Another Time, Another Life

1 Thursday evening, November 30, 1989

It turned out to be an alarm with a number of obstacles, and considering that it also turned out to be a murder it was unfortunate that it took so long before the police arrived at the scene. In the normal course of things, it might have been possible to save the life of the victim, or at least arrest the culprit and thus avoid a lot of inconvenience. But things were not normal, and so it turned out the way it did. At Stockholm Police Department’s command center it was agreed, however, that it was not Charles XII’s fault.

A few days earlier the legal department of that same police agency had granted permits for two different demonstrations, and both decisions had been preceded by considerable legal and mental exertion and extensive strategic and tactical consideration.

In the first application to arrive, various “patriotically minded organizations and individual Swedish citizens”-which was how they described themselves-wanted to “pay homage to the Swedish heroking on the anniversary of his death.” This was to occur in the form of a torchlight procession from Humlegården to the statue of Charles XII in Kungsträdgården, with massed standards, the laying of a wreath and speeches at the statue itself, and the whole thing was planned to start at 1900 hours and be finished at 2100 hours at the latest.

The very next day another application arrived. A number of political youth organizations, representing with one exception all of the parties in parliament, wanted to conduct “a broad, popular manifestation against xenophobia and racism.” So far so good. But for reasons that were not completely clear, in any case not evident from their request, the intention was to conduct this demonstration on that very same Thursday, the thirtieth of November, between 1900 and 2200 hours. There would be a gathering in Humlegården, a march down Birger Jarlsgatan and up Hamngatan, concluding “with speeches and a joint proclamation” at Sergels Torg, all of 400 yards from the statue of Charles XII in Kungsträdgården.

As far as political opinions were concerned, the participants in the two demonstrations were, to put it mildly, dissimilar, to the point where they could easily be sorted into two different piles based solely on their appearance. And this nonexistent common interest would evidently be expressed at the same time and the same place. The sharp minds in the legal department were struck by this. In brief, trickery was suspected, and in order to prevent difficulties, the good old police rule of thumb was followed to separate even presumptive troublemakers.

This plan primarily affected the group of the “patriotically minded.” There was no question of playing political favorites-of course, no official authority could support such things. The decision was made solely on the basis of police department estimates of the relative size of the two groups. Democratic decisions were after all in many respects made based on a question of size, and the friends of the fatherland were considerably fewer in number. As the chief inspector on the detective squad in charge of estimates summarized the matter, it concerned at the most a few hundred, “a few old queers from the Finnish Winter War plus their younger, skinhead comrades,” which was not “very much to hang on the Christmas tree if it’s democracy we’re talking about here.”

So true, so true. And in a time of severely strained police resources the patriotically minded demonstrators were thus granted permission to gather at the pier below the Grand Hotel at 1800 hours, walk in formation about a hundred yards to the statue of Charles XII, where of course it was fine both to lay wreaths and to give speeches, provided that the event was over at 1900 hours at the latest and that the crowd then “dispersed in good order.” They could even sing the national anthem if they wanted to, despite the fact that, probably due to a simple omission, this activity had not been included in the application.

On the other hand, they could forget about the torches. “You don’t really think we’re dim-witted,” as the same chief inspector remarked in explaining the rejection when one of the organizers phoned him to discuss that particular detail. And as far as flag-waving was concerned, it was assumed that this would be kept within reasonable bounds.

On the other hand, because the participants in “the broad popular manifestation,” exactly as promised and according to a similar police department calculation, could be assumed to amount to several thousand, based on the same democratic principles the authorities had been considerably more generous. On the condition that the gathering really commenced at 1900 hours, and in no event earlier, it was fine for the demonstration to set off from Humlegården. And the demonstration could end at Sergels Torg if the crowd took Kungsgatan and Sveavägen instead of Birger Jarlsgatan and Hamngatan.

All available police personnel were then called up, and to be on the safe side they were reinforced with a few hundred men from around the country. An “iron ring” was formed around Kungsträdgården, and the route of the counterdemonstrators was secured yard by yard and well supplied with mobile reserves behind the front lines. Literally everything was being done, it was being done by the book and in the best way, and already by eight p.m. complete chaos prevailed in Stockholm City: rock throwing, window breaking, battered cars… swollen lips, bloody noses, black eyes, broken arms, scraped knees, even a knife cut. There were howling sirens, flashing blue lights, yet at the command center they managed to keep a straight face when in the midst of it all an elderly woman phones and maintains that someone is murdering her neighbor.

Between 2005 and 2020 hours, she calls the emergency number 90 000 a total of three times. She is quickly transferred to the police command center. Already during the first call she sounds very upset but nonetheless she starts by saying in good order what her name is and where she lives: “Rådmansgatan… up by Engelbrekt Church, you know.” After that she says, verbatim, according to the police department’s time-logged recording of the conversation, “You’ve got to come at once. Someone is murdering my neighbor. I think he’s dying.”

The female radio dispatcher tries to calm her as best she can and asks her to stay on the phone while she dispatches the alarm on the radio, but while she tries to find someone to send out, the call is cut off. Probably because the woman who called hung up.

The next call comes at 2014 hours, and the old woman’s voice sounds close to tears. “You’ve got to come. You’ve got to come,” and in the midst of the general muddle that prevails this call too is cut off and no available patrol car has yet been reached.

The third and final call comes at 2020. Now the woman is screaming loudly into the telephone that “the murderers are knocking on my door,” and this is the situation when detective inspector Bo Jarnebring has mercy on his colleague, the radio dispatcher, who has started to sound more and more stressed, takes the microphone out of its holder on the instrument panel, breaks his radio silence, and responds to the call from central command.

Inspector Bo Jarnebring was a few miles from the center of events. At eight p.m. on Thursday the thirtieth of November, he had been sitting for a couple of hours along with a female colleague in one of the detective squad’s most discreet cars, keeping an eye on a restaurant fifty yards farther down the street. The first hour they had been accompanied by an additional surveillance vehicle, but then the growing chaos down in City had forced the officers to respond to more pressing assignments instead.

Jarnebring and his partner were sitting there because of a tip that had come in the day before. This was, incidentally, the most common reason for anyone’s spending time in this way, and if any one of the growing number of bureaucrats in police headquarters ever got the notion to produce statistics on this activity as well, then he (for it was almost always a he) or (in exceptional cases) she would have discovered that as a rule the sitting was in vain. It was exactly like hunting or fishing, uncertainty and waiting were basically the whole idea, and whether or not you got anything it was, at least to start with, exciting enough.

The catch that their informant had promised this time wasn’t bad either. According to the informant, who in the name of discretion lacked all identifying features but in reality was almost always a man with a criminal record, an internationally wanted Iranian drug dealer at the wholesale level would show up around six p.m. to have dinner and discuss a little business with a like-minded countryman.

Jarnebring, who had neither been born yesterday nor recently fallen off a cart, had of course asked the informant why in such a case the Iranians would choose to hold this get-together at a restaurant that with good reason was known for its Swedish home cooking, but the informant had an answer: “Saddam is an ace at not giving himself away, likes sort of exotic settings you know, and besides he’s crazy about Swedish meatballs.”

Sounds almost too good to be true, Jarnebring had thought. Because he was also an incorrigible optimist and interested in both hunting and fishing, he had been sitting there for the past two hours. The last half hour, however, had felt a little long, and to get a break from the tedium he had turned on the police radio to listen to the action playing out down in City.

Despite the cacophony on the radio he had also heard the call about an ongoing violent crime in an apartment on Rådmansgatan, but because he was familiar with the address and those who lived there-a nice block with conscientious middle-aged, middle-class residents-he understood at once that the person who had called was certainly an older woman who would not get worked up unnecessarily.

He still thought that when the second call came in, but he also noted that the voice of his female colleague on the radio was starting to sound a trifle dejected. So when a short time later she dispatched the call for the third time, now actually sounding a little beleaguered, he sighed, took the radio microphone from its holder, and replied.

“Jarnebring here,” he said into the microphone. “Can I help you, little lady?” What meatballs, he thought sourly.

So the Iranian lived on, and presumably he and the informant were sitting in a completely different part of the city chowing down couscous and roast goat, or whatever that sort usually ate, while they laughed their heads off at all the dumb cops cultivating their hemorrhoids in the worn-down front seat of an increasingly chilly unmarked car.

“Let’s forget about the gook,” said Jarnebring to his colleague. “Drive to Rådmansgatan.”

She merely nodded without answering. She looked surly, thought Jarnebring. Probably because of that “little lady” remark. She was rather good-looking, if you liked dark-haired ladies. Personally he preferred blondes. And the occasional redhead, provided she was a genuine redhead. Although of course they weren’t that common, he thought.

But she could drive a car, he had to admit that, for in just over two minutes and after two U-turns she had taken them from the west end of Tegnérgatan to the address in question on Rådmansgatan. And en route he had obtained an entry code to the outside door from the “little lady” at the command center. On the other hand she had not produced a key to the apartment door, but he could take care of that with the help of the bag of police accessories he kept in the storage compartment of the car.

“Let’s do this,” said Jarnebring as she stopped the car outside the entryway on Rådmansgatan. “I’ll take the walkie-talkie and check the apartment, and you kill anyone who tries to sneak out onto the street.”

Now she actually smiled. She really is good-looking, thought Jarnebring as he disappeared through the entryway with his bag and the walkie-talkie. While he was sprinting up the stairs he suddenly felt more exhilarated than he had in a long time.

His delight was short-lived. Jarnebring stopped at the third floor to get an overview: rectangular stairwell, four apartments, two doors at an angle to each other at each end. The name of the victim was Eriksson and his door was farthest away. To the left of it was an ornate brass plate with the surname of the person who had called central command and introduced herself as “Mrs. Westergren, Ingrid Westergren.”

Jarnebring tiptoed up to the door to Eriksson’s apartment. Silent as a grave, not a movement anywhere. He carefully tried the door handle. The door was locked, and when he bent down to peep in through the mail slot, at the same time as he loosened the holster strap that secured his service weapon, in the corner of his eye he saw a faint dent not half an inch long in the dark glazed wood on Mrs. Westergren’s door. Because the dent was at a level with Eriksson’s door handle and the door lacked a doorstop, he realized at once what had happened.

The perpetrator or perpetrators had not tried to break into Mrs. Westergren’s, as she had told the radio dispatcher. On the other hand it was probable that someone had thrown open Eriksson’s door in great haste, whereupon his door handle had struck Mrs. Westergren’s door. Without thinking about it, he buttoned the strap on his pistol handle again, carefully opened the mail slot slightly, and peeked in.

He had done this a hundred times before during his life as a police officer, and on a few occasions it had struck him that this might just be his last action on the job, because he might find himself looking straight into the barrels of a shotgun. But he did not think that way very often; fortunately he did not have that disposition. And it hadn’t happened now. What he saw was good enough.

