A pisshead, a serial litigant, and a pathological fantasist, Bäckström thought.
‘You’ve spoken to his sister,’ Annika Carlsson said as soon as Nadja Högberg had finished. ‘What does she have to say about what you’ve just told us?’
Nadja Högberg said that she had confirmed all the main points. As a young man her brother had been ‘very fond of girls’ and ‘far too keen on partying.’ But things had gone well for him until he was approaching forty, after which time the drink seemed to have more or less taken over his life. She had also made it clear that they had never been particularly close. During the past ten years they hadn’t even spoken on the phone, and the last time they met had been around the time of their mother’s funeral twelve years ago.
‘How did she take it when you told her that her brother had been murdered?’ Annika asked.
For fuck’s sake, Bäckström thought, groaning silently to himself. Maybe we should have a minute’s silence?
‘Fine,’ Nadja said. ‘She was fine about it. She works as a staff nurse at Huddinge Hospital and seems pretty sensible, stable. She said it didn’t exactly come as much of a surprise. She’d been worried about something like this happening for years. Considering the life he led, I mean—’
‘We’ll just have to try to deal with our grief somehow,’ Bäckström interrupted. ‘So what do we think about all this?’
Then they had started throwing ideas around. Or one single idea that Bäckström, just to be on the safe side, threw out there all on his own.
‘Well, then,’ Bäckström said, since the others for once seemed to have the good manners to keep their mouths shut and let him start.
‘One pisshead has been murdered by another pisshead. If there’s anyone here who has any other suggestion, now’s the time to pipe up,’ he went on, leaning forward and resting his elbows heavily on the table, glowering at his colleagues.
No one seemed to have any objections, to judge by the unanimous head shaking.
‘Good,’ Bäckström said. ‘That’s enough suggestions. All that’s left is to work out where we are and how to smoke out Danielsson’s dinner guest from last night.
‘How’s the door-to-door going with the neighbors?’ Bäckström went on.
‘Pretty much done,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘There are a couple of them we haven’t got hold of yet, and a few more asked if we could talk to them this evening, since they had to get to work. And there was one who had a doctor’s appointment at nine o’clock and didn’t have time to talk to us. It should all be done by tomorrow.’
‘The coroner?’
‘He’s promised to conduct the postmortem this evening and give us at least an oral report early next week. Our colleague Hernandez will be attending the postmortem, so we should know the basics first thing tomorrow morning,’ Annika Carlsson said.
‘Have we spoken to the taxi companies, have we had any tip-offs that are worth looking at, what about the search of the area round the building, and his social network, how did he spend his last few hours, have we spoken to—’
‘Calm down, Bäckström,’ Annika Carlsson interrupted with a broad smile. ‘It’s all under control. We’re well on top of this one, so you can relax.’
I don’t feel remotely relaxed, Bäckström thought, but he would never have dreamed of saying so out loud. Instead he merely nodded. Gathered together his papers and stood up.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Bäckström said. ‘One more thing before we go. About the paperboy who made the call. What’s his name, Sooty Akofeli.’
‘Septimus,’ Annika Carlsson corrected, without the slightest trace of a smile. ‘His name’s Septimus Akofeli. We’ve checked him out. Our colleagues have already compared the fingerprints they took off him at Hasselstigen with the ones he had to give the Migration Board when he first arrived twelve years ago. He is who he says he is, and, in case you’re wondering, he’s never been in any trouble.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Bäckström said, ‘but there’s something about that bastard that isn’t right.’
‘What might that be?’ Annika Carlsson said, shaking her cropped head.
‘I don’t know,’ Bäckström said. ‘I’m working on it, so the rest of you can at least spare it a moment’s thought.’
As soon as he had left the meeting room he had gone straight to his new boss, police chief Anna Holt, and explained the situation to her. Pisshead victim. Perpetrator — with almost absolute certainty — also a pisshead. Case completely under control. It would be concluded by Monday at the latest, and he had finished in three minutes even though he could have taken five. Holt seemed almost relieved when he left. She had another matter to think about, and, compared to that, Bäckström’s murder seemed like a gift from above.
That gave the scrawny bitch something to think about, Bäckström thought, as he finally stepped out through the door of his new gulag.
9.
Jerzty Sarniecki, twenty-seven, was a Polish carpenter. Born and raised in Lodz, for the past few years he had formed part of the Swedish migrant workforce. And for the past month he and his workmates had been employed on the complete renovation of a small block of rented flats on Ekensbergsvägen in Solna, about one kilometer from the crime scene at number 1 Hasselstigen. Eighty kronor an hour, straight in his pocket, and free to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week if he felt like it. They bought food in a nearby ICA supermarket, they slept in the building they were working on, and everything else could perfectly well wait until they returned to civilization back home in Poland.
Around the time Bäckström was leaving the Solna police station, Sarniecki had made his discovery when he dragged a large plastic sack of rubble from the building to throw it into the trash bin out on the street. He clambered up an unsteady ladder and discovered another bag on top of the pile of rubble that neither he nor any of his workmates had thrown there. In itself, this was nothing unusual, the fact that Swedes in the neighborhood made the most of the opportunity to get rid of their own rubbish, but because experience had already taught him that they often threw away things that were still perfectly usable, he had leaned over and fished out the bag.
An ordinary plastic bag. Neatly tied at the top and full of something that looked like clothes.
Sarniecki had climbed down from the ladder. Opened the bag and taken out the contents. A black synthetic raincoat of the longer variety. It looked almost new. A pair of red washing-up gloves. Intact, scarcely used. A pair of dark leather slippers, which also looked practically new.
Why would anyone throw things like this away? Sarniecki wondered in surprise; then a moment later he discovered the blood on what he had just found. Loads of blood splattered over the raincoat, and the pale soles of the slippers were more or less dripping with it. The gloves were stained with blood even though someone had obviously made an attempt to rinse them off.
He had heard about the murder in Hasselstigen that morning, when their Swedish foreman showed up and told them over coffee. Some poor retiree, evidently, and normal, decent folk hardly dared leave their homes any longer. Think about what you’re saying, he had thought, as he’d listened with half an ear. Don’t curse the paradise that you Swedes actually live in, because it might be taken away from you, he thought. His Catholic priest back home in Lodz had taught him to think like that.
In spite of this he had wrestled with his conscience for several hours before calling the police. I wonder how many hours this is going to take? he wondered, as he stood and waited for the car the police had promised to send. How many hours at eighty kronor would they take from him and his fiancée and the child they were expecting back home in Poland?