The Sword of Justice

by Leif G. W. Persson

  ‘Nor did I, really,’ Roly agreed. ‘I mean, Mario’s an ordinary, decent person, completely normal. He likes food and drink and women and all the rest. Boxing, horses, football, hockey. But, like you say – art? Surely no normal person’s interested in that crap? Only old women and poofs.’

  ‘But he evidently had a whole collection of Russian art,’ Bäckström persisted. ‘Where did he get it from?’

  ‘Probably something he bought,’ Roly said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Mario would buy pretty much anything, if you ask me. Probably easiest for you to ask him straight out.’

  ‘I’ve got the impression that talking to him isn’t altogether straightforward. According to various medical certificates that I and my colleagues have seen, he’s supposed to be suffering from Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Roly Stålhammar said with a wry smile. ‘If you ask me, it’s much simpler than that. Mario only talks to people he wants to talk to, and when he talks to them he only talks about things he wants to talk about. The problem isn’t that Mario is stupid. Mario’s smarter than everyone else in this country put together. But of course that isn’t his problem, but everyone else’s. You get what I mean?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ Bäckström said. ‘How is he otherwise? As a person, I mean?’

  ‘Mario and I have known each other since we were this small,’ Roly Stålhammar said, holding his right thumb and forefinger apart. ‘Mario’s a friend to his friends and an enemy to his enemies. Because he and I have been best mates since we were snotty little kids, I’ve never encountered any problems in that regard.’

  ‘What about his enemies?’

  ‘Let me put it like this,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘If there’s one person on the planet that you should avoid falling out with, it’s Mario Grimaldi. That business about him wetting himself when Eriksson tried to part his hair with the help of his revolver isn’t something you should get hung up about. It could happen to anyone. Not least an old man like Mario. It even happened to me.’

  ‘It happened to you?’

  ‘Forty years ago. A colleague and I were about to pick up a mental patient who’d escaped from Långbro. A woman, she’d gone straight home to her mum, who called and asked us to collect her. A skinny little thing, twenty at most, looked younger, said nothing, just stood there looking at me with her big blue eyes. And it’s in that sort of situation you sometimes drop your guard. So when I pulled out my ID and was about to explain who I was, she stuck a hunting knife straight into my stomach. If she’d aimed a couple of centimetres to the right she’d have hit my aorta.’

  ‘So you shat yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘Mind you, I can’t remember if that happened when she stabbed me or when I was in the ambulance.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Bäckström said. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?

  After a couple more final cognacs, Bäckström ordered a taxi and made sure his companion got home in one piece. Roly Stålhammar even gave him a bear hug as they parted. And gave him a piece of advice with regard to his ongoing investigation.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been thinking,’ Roly said.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Asking Mario about his interest in art may not be such a great idea. Answering questions isn’t really Mario’s thing, I mean.’

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’

  ‘My advice would be to talk to Pyttan.’

  ‘Pyttan?’

  ‘Yes, you know, Pyttan. The love of Mario’s life. You’ve met her. When you gave that talk for that property developer. A few weeks back. Tall, good-looking woman. And she’s really damn nice as well, even though she’s posh. She’s supposed to be some sort of countess.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Bäckström said. The one with all those diamonds the size of hazelnuts, he thought.

  ‘I’ll give you her number. Talk to Pyttan. She knows everything Mario gets up to. She’s got him eating out of her hand. He’s like a lovestruck puppy.’

  A godfather who’s like a love-struck puppy, a countess who hand feeds an old dago, this country’s already shot to hell, Bäckström thought as he sat in the taxi on the way home.

  135

  Once he was home, Bäckström got to grips with the practical details. He called Anchor Carlsson and told her all she needed to know, and then gave her instructions for the following day. They were to hold thorough interviews with Roly Stålhammar and Mario Grimaldi. Make sure they gave DNA samples, check the GPS of the Mercedes in question, talk to the forensic medical officer and Niemi, to make sure their stories fitted. And make sure Lisa Lamm didn’t start to make trouble and simply dropped the whole case as soon as possible.