There was a light on in the hall. Straight ahead was a living room behind a pair of open, glazed double doors.

In the living room there was a couch, and in front of the couch a coffee table, approximately twenty or twenty-five feet from the outside door. The coffee table had been overturned and there was a lot of blood on the light parquet floor. Squeezed between the couch and the coffee table was a motionless man on his stomach. It was not a comfortable position, and you didn’t need to be a police officer like Jarnebring to figure out that the man had not chosen to lie down there voluntarily.

Oh shit, thought Jarnebring, straightening up. People never can behave decently to each other.

Then he tapped out the hinges on the door and went into the apartment.

First he made sure the victim really was dead. He was, even if he did not appear to have been dead for very long. He had bled heavily from both his nose and mouth. His shirt was soaked through with blood from a wound that seemed to be high up on the left side of his back.

Probably stabbed with a knife, thought Jarnebring. Lungs, heart, major organs were penetrated; trying to resuscitate him would be wasted effort, he thought.

Then he straightened up, drew his service weapon, and carefully searched through the apartment to make certain that the victim was not only dead but also alone at home. Three rooms, hall, kitchen, bathroom, separate toilet, a large clothes closet, a total of about a thousand square feet, strikingly clean and neat, and there was nothing to suggest anything other than that the victim had had sole use of the apartment.

Jarnebring was careful about where he set his feet, and he kept his fingers under control the whole time out of consideration for the crime technicians, but this didn’t prevent him from peeking under the bed, behind the shower curtain in the bathroom, and in the darkest corners of the clothes closet. He had found more than one perpetrator that way over the years.

But not this time, this time it was empty.

The rest was pure routine. He made contact with the command center on the radio. They promised to send people-“on the double”-from the duty desk and the tech squad, as well as reinforcements from the uniformed police. A murder took precedence even over degenerate political demonstrations.

On the other hand, the canine patrol that Jarnebring tried to requisition could not be mobilized. The four-legged colleagues that were on duty had been busy with other things between their jaws for the past few hours. On the other hand, taxi drivers would be questioned as to whether they’d had any interesting fares to and from the victim’s address.

While they waited, Jarnebring and his female colleague did what they could. The first crime scene barriers were put in place. They searched within the building and out toward the street where the victim lived, the courtyard and back building as well. They checked interesting entryways in the vicinity and noted license numbers on all cars parked in the area, in case the perpetrator was in such a hurry that he had not managed to take the car in which he might have arrived. The growing crowd of curious people who had gathered down on the street were gradually questioned, and very soon the plan was to start knocking on doors in a more organized manner.

Half an hour later Jarnebring and his colleague had done everything possible, and given the conditions no one could have done it better. But because neither the people from the duty desk nor tech had shown up yet, he already suspected whom he was waiting for, and that things would soon change.

2 Thursday evening, November 30-The night of Friday, December 1, 1989

Bäckström was short, fat, and crude whereas Wiijnbladh was short, slender, and dapper. Together they complemented each other splendidly and they were also happy working together. Bäckström thought that Wiijnbladh was a cowardly half-fairy-you didn’t even have to raise your voice, and he still did what he was told. Wiijnbladh in turn viewed Bäckström as mentally challenged and bad-tempered-a dream to work with for anyone who preferred having the situation under control himself. Because they were both solidly incompetent, no disputes arose on either factual or other professional grounds, and to sum up, they made a real radar unit.

Bäckström was a detective inspector and normally worked on the homicide squad, but because he was a bachelor, had no children, and his finances were always shaky, he took every opportunity to sign up for a little extra duty. He was no numbskull either, so the thirtieth of November was a day he normally would have avoided, but because it was getting toward Christmas he had no choice. These were hard times, and they would not get better for a long while.

It had turned out just as badly that night as he had feared. His colleagues in the uniformed police shoveled in piles of the worst kind of rowdies. Lots of snot-nosed youngsters who thought that rock throwing was a democratic right and began every attempt at conversation by threatening to report the interrogator for assault and making reference to Daddy, who was either a senior physician at the psych clinic, a technical adviser at the Ministry of Justice, or an editorial writer at Dagens Nyheter.

To begin with Bäckström had managed nicely-not so strange in itself, given his experience-but he had to work like a tightrope walker to keep out of the way, and he basically pulled out every trick he had in his considerable repertoire. First he locked himself in the john to leaf through both Little Pravda and Excessen in peace and quiet-the only place imaginable where a person could read such shit. Then he slipped down and took a nap for a while at registration, but when he came back to his office he was immediately forced to snatch up a dead telephone receiver and sit humming and nodding while a couple of half-apes from the riot squad stood in his doorway and more or less tried to stare him out. He waved dismissively at them several times but they didn’t even react. How the hell did those guys get to be police officers?

The chief inspector on duty arrived like a rescuing angel, surly as usual and a fundamentalist. He was a bastard of course, but in a crisis situation you couldn’t be too particular.

“Stop your monkeyshines now, Bäckström,” said the boss. “I have a murder for you. Some wretch in an apartment on Rådmansgatan has checked out. We have a shortage of cars, so you’ll have to ride with tech. Luck of the draw. Let’s hope for our Lord’s sake the victim doesn’t have any relatives,” he said piously as he was leaving.

Rådmansgatan. Sounds good, thought Bäckström. Not a high gook alert at that address, and if his luck held maybe it would prove to be something really juicy. Worthy of an old pro like himself.

On the way out he took the opportunity to sneak into the break room and liberate the last Danish pastries. A whole bag, in fact. Who wanted to risk landing in a murder investigation on an empty stomach? Besides, there was plenty of time for a pot of fresh-brewed coffee with Wiijnbladh up at the tech squad while he explained to the miserable half-fairy what this was about before they began the evening’s exercises.

Wiijnbladh was looking forward to a calm, quiet evening filled with edifying reading. True, there were demonstrations out in the city, and apparently an awful commotion, but a major advantage of even violent uprisings was that they seldom gave rise to a lot of forensic misery, the need for such disappearing naturally in the general confusion that prevailed in such contexts. In relatively undisturbed peace he would thus be able to go through old issues of the Annals of Forensic Science in hopes of finding some good hints for how, in a completely risk-free manner, he might be able to eliminate his wife. Some kind of poison, thought Wiijnbladh. Definitely not the usual messiness with blunt objects and firearms. He had seen more than enough of that at work. Some effective, discreet poison that he could sneak into her completely unnoticed, and that would preferably cause severe pain when it was too late to do anything about it. She so deserved that. And who of all his half-moronic, visually handicapped colleagues would be able to detect something like that? None of them, thought Wiijnbladh with emphasis, turning the page in his thick book just as his phone rang.

The call was from the duty desk where a murder had come in. At first-in a moment of terror-he got the idea that it had happened during the demonstrations and he would have to spend the night outside in a merciless November wind, but when he understood that the crime scene was indoors, in an apartment on Rådmansgatan, he heaved a quiet sigh of relief. Until that horrid fat slob Bäckström showed up. Waving a lot of sticky pastries squished down in a sack, more or less forcing him to brew fresh coffee while they “talked over the strategy.”

What did he have to say to such a person? But then again, what choice did he have? A man of peace like him, an educated man like him, now being sent out into the cold by a stern fate with this police department Neanderthal who had already managed to consume two pastries before the coffee was even ready.

Poor man, thought Wiijnbladh, and it was the murder victim and not himself he had in mind. Let’s hope he doesn’t have any family.

So it had started as it always did when he and Bäckström had to march out to the field.

“Maybe we’d better get moving,” said Wiijnbladh, glancing nervously at his watch.

Bäckström didn’t even answer. How could he with his mouth full of Danish pastries? He simply shook his head and waved his fleshy, hot doglike fingers dismissively.

“I heard it was Jarnebring who responded to the alarm,” Wiijnbladh said carefully. “So maybe it’s best-”

“That fucking idiot,” said Bäckström, but evidently that remark made an impression, for as soon as he’d finished chewing he got up and started buttoning up his coat around his fat stomach. Then he just nodded and finally they were on their way.

Jarnebring was standing in the entryway to welcome them when they arrived at the murder scene. He looked like a wolf. A big, hungry wolf, with eyes narrow as loopholes, deep-seated eyes set wide apart among the sharp angles of his lean face. He had shoulder blades like guitar cases and arms that started at the wrists and only ended where his thick neck started. He was also dressed in a mid-length black leather jacket, worn blue jeans, and heavy boots. And as far as Wiijnbladh was concerned, he might just as well have worn a black hood and carried a scythe over his shoulder.

“Did you crawl here?” he asked courteously, looking at the watch that fit tightly around his bony wrist, and Wiijnbladh felt the cold fingers of death groping for his heart.

“Nice to see you, Jarnebring,” said Wiijnbladh as he tried hard to smile amiably and hold his voice in check. “The traffic is awful, as you know.” Whatever you do, do not look him in the eyes, he thought; he had learned that at a course on how forensic technicians could avoid being bitten by mad dogs.

“How’s the door knocking going?” asked Bäckström. “If you take care of that, Jarnebring, then Wiijnbladh and I will see to putting some order into the investigation.” And then he only nodded curtly and continued up the stairs.

Say what you will about Bäckström, thought Wiijnbladh with sudden warmth, falling in behind his fat back before the grim reaper could get hold of him.

Jarnebring did not say anything, didn’t move, didn’t even blink. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded at his female colleague. Poor bastard, he thought, and it was not Bäckström or Wiijnbladh that he was thinking about.

Jarnebring and his new, and temporary, female colleague-and that was how he viewed her without the question even being discussed-devoted the majority of the evening of the thirtieth of November to knocking on doors, which had always been their intention, in fact, regardless of what Bäckström thought about it. They spoke with almost all the victim’s neighbors, a total of about twenty people in the building facing the street and ten or so in the back building. Almost everyone who lived there was at home. They were mostly older people, many of them living alone, and with a few exceptions they had been sitting in front of the TV at the time their neighbor was murdered.

When the police rang their doorbells they were without exception friendly and obliging, and in a number of cases truly exerted themselves to answer the police officers’ questions. In a practical sense the door-to-door inquiries went easily and smoothly, but in a factual sense it was an unmitigated catastrophe. No one had seen anything, no one had heard anything, no one knew the victim, the majority did not even seem aware of his existence. The one who seemed to know him best, his closest neighbor Mrs. Westergren, who had called the police, had for the most part only said hello to him on those occasions when they met in the stairwell.

Jarnebring and his female colleague started with her, and Jarnebring suggested that perhaps his partner ought to lead the questioning. The witness was extremely agitated and he had an idea that a woman-despite the fact that she was half the age of the witness-might perhaps make the witness feel more comfortable. Which proved to be true. His younger colleague handled the questioning in an exemplary fashion and Jarnebring just sat there and listened. It felt unusual, but not at all unpleasant. The new generation is taking over, Jarnebring thought philosophically, and concentrated instead on appearing as secure and confidence inspiring as possible.

