‘I’ve been thinking about what you said about that film director and his slippers,’ he said. ‘If I’ve got this right, it would mean that the price would collapse, wouldn’t it?’
GeGurra had no problem understanding either his question or the general point he was making. Obviously, it would be extremely significant if three generations of a royal dynasty were to be replaced by Mario Grimaldi and his forebears. Especially if they had acquired the artefact by nefarious means.
‘“Catastrophe” is perhaps a rather strong word,’ GeGurra said with a precisely judged shrug. ‘At worst, perhaps it would halve the price. And of course it might be more difficult to find a buyer. A lot of institutions and museums wouldn’t be interested.’
‘As bad as that?’ Bäckström said, looking like someone who’d just had half his fortune stolen.
‘Yes. Not a catastrophe, but of course it wouldn’t be good.’
‘On a completely different subject,’ Bäckström said. ‘That painting of the fat monk. You wouldn’t let me borrow it, and take it home?’ Got to make the most of a bad situation, he thought.
‘By all means,’ GeGurra said. ‘You won’t be upset if I ask why?’
‘I’m actually thinking of buying it from you. Just want to see if it would work above my sofa first.’
‘By all means,’ GeGurra said, barely able to hide his surprise. ‘I’ll ask my secretary to fetch it. It’s in the storage facility.’
Bäckström and Saint Theodore went straight back to Bäckström’s home, where Bäckström ate lunch while he stared at the fat Greek priest who was perched on the kitchen worktop a few metres away. Brown beans and fried pork chops, and a couple of emergency vodkas that were urgently required as a result of his forced involvement with thieving priests and Italian pasta cooks who shat on people’s sofas and didn’t even have the decency not to steal from an honest, hardworking police officer like him.
He woke up from his much-needed afternoon nap to find someone ringing on his door, and, once he had pulled on his dressing-gown and gone to open it, he realized that he was being dealt a terrible blow, and that the domestic tranquillity that he treasured more than anything was lost.
138
The visitor was Edvin’s mother, Dusanka. She had brought Isak with her and, judging by the size of the cage he was in, he had ended up in the parrot equivalent of an isolation cell. He also seemed ‘subdued’, as his little surrogate custodian had described Isak’s emotional state to Bäckström during his earlier visit.
Dusanka said she would be brief. In spite of Edvin’s protests, she had decided to return Isak to his rightful owner. They simply weren’t suitable company for each other, and at the ceremony to mark the end of the school year the previous day, sadly they had embarrassed both themselves and Edvin’s parents, Slobodan and Dusanka.
‘Come in and sit down,’ Bäckström suggested, gesturing invitingly with his arm towards the large leather sofa in his living room. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he went on with a generous nod towards the well-stocked antique dresser on which he currently stored the majority of his more expensive strong liquor.
Considering what she was about to tell him, Dusanka wouldn’t say no to a rum and Coke, with plenty of ice and a slice of lemon. Bäckström hurried out to the kitchen, fulfilled her wishes and – just to be on the safe side – armed himself with both a large Czech pilsner and a vodka of truly Russian dimensions.
‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said, contorting his moon-face into an amiable and understanding expression.
On the last day of the school year, Edvin and his classmates had been given the chance to present a talk about their favourite hobbies, and because Edvin went to a ‘non-profit-making free school for particularly gifted children’, there were approximately three parents for every child, and at least one teacher for every half-dozen young pupils. The classroom was packed, and expectations were high when it was time for the climactic high point of the programme, when Edvin was going to show the audience how to teach a parrot to talk.
Edvin had started rather cautiously. He got Isak to say ‘Hello’ to the audience, and say that he was a ‘clever boy’, then claim that ‘AIK are best’. In short, he garnered both laughter and applause until the highly anticipated finale, which Edvin introduced by saying that it was possible to teach a parrot to say sentences of up to nine syllables, and possibly more if you really tried.
He had asked for silence, snapped his little fingers, and looked encouragingly at his blue and yellow partner.
