of the seal on a bottle top being broken was echoing round his head.
Karl Danielsson had been born in Solna in February 1940 and was therefore sixty-eight years old when he was murdered. His father had worked as a typesetter and foreman at a printer’s in Solna. His mother had been a housewife. Both parents long since dead. His closest relative was a sister who was ten years younger than him and lived in Huddinge, south of Stockholm.
Karl Danielsson was single. He had never married and had no children. Or rather, no children according to the various registers the police had access to. He had spent four years in elementary school in Solna, then five years in junior secondary, where he passed his exams and got into Påhlmans Business College in Stockholm, where he spent three years. By the time he was nineteen he had completed a sixth-form economics course. Then he did his military service at Barkarby Airbase. He came out ten months later and got his first job as an assistant in a firm of accountants in Solna, in the summer of 1960, aged twenty.
That same summer he made his first appearance in police records. Karl Danielsson had been apprehended driving while in an intoxicated state and was fined sixty days’ wages for drunk driving and lost his driving license for six months. Five years later the same thing happened again. Drunk driving, fined sixty days’ wages. Driving license withdrawn for a year. Then seven years passed before his third offense, this time considerably more serious.
Danielsson had been drunk as a skunk. He’d driven into a hot-dog kiosk on Solnavägen and absconded from the scene. In Solna District Court he was found guilty of drunk driving and leaving the scene of a crime, and was sentenced to three months in prison and had his driving license revoked. Danielsson had got hold of a hotshot lawyer and went to the Court of Appeal, where he presented two different medical certificates regarding his problems with alcohol. He managed to get his conviction for absconding overturned, and the prison sentence was commuted to probation. But he didn’t manage to get his license back, and he evidently wasn’t bothered enough by this to apply for a new license when the sentence expired. For the last thirty-six years of his life Karl Danielsson had gone without a driving license, so there were no more convictions for drunk driving.