The Sword of Justice

by Leif G. W. Persson

  ‘Come in, boss,’ he said. ‘Nadja just rang and said you’d be coming over to see if there was anything at our crime scene that spoke to you.’

  ‘Where’s Niemi?’ Bäckström asked.

  ‘He went home to get some sleep,’ Hernandez said with a smile. ‘His age is probably catching up with him.’

  ‘I thought I’d have a look upstairs,’ Bäckström said, nodding towards the stairs leading up to the landing above.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Hernandez said. ‘We’re done there. Right now we’re going through the basement. Me and a couple of forensics officers from Regional Crime that we’ve had to bring in. It’s a massive building, so we’re probably going to be here all week if we’re going to do it properly. Just shout if there’s anything I can do to help.’

  Whatever the hell that might be, Bäckström thought, but made do with a simple nod.

  The large bloodstain in front of the desk was still there. It was neatly defined, almost circular, with a diameter of about thirty centimetres, on the part of the floor where the victim’s head had been lying, and when he kneeled down to take a closer look, Bäckström could even make out the impression left by Eriksson’s nose and forehead in the congealed blood.

  But no splashes, not the slightest little drop, he thought, even though Eriksson must have fallen face first on to the floor before the perpetrator set to work smashing in the back of his skull. This doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense, he thought as he got to his feet again.

  The upper floor of Eriksson’s house appeared to have been his private space. There was a large landing that acted as a combination of study and living room. The desk in the centre, two sofas in separate corners of the room, built-in bookcases and various other belongings that deserved a better fate than ending up in the estate inventory of a gangster lawyer. If only Niemi and Hernandez hadn’t taken so many pictures before Bäckström arrived on the scene.

  To the left of the landing was the lawyer’s bedroom, a large walk-in wardrobe and a bathroom that was bigger than Bäckström’s own living room in his cosy apartment on Kungsholmen. To the right was a combination of television and music room, something that seemed to be a guest room, with another bathroom and a separate toilet. Tidy, clean, perfect, white walls, polished wooden floors, marble and mosaics, and how much it had all cost was something he daren’t even think about.

  Ingratitude is the way of the world, he thought with a deep sigh, with his own lot in mind. The only consolation in this instance was his firm conviction that the lawyer was now warming his criminal arse on Our Lord’s very own barbecue, a long way below his former earthly dwelling.

  There was also a large, mobile drinks cabinet on the landing, with at least a hundred bottles on it. Whisky, gin, vodka, cognac, as well as all that other stuff – liqueurs, fortified wine, fizzy water – stuff that was best avoided unless you were a woman, a faggot or, as in Eriksson’s case, a lawyer. Standard stuff, mainly, Bäckström thought, and the only thing that held any interest for a connoisseur like him was a dark wooden box with shiny metal detailing and a relief of a black double-headed eagle on the lid. Just big enough to contain a litre of malt whisky of the very finest sort. Bäckström weighed the box in his hand before opening the lid, but instead of the cut-glass carafe he had been hoping to find, it merely contained a small enamelled figurine of a boy wearing a red cap, a yellow jacket and green trousers, little bigger than an old-fashioned quarter-litre of vodka, a bit like a Christmas elf.

  Just to make sure, he took it out of the box and shook it carefully in the hope of hearing the familiar glugging sound. From his wealth of experience, he knew that so-called smart folk were prone to keeping their drink in the strangest objects, such as books with old leather binding, binoculars, or even walking sticks. He himself had taken a stick of that sort when he searched a house almost thirty years ago during his early days on the violent crime squad in Stockholm, and these days it was in the umbrella stand in the hall of his flat on Kungsholmen. A treasured memory of the good old days when he was a young constable.

  No treasure trove this time. The enamel elf wasn’t making any glugging sound at all, even though Bäckström kept turning it over. But at the bottom of the box he found a small, handwritten note. ‘Enamel music-box in the shape of a young boy. Probably of German manufacture, early twentieth century. Value approximately three thousand kronor.’

  What’s an old music-box doing among all the drink? Bäckström thought, shaking his head in surprise and putting the black box back. Maybe Eriksson liked listening to music when he hit the bottle? Weird fucker, he thought, as he preferred to drink alone, and preferably in complete silence.

  Then he had called a taxi and, while he was standing in the hallway downstairs, he decided to get rid of the briefcase, to avoid any malicious rumours and boorish slander. He couldn’t really understand why he had thought of bringing it with him to a place where a couple of control freaks like Niemi and Hernandez had obsessively photographed everything and thus wiped out any opportunity for a bit of private enterprise. The simplest solution would be to ask the little Chilean-born tango-freak to take it back to the station and leave it in his office.

  Miserable business, Bäckström thought, stopping in front of the little hall table that was just inside the front door. On it was a Chinese vase that would otherwise have looked perfect on his own hall table and which would probably have fitted inside his briefcase. There was probably room for the whole bouquet of drooping tulips that Eriksson’s presumably illegal cleaner had put in it the week before. What the hell’s happening to the force? he thought, glancing at the briefcase that was tucked under his left arm and tentatively lifting the Chinese vase. He realized immediately that something wasn’t right. He put it back down again, pulled out the flowers, and there it was, shiny and silver, like a dead bream at the bottom of the vase.

  Blind bastards, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström thought, especially as he’d just been deprived of a Chinese vase that he could otherwise easily have taken home on a later occasion, once everything had settled down.

  37

  Only an hour after talking to his friend, Ara had met the reporter who had given his friend twenty thousand for a few grainy pictures of a perfectly ordinary security van robbery. They had met in the city, finding each other on a quiet backstreet on Södermalm with the help of their mobiles, then sat in the reporter’s car to negotiate the important details.

  ‘Your friend says you’ve some good stuff about Eriksson the lawyer’s demise,’ Ara’s new friend began.

  ‘It depends on the price,’ Ara said, shrugging his shoulders, wise from his experiences earlier that day.

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ the reporter said, smiling. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ara said. ‘I’m pretty sure I saw who did it. Not as it happened, but afterwards, when he was leaving the scene of the crime. And I saw the car he and his friend made off in.’

  ‘Was it anyone you recognized? The bloke you saw, I mean?’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t want to go into details. It depends on the price. I can give you the following. To start with, I can prove I was there. You’ll get a copy of the print-out from my taxi meter, with driving times and addresses, the whole lot. Secondly, I can identify the perpetrator if I see a decent picture of him. So no, I didn’t recognize him straight off. Thirdly, I can give you the car he and his mate drove off in. Not the registration number, because I never saw that, but it shouldn’t be too hard to identify this particular car. It wasn’t your average Volvo, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ the reporter said. ‘The cops have already interviewed you. They must have shown you a load of pictures already.’

  ‘No,’ Ara said with another shrug.

  ‘Forgive me, but that sounds really odd. They must have got you to look through a whole load of pictures?’

  ‘No,’ Ara said. ‘The one I spoke to was a knackered old cop who said he’d get back t
o me. Just show me a decent picture.’ Ara shrugged again.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ the reporter said. ‘So you’re saying you can give me the car they drove off in and, if you’re shown the right picture, you can identify the perpetrator?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ara nodded. ‘For the right price, like I said.’

  ‘But how can you be sure it was the perpetrator you saw?’

  ‘If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t need to ask,’ Ara said. ‘If you want details, it’s going to cost, like I—’

  ‘Five grand,’ the reporter interrupted.

  ‘Sorry?’ Ara said.

  ‘Five grand. You can have five thousand if you tell me what happened and agree to look at some pictures and give me the car. You won’t have to worry. We’ll describe you as an anonymous source.’

  ‘Five thousand? Forget it,’ Ara said, shaking his head.

