Then the prosecutor rang.
‘Hello, Bäckström,’ the prosecutor said. ‘I’ve just heard that you picked up our perpetrator.’
‘Yes,’ Bäckström said.
‘Then I spoke to Niemi,’ she went on. ‘So I was thinking of pushing through the formal arrest procedures tomorrow morning. We’ve got sufficient grounds now.’
‘That’s nice for you,’ Bäckström said, and hung up.
Anna Holt had even come down to his office.
‘Congratulations, Bäckström,’ Holt said, nodding and smiling. ‘You’ve killed the dragon for me.’
‘Thanks,’ Bäckström said. ‘Are we doing a press conference?’
‘I think we’ll hold back,’ Anna Holt said, shaking her dark cropped hair. ‘There’s been a bit too much of that lately. I think we’ll make do with an ordinary press release. Tomorrow, after the formal arrest procedures.’
Of course, Bäckström thought. First you take the honor away from me. Then you take the glory away from me. And I’ve got a pair of shredded linen trousers, a smashed coffee table, a blood-soaked carpet, and bullet holes in the walls and ceiling of what was once my home. As a thank-you I’ve been given a cut-glass vase that I’ve given to my alcoholic neighbor and an old police badge that’s supposed to have belonged to a mad old ass bandit who wasn’t even man enough to come out of the closet and was forced to wrestle other singlet-wearing trolls to stay happy.
‘What do you think, Bäckström?’ Anna Holt said.
‘Fine with me,’ Bäckström said, giving her the full Sipowicz as she left. Run away, now, you scrawny little nightmare, he thought.
‘What the hell are we going to do about Seppo Laurén?’ Alm said. His face was deep red, and it was just two minutes after Holt had left the room.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Alm,’ Bäckström said. ‘This is what we’re going to do. Now listen carefully.’
‘I’m listening,’ Alm said.
‘First I want you to gather together everything you’ve written about little Seppo. Then I want you to roll it all up and put some elastic bands round it. And then I want you to shove it up your ass.’
Not only is he soft in the head, Bäckström thought, as he watched Alm leave. The bastard hasn’t even got a sense of humor.
‘Respect, boss,’ Frank Motoele said. He turned his gaze outward and nodded to Bäckström.
‘Thanks,’ Bäckström said. ‘I really appreciate that.’ If I had those eyes I wouldn’t need little Siggy, he thought. I could just stand and stare at them while they beg for mercy.
‘One left,’ Motoele said, turning his gaze inward again. ‘We’ll get little Afsan after the trial. I’ve got friends out in the prison system. On both sides. Easy.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Bäckström said. One left, what the hell is he saying? he thought.
‘Respect,’ Motoele repeated. ‘If we had more people like you, boss, we’d already have this sorted.’
‘Take care, Frank,’ Bäckström said. Congratulations, Evert, he thought. You’ve just made friends with the creepiest person ever to have become a police officer in the western hemisphere.
‘So this is where you’re sitting and sulking, is it, Bäckström?’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘How’s your nose, by the way?’
‘Fine,’ Bäckström said, fingering the plaster tentatively.
‘How about going and getting a beer? I’m buying, if that helps.’
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said.
94.
And with that he took his colleague Annika Carlsson to his favorite bar. Which was fine, since his blond tornado had gone home to Jyväskylä to see her family and had taken her glowering partner with her to be on the safe side.
What normal man would risk his monthly cleaning plus a decent lay once a week for a standard-issue dyke? Bäckström thought. Whether or not she claimed to be open to all comers?
In spite of everything, things had been perfectly fine until toward the end of the evening.
‘Do you know what, Bäckström?’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘I’ve actually never fucked in a Hästens bed. So how about it?’
Then she had suddenly grabbed his arm and squeezed with her long, sinewy fingers. It was as if someone had put a metal clamp round it.
‘Shit,’ Bäckström said. His nose was hurting so much that he might as well get his jaw broken before he lost consciousness in his bed at home. In the bullet-riddled flat that had once been his home.
‘Well, if we’re going to be completely open,’ Bäckström said.
‘Go on,’ his colleague Annika Carlsson said.
‘For the fucking life of me, I don’t know if I’m brave enough,’ Bäckström said. There, it was said and his jaw was still intact, he thought.
‘Like I said before, Bäckström, I keep an open mind when it comes to sex,’ Carlsson said. ‘If you like, I can be really, really sweet. But if you were to change your mind and decide you’d like to try something else, then I can be really, really mean.’
‘Let me think about it,’ Bäckström said, already feeling the sweat running down his back under his yellow linen jacket. A woman talking like that. Terrible, he thought.
‘Absolutely fine,’ Annika Carlsson said, shrugging her broad shoulders. ‘As long as you make your mind up before we leave here.
‘It’s fine, Bäckström,’ she assured him, scraping her nails across his hand. ‘Anyway, I’ve already said I’m paying.’
And she put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a thousand-kronor note. Strikingly similar to the ones they had been staring at a week or so before down in the vault of Handelsbanken on Valhallavägen.
Oh, so it’s like that, is it? Bäckström thought. He had lost any faith in humanity more than fifty years before.
‘How did you get them out of the vault?’ Bäckström asked.
‘The usual way, the way girls always have throughout the ages,’ Annika Carlsson said, smiling at him. ‘Besides, you were kind enough to run upstairs to call Toivonen, so it was easy. I took a bundle from the pile, rolled it up, put it inside the plastic glove, and inserted it in the usual place.’
‘In your snatch,’ Bäckström said, although he already knew the answer.
‘Mind you, I got it wet with saliva first,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘Some old advice I was once given. I worked as a prison guard in the women’s unit before I got into the Police Academy. You have no idea what I found between the legs of my clients while I worked there.
‘Mind you, it was a nightmare when we had to go and see Niemi,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘I’m quite tight down there, so it was chafing badly,’ she clarified.
‘What do you think, Bäckström?’ Carlsson said. ‘I’ve got it into my head that we’d make the perfect couple,’ she said, running her nails along his arm once more to underline her point.
‘I need to think,’ Bäckström said. Where’s humanity heading? Where’s Sweden heading? What the fuck is happening to the force? Bäckström thought.
And what the fuck happened to the princess and half the kingdom? he thought.