  ‘It’s an extremely tragic business, considering what happened to our witness,’ Annika Carlsson said.

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Bäckström said. ‘But what can we do about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Annika Carlsson said. ‘What are we going to do about tomorrow morning’s meeting?’

  ‘Cancel the bastard,’ Bäckström said. ‘And they won’t get any cake until they’ve finished filling in all the paperwork. You can tell them that from me.’

  ‘What were you thinking of doing?’

  ‘Time owing,’ Bäckström said. I’ve got considerably more important things to grapple with, he thought.

  Bäckström spent the evening and half the night submerged in gloomy thoughts. Suppose things were so bad that Mario Grimaldi did really own all the art. Or worse, that he and his family had owned it the whole time, because one or more mafiosi of an older generation of the Grimaldi family had broken into Prince Wilhelm and Maria Pavlovna’s palatial villa out on Djurgården and helped themselves to whatever they could carry. There are far too many dagos in this story, he thought, pouring himself another drink.

  He himself had been hoping for His Majesty the King of Sweden, or at least one of all the other princes and princesses in his vicinity. Even that bodybuilder from Ockelbo would have been a blessing from above compared to Mario the Godfather Grimaldi, and he himself had entered the chain of ownership far too recently for that to have affected the price in a positive direction.

  As an art connoisseur of long standing, since his time in the police’s lost property store, he knew better than most people how much difference the province could make to the value. What would the heirs of that old fisherman have got for his sealskin slippers at the bog-standard estate sale they’d have ended up in if that film director hadn’t stuffed his frozen blue feet in them? Five kronor at most, from the chairman of the foot fetishists’ association, Bäckström thought. Then, full of these mournful thoughts, he finally fell asleep.

  136

  At eight o’clock on Tuesday morning Detective Inspectors Annika Carlsson and Johan Ek conducted an interview with former Detective Inspector Roland Stålhammar about his visit to the home of lawyer Thomas Eriksson on the evening of 2 June. The purpose of the interview was to gather information, and in the observation room next door sat Senior Prosecutor Lisa Lamm, Detective Superintendent Peter Niemi and their forensic medical officer, Dr Sven Olof Lidberg, watching the interview.

  The interview took about an hour, and gave neither of the interviewers any reason to cast the slightest shadow of a doubt on anything Stålhammar told them. He even had a perfectly plausible explanation to the final question he was asked: how come he hadn’t contacted the police at once when he heard about what had happened? Especially considering his background in the force?

  ‘There was nothing wrong with him when Mario and I left,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘But, as you ask, I still don’t understand what he died of.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking it seems a bit odd,’ Annika Carlsson retorted. ‘That you didn’t come and tell us what had happened, I mean.’

  ‘If you switch the tape recorder off, I’ll tell you,’ Roly said. ‘Otherwise, I won’t bother. Because it’s not about me, but Mario.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anni
ka said, as the loudspeaker in the observation room was still working and both she and Ek had ears that were perfectly good enough to stand witness to anything he said.

  ‘He tried to blow Mario’s head off,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘Mario’s an old man. He could have died. I asked him the next day if he wanted to report Eriksson, but he said we shouldn’t, so that’s what happened.’

  ‘Why did he say that, then?’

  ‘It’s hardly that difficult to understand,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘He shat himself. He was bitterly ashamed. He could live with all the rest of it.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Annika Carlsson said.

  ‘Good,’ Roly Stålhammar said. ‘If I ever hear a single word about what I’ve just told you, I swear I’ll tear down Solna police station with my own hands.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Annika said with a smile. ‘Well, I’d like to thank you for coming, and that last part will stay in this room.’

  ‘What do we think about that, then?’ Lisa Lamm asked a quarter of an hour later.