Isak reacted instantly with a loud, cackling utterance, and there was no doubt whatsoever about the meaning of his message.
‘It was terrible,’ Dusanka sighed, crossing herself and taking a couple of large, fortifying gulps of her rum and Coke.
‘What did he say, then?’ Bäckström asked. Nine syllables? What did Edvin mean by that?
‘Little Willy in the lady-cave,’ Dusanka said in a muffled voice.
‘Ah, perhaps that was a little unfortunate,’ Bäckström said, and downed half his vodka. That lad’s going to go far, he thought. Nine syllables, he thought with reluctant admiration. Not the usual five he used to shout when he would sneak after his religious education teacher while she was walking home at night to the parish house from school.
‘What happened after that?’ he asked with a serious expression. He’s definitely going to go far, he thought.
All the children had been delighted. They jumped about, howling with laughter, and their behaviour suggested that the whole thing might have been planned in advance. Their parents, teachers and school governors were less amused, and once Isak had been banished to a neighbouring classroom and order had been restored among the children, and they had sung the obligatory ‘Ida’s summer song’ by the great Astrid Lindgren, and handed out certificates, the headmaster had concluded events by summoning all the parents to an extraordinary meeting with the teachers and governors later that week.
‘At first we thought Edvin was going to be expelled,’ Dusanka sighed. ‘But now Slobodan has spoken to the headmaster, and he’s promised that Edvin will be allowed to go back in the autumn. On probation. The headmaster was concerned about him knowing phrases like that.’
Expelled? Fucking upper classes, Bäckström thought. If that was how it was going to be, perhaps he could intervene with a bit of music-box money and send the lad to Lundsberg, so he got the chance to behave like every normal young man of his age.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘So what do we do now?’
Dusanka was happy to leave Isak’s owner to find a solution to that problem. But, for Edvin and his parents, Isak was a closed chapter. Bäckström took the opportunity to suggest that the simplest solution would be to wring Isak’s neck. Slobodan had evidently been thinking along the same lines, but because Edvin would never forgive his parents if they did anything like that, they had decided to hand responsibility back to Isak’s rightful owner.
What the fuck am I going to do now? Bäckström thought when Dusanka left him, after downing another rum and Coke.
Bäckström spent a couple of hours in front of his computer in a vain search for a discreet and competent parrot exterminator. Isak clearly realized the seriousness of the occasion, and kept his beak shut the whole time.
Then Bäckström returned him to his usual cage. He put on a fresh set of clothes and strolled down to his local bar to get something to eat while he considered the dangerous position in which he had clearly ended up. When he got home shortly before midnight things were still calm, until he was woken at four in the morning, when Isak was evidently back to his old self again.
139
At nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, the last meeting on the subject of the Western District’s investigation into the murder of lawyer Thomas Eriksson took place. The head of the preliminary investigation, Senior Prosecutor Lisa Lamm, had brought coffee and cake, and thanked her detectives for their hard work. What had at first looked like an unusually brutal murd
er had, on closer inspection, turned out to be a forgivable use of force that was more than covered by the Penal Code’s definition of self-defence.
If there was anyone who could be criticized for what had happened, it was the dead man himself, Thomas Eriksson. If he had survived, Lisa Lamm would have had no hesitation in prosecuting him for attempted murder, or attempted manslaughter, but seeing as Eriksson was dead that was obviously no longer an option.
After consulting her own boss, the Chief Prosecutor for Stockholm, as well as the head of the Western District Police Force, Police Chief Anna Holt, Lisa Lamm had decided to close the case the following morning, on the grounds of ‘no crime committed’, which was the strongest of the options open to her. Considering the vast amount of media interest, she had also decided to hold a press conference in conjunction with the publication of her decision.
All that remained, from a legal perspective, were little more than minor details when seen in the wider context. She had also decided to drop Isabella Norén’s complaint against Afsan Ibrahim, Ali Ibrahim and Ali Issa for threatening behaviour, or for perverting the course of justice, as ‘crime not proven’.
