But even as a pedestrian he continued to attract the attention of the police. During this period the police had locked him up on five occasions, under the Act on Taking Intoxicated Persons into Custody, and it had probably happened more often than that. Danielsson always used to refuse to give his name, which he was under no obligation to supply. The last time he had been taken into custody, things had gone badly wrong.
It had happened on the day of the Elitloppet trotting race at Solvalla racecourse, in May five years before he died. Danielsson had been drunk and rowdy, and when he was being helped into the police van he had started fighting and flailing about. Resisting arrest and violent conduct against a public official, and merely being taken into custody turned into getting arrested, even if it ended the same as usual, with his being put in a cell in the Solna police station to sober up. By the time he was released six hours later, Danielsson had accused both the arresting officers and the staff at the station of physical abuse, in total three police officers and two custody officers. Another hotshot lawyer turned up, new medical certificates were submitted, and then everything spiraled into a big circus. More than a year passed before the first case went to court, and it had to be adjourned immediately when the prosecutor’s two witnesses for some reason failed to appear.
Because Danielsson’s lawyer was an extremely busy man, another year passed before time could be found for new proceedings. Once again they had to be postponed because the prosecutor’s witnesses failed to appear. The prosecutor lost patience and dismissed the case. Karl Danielsson was an innocent man, at least for that part of his life.
‘Considering the fact that the chances of being taken into custody and arrested for crimes of this nature are minimal, he must have been drunk pretty much the whole time,’ Nadja Högberg said, and she knew what she was talking about. She had been a civilian employed by the police in the Western District for ten years, after being born Nadjesta Ivanova and gaining a doctorate in physics and applied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University. In the bad old days as well, when Saint Petersburg was called Leningrad and when academic requirements had been considerably stricter than they were in the new, liberated Russia.
‘What other fuckups has he made, then? Apart from rolling around when he’s been on the bottle, I mean,’ Bäckström asked, nodding toward Nadja Högberg.
Not that he was remotely interested in the murder victim’s dealings with his more or less retarded colleagues in the regular force and traffic division, but mainly to rein her in so that he could put a stop to this interminable meeting. So that he could finally drag himself home to Inedalsgatan and the remnants of what had until yesterday been his home. Get in the shower and put a stop to all the noise in his head. Gulp down a few more liters of ice-cold water. Gorge himself on raw vegetables and then do all the things that remained in a life that had been stripped of all meaning the day before.
Why can’t you ever learn to hold your tongue, Bäckström? Bäckström thought five minutes later.
Nadja Högberg had taken him at his word and was giving a detailed account of Danielsson’s various financial activities and the interactions with the judicial system that these had, in turn, led to.
The same year that he was first convicted of drunk driving, Karl Danielsson had been promoted from accounts assistant to head of the office’s section for ‘trusts, corporations, economic and charitable societies, estates and probate, private individuals, and miscellaneous affairs.’ After that things had really taken off. First he moved to the business section as a financial adviser and tax consultant, then after a few years he was appointed head of the whole group and was co-opted onto the board.
The week after his close encounter with the hot-dog kiosk on Solnavägen, soon after his thirty-second birthday, he was appointed deputy managing director and given a permanent seat on the board. A couple years after that he had taken over the whole company and renamed it Karl Danielsson Consultants Ltd. According to the company’s articles of association, the business was involved in ‘financial, accounting, and auditing consultancy, tax and investment advice,’ and also ‘management of property and capital investment,’ which must have been quite an achievement, since throughout this age of greatness the company never seemed to have had more than four employees. One female secretary and three men with the title of consultant and rather vague duties. Karl Danielsson himself was the owner of the company, its managing director, and the chairman of its board.
As such, he had acquitted himself considerably better than he had as Karl Danielsson, the possessor of a driving license and pedestrian. Over a period of twenty-three years, between 1972 and 1995, he had been investigated for various financial crimes on a total of ten occasions. Four cases of complicity in tax evasion and serious tax fraud, two cases of currency offenses, two cases of so-called money laundering, one case of aggravated receipt of stolen goods, and one case of dishonest dealing. In every instance the charges had been dropped. The suspicions against Karl Danielsson could never be proven, and every time, Danielsson had gone on the counterattack and reported his adversaries to the parliamentary ombudsman and the chancellor of justice, or both, just to be on the safe side.
In this he had also been more successful than his opponents. One of the investigating officers of the financial crime unit of the Stockholm Police had been picked up by the ethics committee of the National Police Board and had received a formal warning and been docked fourteen days’ pay. The parliamentary ombudsman had arrested one public prosecutor and one of the Tax Office’s auditors. The chancellor of justice had prosecuted one of the evening papers and secured a conviction for grave defamation of character.
After 1995 things had calmed down. Karl Danielsson Consultants Ltd. had changed its name to Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. There didn’t seem to have been much activity, and the company had never had any employees. Nadja Högberg had requested copies of the most recent annual accounts from the company records division of the Patent and Registration Office, and was planning to spend the weekend going through them.
He did not appear ever to have had a particularly remarkable income. Nadja Högberg had dug out his self-certified income declarations for the past five years, and his taxable income had hovered around 170,000 kronor per year. His state pension and a smaller private pension from Skandia. The apartment he lived in cost 4,500 kronor per month, and after tax and rent there were approximately 5,000 kronor left for other things.
If a person’s success can be measured by the titles he or she garners, then Karl Danielsson had lived a successful life and had left this world at the top. At the age of twenty he had started his career by working as an assistant in a firm of accountants with thirty-five employees. Forty-eight years later an as-yet-unknown perpetrator had put an end to it by smashing in his skull with the help of a cast-iron saucepan lid, by which time the company in which he had spent all his adult life had been for all intents and purposes dormant for almost fifteen years. In the phone book he was listed as a director, and according to the business cards the forensics experts had found in his otherwise empty wallet, the victim was both managing director and chairman of the board of Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd.