But it seemed that wasn’t altogether straightforward either, according to Nadja, who had already started thinking about the matter with the help of the databases she had access to. Within a hundred-kilometre radius of the crime scene – far enough for them to drive if they forgot something on their first visit and had to return four hours later – there were three million people and almost two million cars, of which almost thirty thousand were Mercedes.
For that reason, she had applied certain criteria, all of which could be used to search the national vehicle register, to reduce the number of possible vehicles.
‘Silver, an expensive coupé, five years old at most,’ Nadja summarized. ‘That brings it down to a total of about four hundred vehicles within our radius. Just over half of those are hire cars, leased out or owned by businesses. And just under half are privately owned. Six of those are registered to people living within a kilometre from our victim’s home.’
‘Good,’ Bäckström said. ‘Take any safe short cuts you can. Just say if you need more people.’
‘That’s underway,’ Nadja said. ‘I’ve already spoken to Annika about it.’
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘We’ll stop there and get some work done, then we’ll meet again tomorrow, same time, same place. I’ve also got something I want you to think about. I’m expecting a good answer tomorrow.’
Bäckström left a dramatic pause while he pretended to read his notes.
‘Eriksson was murdered at quarter to ten in the evening. So can someone please explain to a simple officer why the perpetrators would return some four hours later to cut his dog’s throat, and then smash in the skull of someone who’s been dead for several hours. What is it that makes them so pissed off they’re prepared to take that risk?’
That gave them something to think about, Bäckström thought. The only ones who didn’t look astonished were Peter Niemi and his colleague Chico Hernandez. Neither of them said anything, just nodded in agreement.
45
Nadja handed the search for the silver Mercedes over to her colleagues. Once reinforcements had arrived, there were five of them in total, and they had each been issued with copious instructions. Purely routine, she thought, and if any problems did arise, they could always ask her. She had other things to be getting on with. Questions that couldn’t be answered with the help of a simple manual and a bit of tapping at a keyboard, questions relating to what their murder victim had spent the last twenty-four hours of his life doing. Questions that required considerations of a more speculative nature, where the degree of probability had to be carefully evaluated.
Judging by the log of the alarm at Eriksson’s house, he appeared to have woken up before half past ten in the morning. That’s when he deactivated the alarm and opened the front door, only to reactivate it a minute later. He had probably let his dog out into the garden and fetched his morning paper from the letterbox, Nadja thought, noting her conclusions on the timeline she had drawn up on her computer.
After that, he probably read the paper and had breakfast, she thought, seeing as it wasn’t until twenty to eleven that the alarm was deactivated and the front door opened again, and then the alarm was again reactivated a minute later. That’s when he lets the dog back in. The dog runs round the garden while he eats breakfast and reads the paper.
To judge by the remnants in his sink, he had started the day with bacon and eggs, bread, coffee and a Fernet-Branca while reading Svenska Dagbladet and making a failed attempt to solve that day’s difficult sudoku. He doesn’t seem to have been much of a mathematician, Nadja thought, shaking her head sadly and opening the log of Eriksson’s phone calls on her computer. His landline had been silent all day, but he had received three calls on his mobile and made two outgoing calls.
The first call was short, just a couple of minutes, and was from an unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile. It was made at thirteen minutes past twelve and ended at a quarter past. The identity of the caller remained to be seen, but it looked like a typical call to confirm something that he or she and Eriksson had already talked about, Nadja thought, making another note on her timeline.
The next call was more straightforward. It had been made from a mobile belonging to his colleague, the lawyer Peter Danielsson. It was received at half past one in the afternoon, and they had clearly had a lot to talk about, as the conversation lasted over half an hour, ending at seven minutes past two.
Nadja opened the transcript of the first interview with Danielsson on her computer and found the part where he said he had called Eriksson at around midday. Then she sighed and made another note on her list of contradictions and things that weren’t altogether clear, things she’d have to check again just to make sure, even though she knew that, nine times out of ten, they were the result of human error and had nothing to do with anything. Memory is an unreliable companion, she thought, going back to the list of calls.
The last incoming call had been made from the offices of Eriksson and Partners at ten minutes to three in the afternoon. It lasted nine minutes, and the evidence seemed to suggest that it wasn’t Danielsson calling back, as the call from his mobile which had ended only half an hour earlier had been made via a phone mast in the vicinity of Danielsson’s summer cottage on Rådmansö outside Norrtälje, whereas the law firm was based in Östermalm in Stockholm.
So he was talking to someone else at work, Nadja thought, and she already had her own ideas about who that might have been. Three minutes after that call ended, Thomas Eriksson had made his first outgoing call from his mobile. He called another mobile, belonging to a young woman who worked as a legally trained secretary at the law firm and, going by the location of her phone when the call was received, she had probably called him first from the office. And he called her on her mobile three minutes later. Possibly for the simple reason that they were seeing each other, Nadja thought. She was very familiar with the pattern such calls usually followed.