  ‘I don’t have any objections,’ the medical officer said. ‘Stålhammar’s story fits the results of the forensic medical examination.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ Peter Niemi said. ‘And for once we’re in the fortunate position of being able to tick off his story against the results of the forensic search. I don’t think there’ll be any surprises on that score.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ Annika Carlsson agreed, while her colleague Johan Ek simply nodded his agreement.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ Lisa Lamm said, ‘considering the circumstances, I judge that the force Stålhammar used against the lawyer is within the bounds of the paragraphs of the Penal Code governing self-defence. By quite some margin, I might add. I don’t have any reservations about closing the case. All I need now are the results from the National Forensics Lab, the DNA samples from that handkerchief and the sofa cushion.’

  ‘We should be getting those tomorrow, believe it or not,’ Peter Niemi said. ‘Bearing in mind the media pressure, we’ll drive the new samples down as soon as we’ve interviewed Grimaldi and taken a swab.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll make sure Stålhammar gets his handkerchief back,’ Lisa Lamm said. ‘Nice to be able to surrender a piece of evidence for once.’

  ‘What if Eriksson had survived?’ Annika Carlsson asked. ‘What would you have done then?’

  ‘I’d probably have charged him with attempted murder, or attempted manslaughter,’ Lisa Lamm said.

  Three hours later Carlsson and Ek were finished with their next interview with an unusually garrulous Mario Grimaldi, who had also brought along a lawyer. It took thirty-five minutes, and everyone who heard him drew the same conclusions as after the interview with Roland Stålhammar, even though he refused to answer the question of who owned the paintings he had gone to collect.

  According to Mario, he got involved on behalf of an old friend. Before he gave them his friend’s name, he wanted to obtain their approval. Because he had taken with him the power of attorney that Eriksson had been given when he was commissioned to sell the items, Eriksson must have realized that Mario was authorized to be there in that capacity. His lawyer was able to confirm this, because he had signed the immediate withdrawal of Eriksson’s power of attorney and made sure it was properly witnessed. The reason for the withdrawal was that Eriksson had tried to defraud his employer. They were planning to return to the matter of their financial claim against Eriksson’s law firm and his estate.

  Mario Grimaldi began by telling them that he was an old man. That what had happened that evening inside the lawyer’s home was the worst thing he had experienced in his whole life. In spite of all the terrible things he had been through in his native Italy at the end of the Second World War, when he was just a little boy.

  ‘He suddenly went mad,’ Mario said. ‘He pulled out a pistol and aimed it right at my face while I was sitting there. The bullet flew past my head, and if my old friend Roly hadn’t thrown himself at him and disarmed him, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.’

  ‘Someone must have borrowed your car later that night,’ Johan Ek said, as the last question of the interview. ‘That much is apparent from the vehicle’s GPS. Do you have any comment to make about that?’

  No comment. He had given up driving twenty years ago, and handed his licence in more than ten years ago. Entirely voluntarily, and as soon as his doctor had advised him to do so. But it did happen that people he knew sometimes borrowed the car from him. Among others, a nice Chilean lad who worked as an odd-job man and had recently helped him hang some new curtains in his kitchen. That must have been when he borrowed the car keys from him. His spare keys, that is, because he was fairly sure that he still had a set of keys at home in his apartment.

  ‘His name is Angel,’ Mario said. ‘Like the heavenly host,’ he explained. He couldn’t remember the lad’s surname, but it was one of those common names that Spanish-speaking people often had. His mother had worked for him many years ago, when he owned a restaurant in Solna. She was a very pleasant woman, very reliable. Not long ago, Roly had told him that she had passed away.

  ‘We shall all tread that path,’ the Godfather declared with a sad sigh.

  That afternoon, interviews were also conducted with Omar ben Kader and Afsan Ibrahim, who arrived in the company of their respective lawyers.