First they talked about the witness herself, Mrs. Westergren. Then about the victim, her closest neighbor Kjell Göran Eriksson, who had just turned forty-five at the time of his demise, according to the information that Jarnebring had received from the duty desk a while earlier. Only after that did his colleague bring up the events that had led Mrs. Westergren to call the emergency number. The entire conversation was conducted in a careful, systematic, professional manner and the results were as thin as gruel.

Mrs. Westergren herself was sixty-five years old and recently retired from a job as an official at a bank in Stockholm. She lived alone, had no children, and had moved into the building after her divorce some ten years earlier.

“My ex-husband and I had a house out in Bromma,” she explained. “When we separated and sold the house, I bought this apartment. It’s a condominium.”

Then she told what little she knew about Eriksson. He had moved into the building a few years later, and that was when she had her only long conversation with him. She had knocked on his door to welcome him, and he had invited her in for a cup of coffee.

“I was on the association’s board, after all, the condo association that is, and I thought that it was appropriate. Yes… and then he was my closest neighbor too.”

But there had not been much more.

“He introduced himself of course, but I already knew what his name was. I’d seen it on the paperwork when he bought the apartment. Yes… then he said that he worked at the Central Bureau of Statistics. With labor market statistics, as I recall. But he didn’t actually say much more than that. He seemed rather reserved. Yes, not disagreeable or anything, not really, but far from talkative.”

He must have riled up someone in any event, thought Jarnebring, but of course he didn’t say that.

What was he like as a person?

“As a neighbor he was almost ideal, I guess, if you appreciate peace and quiet. He never made any fuss. He never went to the association meetings or anything. I don’t think he knew anyone here in the building.”

Did he have any friends that Mrs. Westergren had noticed?

“No women in any event. I don’t believe I ever saw him with a woman during all the years he lived here. Sometimes I saw that he had visitors, but it was always men his own age. There were some that I’ve seen on at least a few occasions. But it really didn’t happen very often that I saw him having visitors. The last time must have been several months ago. Yes… and this evening then… a few hours ago.” Mrs. Westergren had become noticeably paler.

What was it that made her call the police?

“I heard that he had a visitor. I had just come in the door. I’d been out shopping. It must have been some time around seven. I was standing in the hallway hanging up my coat when I heard someone ringing his doorbell. Yes… he opened the door and said something and then the door was closed.”

Had the visitor said anything? Did she have any idea who the visitor was?

She did not. The murder victim’s mysterious visitor had not only been unseen but unheard as well. The witness herself had not thought any more about it. Besides, why should she? Her neighbor had a visit from someone that he knew, and, true, it wasn’t common, but it was no more than that. She had gone out into the kitchen, made a cup of tea and a warm sandwich, which she brought into the living room. She’d had her sandwich, finished her tea, and then read a magazine she had bought when she was out shopping. She preferred reading, you see, and she almost never watched TV.

“It must have been about then that it started… right before eight o’clock. I remember that I was looking at the clock, because at first I had the idea that it was his TV that I was hearing. But of course it wasn’t that… I realized that. I heard how he was screaming… how he bellowed right out… Then I heard thumps from the furniture as if someone was falling or as if… Yes, as if he was fighting with someone then… Yes, my neighbor, I mean. It was only him that I heard. Not the other one… although they must have been fighting. What is it the lawyers always say-it’s in the nature of things-although that was what was so strange.” Mrs. Westergren shook her head.

What was it that had been strange?

What was so strange was that he had not sounded afraid. Angry, furious, crazy with rage, but not afraid. Their witness had become noticeably paler as she spoke, but at the same time it was very clear that she was truly exerting herself to remember what she had heard.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not afraid, he sounded more like he was angry… or furious… He just bellowed in rage… although I didn’t hear what he was screaming.”

“And you’re certain that it was your neighbor you heard? Not the one who was visiting him?”

“Yes. It was Eriksson who screamed. He sounded completely insane actually. The other one I didn’t hear. He was quiet, I guess.”

But it was only when the neighbor’s bellowing had ceased that she had phoned the police. By then she had heard him moaning loudly, and it sounded as though he was crawling around on the floor in the apartment. It was then that she made her first call to the police.

“It never stopped. It felt like an eternity. It sounded as if he was dying in there… and he was too.

“You never came,” she said, and for some reason it was Jarnebring and not his colleague she was looking at when she said that.

Had she noticed anything else? Anything about Eriksson that struck her? Some observation that she had made? Any speculations she’d had?

Anything at all, thought Jarnebring. Give us anything at all because we’re not picky. Just give us a little piece of thread that we can start pulling on.

“No,” said Mrs. Westergren, suddenly looking guarded. “Like what?”

She’s hiding something, thought Jarnebring, feeling the familiar scent in his nostrils, but before he managed to ask the question, his colleague got there first.

“Let me put it like this, Mrs. Westergren,” she said with a friendly smile. “In my job the people we encounter are rarely completely black or completely white… in a moral sense that is. It’s more complicated than that. I’m thinking about what you’ve told me and my colleague. Everything you’ve said indicates that it was someone who knew Eriksson who attacked him. Why? Eriksson doesn’t appear to have associated with any crazy people. What was it about Eriksson that might provoke someone he knew to the degree that he-”

“Murdered him.” Mrs. Westergren looked pale as she finished the sentence.

“What I mean is… what was it about him that could have caused someone to do that?”

Well done, thought Jarnebring. She has not said “murder” the whole time. She was really good-looking too. Although maybe a little thin?

“I don’t really know,” said Mrs. Westergren. “I have no idea what it could have been.”

His female colleague just nodded without saying anything, simply looking at the older woman who sat across from her. Friendly, cautious, encouraging. Now then…

“I had the feeling,” said Mrs. Westergren hesitantly, “that he had started to drink a great deal recently. That something was worrying him. It’s not like I saw him drunk or anything… but there was something. The last few times I saw him… he seemed really nervous.” Mrs. Westergren nodded in confirmation, and looked almost relieved herself.

Well, well, well, thought Jarnebring. Then we’ll have to find out what sort of thing it was, and then the prosecutor can take over.

When the door knocking was finally finished it was almost midnight and they had gathered in the victim’s apartment for a first go-through. The corpse had already been carted away, leaving only the impressions of his upper body and head on the blood-covered parquet floor where he had been lying. It was clear that effort had been devoted to searching for fingerprints-that flagship of police work-because moldings, handles, and cupboard doors were smeared with black traces of carbon dust. For some reason they had also tidied up-the overturned coffee table, for example, was now standing in its usual position, and it was only to be hoped that Wiijnbladh had managed to take photos before they’d rearranged the furniture. Bäckström sat and smoked as he wallowed in the largest armchair in the room, talking on the victim’s phone while trying to make a show of not noticing either Jarnebring or his colleague. Wiijnbladh too was his usual self. Little, gray, and fussy as a sparrow that had just stopped pecking for a moment.

“Step right in, just step right in,” said Wiijnbladh, waving a hand, his head at an angle. “Make yourselves at home. I realize that you want to take a look.”

Fucking idiots, thought Jarnebring. How the hell can anyone like them become policemen?

Jarnebring and his new, temporary colleague made the rounds of the apartment, and considering that Eriksson was supposed to have been a bachelor it was a remarkable place. Not the least like Jarnebring’s own two-room apartment over in Vasastan. If you disregarded the disarray created by the crime and the traces of Wiijnbladh’s and the others’ work, the place was quite tidy, neat, almost overfurnished, and in a taste that Jarnebring neither shared nor would have had the means for.

“Strange fucking place,” Jarnebring said to his new colleague.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“To live in,” said Jarnebring. “Hell, I don’t live like this.”

“Imagine that,” she said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t expect you to.”

Wiijnbladh displayed his finds, lined up like trophies on the coffee table. Although he looked like a sparrow he was still proud as a rooster for he had “secured both the murder weapon and a great number of other interesting clues.”

“Yes, we found the murder weapon in the kitchen. The perpetrator had thrown it in the trash.” Wiijnbladh pointed at a large carving knife with a black wooden handle, its shiny blade black with dried blood.

Congrats, thought Jarnebring sourly. This is almost too much to expect from someone as blind as you.

“Is this the victim’s knife?” asked Jarnebring’s colleague.

“It appears to be so, yes, it appears so,” said Wiijnbladh, nodding insightfully. “The blade is almost a foot long, after all, so it’s hardly something you would carry around.”

“Sabatier,” said Jarnebring’s colleague. “French brand, kitchen knives, very expensive. I saw that the other knives in the holder out in the kitchen were also from Sabatier.”

“Exactly, exactly,” said Wiijnbladh, trying to look as though he were appearing on “Nobel Minds.”

What the hell are they up to? thought Jarnebring, looking at his watch. It was past twelve and high time to hit the sack before a new day with fresh mayhem and misery, and here they are yakking about the victim’s choice of kitchen utensils. Even a child could figure out where the knife had come from.

“I’m hearing that you were in the home ec program out at the police academy,” said Bäckström to Jarnebring’s colleague. “It didn’t exist in my day, but maybe we can stop talking domestic science and try to get something done.

“I’ve talked with your boss, Jarnebring,” Bäckström continued, “and he has promised that both you and your girlfriend will help out. So if we could meet at homicide tomorrow morning at nine, I’ll thank you ladies and gentlemen for a pleasant evening.”

Watch out, you little shit, thought Jarnebring, but he didn’t say it.

There really were no major faults with his new, temporary colleague, even if she was a woman, thought Jarnebring as they drove away. First she had offered to put their car back in the garage at the police headquarters on Kungsholmen-she lived nearby so that was no big deal-and on the way there she had driven him home.

“How does it feel to start working as a detective?” asked Jarnebring, who didn’t want to be outdone.

“Good,” she said, nodding. “I think I’m going to like it.”

“You worked with the uniformed police,” said Jarnebring, and this was more a statement than a question. Strange I didn’t notice her, he thought.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That was a long time ago.”

It couldn’t have been that long, thought Jarnebring. How old could she be? A little over thirty, tops.

“I worked at Sec,” she said. “As a bodyguard.”

The hell you did, thought Jarnebring, but naturally he didn’t say it.

“And now you’ve wound up in a murder investigation,” Jarnebring stated. With two real fools, he thought.

“It’s my first one,” she said, “so it will be interesting.”

“With two real fools,” said Jarnebring.

“You mean Bäckström and Wiijnbladh,” she said and smiled. “I’d actually heard about them. Although it’s only now that I’m starting to believe it’s true… what I heard, that is.”

“Bäckström is a known douche bag,” said Jarnebring. “Let me know if he messes with you and I’ll slap him around.”

