by Leif Persson
‘It was very good,’ Svanström twittered. ‘Janne had a couple of things to do on the way, that’s why it took so long.’
‘I see,’ Bäckström said. ‘Well, maybe we should take the opportunity to get something done while we’re on our own, so that we can have a bite to eat without having to talk about the case among all the vultures down there. Erik, you brought a load of papers with you. Have you got copies for everyone?’ Completely useless, he thought.
Knutsson had brought with him pretty much everything that was available and ready when he visited the police station. And six copies of everything, enough for one each. In their bundles they each had the initial alarm call, a report from the first responders, various photographs of the crime scene and the surrounding area, a sketch of the flat where the body had been found, a short description of the victim, and a log detailing what their colleagues had already had time to make a start on.
Bäckström felt slight disappointment when he glanced through the file. They didn’t seem to have missed anything obvious. Not yet, at least, and considering that he was about to take charge things would doubtless be fine.
‘Any questions?’ he asked, to a unanimous shaking of heads.
‘Well, it’s not time for food yet,’ he said with a crooked smile. Lazy fuckers, he thought. All they think about is food, drink and fucking.
‘Do we know when we might get anything from the medical officer and forensics?’ Rogersson asked.
‘The post-mortem’s tomorrow,’ Knutsson said. ‘They’ve evidently driven her down to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Lund. The forensics team are hard at work but the one I spoke to thought that they’d managed to get samples of semen from the perpetrator, as well as blood from the windowsill outside the bedroom. There were also some clothes that they think belong to him. Things he left behind when he ran off. Looks like he was in a hurry, and the officer I spoke to is pretty sure he jumped out of the bedroom window. That’s probably when he cut himself on the windowsill.’
‘You mentioned something about clothes,’ Bäckström grunted. ‘Don’t suppose we’re lucky enough that he ran off without his trousers?’
‘Looks pretty much like it,’ Knutsson replied. ‘Well, I don’t know how he was dressed when he arrived, but it looks as though he left without his underwear.’
‘That was rather careless of him,’ Bäckström said. ‘Still, I don’t suppose that’s where he kept his driving licence, because that would be a bit too much to hope for.’ Hardly anyone’s that stupid, he thought, although this one seemed stupid enough, and that was usually a good sign.
‘Bäckström,’ Rogersson said, apparently in a very good mood all of a sudden. ‘Do you remember that idiot who strangled that woman in her flat on Högalidsgatan? The Ritva murder. That was her name. He spent ages cleaning up after him, wiping away fingerprints and pretty much scrubbing the walls, floor and ceiling before he left. The idiot spent hours at it. It was just a shame that little Ritva who lived there didn’t get to see the benefit of having everything so clean.’
‘I remember,’ Bäckström said. ‘We were both on the case, and it’s pretty much the only one you’ve ever talked about in the past twenty years.’ Must be all the drink, Bäckström thought.
‘Now, now, there’s no need to be like that,’ Rogersson said, no less cheerfully. ‘I wonder how he felt when he slammed the door behind him and suddenly realized what he’d forgotten.’
‘I don’t suppose he felt too great,’ Bäckström said. He nodded towards Thorén. ‘Peter, you’ve been to look at the crime scene. What does it look like?’
‘What was the point?’ Thorén asked. ‘Forgive a young man’s ignorance, but what was the point?’
‘What do you mean, the point?’ Bäckström said. What the hell’s he going on about? How about answering a perfectly simple question instead?
‘With the bloke on Högalidsgatan?’ Thorén persisted.
‘Oh, him,’ Bäckström said. ‘Well, he’d forgotten to pick up his wallet, with his driving licence and all the other things people usually have in their wallets. He left it on the victim’s bedside table. But apart from that he’d left everything beautifully neat and tidy. Forensics didn’t actually find a single strand of hair. But to get back to the matter in hand . . .’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Knutsson exclaimed, looking almost as happy as Rogersson.
‘Our case,’ Bäckström reminded them. ‘What about the crime scene?’
According to Thorén, it looked the way crime scenes usually looked. Just as miserable as they always were when a woman had been raped and murdered. Possibly slightly more miserable this time, as the perpetrator had been alone with the victim in her home and seemed to have had complete control over her, and had evidently had plenty of time.
Unfortunately none of the usual classic suspects had been identified. No former or current boyfriend, nor anyone else that she knew and trusted. She didn’t appear to have had a boyfriend for a while, and there were no known madmen or particularly suspicious characters either in the neighbourhood or among the people she knew. Which left the typical police nightmare. A perpetrator who was unknown to the victim. Someone she had never met before, and, in the worst cases, someone no one else had ever met either.
‘So it looks like it’s going to be a proper murder investigation after all,’ Thorén concluded.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘We’ll sort it out. You can all read through the file in peace and quiet before going to bed. Make sure you look after them, so I don’t have to see it in the paper. This whole building’s crawling with reporters and other body-snatchers. Well, I for one could do with some food now. I haven’t eaten a thing since this morning and I’m hungry as hell.’
‘If you all write your names at the top of your file and give them to me, I’ll lock them in my safe while we eat,’ Svanström said.