Isabella Norén, twenty-four years old, employed at the law firm for the past three years, Nadja thought as she typed Norén’s ID number into her computer and immediately found the interview conducted by her colleague Johan Ek late on Monday afternoon, barely twenty-four hours earlier. According to Norén herself, her last contact with Eriksson had been around lunchtime on the Friday before the murder. He had looked into her office and asked her to get out the documentation relating to a case that was due to be heard in the Court of Appeal the following week. A routine task, nothing remarkable, and, according to Norén, the short conversation had ended with them wishing each other a good weekend.
But that isn’t what happened, Nadja thought, adding another note to her list of details that would require further investigation.
That just left the last phone call. Made to SOS Alarm at twenty to ten in the evening, when whoever made the call didn’t say anything before the call was cut off. That was when he died, Nadja thought. He gets up just before half past nine in the morning and is killed twelve hours later. Her next task was to work out what he was doing between twenty to eleven in the morning, when he let his dog in, and thirteen minutes past twelve, when he received the first incoming call.
First, he feeds the dog, Nadja thought. Then he probably has a bath. She had the impression he was the sort who preferred baths to showers, especially on a Sunday morning, when he could do as he pleased. About half an hour in the bath, no longer, given that he had switched on his computer and logged in at quarter past eleven, and he seemed to have been sitting in front of it for the rest of the day, until almost nine o’clock that evening, when he lets his guests in.
With short breaks to let the dog out again – the alarm log indicated that the front door had been opened and closed at quarter past six and quarter to seven – and another meal, which he probably ate in front of his computer. Breadcrumbs on the keyboard, a side plate with a few olive stones on it, a cheese rind, a couple of uneaten slices of salami and an empty beer bottle. Nine hours or so in front of the computer. On the internet the
whole time, and the sites he visited were pretty extreme, even for a hardened woman like her.
46
On Tuesday, Detective Inspector Jan Stigson and his colleagues had done another round of door-to-door inquiries, showing the people living in the area pictures of the silver Mercedes. It hadn’t led to anything useful. But that evening they had found another witness who could provide additional information about the white boxes that Stigson’s female neighbour had mentioned.
This was another neighbour who, on Thursday or Friday evening, two or three days before the murder, had seen Eriksson unloading a couple of white boxes from the back seat of his black Audi and carrying them inside the house. He was unsure which day it was – either Thursday or Friday, but he was certain it couldn’t have been any other day of the week leading up to Eriksson’s murder. He had been away on business for the first half of the week and returned to Stockholm only late on Wednesday evening. He had been kind enough to show his diary to one of Stigson’s colleagues.
The same thing applied to the end of the week. Early on Saturday morning he had gone off to his summer house on Värmdö to play golf and see friends, and hadn’t returned until Monday morning, when he went straight to his office in central Stockholm.
Which left Thursday or Friday evening, as he usually set off to work at seven in the morning, ‘to avoid the worst of the traffic, and long before someone like Eriksson would have come round after his antics the previous night’, not returning before six o’clock, at the earliest, to have dinner with his wife.
Stigson’s colleague had thanked him for his help and was given a few parting words from the witness.
‘They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead …’
‘Yes, so they say,’ Stigson’s colleague said, then gave an encouraging nod suspecting that a confidence was on its way.
‘I might be a bit more old-fashioned,’ the witness began, ‘and that’s probably why I firmly believe that everyone should be judged according to their behaviour while they were alive. If we’re to believe the papers, Eriksson was a bit of a gangster. Well, apart from the last day or so, since he was murdered. You’d hardly believe they were writing about the same man.’
‘Oh?’
‘As far as that’s concerned, whether or not he was a bad guy in the broader sense, I probably shouldn’t say anything. You can’t believe everything you read in the papers, after all. But I do know what he was like on a more personal level, if I can put it like that, seeing as I’ve had him as a neighbour for several years.’
‘What was he like, then?’
‘He was a uniquely unpleasant little bastard,’ Eriksson’s neighbour declared, nodding emphatically.
‘You couldn’t give me any examples? Any concrete examples …?’
‘No,’ the neighbour said, shaking his head firmly. ‘On that point I’m afraid I must disappoint you. I’ll leave the gossip to others. You’ll just have to take my word for it.’
47
After Tuesday’s meeting Peter Niemi had gone to see Bäckström. He nodded towards the chair in front of Bäckström’s desk and asked if he could sit down.
‘Sure,’ Bäckström said, nodding back. If you offer one of those bark-bread munchers a finger, they try to grab your whole arm, he thought.
‘I completely agree with you, Bäckström,’ Niemi said. ‘No trace of any splatters of blood and, considering the injuries to his head, we should be looking at a spatter pattern of several metres. The only explanation is that he had been dead for several hours by the time our perpetrator lets loose on him for the second time. Congealed blood doesn’t spatter, of course. Which is something I intend to make clear to our esteemed colleagues as soon as possible in a little educational email.’
‘Was that why you called the friendly old doctor this morning?’ Bäckström said with a slight smile. Even a Finn like Niemi deserves a second chance, he thought.