“No need to worry,” she said, smiling wanly. “I can do that myself.”

Strange gal, thought Jarnebring. Where the hell is the police department headed?

“So you can then,” said Jarnebring, “in a pinch?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding with her gaze directed straight ahead and her hands steady on the wheel. “I can. In a pinch.”

When she dropped him off outside his door and before he had even managed to think up a suitable farewell line, she simply drove away.

“See you first thing tomorrow morning,” she said and smiled. “Sleep tight now.”

Jarnebring watched the car as it disappeared down the street. Anna Holt, he thought, Inspector Anna Holt. Strange he hadn’t run into her before. After all, he’d been a policeman his entire adult life.

Bäckström had surprised Wiijnbladh. He had offered to stay behind and make sure the crime scene was locked and sealed before they drove away.

“Aren’t you going to ride with me?” asked Wiijnbladh.

“No,” said Bäckström, smiling mysteriously. “I’ve got a little something going if you know what I mean. And you have to drop off what we’ve confiscated up at tech. So I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“That’s nice of you,” said Wiijnbladh. What if I was to sleep at the office? he thought, but obviously he didn’t say that to Bäckström.

Finally alone, thought Bäckström, and as soon as the little half-fairy Wiijnbladh disappeared out through the door with his bag and baggage Bäckström locked himself in and searched through the corpse’s clothes closet. The bastard had cases of expensive alcohol. Bäckström thought about calling a taxi, but at the same time a real pro took no unnecessary risks. Who knew, there might still be some reporter outside on the street. Whatever. There would be other occasions to return for more bottles-rather that than the goods ending up in the general inheritance fund for any relatives the victim appeared not to have had. The bastard.

Good thing he had brought his winter coat. The be-all and end-all of crime scene investigation gear, thought Bäckström with delight, an ample coat with deep pockets. He put some well-chosen bottles in the pockets and then locked up from the outside with the victim’s keys, pasted sealing tape on the door, and took off.

When he got home he sat down on the couch in front of the TV and inspected the goods he’d brought with him. Then he pondered how to set up the investigation so that he could mess with Jarnebring and that skinny police dummy he’d had with him.

“Cheers,” said Bäckström, raising his glass of malt whiskey toward the blurred mirror image of himself in the dark TV screen. True, he didn’t have any expensive furniture like the corpse, and it was high time that he brought home a whore who liked to clean and could get laid for clearing away the worst of it, but all in all he had it good enough. We’re drinking the same alcohol, the corpse and I, thought Bäckström and sneered. Although I’m alive while he’s dead. So he poured another ample shot before taking a pee, and just as he swallowed the last swig he saw the light. Suddenly he understood exactly the way things were, clear as water, the motive, the whole nine yards. Lit up like a plain under a flaming sky he saw the truth spread out before his eyes. Hell, thought Bäckström with delight. This is going to be fun.

3 Friday morning, December 1, 1989

Jarnebring’s day had not started out well, but it got much better as it went on. At the end of the day things got a little shaky again, and if he hadn’t pulled himself together as evening approached and showed some determination the day might have ended really badly. But there was finally a good end to it and a very promising weekend lay ahead. The reasons for this were complicated but were in all essentials connected with his love life, and personally he preferred not to think about it, much less talk about it.

For almost four years Jarnebring had been engaged. His fiancée worked as a uniformed police officer at Norrmalm. She was beautiful to look at, fun to be with, had considerable household talents, and led an orderly life. Besides, she was very much in love with Jarnebring, and so far all was well and good. The problem was the engagement, and time’s more and more rapid flight, drawing him into some kind of strange union that he couldn’t seem to get a handle on.

To start with, everything had been peace and harmony. Jarnebring moved in with his sweetheart. He had been extraordinarily well taken care of and seen their engagement as an omen of an imminently approaching marriage, eternal future harmony, and peaceful domestic happiness. Then he put on ten pounds, the ring on his left hand suddenly felt irritatingly tight, and their relationship started to flounder.

Unfortunately he had also discovered new sides to his “girlfriend,” such as the fact that it annoyed her when he called her his “girlfriend” instead of his “fiancée.” If that was how things stood for him, she had said, if he saw their engagement as just a ploy to gain time, he might just as well “come out with it immediately” so she’d have the opportunity to arrange something else instead. So he’d moved back home again, they had reconciled, he’d moved back in, moved home, and so on as time literally rushed onward. At the moment he was living at home, but their plans were no more definite, and personally he would have preferred not to think about the future. But on this particular morning he had no choice, as soon as he opened the refrigerator door at a quarter past six in the morning.

Jarnebring never slept more than five or six hours even when he’d partied. When he got out of bed he was always alert and rested, but above all hungry and in need of an ample breakfast. Even as he was standing in the shower he had unpleasant premonitions, and when he looked in his refrigerator those premonitions were confirmed.

It did not look good. Yesterday’s roll lay collapsed in a bag-who could be so dense as to put bread in the fridge?-in the company of a wedge of cheese, a trickle of apple juice, and a very tired, soggy tomato that had clearly given its all. The only consolation in this wretched state of affairs was an almost full carton of eggs. When he saw the miserable prospects for a dizzyingly brief moment he considered calling his girlfriend despite everything-she lived on the way to work after all-but then he steeled himself, pushed that thought aside, and made the best of the situation.

As a policeman I have to approve of the situation, thought Jarnebring, without really feeling convinced of that. They’re not like we are, and the ones he had in mind were the great human collective among which his fiancée could also be counted. They’re like children, damn it, he thought with irritation as he put the pan on the stove and poured in enough water for both coffee and the eggs.

Half an hour later he was on the subway en route to work after a breakfast of instant coffee without milk, half a glass of juice, almost an entire tomato, yesterday’s roll with a few shavings of cheese and five soft-boiled eggs. He was prey to conflicting emotions, only partly connected to his first meal of the day.

When he arrived Holt was already in place behind her desk, and evidently she had been sitting there a good while because she had managed to do searches on the victim, his neighbors, and the cars that had been parked on the street.

“Haven’t come up with anything, unfortunately,” said Holt, shaking her head.

“Hell,” said Jarnebring. “Have you been sitting here all night?” He nodded toward the thick bundles of computer printouts on her desk.

“I got here an hour ago,” said Holt, smiling wanly as she shook her head. “Nicke is with his dad this week, so I had nothing better to do.”

I could have fixed that if you’d come by, thought Jarnebring, although mostly from habit and without feeling that old conviction he used to feel before he got engaged. Damn that too, he thought with irritation.

“Nicke,” said Jarnebring questioningly.

“My boy. Haven’t I told you about him? He’s six and he’ll start school next fall.”

“Great age,” said Jarnebring vaguely. “Does he have any siblings?” What was I thinking about just now? he thought.

“Just Nicke,” said Holt. “None on the way and none planned.”

I’ll just bet, thought Jarnebring, who had carried on that discussion on a number of occasions in recent years.

“Well well then,” said Jarnebring, smiling. What the hell should he say? “Has anything else happened?”

“Yes,” said Holt, digging out a yellow message pad. “Our colleague Danielsson at homicide called and wondered if you could go see him before the meeting.”

“I see,” said Jarnebring, taking the slip of paper. Must be that idiot Bäckström, he thought.

“Danielsson,” said Holt. “Is he the guy they call Jack Daniels?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring, nodding. “Although I don’t understand why. He doesn’t drink more than most of the others and he can hold considerably more, even though he’ll soon be retirement age.”

“See you at the meeting,” said Holt, as she resumed leafing through yet another bundle of papers in the pile on her desk.

“Sit down, Jarnebring,” said Danielsson, nodding toward his visitor’s chair.

“You look energetic, old man,” said Jarnebring with warmth in his voice. There’s a real policeman, he thought.

“What the hell choice do I have,” said Danielsson, “as expensive as schnapps has gotten.” He was just as big and burly as Jarnebring. Twenty years older, sixty pounds heavier, blue-red in the face, and with a tie like a snare around his bull’s neck.

He must be built like a woodstove, thought Jarnebring, looking appreciatively at the medical miracle before him.

“What did you have in mind?” he asked.

Nothing in particular as it turned out, just the same old same old. A little talk about this and that between fellow police. An opportunity to thank Jarnebring for wanting to help out. Danielsson was nonetheless the assistant head of the squad.

“Nothing’s the same here since they killed Palme. You may be wondering why our colleague Bäckström is the lead detective. If he starts any foolishness just say the word and I’ll kick some sense into the little bastard.”

“It’ll work out,” said Jarnebring. “I can arrange that myself in any event.”

“I would think so,” said Danielsson, grunting appreciatively. There’s a real policeman, he thought.

Then the old man brought up his favorite subject. Things had been much better before and best of all in “Dahlgren’s day,” referring to the legendary old squad chief who had closed up shop more than ten years ago. The one who had ended his life by his own hand and with the help of his service revolver to save society unnecessary nursing expenses and himself an undignified life. Although that particular detail was not usually talked about, not even at the time when it was fresh in people’s memory. Back then you could still talk to the crooks, who had surnames that weren’t all consonants, even if Danielsson chose to formulate that linguistic problem in a different way.

“Do you remember those days, Jarnie,” said Danielsson, “when you could spell the crook’s name? And understand what he said?”

“Sure, sure,” said Jarnebring, smiling a little. Although Blackie, Genghis, the Pistol Gnome, and Charlie Cannon weren’t always so fun to deal with either. Sometimes you could keep a straight face.

“Lars Peter Forsman… and Bosse Dynamite,” said Danielsson dreamily. “Even the Clarkster, that fuckup from Norrmalmstorg, although maybe that wasn’t exactly his fault. Do you remember when they wrote on the front page of Little Pravda that they’d given Bosse Dynamite an intelligence test and he had an IQ like a professor? Do you remember how furious Dynamite got? That was one talented guy. Completely normal. He didn’t want to be compared to any crazy academics. He should have sued those bastards.”

He’s the same as ever, thought Jarnebring, sneaking a look at his watch.

“Fine lads,” said Danielsson and sighed nostalgically. “And what the hell do we have now? A lot of Yugos and Polacks and Turks and Arabs and guys like that fuckup Bäckström who’s going to take charge of all the misery. And on the shelf there”-Danielsson nodded toward the bookshelf behind his desk-“I have two rows of binders with unsolved murders. Damn, Dahlgren would have killed me if he’d lived. Although he never even swore at you.”

“Dahlgren was good,” Jarnebring agreed, despite the fact that he was always going on about his diploma, he thought.

“Sure,” said Danielsson. “And here I am talking shit.”