‘Excellent idea,’ Bäckström said. You jumped-up little nightmare, he thought. And he was right: she was far too skinny as well.
After dinner they had all gone back to their rooms to start studying the case. At least that’s what they told Bäckström they were going to do, and Knutsson and Thorén were naturally going to do it together. Even Rogersson, who was usually a perfectly normal officer, seemed to have been afflicted by the desire to do some reading. Although he had accompanied Bäckström back to his room first and borrowed a couple of export-strength lagers from him, he had declined Bäckström’s invitation to join him in a postprandial snifter.
‘You’re not coming down with something, are you, Rogge?’ Bäckström asked. ‘I’m starting to worry about you.’ Feeble little bastard, he thought.
‘No,’ Rogersson said, shaking his head. ‘No need to worry. I just need to get a few hours’ sleep so I can keep up tomorrow.’
So they had gone their separate ways, which was just as well really, considering that Bäckström was thinking of taking a discreet little walk round the town. To check the lie of the land, if nothing else, and that sort of thing was best done alone.
He had snuck out of the back of the hotel, and spent a while strolling at random round the centre of town. He had never visited Växjö before, either on business or privately, and now he wandered past the governor’s residence and the cathedral, past all the nice old buildings that had been restored the way buildings like that demanded, and past a number of outdoor bars full of people dressed for summer who didn’t look particularly upset by the event which had brought him here. How on earth could anyone kill someone else in that way in a place like this, Bäckström wondered. It must be the first time in local criminal history.
There were several pleasant hostelries along his route, and even though it was after eleven o’clock in the evening it was almost twenty degrees, but Bäckström had been steadfast in resisting temptation until he got back to the hotel.
There he ordered a beer on the terrace, and went and sat in the gloom of the far corner so he could have some peace. Not too many pe
ople about, either, he thought. His colleagues were conspicuous by their absence, and the simplest explanation was that they had all actually done what they had promised to do. He had his doubts as far as Lewin and little Svanström were concerned, because he doubted that reading came very high up their list, but Knutsson and Thorén were probably more straightforward. They would be sitting in one of their rooms talking about murder cases, and they’d probably carry on like that half the night if no one stopped them. Who on earth would do something like that, Bäckström wondered. And they’re stone-cold sober as well, the little idiots, he thought, sipping his beer.
‘Is this seat taken?’
The person asking was a woman. In that indeterminate age between thirty-five and forty-five, and obviously past the best-before date for women, but at least she was verging on the well-rounded side, Bäckström thought.
‘That depends who’s asking,’ he said. Journalist, he thought.
‘Yes, maybe I should introduce myself,’ she said, putting her own beer on the table and sitting down in the empty chair. ‘My name’s Carin Ågren.’ She handed over a business card. ‘I’m a reporter for local radio here in town.’
‘What an astonishing coincidence,’ Bäckström said with a smile. ‘So what could I possibly help you with, Carin?’ Other than giving you a shot up the snatch up in my room, he thought.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she said, smiling and showing her white teeth. ‘Funny the way things turn out sometimes. I actually recognize you. I’ve seen you before, when I was working for TV4 in Stockholm a couple of years ago. I was covering a trial and you were one of the witnesses. Three Russians who’d robbed and killed an elderly couple. Might I ask what National Crime’s murder unit is doing in town?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ Bäckström said, taking a large gulp of his beer. ‘I was thinking of paying a visit to Astrid Lindgren’s childhood home.’
‘Maybe we could meet some other time,’ she said with a smile. Just as broad as before, the same white teeth.
‘Maybe,’ Bäckström said, and put her card in his pocket. He nodded and finished the last of his lager. Then he stood up and gave her his most effective smile. The battle-scarred cop from the big city. Tough against the tough guys but the nicest man in the world if you were gentle enough and stroked him in the right way.
‘I’ll take that as a promise,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’ll have to start stalking you.’ She raised her glass and smiled at him for a third time.
Definitely up for it, Bäckström thought quarter of an hour later as he stood in front of the bathroom mirror brushing his teeth. It was just a matter of taking it slowly and in the right order, and she’d soon get a taste of the Bäckström super-salami.
7
IN MARKED CONTRAST to Bäckström’s imaginings, Detective Superintendent Jan Lewin had sought the tranquillity of his own room immediately after dinner, so that he could read the file on the case in peace and quiet. He had summarized everything that was good and everything that was bad, and even though most of it was little more than preliminary information, there seemed to be quite a lot working in his and his colleagues’ favour.
They had a victim whose identity was known, a crime scene, an approximate idea of how it had all happened and when the crime was committed. He and his colleagues were on the scene less than twenty-four hours after the murder, and that wasn’t always the case if you worked for the murder squad. The crime had been committed indoors, which – all things considered – was better than outdoors, and their victim seemed to be a perfectly normal young person without any extravagant habits or contacts.
In spite of all this, he hadn’t been able to shake off the usual sense of gnawing unease. First he had considered going to visit the crime scene on Pär Lagerkvists väg, to get an impression of what had happened with his own eyes, but because every indication suggested that their colleagues from forensics were still busy there he had decided not to disturb them unnecessarily.