‘Partly,’ Niemi said, ‘and we’re in complete agreement on that point, the doctor and I, in case you’re wondering.’
‘Partly?’
‘The pool of blood he was lying in, the one he had his face in, which indicated pretty extensive bleeding through the nose and mouth. That’s what was worrying me, because it suggested a serious blow from the front while he was still alive. The simple solution is that that’s what actually killed him.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Bäckström said. ‘I’m thinking the same as you. So what’s the problem? The forensic medical problem, I mean?’
‘Comprehensive injuries inflicted both before and after death. The fractures and cracks are evidently all mixed up, so the short version is that he needs more time to work out which injuries occurred at which point.’
‘Bloody academics,’ Bäckström said. ‘Can it really be that fucking hard to work out that the bloke’s dead because someone smashed his head in? Who cares about the details?’
‘Each to their own, according to talent and ability,’ Niemi said. ‘If you ask me, it’s probably also because he can’t see any reason to change his preliminary statement. That Eriksson died as a result of a fatal blow to the head and neck.’
‘Good to hear. Sometimes you have to be grateful for small mercies,’ Bäckström grunted.
48
On Tuesday afternoon the court in Stockholm had agreed to the prosecutor’s request to search the premises of the law firm Eriksson and Partners on Karlavägen in Stockholm. After some reflection, the firm had decided not to appeal against the decision: ‘So that we can finally get shot of you,’ as Danielsson expressed his and his colleagues’ view of the matter when he spoke to Lisa Lamm on the phone. At four o’clock that afternoon two detectives and a forensics officer arrived to go through the murder victim’s office in the presence of a representative of the law firm. All in accordance with the prosecutor’s request, and with the approval of the court.
In Eriksson’s computer, in his filing cabinets, drawers and bookshelves, the police found hundreds of thousands of documents, ninety-nine per cent of which shared the quality that they could have been acquired by other means without any great difficulty, and without the need to search the victim’s office: copies of police files of preliminary investigations, court verdicts, other legal judgements and protocols, almost all of which were covered by freedom of information legislation. The impression that the victim’s office gave of him as a person was simple and unambiguous. A hard-working criminal-case lawyer who had to spend all his time at work actually doing his work.
Beyond that, there was practically nothing. His diary, showing the times of his visits to the police in conjunction with his participation in interviews with clients he represented, prison visits, and the times of his appearances in court. They appeared largely to form a record upon which his invoices could be based. A few lunches and dinners were also included, but not many, and there was no indication of where they had taken place or who he was going to be dining with.
The search was conducted under the leadership of Detective Inspector Bladh, who was known among his colleagues as a practised hand when it came to looking through paperwork, and once again he lived up to his reputation. At eight o’clock that evening he called Nadja Högberg and gave his preliminary report on what he and his colleagues had found.
‘Almost exclusively work-related files,’ Bladh summarized.
‘Oh, I see,’ Nadja replied. But what else had she really expected?
‘His computer,’ Nadja said. ‘You checked to see if anyone had been on it since he left work on Friday?’
‘Yes,’ Bladh said. ‘There’s no cause for concern. Nothing’s been removed, added or altered. Presumably because they only found out what was going on when we showed up at the office and secured his room. We only found three things of a more private nature. Number one, his diary. Number two, a couple of folders in which he seems to have collected any letters or emails in which people threatened him or generally expressed disapproval. I get the impression he was very careful to
monitor that sort of thing.’
‘Did you find any death threats?’ Nadja asked. Considering what his house was like, Nadja thought. All those alarms, cameras and motion detectors, all of which, when it came down to it, hadn’t made the slightest difference, as he had switched them off because he trusted the person who was about to kill him.
‘Eleven, if I counted correctly, in which the sender promised to finish him off one way or another. But even they aren’t particularly exciting. They mostly seem to be from the sort who put stamps on upside down and finish every sentence with one or more exclamation marks.’
‘Number three, then,’ Nadja said. ‘What about that?’
‘He seems to have had a number of private cases alongside his criminal caseload,’ Bladh said. ‘Various documents which he kept in a separate folder. Not much, but they amount to a hundred or so pages. They’re quite difficult to interpret in places, so I was thinking of seizing them.’
‘Good. Call me if you find anything you think it’s worth waking me for. Anything else?’
‘Keeping his room sealed off,’ Bladh said. ‘That colleague of his, Danielsson, was on my case like a polecat the whole time, so, if for that reason alone, I’m inclined to keep it sealed for an extra day, and our prosecutor seems to be of the same mind.’
‘Why not?’ Nadja said, with all the feeling that could only come from having grown up in the old Soviet Union. ‘Say hello to him from me, and explain that this might take a bit of time if he doesn’t behave and do as we say.’
49
Rosita Andersson-Trygg had begun her afternoon by contacting her colleagues in the animal welfare unit at the City Police to ask for their help in getting hold of pictures of notorious offenders who had somehow got away with terrible cruelty to animals and weren’t on the usual police registers. A task which turned out to be rather complicated.
The Sword of Justice Page 17