Then they went their separate ways. Jarnebring went to his meeting and Danielsson leaned back, looked at the clock, and wondered whether he could slip down to the liquor store before lunch so he could avoid standing in line for hours. In recent years he’d had an awful ache in his knees, and it was the weekend anyway and soon it would be Christmas…

The first meeting of the invesitgation team with lead detective Bäckström had astounded all those who knew him. He was alert and freshly showered, despite what was for him an early hour, and radiated both effectiveness and a strong odor of menthol-flavored throat lozenges.

“Okay then,” said Bäckström energetically, opening up his folder of notes. “Allow me to welcome everyone. We have a murder and we have to like the situation.”

And not make things unnecessarily complicated and mistrust the chance coincidence, thought Jarnebring, something touching his heart at the same time as he thought about his best friend, police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson, and his three golden rules for a murder investigator. I’ll have to call Lars Martin. It’s been awhile. What the hell has happened to Bäckström anyway? He must have put vitamins in his nightcap, thought Jarnebring.

“Let’s see now, said blind Sarah,” Bäckström said, leafing among his papers with his fat right thumb. “First we have our corpse… Eriksson, Kjell Göran, born in 1944, single, no children, no known relatives whatsoever… that we could produce in any event.” Bäckström gave Holt an inquisitive look.

“No,” Holt confirmed, without needing to consult her own folder. “No wives, no children, no relatives.”

This is almost too good to be true, thought Bäckström, feeling how the keys to the victim’s apartment were keeping warm in his right pants pocket.

“Worked as some kind of bigwig down at the Central Bureau of Statistics over on Karlavägen. Isn’t that the monstrosity at the intersection down by the Radio and TV building?”

New nod from Holt, although more hesitant this time.

“Not exactly a bigwig,” she said. “He was bureau director, hardly a bigwig.”

Typical, thought Bäckström. Fucking attack dyke. As soon as you’re a little nice to them and extend a hand, they try to tear off your whole arm.

“Yes,” said Bäckström. “Bureau director. Wasn’t that what I said?”

“I don’t recall,” said Holt, “but a bureau director is hardly a bigwig,” she clarified. “That must be the lowest management position they have. Like a detective inspector with us.” Watch out, you fat little schmuck, she thought.

“He’s dead anyway,” said Bäckström. They always have to talk back, he thought. Thank the Lord he had resisted the pressure and was still a free man.

“Where, when, and how,” said Jarnebring, looking encouragingly at Bäckström. So we can get out of here sometime, he thought.

“Exactly, exactly,” said Bäckström with newfound energy. “The scene of the crime is the victim’s residence. More precisely, the living room in his apartment on Rådmansgatan. Of that point we can be completely certain.”

Wiijnbladh nodded in agreement, without Bäckström condescending to give him a glance.

“So then there is the time,” Bäckström continued. “If we’re to believe our witness and the call she makes to the colleagues down in the pit, the whole thing seems to have gotten going about eight o’clock, quarter after eight, yesterday evening.” Bäckström let his gaze sweep across those assembled, but no one seemed to be of a different opinion.

“Cause of death… one or more knife wounds in the chest area… from the back. Wiijnbladh?” Bäckström looked inquisitively at Wiijnbladh, who nodded obligingly.

“Yes, well, I’ll be meeting the forensic doctor later today, but that’s my definite opinion as well,” said Wiijnbladh. “And I believe we’ve found the knife.”

“Okay then,” said Bäckström, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands over his fat belly. “Then only two questions remain out of six. Who did it and what’s the motive. As far as the latter is concerned I already have my ideas, but there are a few things I’ve asked Wiijnbladh to check before I get back to that. We still have to flush out the perpetrator, and I don’t think that will take very long.” Bäckström looked shrewdly at those gathered.

Nice to hear, thought Jarnebring, for personally he had been part of more impressive detective teams than this one.

The smaller of the two conference rooms at the homicide squad held a total of nine individuals that morning, considerably fewer than would usually be at the first meeting of a new murder investigation: lead detective Bäckström and his little squire Wiijnbladh, who would take care of the technical aspects; Jarnebring and Holt; one of Bäckström’s coworkers in the squad, whose name was Alm but who was generally known as Blockhead and was not considered a shining light; a female civilian office worker, Gunsan, who would take care of filing the preliminary investigation material; plus three younger talents who were on loan from the uniformed police. The idea was that they would do all the other things that weren’t very important but still had to be done, and because all of them were almost jumping with eagerness despite the fact that they were still sitting down, evidently none of them had figured out what had been planned.

“Okay then,” said Bäckström, closing his folder. “Any questions?”

“Should we work this weekend?” asked Jarnebring.

“I’m sorry,” said Bäckström, making a brave effort to look gloomy. “We’re still short on cash since they shot that socialist down on Sveavägen, so there’s no question of overtime.” In any case not so it extends to you, you incompetent bastards, thought Bäckström, having already filled out the overtime forms for the weekend on his own account. “So we’ll have to meet on Monday morning. Unless something comes up. Then I’ll be in touch.” You can forget about that, he thought.

“Yes?” Bäckström looked questioningly at Wiijnbladh, who had actually raised his hand. A careful little wave of his little handsy-pandsy, typical for that half-fairy, thought Bäckström.

“Are you coming to look when we undress the body, Bäckström?” Wiijnbladh asked. The question was not as strange as it sounded because it had been a tradition since old Dahlberg’s days that at least one of the squad’s heavy-duty murder investigators was there for the autopsy.

“Thanks for asking but I have to pass,” said Bäckström, who had other, more important matters in mind. “You and I can talk later.”

4 Friday morning, December 1, 1989

The survey of the victim’s personal characteristics is the very hub of the steadily rolling wheel of a murder investigation, and considering this particular victim’s appearance, Jarnebring and Holt had decided to start with his coworkers, without even needing to discuss the matter in more detail.

First they talked to the head of the department at the Central Bureau of Statistics where Eriksson had worked. Naturally he was shocked. The whole thing was inexplicable, for according to him, Eriksson had been not only an ideal colleague but also an extraordinary and generally well liked individual. Besides which he had been active in the union at work, with a strong, genuine commitment.

Who at the bureau had known him best? Was there anyone he socialized with outside of work?

Eriksson’s boss had given them two names. A woman and a man who sat next to Eriksson and were part of the same statistics-producing unit. But he couldn’t think of anyone else. And as far as things outside the workplace were concerned, perhaps it was best to ask his coworkers directly. Personally he had not seen Eriksson outside work. Had never even run into him in town, now that he thought about it.

Holt questioned the male colleague and Jarnebring the female one, and considering what they said about Eriksson it would have been enough to speak with either one of them.

Neither of them had anything bad to say about Eriksson. He had done his job, even if his union obligations naturally occupied a good deal of his time. Neither of them had socialized with him privately. Neither of them had seen him at all outside of work, and they could not name anyone else who had either. Eriksson had always been correct, maintained a certain distance from his surroundings, was courteous of course but at the same time a man of high integrity.

You don’t say, thought Jarnebring.

You don’t say, thought Holt.

On the way out through the reception area, when it was time to return to police headquarters, they finally got a lead. A doorman in his fifties who was standing bent over a copy machine behind the counter in the lobby had given them that lingering gaze that every true detective learns to recognize early on.

Jarnebring slowed his pace, smiled and nodded amiably, giving the doorman the extra moment that such people always need. Medium height, slender build, with thin medium blond hair and forward-leaning body posture, Jarnebring noted without even thinking about it.

“I heard that Eriksson was killed,” the doorman said without looking at them, as he filled a carton with paper.

“You knew him,” said Jarnebring, and this was more a statement than a question.

“Hmm,” said the doorman, nodding.

“Should we meet down in the cafeteria in five minutes,” said Jarnebring, and this was more a suggestion than a question.

“There’s a café in the Radio and TV building,” said their prospective informant. “It’s quieter there. Give me ten minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later they were sitting by themselves in the most remote corner of the café, each with a cup of coffee. Holt started their conversation with a police-style scissors kick.

“With or without filters?” said Holt, smiling at their prospective interview victim even before he started digging in his pockets with his skinny, nicotine-stained fingers.

“Preferably with,” the doorman said, and Holt immediately conjured forth a pack of Marlboro Reds and a lighter. Then everything went like clockwork.

Holt doesn’t smoke, thought Jarnebring with surprise, and on that point he was almost certain.

What had Eriksson been like as a person?

“This stays completely between us, right?” the doorman asked, drawing his fingers through his thin hair.

Jarnebring nodded, Holt nodded, and the doorman took a deep, contemplative drag before he nodded too.

“What Eriksson was like as a person,” said their source. “Well… I don’t really know how I should put it.”

“Try,” said Jarnebring, smiling his famous wolf grin.

“You meet a lot of people over the years. I’ve worked at this place for almost thirty years now… and…” The doorman smiled wryly, shook his head, and tapped the ash off his cigarette, while both Jarnebring and Holt waited in silence. Oh well, thought Jarnebring while in his mind he watched the line running out from the reel.

“Kjell Eriksson,” said the doorman. “What was he like as a person? If I put it like this… Kjell Eriksson was probably the absolute smallest person I’ve met here-and the absolute biggest asshole.” He nodded with emphasis and looked at them, evidently delighted now. “That man was one exceptionally large asshole.”

“I’m interpreting this as meaning it wasn’t you who killed him,” said Jarnebring, grinning cheerfully.

“Oh no,” said the doorman, shaking his head. “Why would I do that? A child could see that someone was going to do it sooner or later, and the only thing that’s a little mysterious is why it took so long. He must have worked with us for ten years at least. Talk about living on borrowed time. Well, damn…” Eriksson’s former coworker looked at them with eyes shining with delight.

“What was it with him?” Holt asked.

Lazy-ass, wheeler-dealer, chicken, ass licker, stuck-up, bully, gossip, backbiter, thief, and just a bastard in general; he even had bad breath. But he did not seem to have had any other faults. Not that the doorman could think of now in any case.

“Sounds like a nice guy,” said Jarnebring.

“Eriksson was a bad person,” said his former coworker seriously. “But he was no ordinary idiot. He was a shrewd bastard.”

Bäckström had held a press conference up at homicide. Not especially well attended, half a dozen journalists from the newspapers as well as some from radio, but none of the TV channels had done him the honor. That was a shame, because those few times he had appeared on screen it had immediately resulted in a number of odd jobs when he was at the bar showing the flag. Lazy and incompetent, thought Bäckström. They get to report the weather on the screen for a week, and then they think they are the weather.

He had not had much to say himself. Of course the investigators were covering a lot of ground without preconceived notions at the same time as a number of promising leads were being followed up, and conclusive evidence had of course been secured. If he were to say something off the record, it would only be that he was personally convinced that this would be cleared up soon.

“Can you tell us how he was murdered?” asked an older female reporter who was sitting in front.

“Not at the present time,” Bäckström said heavily. “This is the sort of thing I want to be able to confront the perpetrator with.”

“Do you know anything about the motive?” asked a middle-aged male journalist who was sitting farthest down by the door.