The suspicions of financial irregularities that had arisen concerning Thomas Eriksson and Baron Hans Ulrik von Comer had been handed on to the Economic Crime Unit. Responsibility for the triple murder of Fredrik Åkerström, Angel García Gomez and Ara Dosti was in the hands of the police and prosecutor’s office in Södermanland. That left the charge against Hans Ulrik von Comer for assaulting a public official, and that investigation was being dealt with by one of her younger colleagues.
She was happy to move on with her life, richer from this interesting experience, and was now planning to take some holiday. From the cheerful expressions around the table, she understood that she wasn’t alone in planning to start the summer that way. Lastly – but by no means least – she wanted to express particular gratitude to her right-hand man for the exemplary way in which he had conducted their investigation.
‘Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström, the Man, the Myth, the Legend,’ Lisa Lamm said, directing a broad smile at the man in question.
Bäckström, on the other hand, wasn’t his usual self. He seemed almost distant, in an amiable but very peculiar way. He thanked the prosecutor, all of his dear colleagues, and said that this had been an arduous case, not least for him personally, although he didn’t want to go into that in detail, but that there were far worse things that could happen to you. When he went on to excuse himself by saying that he had an important meeting to go to, there were a number of his colleagues who felt genuinely concerned on his behalf.
Isak, however, was most definitely his usual self, and when he was at his worst, Bäckström seriously considered abandoning his own home and moving into a comfortable local hotel, leaving the fucker to slowly starve to death. Once he got that far with his thoughts, Isak suddenly went quiet. He just sat there on his perch in total silence, glaring at Bäckström. In spite of everything he had done beforehand, this complete silence was almost unbearable.
In the midst of all this, his tame reporter had called to moan. He’d heard rumours that the investigation into the murder of Eriksson the lawyer was suddenly about to be dropped. The palace press officers were also behaving in a much more forthright manner, to the extent that you might almost imagine they were gearing up to win a rerun of the battle of Poltava. The editor-in-chief was getting cold feet. He had taken to padding round the corridors like an unquiet spirit, constantly asking what was really going on.
‘So what do we do, Bäckström?’ his tame reporter asked.
‘That’s hardly my fucking responsibility, is it?’ Bäckström replied. ‘I’m not the one who publishes your rag, am I?’ It is to his credit that he didn’t actually have any idea that this was precisely the situation at the largest paper in the country, and had been for the past week.
‘You could at least give me a bit of good advice, though, couldn’t you?’ his tame reporter pleaded.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said, having finally made up his mind. ‘See you in the bar of the Grand Hotel at six o’clock. Make sure you’ve got paper and a pen.’
Then he packed a bag with the bare necessities, left Isak to his fate and fled the field for a different, better life.
140
On Thursday morning there was a press conference in the police station in Solna. Senior Prosecutor Lisa Lamm opened proceedings by explaining that the preliminary investigation into the murder of Thomas Eriksson the lawyer had been closed. Then she gave a fairly exhaustive description of what had happened. That Thomas Eriksson had died as a result of a combination of his own violent conduct, it had been fully justified self-defence, and the poor state of his heart.
The whole event was actually entirely unnecessary, as everything that was said in the press conference was already available to read in the largest of the country’s evening papers. Even before the press conference began, readers of that day’s edition of the main evening paper could learn both what Lisa Lamm was going to say an hour later, as well as a considerably more dramatic and detailed story that bore a conspicuous resemblance to what Roly and Mario had said during their interviews with the police two days before.
The headline almost wrote itself: ‘DESPERATE GANGSTER LAWYER TRIED TO ROB AND MURDER PENSIONER’. Once again, the biggest paper in the country had wiped the floor with its competitors, and the fact that Bäckström the legend was absent from the press conference itself looked as if it was the result of conscious thought.
VIII
The true story of Pinocchio’s nose.
