Sammy Nilsson explained that Nils Dufva was listed as one of the Swedes who had tried to rebuild the Nazi movement in Sweden after the Second World War. He had played a prominent role.
‘If he was a Nazi after the war, then he was probably one before and after as well,’ Sammy Nilsson said.
‘There are more Uppsala residents in here,’ Berglund exclaimed.
‘Yes, a furniture dealer, a builder, and a lieutenant at the regiment.’
‘That was the one, I’ve shopped there,’ Berglund went on. ‘We bought a dining table there in the sixties. If I had known…’
‘That was nothing they advertised,’ Sammy said. ‘“Buy the Himmler sofa” is not exactly a catchy slogan.’
‘He’s listed in here as “employed in defence”. What does that mean? Did he work in the warehouses of S1, or what?’
‘It’s mysterious. I think I remember him as having worked in an office before retirement,’ Sammy Nilsson said.
‘But we didn’t find anything at his home…’
Berglund broke off. He recalled the medals from Germany.
After that he put down a great deal of effort in trying to chart out Nils Dufva’s earlier life. He even contacted the author of the book that Sammy Nilsson had stuck in his hand.
The author, a historian from Göteborg, had no further information about Dufva other than that during the fifties and sixties he had probably been employed by some organisation within the defence department, maybe the military information service.
When Berglund wanted to keep researching this he came to a dead stop. Dufva was not listed in the defence registers. No one wanted to or could give him more meat on the bone. One theory was that Dufva had been subcontracted by the defence department through the private company who employed him.
The company was called Bohlin’s Agency and was dissolved in 1989. When Berglund started to delve into what Bohlin’s Agency had worked with and who had managed it, he found an August Bohlin, deceased that same year.
His son, Jerker Bohlin, who worked in Florida, had told him over the phone that his father had worked with tax declarations, accounting, and wills. He had not been a lawyer or accountant, but had always kept busy. If the company had been hired by the defence department he did not know, but found it hard to believe.
According to the son, his father’s clients were mostly elderly women. One summer he worked at his father’s company and said it might as well have been a nursing home. He visited old people in Luthagen who had to sign documents. Company papers were probably no longer in existence.
Jerker Bohlin had a faint memory of the fact that he, after his father’s death, had stored a couple of boxes with folders in a storage unit in Boländerna where he kept a few things he wanted to save but not ship across the Atlantic. He still retained a storage unit.
He had naturally met Nils Dufva many times over the years but had no idea what tasks he had undertaken or how he had been as a person. Dufva was not a talkative sort. Bohlin remembered, however, that Dufva collected old coins.
Berglund had the feeling that no one wanted to dig in all of this, at least no one who had any information, but he still received permission to look through the remaining documents in the storage unit.
These turned out to be an unholy blend of copies of agreements, contracts, and estate inventories, spanning a period of twenty years. Berglund looked through the papers without encountering anything out of the ordinary. August Bohlin had clearly maintained his papers in an exemplary order; everything was sorted and numbered. On many of the documents, in his beautiful and delicate handwriting, he had made comments of an exceedingly personal character. In an estate inventory he might have said ‘a most honourable person who unfortunately passed away at too young an age’, whereas another one received the appraisal ‘a scrooge who never made anyone really happy except on aforementioned date’.
Berglund had still taken the trouble to write down all the names that appeared in the documents, without nursing any real hope about its usefulness, and attached the list of names to the case files. Then he had returned the five boxes to the storage unit, contacted Jerker Bohlin, and asked him to keep the documents from his father’s agency.
Now here he was, seven years later, at the Akademiska Hospital, looking through the materials. The leads were colder than ever. The ones who could talk were either old or gone for good, or simply unwilling to cast any light on Nils Dufva’s career.
Whether Dufva’s past had anything to do with his murder was as unclear as before. If the intention had actually been to take out the old man then the deed was almost macabrely amateurish. A natural preventive measure would have been to try to conceal such a motive by stealing such items as could have been carried off, in order to make the whole thing appear as a straightforward robbery-killing.
‘Saab 9000,’ he muttered. ‘It pulls up, parks, drives away.’
He could picture the whole scene: the curious neighbour, her hands in the dough, peeks out but turns away to take a tray of cinnamon buns out of the oven. The man gets out of the car and walks up to Dufva’s door. The concrete walkway is five, six metres long, the stairs have three steps.
Does he walk straight in, does he ring the doorbell, or does he even have keys? Whichever it is, he gets inside. Dufva is in a wheelchair and defenceless against his attacker, who rushes toward him and hits him in the head. The power of the blow sends him tumbling to the floor with enough force to kill him instantly.
Did the murderer bring the weapon or simply pick an object at the scene? Jenny Holgersson, the cousin twice removed, did not believe that anything had gone missing, but admitted that she did not have an exact inventory of all the items in the house. The murder weapon had never been located.
The film played in Berglund’s head in meaningless reprise, but the sequences rolled of their own accord.
His headache intensified. The effect of the tablets he had been given in the morning had worn off. He was still worried, although less so with each passing hour, that the operation would cause permanent damage, that he would lose his sense of balance, speech, or memory, or anything else that would happen to make a normal life impossible.
He had attempted to walk in a straight line from the door to the window following a seam in the flooring. That he could manage. He had recited the names of all the towns in Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland, the capital cities of Europe, and the English football teams in the highest league. He had managed that too. He understood all the words in the Dufva files and when he read aloud to himself his tongue did not slip once. His handwriting was as even and legible as before.
He would make a complete recovery. What was a little headache compared to when they carved in his head?
He was going to struggle through the Dufva files one more time and find the despicable individual who had clubbed a defenceless eighty-five-year-old to death.
Berglund got up and went back over to the window. He stood there for a long time looking down at the people in the street below and the small parking lot for which there was so much competition. Now they could come, the rascals from Violent Crimes.
He glanced at the stack of papers on the night table and smiled to himself.
NINETEEN
Nilsson, Ottosson, Fredriksson, Haver, and Beatrice Andersson were all listening to Lindell’s lecture, but as if through a silent pact none of them revealed how comical her enthusiasm sounded. On the table she had spread out about a dozen photographs of the site and the surrounding area.
She was talking about the archipelago.
‘It’s chilly out there now,’ Sammy Nilsson said.
‘Not really,’ Lindell said, ‘the sun was shining, it was idyllic.’
‘If it weren’t for that foot,’ Beatrice said roughly.
Lindell shot her a look.