“I have my own definite ideas about that,” said Bäckström. “But even at this point it is too early to say anything.”

“Have I understood you correctly if I say that it’s exactly as usual at this point. That you’re fumbling around in total darkness?” A younger talent with an irritating smile who had not sat down but instead stood leaning against the wall moping.

Bäckström looked at him sourly.

“No comment,” said Bäckström. “We’ll leave it at that.” Fucking asshole, he thought. Those bastards ought to be boiled for glue.

“I don’t know about you, ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, “but personally I have a great deal of work to get down to, so if you have no more questions, then…” Bäckström had already stood up, nodded heavily at them all. None of them had any objections.

While Bäckström was holding his press conference, his colleague Alm was organizing the incoming tips.

As soon as the media had informed that Great Detective-the General Public-that citizen Eriksson had been murdered, ordinary people would start calling the police like crazy, because they always did, despite the fact that they almost never had anything sensible to say.

“Keep that in mind as you’re sitting there by the phone,” said Alm, nodding at his younger colleague with the uniformed police who had been given this responsible task. “Whatever you do, don’t start arguing with them, because you’ll never be finished. It’s only a lot of bag ladies and drunks and other riffraff.”

“Doesn’t anyone ever call with something important to say?” the borrowed police constable asked, looking at Alm with youthful seriousness.

“Not that I can recall,” said Alm. “It has never happened to me in my twenty years at homicide, so just keep it short so they don’t get a lot of ideas in their little heads. And as far as the two of you are concerned, you should complete the door-knocking from yesterday.” Alm nodded, looking like a general, at the two remaining younger colleagues from the uniformed police. Just as well to explain this so they won’t sit here moping, he thought.

“Yes, I’m wondering-” said one of them.

“Talk with Gunsan and you’ll get a list of names,” Alm interrupted.

“… if there’s anything in particular we should be bearing in mind?” the second one continued.

Who are they recruiting nowadays? Alm thought sourly, staring at them.

“Bearing in mind,” said Alm. “You can find the way to Rådmansgatan, can’t you?”

“I didn’t mean that,” the one who had asked the question persisted. “Is there anything special we should remember to ask them? When we knock on doors, that is.”

“Ask them if they’ve seen or heard anything,” said Alm. “Is that so hard to understand?”

Apparently not when it came down to it, for all three had immediately left his office.

Well now, thought Alm, leaning back in his chair and looking at the clock. Suppose one were to take the opportunity to get the trip to the liquor store over with before lunch, to avoid getting varicose veins by standing around half the afternoon along with all the welfare recipients who don’t have anything better to do.

5 Friday afternoon, December 1, 1989

As soon as Bäckström got rid of the journalistic mob he snuck out to a discreet lunch place in City where he met his own reporter from the major evening tabloid. He was a relatively normal character, considering his chosen profession, and he always entertained on the newspaper’s dime. After a few beers and a generous portion of roast pork with potatoes and lingonberries, Bäckström recovered his good mood and, as a thank-you for the meal, lifted the veil of police secrecy a bit.

“Just between the two of us, I’d say he was stabbed to death,” Bäckström said, nodding confidentially at his host.

“It wasn’t a pretty sight,” the reporter said expectantly.

An overturned coffee table, a little blood, and a stiff-that wasn’t such a big deal. He had seen considerably worse himself, though he couldn’t say that of course. You have to give the audience what it demands, thought Bäckström.

“Let me put it this way,” said Bäckström. “It didn’t look like your house or mine.” Which was completely true, he thought.

“A knife, you said,” the reporter said greedily. “So it was a real slaughterhouse then? Was it a big knife?”

“Between us…” Bäckström lowered his voice and leaned even closer. “It was a real machete… like a samurai sword almost.” Bäckström indicated this by stretching out his fat arm.

“You don’t think this might have any connection with the porno murders,” the reporter said with eyes shining.

“What do you mean?” asked Bäckström evasively. This may be going a little too fast, he thought.

“There’s a lunatic going around hacking up people with a big knife. There are at least three now. First that Negro on Söder, and then those other two who were jerking off in porno shops. One down in Vasastan and one outside the apartment where he lived. Hell, Bäckström… don’t you see we have a serial killer on the loose?”

“Well, yes,” said Bäckström. “I hear what you’re saying, and that thought has occurred to me too.” What the hell do I do now? thought Bäckström, and for some reason he also happened to think of his immediate supervisor, chief inspector Danielsson. It was not a pleasant thought.

“Was Eriksson involved with pornography?” Now his host was looking Bäckström right in the eye. “Was Eriksson involved with pornography?” he repeated.

Involved with pornography? I guess everyone is, thought Bäckström confusedly, but then he pulled himself together and nodded energetically at his host.

“Personally I’ve been thinking that there’s a sexual motive,” said Bäckström. For he actually had. He’d realized this as soon as he saw how the bastard lived. So far that was completely true, thought Bäckström. And pretty much everyone looks at pornography except old ladies of course. I’ll have to see if I find any magazines or videotapes at his place. With those butt princes in their sailor suits, he thought, suddenly feeling livelier again.

“Great, Bäckström,” said the reporter. “I get it, I get it. We’ll do the usual… sources in police headquarters allege. It’s cool. What do you say to a cognac with coffee, by the way?”

“It’ll have to be a small one,” said Bäckström.

Criminal Inspector Wiijnbladh spent the better part of the day at the medical examiner’s office in Solna where he attended the autopsy of their murder victim, Kjell Göran Eriksson, and also secured the clothing the corpse was still wearing when the forensic examination started.

Normally these were rather pleasant affairs, during which you had the opportunity to exchange professional experiences and shoot the breeze with officers from homicide and the doctors who worked at the office. But not this time, Wiijnbladh thought gloomily. For it wasn’t enough that he was there as the sole representative of the police, since that completely unrestrained binge eater Bäckström was overseeing the investigation. As soon as he stepped inside the door out in Solna he had been struck by yet another blow. The autopsy would evidently be performed by a new forensic physician in the department. A young woman, thirty-five at the most, it seemed, whom Wiijnbladh had neither met nor heard mentioned before. A short little person with unpleasantly searching eyes, who judging by the nametag she wore on her white coat was named “Birgit H.,” just like some character in that incomprehensible novel he’d received as a birthday present from his dreadful sister-in-law, but who apparently preferred to be called “simply Birgit.”

“My name is Birgit,” she said, extending her steady little hand, “simply Birgit, and I’m guessing that you’re Wiijnbladh.”

“Okay then,” said Wiijnbladh when the formalities were out of the way and they had taken their places at the autopsy table. “The professor himself is away at a conference I’m guessing?”

“The professor?” Birgit said questioningly. “Do you mean Dr. Engel? Or ‘Esprit de Corpse,’ as I’ve heard you all call him.”

“Well, yes,” said Wiijnbladh evasively. He didn’t like people to be called by their nicknames. Especially when they themselves were not present. But certainly, at police headquarters and among police officers Dr. Engel was best known as Doctor “Corpse” or “Engel with two e’s.” An interesting man of somewhat vague German-Yugoslavian background, but with considerable practical experience according to what the police officers could tell, and known as a great joker besides, provided the joke wasn’t about him.

Birgit shook her head.

“He hasn’t gone away,” said Birgit. “He fell off a loading dock.”

“Good Lord,” said a shocked Wiijnbladh. “How did it happen?”

“Eh!” Birgit shrugged her shoulders with irritation. “Work accident. Going out to look at the scene. I guess it was one of his moonlighting jobs for one of those insurance companies that he fiddles around with instead of focusing on his job. And because he’s almost blind he walked right off the end of the loading dock. Wrist fracture and concussion but none of his nobler parts.”

“Blind,” said Wiijnbladh. What did she mean? he thought.

“Precisely,” said Birgit, fixing him with her black peppercorn eyes. “Our colleague Dr. Engel is acutely near-sighted and because he’s as vain as he is he refuses to wear glasses. Among other things that’s why he always says hello to the palm tree down in the lobby when he comes to work in the morning. Moving the palm is a popular prank among his younger coworkers, by the way. However not with me, and if you don’t believe me or understand why, I suggest you go to a blind dentist next time you have a toothache.”

“I really had no idea,” Wiijnbladh defensively. What is that person standing here saying? he wondered. Blind? Could his old friend Milan be blind?

“Besides, he’s not a professor,” said Birgit. “He calls himself professor but that’s not the same thing, and if you don’t have any objection I was thinking about starting now.”

“Of course, of course,” said Wiijnbladh. What an unpleasant, pushy woman, he thought.

“Nice to hear,” said Birgit as she let her gaze sweep over the gleaming implements on the instrument table, “and in contrast to Engel I am actually a professor, a real professor, so you can be completely at ease, Inspector.”

What an extraordinarily unsympathetic woman, thought Wiijnbladh.

One thing was certain, however, thought Wiijnbladh reluctantly as she pulled off her rubber gloves two hours later: This wasn’t the first time she’d done an autopsy. Personally he’d never seen anything like it, despite the fact that he had attended hundreds of them.

“Well then,” said Birgit as she plucked the cassette tape out of the tape recorder into which she had dictated her observations during the course of her work. “Let’s go into my office and talk. Don’t forget to bring his clothes along. I don’t want them left here making a mess.”

She nodded at the bags with Eriksson’s trousers, shirt, undershirt, underwear, socks, and shoes.

“Coffee or tea?” asked Birgit, nodding at the coffeemaker set up on a small table next to her desk. She had already supplied herself with black coffee and was sitting in her large desk chair with her legs resting on the desk.

“I’m okay,” said Wiijnbladh. This is not a human being, he thought. This is a little ballbuster in human form.

“Good,” Birgit said curtly. “You’ll get the report next week when the tests are ready. But I’m guessing you’ll want a preliminary statement.”

“Yes, gladly, if it’s all right, I mean,” said Wiijnbladh, and for some reason he happened to think of Jarnebring, even though this specimen was only half as large as the dangerous lunatic on the homicide squad.

“Then that’s what you’ll get,” said Birgit. “I’ll do it in ordinary Swedish so there aren’t any misunderstandings.”

“Thanks,” said Wiijnbladh, smiling wanly. “Thanks.”

Eriksson had died of a knife wound or rather a knife thrust that had been administered at an angle from above.

It had struck him from behind, high up on his back, between the left shoulder blade and spine and passed between two ribs into the chest cavity, wounding the heart, left lung, and the aorta. The stabbing resulted in rapid, extensive loss of blood, dramatic drop in blood pressure; the victim lost consciousness and stopped breathing, which led to death within a few minutes at most. The knife blade had been held at an inclined horizontal angle when the knife struck the body, which thus argued for a thrust rather than a cut; a cut would have produced an incision that was vertical or inclined to vertical as a rule.