  Omar ben Kader left the police station within half an hour, a free man. He had been unswervingly friendly the whole time, and had expressed his surprise that they wanted to see him. The fact that he had accompanied Afsan Ibrahim in his capacity as his financial advisor to a meeting with Peter Danielsson, a lawyer with the firm of Eriksson and Partners, was hardly a secret. That much ought to be clear from the law firm’s visitors’ book, but if they had been neglectful on that score, he was very happy to confirm that he had been there. Because the meeting with Danielsson had actually been booked by him. He wasn’t prepared to go into the reasons why he had done so. Before he left, he gave them his business card and said that the police were welcome to call him if there was anything else they were wondering.

  The spitting image of his father, Jan Lewin thought as he sat in the observation room watching him.

  His employer, Afsan Ibrahim, remained in the interview room for approximately an hour. The reason he had gone to visit Isabella Norén was that Thomas Eriksson had told him to talk to her if anything happened to him. According to what Eriksson had told him, he and Norén had been in a relationship for the past couple of years, so she would be able to help him with a few things that his colleagues in the office knew nothing about.

  In this instance, it was about whether she could possibly help him find the money that Eriksson had borrowed from a Cypriot bank, because Afsan had been charged by the bank to demand that the money be repaid. It had been a very short visit, ten minutes at most, and nothing remotely untoward had taken place. If Norén was claiming otherwise, he was more than happy to participate in an open interview with her.

  As far as their questions about two of his employees, Ali Ibrahim and Ali Issa, went, unfortunately he wasn’t in a position to say very much. Ibrahim had had to go back to Iran suddenly because his father had been taken ill. When he spoke to him on the phone the previous day, Ibrahim had told him that he expected to have to stay for at least a month in order to take care of his mother and the rest of the family.

  Ali Issa and his girlfriend had been abroad on holiday for the past week or so. It was both much needed and well deserved, because Ali Issa had worked hard all winter and spring opening a restaurant on Södermalm that was owned by one of Afsan’s businesses. If he got in touch, of course Afsan would tell him that the police wanted to talk to him.

  ‘Well, Jan. What did you get out of your visit?’ Lisa Lamm asked.

  ‘Hopefully, my colleagues got some good moving footage of Afsan and Omar,’ Jan Lewin said with an amiable smile. ‘Otherwise, it was pretty much what I was expecting.’

&nb
sp; ‘If you don’t insist on taking over my complaint against them for making unlawful threats, I was thinking of dropping it.’

  ‘Sounds sensible,’ Jan Lewin said.

  ‘How are you getting on down in Nyköping? Anything you can talk about?’

  ‘It’s going badly,’ Jan Lewin said. ‘Right now, we’re pinning our hopes on the possibility that those most closely involved are going to use their freedom to do something else stupid. I don’t find that very reassuring.’

  ‘There’s not much there to make the most of,’ Lisa Lamm said.

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ Jan Lewin said, and shrugged his shoulders.

  137

  While his colleagues were busy conducting interviews, Bäckström had considerably more important matters to deal with. In this instance, a crisis meeting with GeGurra at his office in Gamla stan, where they discussed the significance of provenance to the price of an item.

  ‘How can I help you, my dear friend?’ GeGurra asked, as amiable and obliging as always.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been wondering. How important is the province in this case? The musical box, I mean.’

  ‘The importance of the provenance in this case …’ GeGurra said, making a conscious effort to pronounce all three syllables in the word but without actually inscribing them on Bäckström’s nose.

  ‘Yes, the provenance,’ Bäckström repeated. ‘Isn’t that what I said?’ Why are faggots always so fucking stuck-up? he thought. Especially arty faggots.

  ‘How do you mean?’ GeGurra asked, arching his fingers and resting his elbows on his extremely valuable rococo desk.

  Bäckström wanted to try out a hypothesis on GeGurra. It was, admittedly, entirely theoretical, but at the same time it was based in part on his hitherto unsuccessful search. Suppose the king or some closely related member of the Bernadotte family had never actually owned the musical box. And that someone like Grimaldi had owned the collection in question, and that he had acquired it in a way that wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. If Bäckström had understood correctly, that would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the value of the musical box of Pinocchio and his nose.