In the absence of anything else and largely to give himself something to do, he had hooked up his computer and gone on to the internet to read about the author and Nobel Prize-winner Pär Lagerkvist, who had lent his name to the road where their victim had lost her life. Whatever he might have to do with anything, Lewin thought. He’d been dead for the past thirty years.
Not entirely unexpectedly, it turned out that Pär Lagerkvist came from Växjö. Born in 1891, the youngest of a clutch of seven children. Meagre financial circumstances, father a foreman of the goods yard at Växjö railway station, the highly talented youngest son who, in contrast to his older siblings, had the opportunity to study and graduated from high school in Växjö.
Then he had left his childhood behind and gone away to become a writer. At the age of twenty-five, in 1916, he made his literary breakthrough with a collection of poetry, Angst. Eventually he was elected to the Swedish Academy, and in 1951 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was evidently held in high regard by his hometown, because just a few months later a road was named after him in the town where he had been born and grew up. And this more than twenty years before he died, which tended to be when such accolades were bestowed upon people like him. And at the time the buildings which would eventually be constructed along the road bearing his name only existed in the designs of the town planning office.
Now one of them had become Jan Lewin’s latest crime scene, and as soon as he had time and it seemed appropriate, he planned to pay it a visit. But not tonight, he thought. Not tonight, when their colleagues in forensics needed to get on in peace.
Instead he had taken a walk through the town. Night-empty streets that led him, after just four hundred metres, to the new police station that would be his workplace for the immediate future.
The building was situated on Sandgärdsgatan, on one of the town’s squares, Oxtorget. It had been put up at the start of the new millennium, and was a temple to justice typical of its time. A boxlike building of four or five floors, depending how you counted, with a pale yellow façade, where the police shared premises with the prosecutor’s office, a courtroom for custody proceedings, a jail and the probation office. A justice factory, arranged in such a practical way that it covered the entire judicial chain. A clear message, of scant solace to those who ended up there, and poor support for the theory that every suspect should be treated as if he were innocent until the opposite had been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.
To the left of the entrance Lewin had found a small copper plaque which told him that back in Pär Lagerkvist’s day, and even long after he had won the Nobel Prize, this had been the site of Växjö’s old dairy, with pens for the local cattle market. For some reason Lewin suddenly felt depressed. He turned on his heel and headed back to the hotel, to try to get a few hours’ sleep before the serious work began.
Before he fell asleep he found himself thinking about angst for some reason. Presumably not an unusual subject for a young poet, regardless of when he had been alive. And presumably a common subject for authors no matter how old they were, in the middle of a world war with the whole of Europe in flames.
Jan Lewin knew a fair amount about angst. Private and personal experience of the emotion that had been his lot ever since he was a child. Admittedly, it visited him less often the older he got, but it was still lurking out there, constantly present, always ready to attack if he wasn’t strong enough to resist. Suddenly, unexpectedly, every time from a different source. Its consequences abundantly clear even if its message and origins were always shrouded in darkness.
Added to this was the angst he encountered in the course of his work, when it prompted violent attacks that he ended up investigating. Dates that had gone wrong, relationships that had gone off the rails, providing fruitful territory for fear and hatred. And sometimes ended up on his desk in the National Crime Unit in Stockholm.
And finally there was the angst that could afflict even the most hardened and ruthless criminal when he realiz
ed the enormity of what he had done. Always assuming that the police were going to catch him, of course, so it was best to hide in the darkness. Constantly aware that people like Jan Lewin were searching the same darkness, trying to find him.
If nothing else, then to ease my own angst, Jan Lewin thought, before finally falling asleep.
8
Växjö, Saturday 5 July
WAS I RIGHT, or was I right? Bäckström thought when he came down to the hotel reception for breakfast on Saturday morning. The evening papers had already arrived. Even though it was only quarter past eight in the morning, they were displayed in a stand by the reception desk. Bäckström grabbed a copy of each and headed towards the breakfast room and his colleagues. If this is just a small complication, we must sincerely hope we don’t encounter anything larger, he thought.
The whole of the front page and a great deal of the rest of the papers were full of his murder, and the angle was precisely what he had expected: POLICE OFFICER KILLED IN SEX ATTACK, screamed the larger of the two, while its slightly smaller competitor tried to roar even louder: YOUNG FEMALE POLICE OFFICER MURDERED . . . Strangled, raped, tortured. Bäckström tucked the papers under his arm, picked up a tray and started loading it with his breakfast. No one could run a murder investigation on an empty stomach, he thought as he helped himself to liberal portions of scrambled egg, bacon and sausage.
‘Have you seen the evening papers, Bäckström?’ Lewin asked as he sat down at the table where the others were sitting. ‘Wonder how her family will feel when they see that?’
Are you stupid, or what? Bäckström thought, leafing through the papers with his left hand while he shovelled in scrambled egg and sausages with the right.
‘It’s just . . . bloody vile,’ Thorén, who almost never swore, agreed.