The weapon was a large, very sharp, single-edged knife with a straight blade at least ten inches in length and two inches wide where the end of the blade met the handle. These observations in connection with the autopsy matched the knife in the photo that Wiijnbladh had faxed over to her before he came. And as for that, by the way, there was something she wanted to say.

“I understand that the intention was good,” said Birgit, fastening her eyes on Wiijnbladh, “but in future I want you to wait with this type of information until I ask for it. First, I want to form my own opinion. I’m a forensic physician, not a fortune-teller.”

“Of course, of course,” said Wiijnbladh.

“Was there anything else?” asked Birgit, inspecting him up and down.

“The time,” said Wiijnbladh. “Can you say anything about the time?”

“When you got the alarm. Around eight o’clock. Nothing I’ve seen contradicts that time. I thought it was you who wrote the fax I received? At least your name was on it.” Birgit shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Wiijnbladh said carefully. “Eriksson was five foot ten inches tall, and in my mind I see a perpetrator who must be considerably taller than Eriksson, and have considerable body strength besides. Considering the angle of incision and the depth of the cut, that is,” Wiijnbladh clarified. Surely she must be able to take all that in. She has an academic degree, after all, he thought.

Now she looked pleased in a manner that Wiijnbladh experienced as deeply disturbing.

“So that’s what you see in your mind,” said Birgit.

“Yes,” said Wiijnbladh. “A big, powerful perpetrator, very tall, about six foot three, considerable body strength, violent stab… or else a thrust then… so to speak.”

“I see,” said Birgit tranquilly, inspecting her neat, short trimmed nails. “Personally I might imagine that Eriksson was sitting on that couch I saw in one of your pictures. As far as the stab wound is concerned, no particular strength would be required for that. A sharp knife slipped in between two ribs. The perpetrator sneaks up behind and just makes a thrust. If it had been me who’d done it I would have been very surprised at the result.”

“Could it have been a professional of some type?” said Wiijnbladh. “Considering where the stab went in, I mean. In my opinion this suggests considerable anatomical knowledge.”

“Where do you get all this from?” asked Birgit, sighing. “Is this the sort of nonsense that you and your colleagues sit and blabber about with Milan? It was pure luck, or bad luck depending on how you look at it. Call it what you want. How could the perpetrator see where the victim’s ribs were? The poor man had his shirt on. Unless you think that the perpetrator came up and squeezed his chest cavity before he stabbed him?”

“No, that’s clear,” said Wiijnbladh. What a horrid person, Wiijnbladh thought, and to top it off he had started to sweat too.

“Was there anything else?” said Birgit, nodding courteously at the clock on the wall of her office. “Otherwise I actually have a lot to do.”

Good Lord, thought Wiijnbladh. Bäckström’s question.

First he felt almost desperate, but then he breathed deeply, pulled himself together, and asked it, because it had to be done anyway, even if he gladly would have switched places with that fat runt from the homicide squad.

“Just one more thing,” said Wiijnbladh. “I was wondering… during your autopsy here… did you make any observations that suggest that Eriksson… the victim, that is,… that he was…well, homosexual? So to speak.”

“You mean whether he had a tail,” said Birgit, looking at Wiijnbladh with an amused smile.

“No,” said Wiijnbladh, smiling nervously. “Perhaps you understand what I mean?”

“No, actually not,” said Birgit. “I can only guess. You’re wondering if I found anything that indicated that he, for example, was regularly penetrated in the rectum in connection with anal intercourse.”

“Just so,” said Wiijnbladh. “For example, anally, so to speak.”

“Or if I found semen in his rectum or made any other terrifying observations regarding his penis?”

“Yes,” said Wiijnbladh, and now he felt the sweat running down between his skinny shoulders. “Did you?”

“No,” said Birgit. “So you and the other boys up there on Kungsholmen can be completely at ease.”

“Well, okay then, then I’ll just say thanks,” said Wiijnbladh.

“It was nothing,” said Birgit.

After their visit to the Central Bureau of Statistics, Jarnebring and Holt went to the SACO union headquarters in Östermalm. When they inquired about Eriksson’s doings, Eriksson’s boss answered that the day before, the same day he was murdered, Eriksson was supposed to attend a conference on current issues in labor law hosted by SACO. This also proved to be true.

“He was invited as a representative of the academics employed at Statistics who are organized within TCO,” the woman who took care of the practical details in connection with the conference confirmed.

Then she retrieved the conference program and the list of participants. It was a one-day conference that began at nine o’clock in the morning and concluded at five with a break for lunch between twelve and one. It had been held in the SACO offices and had featured current issues in labor law as stated, which was always interesting to the union and its members. There had been fifty-some participants besides Eriksson.

“And you’re quite sure that Eriksson was at the conference?” Jarnebring asked.

He had registered in the morning and received his conference materials. Of that she was quite certain because she had taken care of that detail herself and she recognized Eriksson from previous, similar meetings. On the other hand she was uncertain if he had been there the whole day.

“It’s not unusual for people to come and go,” she explained, and personally she’d had other things to think about than Eriksson’s presence, even if naturally she didn’t put it that way.

With the help of her two coworkers the details were soon cleared up.

Eriksson had been at the conference until lunch. He should have stayed the whole day, but at the short smoking break before the last lecture before lunch he had excused himself and reported that something had come up at work and he was going to have to depart at twelve, which meant he wouldn’t have time for lunch.

“Did you get the impression that something had happened? Did he seem upset or anything?” Holt asked the conference hostess with whom Eriksson had spoken.

Nothing strange at all, as far as she could recall. He had been happy and pleasant, almost exuberant, and because people basically came and went the whole time, it wasn’t strange that Eriksson too had departed, was it? She’d made a note to inform the kitchen that there would be one person less for lunch. That was it.

Jarnebring and Holt thanked her and went to a nearby restaurant to get some food in their stomachs themselves. While they were waiting, Holt leafed through the papers they had received from the conference organizer.

“Well,” Jarnebring said, grinning, “find anything interesting?”

“The chairman gives a welcome, the head of legal affairs at the labor ministry reports on some developing trends in Swedish labor law during the eighties, the secretary of the labor law committee reports on the requested oversight of the Codetermination Act-”

“Thanks, thanks,” Jarnebring interrupted. “I understand exactly why he left before lunch.”

“Lunch, yes,” said Holt. “For lunch there were veal roulades with boiled potatoes and lingonberries. And a vegetarian alternative for those who wanted it.”

“Veal roulades can be damn good,” said Jarnebring, who five minutes earlier had ordered beef patties with fried onions and felt how his stomach was growling precariously. “Are there any interesting names on the list of presenters and attendees?”

“Besides the already mentioned head of legal affairs and the secretary of the labor law committee, both men of course, we actually have a female lawyer who lectured on a recently concluded case in the Labor Court as well as a whole pile of ombudsmen from every nook and cranny… and Kjell Eriksson as an invited guest from TCO.”

“Good, we’ll deal with that later. Let’s not talk with our mouths full,” Jarnebring decided, catching sight of a waiter who had a steaming plate in each hand and his eyes trained on their table.

Over coffee they talked about other things. The list of who had been at the conference did not seem particularly exciting, and regardless of that any further research could wait until the excellent Gunsan had looked up the names on the police department’s computer. Instead Jarnebring brought up Holt’s somewhat bewildering smoking habits.

“I’ve never smoked,” said Holt, shaking her head when Jarnebring asked the question. “Why should I do that? It’s pure craziness to smoke.”

“So the ciggies you offer are just a tactical instrument in police work,” Jarnebring marveled. “Something you learned at a course when you were working with the felt slippers in Building B?”

“You might put it that way,” said Holt. “Although it was not in a course. It must have been something I saw on a detective show or something like that. Isn’t there anything you use when you’re going to talk with people you meet on the job?”

“No,” said Jarnebring, trying out his wolf grin. “I don’t meet any people on the job. I only meet crooks. Plus a loaded Joe Six-Pack or two, and they’re often the worst to deal with.”

“What do you do when you want to develop a rapport with them?” Holt asked curiously.

“Scare the shit out of them,” said Jarnebring. “And then when I’m nice to them they look like they’ve gotten a whole carton of cigarettes.” Jarnebring nodded and did not appear at all dissatisfied with his approach. “Cheap and good, and it saves time too.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” said Holt. “Not even if I wanted to, which I don’t, would I be able to do it like that.”

“Feminine wiles,” said Jarnebring.

“No,” said Holt. “I’m just that way. It’s nothing I’ve chosen.”

Like I believe that, thought Jarnebring.

“I’m a bad person myself, so what do you think about trying to make glue out of the culprit we’re looking for,” said Jarnebring, looking at his watch.

“Track down and arrest the perpetrator,” said Holt. “Sounds like an excellent idea.”

When Wiijnbladh finally left the medical examiner’s office in Solna he was worried, agitated, and confused. The first thing he did when he sat down at his desk was to call his old friend Dr. Engel to find out how he was doing.

Under the circumstances, well, according to the patient himself. Wiijnbladh told him about the unfortunate meeting with his colleague Birgit-“simply Birgit”-and the serious concerns for the progress of the investigation he had subsequently felt. Unfortunately the more he thought about his concerns the more serious they looked, and it was even more gratifying to find that Milan completely shared both his perception and his apprehensions.

“You are completely right,” Engel agreed. “She is not sane. She is crazy. She lives with other women. She is a fucking dyke. She is totally lacking in judgment. She is-”

“If you want I can bring the documents over and see you,” Wiijnbladh interrupted cautiously.

Which he did. Half an hour later he was sitting with Dr. Engel in his pleasant bachelor’s pad on Sveavägen, analyzing the particular circumstances of Bureau Director Eriksson’s woeful demise only twenty hours earlier. Just as Wiijnbladh had suspected all along, Engel shared his view of how it had happened down to the slightest detail. Translated into comprehensible Swedish, in any event, according to the doctor’s opinion-based on science, common sense, and proven experience-the victim was “a typical closet gay who picked up a big, strong and above all very tall, violence-prone bum boy who stabbed him from behind with one of his own kitchen knives.”

In addition Engel had made a completely unique, independent contribution to the investigation that not even Wiijnbladh himself had thought of.

“You said him Eriksson lived Rodmansgatan op by ze church?” Engel asked, squinting sharply at Wiijnbladh.

“Exactly,” said Wiijnbladh. “At the corner at Karlavägen.”

“Hommelgarden,” Engel said emphatically.

“Hommelgarden?” What does he mean? thought Wiijnbladh.

“Hommelgarden where all ze bum boys go pick up closet gays. Rodmansgatan is right in the vicinity.”

“You mean Humlegården,” said Wiijnbladh, suddenly feeling the same familiar excitement he had felt so many times before when a breakthrough in an investigation was near at hand. Why didn’t we think of that? he thought.