  They didn’t get any further than that. As they parted, the reporter promised to get back to Ara as soon as he’d spoken to his boss, assuming that Ara didn’t speak to anyone else in the meantime. They shook hands and agreed to be in touch again soon. Not a good day, despite the fact that it had started so promisingly, Ara thought as he got behind the wheel of his own car and tapped at his computer to indicate he was available.

  Not a good day – and it had, if such a thing was possible, only got worse. During his first job after the meeting with the journalist his mobile had rung and, even though the call was from an undisclosed number and he had a customer in the car, he had answered it. It was a young female police officer who had evidently taken over from Alm. She sounded friendly, and wanted to show him some pictures, so the best thing would be if he could go back to the police station in Solna as soon as possible, preferably at once.

  Ara had explained that he didn’t have time. He had to work if he didn’t want to starve. If they wanted to compensate him for the time he’d lose, obviously, he’d be prepared to go. Otherwise, they’d have to get back to him tomorrow, when he was free all morning. It would be simplest if they could come round to his with all the pictures, so he didn’t have to drag himself over to the police station. Then he had ended the call by switching his mobile off.

  They weren’t about to give up. When he switched it on again a couple of hours later, he had two new messages in his voicemail. The first was from the same female officer he’d already spoken to. Just as friendly as before. The second was from one of her male colleagues, and he sounded considerably more abrupt, and wanted to see him at once for a supplementary interview, to show him the pictures. Ara had sighed deeply and decided it was time he got something to eat and thought things through in peace and quiet. So he had driven to his usual café. He had ordered a kebab, a diet Coke and a cup of mint tea, and sat down to eat as he thought.

  Good-looking girl, Ara thought as he was about to take the first bite of his kebab. He didn’t recognize her. She was just standing there in the doorway all of a sudden. Legs apart, broad shoulders, arms dangling, the way only blokes’ usually did. Short dark hair, loafers, jeans and a leather jacket, checking out the people in the café.

  Good-looking girl, Ara thought again, and the only problem was that she had the same look in her eyes as the person he had almost run over the night before. And that her eyes had stopped on him.

  Twenty minutes later he was sitting in a room at Solna police station. His taxi was parked outside the café in the city and, before he was put in the back seat of the police car that had driven him to the station, two male officers had searched him and emptied his pockets. Then the woman who had been standing in the doorway had taken hold of his arm and nodded to him.

  ‘Okay, Ara,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘The prosecutor’s decided that you need to be picked up for questioning immediately, seeing as you’re evidently pissing about with me and my colleagues. So the following rules apply now. No bollocks, no games, just nice and helpful, and, if you help me, I promise I’ll help you.’

  ‘No problem,’ Ara said with a nod. What choice have I got? he thought.

  38

  The door-to-door inquiries had far exceeded expectations, even in an area like this one. When Felicia Pettersson took over from her colleague Jan Stigson, they had sat in the police command vehicle outside the victim’s house for a brief handover.

  ‘How’s it been going?’ Felicia Pettersson asked.

  ‘Like a dream,’ Stigson declared. ‘We’ve had an incredible response.’

  To begin with, they had managed to get hold of practically everyone who lived in the area. They had started work at around seven in the morning. They had knocked on almost one hundred doors around the victim’s home and, by the time Felicia took over ten hours later, there were fewer than half a dozen neighbours left on the list Stigson had given Pettersson.

  Secondly, they had managed to talk to all four neighbours who had called SOS Alarm during the evening and night because of the barking dog: the first three, who had called between quarter past ten and five past eleven in the evening and who had been referred to the noise disturbance unit because the police had other, more important things to do, and the fourth, who had called just after two o’clock in the morning, the call which had finally resulted in a patrol car arriving at the scene ten minutes later.

  ‘We were a bit unlucky there,’ Stigson said with a wry smile. ‘Nadja called and told me about that taxi-driver who almost ran over one of our perpetrators just a couple of minutes before the first patrol arrived. And there was that poor dog as well, getting its throat cut.’

