by Leif Persson
‘As I said, I’m chair of the residents’ association, and we usually look out for each other here. Especially during the summer when so many people are on holiday. So I’ve got spare keys to most of the flats in the building.’
So she had fetched the key that the victim’s mother had given her, taken the lift down to the ground floor, rung on the bell a few more times, ‘just in case she was home after all’, then unlocked the door and gone into the flat.
‘I suppose it looked the way you’d expect when youngsters are left at home alone, so I didn’t really think anything of it. I think I called out to see if anyone was home, but no one answered so I went in . . . into the bedroom . . . yes . . . and then I saw what had happened. I realized straight away. So I . . . I turned and ran right out into the road. I was terrified – I thought that he might still have been there. Fortunately I had my mobile with me so that’s when I called . . . called the emergency number . . . you know, one one two. And they actually answered at once, even though you read in the paper that there are never any police.’
She never did get round to closing the open bedroom window, which didn’t really matter because it had stopped raining by the time the first patrol car arrived on the scene, and any eventual water damage was by then completely irrelevant. Police Constable Adolfsson naturally had no intention of closing it. He had actually noticed that there were extensive traces of diluted blood on the windowsill outside, but he decided to leave that particular detail to his colleagues in the forensics division.
The hottest summer in living memory, a neighbour who took the same walk with her dogs every morning, and also happened to have spare keys to the victim’s flat, a sudden downpour, an open window. Circumstances working together, the hand of fate if you like, but, whatever you called it, this was why the police were able to work out that things had happened one way and not another. And, considering the alternatives, that was far from being the worst possible outcome.
3
THE DUTY OFFICER had certainly done his bit. Within less than two hours everyone who should have been at the crime scene was actually there. Unfortunately there were also a whole load of other people that they could happily have done without, but there was nothing he could do about that, and the area around the building had been cordoned off, as had the road in front of it, in both directions.
Uniformed officers had systematically begun to search through the neighbouring properties and the immediate locality, while a dog patrol was trying to pick up the trail they assumed the perpetrator must have left when he jumped from the open window at the back of the building. Without success, however, but considering the downpour a couple of hours earlier that was hardly surprising.
Forensics had started searching the flat; the medical officer had been contacted and was on his way in from his house in the country. Officers from the county crime unit had already conducted a first interview with the witness who had found the body, and both the victim’s parents had been informed of what had happened and had been taken to the police station. Soon the uniforms would start going door-to-door in the area, and all the points on the duty officer’s list – with the exception of the last one – had been actioned and ticked off.
When he was sure that all the pieces were in place, or at least on their way, he got to grips with the final point on the list and called the county police commissioner. Astonishingly, even though it was a Friday during this endless summer and the man was supposed to be on holiday, he wasn’t at his place in the country, on the coast outside Oskarshamn, some hundred kilometres from Växjö, but behind his desk a few floors above in the same building as the duty officer. They spent almost fifteen minutes talking on the phone. Mostly they talked about the victim, and when the conversation was over, regardless of how experienced and hardened he might have been, the duty officer suddenly felt inexplicably depressed.
It was odd, really, because he usually felt strangely elated when he thought back to what had happened the last time he had needed to consult his handwritten list. He had been on a lengthy secondment to the neighbouring force in Kalmar, and two of the town’s worst hooligans had started shooting madly, in the middle of the day, in the middle of town, in the midst of all the decent, law-abiding citizens, firing off a couple of dozen shots in every possible direction. As if by some miracle, they had only succeeded in hitting each other, and a thing like that could only happen in Småland, the duty officer had thought at the time.
The county police commissioner wasn’t happy either. Admittedly, he wasn’t a murder detective, and one of his maxims in life was never to meet trouble halfway, but this case really didn’t look good. It had all the signs of a classic murder inquiry, and if things turned out badly – which wasn’t improbable, considering who the victim was – there was a serious possibility that he would be left feeling the way people like him always felt when things at work went as unfairly as they possibly could.
During an after-dinner speech he had given the previous week he had spent a long time talking about the limited resources of the police, and had concluded by comparing his force to ‘an inadequate and poorly maintained fence trying to hold growing levels of criminality at bay’.
It had been a much appreciated speech, and he himself had been particularly pleased with the metaphor of the fence, which he thought both ingenious and well phrased. Nor was he alone in this: the editor-in-chief of the largest local paper had been at the same dinner and had congratulated him over coffee and cognac. But that was then, and the county police commissioner would rather not imagine what direction the editor-in-chief’s thoughts would be taking over the next few hours.
Worst of all were his personal, entirely private, feelings. He was acquainted with the victim’s father, and he had met the daughter – the murder victim – on a number of occasions. He remembered her as a delightful young woman, and if he had had a daughter he would have been happy if she could have looked and behaved like her. What’s going on, he thought. And why the hell was it happening in Växjö, where there hadn’t been a murder case during all the years he’d worked there. In my patch. And in the middle of summer, to top it all.