Part II
141
When Bäckström woke up in his large suite in the Grand Hotel, he was in a quite excellent mood. He had ordered breakfast in his room and, as he stuffed himself with scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon, he improved his already good appetite with the help of giddy fantasies about the starvation which ought by now to be afflicting Isak.
Then he called Mario’s girlfriend, Pyttan, and asked if he could meet her. There were a few questions he wanted to ask, about a collection of Russian art that she might have read about in the papers.
Pyttan seemed to be in a good mood as well. Superintendent Beck was ‘ever so welcome’, and she could see him in an hour in her and Mario’s new apartment by the Karlberg Canal, where she had been fully occupied recently with the final details of the furnishings.
Bäckström packed what he needed in Superintendent Pisshead’s old briefcase and ordered a taxi to the palatial building overlooking the Karlberg Canal, where his old property-developer friend could offer the most secure housing in the land to the elite group of senior citizens who owned most of Sweden, and where the Godfather and Pyttan had evidently laid claim to the entire top floor of the building. ‘Hamilton – Grimaldi’, Bäckström read on the large gilded sign on the front door. Which ought surely to mean that Pyttan was related to that special agent, Carl Hamilton, in all those books by the only writer in the country worthy of the description, Bäckström thought. In spite of all the malicious rumours he had heard recently about him switching to writing faggot novels. How likely was that? About as likely as the pope handing out sacramental wafers wearing the esteemed author’s hunting cap, he thought, shaking his head and ringing the doorbell.
Pyttan was just as charming as she had been on the previous occasion. Suntanned and bedecked with diamonds. After a mere fifty-metre walk she and Bäckström sat down on a large suite of sofas and chairs with a view of both Karlberg Palace and the canal below. He put his little tape recorder on the big glass coffee table where they were sitting, and asked if she had anything against him recording their conversation, because over the past few years he had started to have a bit of trouble with his memory.
Pyttan knew exactly what he meant. Some days it took her until lunchtime before she could remember what Mario’s first name was. ‘God, how exciting!’ Pyttan said, flashing her eyes, teeth, rings and necklaces all at the same ti
me. Finally, a proper police interview, and with one of her great idols as well.
‘Shoot, Detective,’ Pyttan said, then lit a cigarette, crossed her long legs and leaned back in the Gustavian armchair she was sitting on.
Bäckström started by showing her pictures of all the icons, the remnants of the hunting service, two canteens of cutlery and a gold cigar-lighter. The only thing missing was the picture of Pinocchio with the long nose, which he was planning to hold back as long as he could, and hopefully keep to himself for ever. The first question was obvious: did she happen to know who owned the paintings and other objects in the pictures?
‘Yes, of course,’ Pyttan said. ‘They’re all mine. I got them from my daddy, Archie, when he died. He got them from his mother, Ebba, my grandmother, who in turn got them from that Russian, Maria Pavlovna, when she got divorced from Prince Wilhelm.’
‘Could you tell me a bit more about that?’ Bäckström asked, giving her a friendly smile. This is more like it, he thought. Admittedly, not kings and queens, princes and princesses, but plain old counts and barons weren’t to be sniffed at in a situation like this. They were at least several million kronor better than a load of pomaded brilliantinos of mixed Mediterranean extraction.
‘Could you tell me more?’ he repeated, as Pyttan suddenly looked as if she was in a better, long-lost world.
‘Of course,’ Pyttan said. There were no problems with her memory on that point. She could list the Swedish aristocracy even if you woke her up in the middle of the night, as she was related to pretty much all of them and had met most of the ones it was possible to talk to. Her grandmother had been born in 1880, her maiden name was Lewenhaupt, and she was born a countess. At the age of twenty she married Count Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton, who was twice her age. He was head of the Västergötland branch of the great Hamilton family, a big landowner, rider, hunter and courtier, and a personal friend of both Oscar II and Gustaf V.
The Sword of Justice Page 49