  ‘Can’t be lucky all the time,’ Felicia said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, the question mark hanging over the dog,’ Stigson said. ‘Between ten and eleven he barks almost non-stop. Then he’s quiet for almost three hours, before starting up again, at which point he makes a hell of a racket for five minutes, until someone cuts his throat. That’s the collated version we’ve worked out from the people we’ve spoken to. That the dog was quiet for three hours. Bit odd, if you ask me.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Possibly two more things, according to Knutson. They’d spoken to another witness, another dog-walker, who had made some interesting observations, even if they actually complicated the picture that was beginning to emerge. At half past nine that evening their witness and his dog had walked past the lawyer’s house and had seen a man sitting on the steps, and the door standing wide open.

  ‘An elderly, white-haired man was sitting on the steps in front of the house, and our witness says he thought about asking if he could help him with anything. But seeing as there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him, he didn’t bother. The witness says he thought the man sitting there might just have gone outside for some fresh air.’

  ‘An elderly, white-haired man?’

  ‘Yep,’ Stigson said with a nod. ‘The witness was in a bit of a hurry, he needed to get home for a wee – he said that off the record and in confidence – so he didn’t stop to take a close look. An elderly, white-haired man, slim, well-dressed, wearing a light summer suit. That’s what he says he saw, anyway. But he didn’t see the younger fit bloke who our female witness saw loading boxes into that silver Mercedes.’

  ‘An elderly, white-haired man. How old was he, then? Sixty? Seventy? Eighty? A hundred?’

  ‘Somewhere between seventy and eighty, if we can believe the witness,’ Stigson said, pulling a face. ‘That’s what he reckoned when we put a bit of pressure on him. About seventy-five years old, so definitely an older man. The witness himself is around sixty, which suggests he ought to be able to make a reasonable stab at the age of the man he saw.’

  Seventy-five years old, sitting on the steps with the door wide open, Felicia Pettersson thought. Doesn’t sound like the sort of person who’d have smashed in Eriksson’s skull. Possibly someone who’d been through something bad, she thought.

  ‘The car,’ Felicia said. ‘That silver Mercedes. We’ve got two witnesses who’ve mentioned it now. That woman, and the taxi-driver. Did this
witness—’

  ‘He didn’t notice any car, or see any white removal boxes,’ Stigson interrupted, shaking his head. ‘The fact that he didn’t pay any attention to a Merc of that colour probably isn’t so strange, considering the people who live here, and all their Mercs and BMWs and Lexuses and … well, you name it … It’s not really that strange.’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Felicia said. ‘One car among a load of others, and it wouldn’t have stood out here.’

  ‘Let’s drop the car for now. There are a few other things I’ve been wondering about,’ Felicia said, looking at her notes just to be sure.

  ‘I think I can guess,’ Stigson responded with a smile. ‘Shoot! I’m listening.’

  ‘That emergency call that was made from Eriksson’s mobile comes in at twenty to ten, and that’s definite, because it was logged by SOS Alarm—’

  ‘Whereas my witnesses mention a time between half past nine and just before ten.’ Stigson had thought the same thing that morning when he had been speaking to his first witness. ‘I can think of various explanations for that.’

  ‘Me too,’ Felicia agreed, ‘but the most likely still has to be that Eriksson tried to call SOS Alarm when things kicked off, and that’s when he was killed, and then the perpetrators leave the scene—’

  ‘Taking numerous items that they’ve stuffed into white boxes, which would mean that our female witness got the time wrong by about a quarter of an hour. It wasn’t half past nine but quarter to ten when she made her observations, and it would hardly be the first time someone’s got the time wrong by fifteen minutes. But there’s another explanation as well.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of them leaves the house, taking the stuff with them, while the other stays and kills Eriksson. Or they carry the stuff out first, then return to the house to finish off the lawyer.’

  ‘What about the old man sitting on the steps, then? How do you fit him in?’