That was when he made up his mind. No matter how stretched his fence was right now, and regardless of the fact that holidays and other investigations were hardly helping, it was high time for him to prepare himself for the worst that could happen. So he picked up the phone and called his old friend from their student days, HNC, to ask for help. Whom else could he possibly turn to in a situation like this?
After the conversation, which lasted less than ten minutes, the county police commissioner felt noticeably relieved, almost liberated. Help was on its way, the best possible help, from the murder squad of the legendary National Crime Unit, and their head had promised that it would arrive that very day.
He too had managed to acquit himself with honour during the early stages of the task. No gold star, admittedly, nor even a silver star, but probably a little bronze one because he had managed to think about a not inconsiderable practical detail. Straight away he had his secretary call the Town Hotel and book six single rooms for the foreseeable future, and had requested that the rooms be close together, and preferably separate from the rest of the hotel.
The people at the Town Hotel were happy, because it was the middle of the summer lull and there were plenty of vacancies, which wasn’t the case just a few hours later that same day, when there wasn’t a single hotel room to be had anywhere in the centre of Växjö.
4
Stockholm, Friday 4 July
EVEN THOUGH IT was only ten o’clock in the morning – during this remarkable summer that had begun in May and didn’t seem to want to end – one of the great legends of the National Crime Unit’s murder squad had already arrived at work. Unlike most of his colleagues, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström hadn’t gone off to the country to battle with gnats, a cross wife and whining kids. Not to mention all the crazy neighbours, stinking outdoor toilets, barbecues that
smelled of petrol, and warm lager.
Bäckström was short, fat and primitive, but when necessary he could be both sly and slow to forget things. He regarded himself as a wise man in the prime of life, an unfettered free spirit who preferred the quiet life of the city, and since a sufficient number of appetizing and scantily clad ladies seemed to share the same view, he had no reason at all for complaint.
Summer holidays were a source of pleasure for people who didn’t know any better, a device used excessively by almost all his colleagues, and thus a very good reason to stay at work: you finally got the opportunity to govern your own time. Last in and first out, and no one around to make any comments. And that was the whole point. Plenty of time for various errands outside police headquarters, and if any remaining boss should happen to look into his office, he was well prepared.
The day before his immediate superior went on holiday Bäckström had announced that as well as looking after practical matters if the worst should happen, he intended to fill any spare time by going back through old cases which had now gone cold. His boss hadn’t made any objection, largely because he just wanted to get away from police headquarters on Kungsholmen, and partly because the last thing he wanted to do was talk to Bäckström. So Bäckström’s desk was now covered by a mountain of unsolved murders which his less mentally blessed colleagues had messed up for no good reason.
The first thing he did when he arrived at work was to rearrange the piles of paper, in case anyone happened to poke about in there. After planning the rest of his day from the not inconsiderable comfort of the office chair behind his overburdened desk, he clicked on his telephone to activate a suitable reason for his absence. There were several to choose from, and to avoid any suspicious pattern he threw a dice to let fate decide if he would be spending the rest of the day ‘in a meeting’, ‘out of the office on official business’, ‘temporarily out of the office’, ‘on external business’, or possibly even ‘away on business’. By the time this recurring task had been dealt with, it was usually high time to continue the trials and tribulations of the day by having ‘lunch’. A fundamental human requirement, a right enshrined in employment legislation, and naturally an absence worthy of its own code in the police telephone system. He didn’t even need to throw the dice.
The only practical problem was that there was a distinct shortage of overtime and other small pecuniary advantages, because, as so many times before, he was suffering from a slight shortage of funds even though it was only a week since payday. Something will turn up, Bäckström thought. There’s always the weather, and all the half-naked ladies in the city. Soon enough a lunatic will beat some poor bastard to death in some three-star destination worthy of a trip in its own right, and then there’ll be overtime, expenses and all the other tax-deductible advantages for a simple police officer. And while he was in the middle of these encouraging thoughts his phone had suddenly rung.
The head of the National Crime Unit, Sten Nylander – or HNC as he was usually known among his eight hundred fellow officers – had also been deep in thought when the county police commissioner had called him from Växjö. Elevated thoughts about an intricate operational problem he’d set out on the vast planning desk in his own control room, or op-centre as he preferred to call it, principally about how best to deploy his rapid-response unit, in case international terrorists should hit upon the foolish notion of trying to hijack a plane out at Arlanda.
His colleague down in Växjö evidently didn’t have the same ability to differentiate between large and small concerns, and in order to prevent half his day from being wasted he had promised to send down some people from the murder squad at once. The worst that could happen, in the event that they were busy, was that they would have to rearrange their priorities, he thought as he hung up and asked his secretary to ‘get hold of that little fat bastard from National Crime, the one whose name I can never remember’. Then he had returned to more important matters.
‘HNC seems to have a lot on, even though it’s the height of the holiday season,’ Bäckström said, as he smiled his most ingratiating smile at his boss’s secretary and nodded towards the closed door behind her back. Op-centre, HNC, yeah, right! he thought.
‘Yes, he’s certainly very busy,’ the secretary said in a measured tone, without looking up from her papers. ‘No matter what time of year it is,’ she added.
Naturally, Bäckström thought. Or else he’s been on a course and learned that people like him should always make people like me sit and wait for quarter of an hour while he reads the editorial in Svenska Dagbladet.
‘Yes, we live in troubled times,’ he lamented.
‘Indeed,’ the secretary said, giving him a stern look.
Unless you’re HNC, of course, Bäckström thought. The bastard had a nice title as well. HNC sounded military, as well as macho. Definitely better than being National Police Chief, the biggest bird in the farmyard, and being called NPC. Who the hell wants to be NPC? Sounds like something you pick up if you’ve been out with the wrong sort of woman.
‘HNC is free now,’ the secretary said, nodding towards the closed door.
‘Humble thanks,’ Bäckström said, bowing slightly from where he sat. Exactly quarter of an hour. Even a child could have worked that out. Even you, you nice little attack-dyke, he thought, smiling cheerily towards the secretary. She didn’t respond, and just glared suspiciously at him.
Bäckström’s most senior boss seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. He was still stroking his manly and well-defined chin with his right thumb and index finger, and when Bäckström came into the room he hadn’t said a word, merely given him a curt nod.
Odd character, Bäckström thought. And what ridiculous clothes, when it’s thirty degrees outside.
The Head of National Crime was, as usual, dressed in an impeccable uniform, and for that day this consisted of a pair of black riding boots, the blue trousers of the police horse unit, and a blindingly white uniform shirt with epaulettes bearing four gold bars and an oak leaf topped by a regal crown. On the left side of his chest was a four-barred ribbon, and on the right the two crossed golden sabres that for some reason had become the emblem of the National Crime Unit. A tie, naturally, fixed at exactly the right angle with the help of the police service’s own tiepin for senior commanders. Back straight as a poker, stomach pulled in and chest puffed out, as if it were trying to compete with his most prominent physical feature.
What a fucking chin! He looks like a bloody oil tanker, Bäckström thought.
‘If you’re wondering about the way I’m dressed,’ HNC said without gracing him with so much as a glance or taking his fingers from the part of his face that was occupying Bäckström’s thoughts, ‘I’m planning to go riding on Brandklipparen later on.’
No flies on him. Better be careful, Bäckström thought.
‘A regal name for a noble steed,’ HNC added.
‘That’s what Charlie the Twelfth’s nag was called, isn’t it?’ Bäckström said obsequiously, even though he had skived off most of his history lessons.
‘Both Charles XI and Charles XII,’ HNC said. ‘The same name, but naturally not the same horse. Do you know what this is?’ he added, nodding towards the intricate model set out on the vast planning desk.
Considering all the terminals, hangars and aeroplanes, it probably isn’t the battle of Poltava, Bäckström thought.
‘Arlanda,’ he guessed. What on earth did Arlanda look like from above?
‘Exactly,’ HNC said. ‘But that’s not why I wanted to see you.’
‘I’m listening, boss,’ Bäckström said, trying to look like the cleverest pupil in class.
‘Växjö,’ HNC said emphatically. ‘A murder inquiry, a young woman, found strangled in her home this morning. Probably raped as well. I promised them our help. So put a team together and set off at once. You can sort out the details with Växjö. If anyone here has any objections, refer them to me.’
Excellent, Bäckström thought. Damn
, this was even better than the age of the three musketeers, which was one book he had actually read. When he was playing truant from school.
‘No problem, boss,’ Bäckström said. Växjö, he thought. Wasn’t that by the sea somewhere, down in Småland? It must be crawling with women at this time of year.
‘And one more thing,’ the Head of National Crime said. ‘Before I forget. There’s a slight complication. The identity of the victim.’
Let’s see, said the blind man, Bäckström thought, as he sat at his desk half an hour later, busy arranging the practical details. First of all, a serious injection of liquid assets in the form of a postal order he had managed to pick up from accounts even though it was a Friday at the height of the holiday season. This he had reinforced with a few thousand-kronor notes from the gratuities box of the violent crime unit. There was always something there in case of urgent, unexpected expenses, and Bäckström always kept a close eye on it, because no matter how malnourished his own bank account might look, he had no intention of ever suffering any form of deprivation.
He had also managed to scrape together all of five colleagues, four of whom were proper police officers and only one a woman. But, on the other hand, she was a civilian employee and would mostly be busy trying to keep the paperwork in order, so he could probably live with that. And one of his colleagues would appreciate her being there, seeing as he usually jumped on her whenever he had the chance, at a sufficient distance from his miserable wife. Maybe it wasn’t the absolute elite, Bäckström thought as he looked over the list of his team, but good enough considering how many people were on holiday. Besides, he was going to be there as well.