“An interesting thought you have there, Milan,” said Wiijnbladh carefully, because he was reluctant to relinquish anything unnecessarily.

“It vas nothink,” said Dr. Engel modestly. “Dat’s my treat.” After his nourishing lunch in town, Bäckström spent the remainder of the afternoon in peace and quiet, going through the victim’s apartment on Rådmansgatan. It was an interesting experience in a number of ways, and productive in at least two. Bäckström was no expert on interior decorating, but he did understand that the furniture in Eriksson’s apartment did not get there by chance and that it must have cost a lot of money. Everything from the paintings on the walls and the draperies on the windows to the gleaming copper pans in his kitchen and the thick terry-cloth towels in his bathroom. It was hardly surprising considering how types like Eriksson usually were, thought Bäckström.

Besides looking through shelves of books and neatly organized binders of papers in what was evidently his office, items that Blockhead or another one of his simpler colleagues could start digging through after the weekend, Bäckström contented himself with a quick sweep in his hunt for more interesting artistic works. Strangely enough he did not find the least trace of what he was looking for: no videocassettes in anonymous packaging with innocuous handwritten labels, no videocassettes whatsoever. No scrupulously concealed bundles of magazines with oiled-down butt princes in leather, chains, and shiny four-color printing. Nothing at all in that line, actually.

Wonder where he hid them? thought Bäckström, for they must be somewhere. But because he found so many other things of interest he decided to let this matter rest until after the weekend.

In the victim’s bathroom he made his first discovery. A rather refreshing detail that had evidently escaped that blind bat Wiijnbladh the evening before. The fact that Bäckström’s sensitive police nose had put him on the trail didn’t hurt either.

At the bottom of the laundry basket was a dark blue terry-cloth hand towel with a yellow border, soiled with vomit. It was of the same color and pattern as the ones hanging on the hooks in the bathroom. What was strange was that it was farthest down in the large, woven laundry basket, despite the fact that the vomit appeared fresh. It was under a lot of other dirty laundry, including a number of similar hand towels, all brick red with wine red borders, probably put into the laundry basket when someone replaced them with a new, clean set in dark blue with yellow borders.

So that’s how it is, thought Bäckström with delight. Someone’s been sick and tried to conceal that he’s been sick; as a weekend present for a blind technician this couldn’t be better.

Bäckström fished the hand towel from the basket and set it to one side for the time being, in order to devote himself to more essential things, namely the corpse’s quite unbelievable stocks of alcoholic beverages. I’ll be damned if he doesn’t have liquor everywhere, Bäckström thought excitedly.

In the clothes closet there were cases of alcohol. Some were unopened cases, others had only a single bottle missing, and still others had been nipped at longer and harder and most recently by Bäckström himself. Rows of bottles lined up on the floor: cognac, whiskey, gin, vodka, aquavit, as well as a lot of mysterious liqueurs and other shit that ladies and types like Eriksson pour down their throats.

Likewise in the kitchen: a whole pantry and two overhead cupboards full of wine and dessert wine. A number of full wine racks on the kitchen counter and alongside the stove. In the living room was an antique peasant sideboard which, judging by the contents, evidently functioned as a liquor cabinet. On the desk in the office there was a large tray of hammered silver with several carafes filled with amber-colored drinks.

Bäckström made a careful, very discreet culling of this unrestrained excess, but despite the fact that he was exceedingly moderate in what he took, he was forced to borrow an empty suitcase from the victim, as well as a pile of his clean hand towels, so that the contents wouldn’t rattle too terribly much when he drove home.

On his way out he remembered the soiled hand towel and went into the kitchen and rooted among the bags under the sink to find something to put it in. What the hell do you do with soiled hand towels? thought Bäckström. Should they be stored in paper or plastic? Whatever, he thought. Eriksson appeared to have paper bags, and why should he have to do Wiijnbladh’s job? He crumpled the hand towel into a paper bag and called for a taxi on the victim’s phone. What else would you expect? This was a murder investigation, and he had signed for a whole book of taxi vouchers just in case.

On the way home he stopped at the tech squad and asked the taxi to wait on the street while he left the hand towel on Wiijnbladh’s desk along with a collegial, friendly note and wishes for a nice weekend. Then he could finally call it a day and go home.

It was nice to be able to avoid thinking about the liquor store on a Friday, thought Bäckström.

Paperwork was not Jarnebring’s strong suit, and if he had the choice he would rather use his hands for something besides thumbing through binders. At the same time he was not one to desert a colleague either, so it was actually on Holt’s own suggestion that he decided to swing by the homicide squad and check out the situation, see if anything interesting had come in. Nothing had.

Besides, homicide was basically deserted. The only one there was a young colleague from the uniformed police who was sitting by the tip phone, reading a tabloid and looking rather down in the mouth.

“Has anything happened?” Jarnebring asked.

Not much, according to the tip taker. A few bag ladies and drunks had called, but he had kept it short and was able to get rid of them pretty quickly, jotting down the names of anyone who wanted to provide them. Two individuals had also called and reported that they had known the victim. He had given their names to Gunsan for further processing. He’d be going home soon. His supervisor, Detective Inspector Alm, had promised him he could, when Alm had disappeared on urgent duties in town a few hours earlier.

“He said the duty desk would take over the tip line starting at six o’clock,” he explained to Jarnebring.

“Go home and sleep, kid,” said Jarnebring, nodding. “So that you’re wide awake on Monday.”

Then Jarnebring talked with Gunsan, who would soon be done with the entries on the neighbors that had come in after the additional door-to-door inquiries. It had gone unexpectedly well, considering that it was Friday. That was because almost everyone who lived in the victim’s building was conscientious middle-aged or elderly.

The most interesting thing that had happened was that two individuals had called to say they knew the victim.

“Fine folks on the go,” said Gunsan, smiling. “One of them is even a B-list celebrity you may have seen on TV.”

Jarnebring did not have the faintest idea who either of them were, but he took all of Gunsan’s papers with him anyway to read through in peace down in his own office.

“Isn’t it time for you to go home too?” said Jarnebring, smiling at his female civilian colleague. She was the only real police officer in this place since Danielsson lowered the flag, thought Jarnebring. Why hadn’t she ever applied to the police academy?

“Pretty soon,” said Gunsan, smiling. “How about you, old man? Isn’t it high time you went back to your little fiancée and looked after her?”

“It’ll work out,” said Jarnebring, and then he went down to his own office and his new colleague. Gunsan is actually an extremely attractive woman, he thought as he went through the door to the detective squad. It’s a shame she’s not twenty years younger, he thought. If nothing else this showed how prejudiced he was, as Gunsan was only a little older than he was.

“Okay,” Jarnebring said energetically as he poured yet another mug of black coffee. “If we were to summarize the day, what do we know about our victim? So far?”

He didn’t have a large social circle, or so it seemed. At the same time it was large enough to include-in all likelihood-at least one person who had murdered him.

He was unpopular with his coworkers, to say the least. You could read that between the lines of what his boss and closest coworkers had said. It came through pretty clearly in the doorman’s story. At the same time there was nothing concrete to go on.

“He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want to share an office with,” Jarnebring summarized.

“It would be nice to have something more concrete,” said Holt. “An example, I mean. The man can’t just have been born bad.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Jarnebring.

Holt had been struck by one thing as she was plowing through all the papers. Considering his rather modest salary, for it was no more remarkable than her own or Jarnebring’s after the customary police overtime, he seemed to have astonishingly good finances. According to income statements for the last five years, which was what she had produced up to now, he had capital income that widely exceeded his income from his job. He also owned a condominium worth at least a million Swedish kronor, and according to the tax form he had a fortune of the same magnitude in stocks, bonds, and regular bank balances.

“You saw his apartment,” said Holt. “Strange as it may sound, I do actually know a bit about art and antiques, and I’d guess there’s another million in the contents of his apartment. Which would mean he must have been worth three or four million.”

“Maybe an inheritance,” Jarnebring suggested. “Didn’t he have an old mother who kicked the bucket in the mid-eighties? Art and antiques, isn’t that the sort of thing you inherit if you’ve chosen the right parents?”

Holt just shook her head. The mother had died in 1984, and according to the estate inventory that the excellent Gunsan had already produced, the old woman had left behind four thousand kronor.

“His old man,” Jarnebring suggested.

“Father unknown,” Holt shot back. “Eriksson seems to have grown up with a single mother and a completely absent father. Poor thing. Think how that must have been.” For some reason she sounded almost ready to burst into laughter.

Shit, thought Jarnebring. He hated cases like these. The victim at home with a knife in the back and someone he or she voluntarily let in usually involved drunkenness, agitated emotions in general, or jealousy and ordinary insanity in particular, and regardless of whether the latter was temporary or permanent, he and his colleagues would seldom need more than a week to put the pieces together and land the perpetrator in lockdown. But when money was involved it was almost never that easy, and if there was anything he wished for it was that Eriksson’s inexplicable good finances had nothing to do with his death.

“It’ll work out,” said Jarnebring, smiling and nodding with more conviction than he really felt, as he rocked back in his chair.

“On Monday,” said Holt, and she smiled too.

“On Monday we’ll turn his apartment inside out,” said Jarnebring, “and then I’m willing to bet a month’s pay we find our perpetrator too. When we’ve got the telephone lists and all the entries and have gone through all his notebooks and scraps of paper and photo albums and old letters and God knows what.”

“So isn’t it time to step on the gas now?” Holt was still smiling, but the question was serious enough. “You’ve heard about the twenty-four-hour rule and all that, haven’t you?”

“You watch too many of those American detective shows,” said Jarnebring. “Let me say this,” he continued. “Our colleague Bäckström is definitely no bright and shining light, but he does have a certain instinct for self-preservation. Besides, his boss has been around awhile and doesn’t usually pull his punches when things get too far off course.”

“Jack Daniels,” said Holt, smiling.

“Yes, sure,” said Jarnebring. “I understand what you mean. But assume we’d found Eriksson outside his apartment. Knifed in the entryway or out on the street. Then we would have had an all-out effort, and I can assure you it wouldn’t have been colleague Bäckström behind the wheel.”

“The murder of Eriksson isn’t so difficult that it can’t wait until after the weekend?” Holt looked at him inquisitively.

“I really don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. “At least it doesn’t feel that way. Unplanned, not premeditated. A perpetrator who must have made lots of mistakes, and who knew the victim besides. We almost always nail that. And if we have really good luck then the culprit comes to us on his own when his conscience gets to him.” Although it’s a bitch that Lars Martin isn’t here, he thought with irritation. Then we could have probably taken the weekend off because the perpetrator would already be sitting in jail crying his eyes out. Someone other than Jarnebring usually took care of that part.

“Sounds good,” said Holt. “Then I can see my guy.”

“What does he do?” said Jarnebring, smiling despite the fact that he had a rather hard to place and not altogether pleasant feeling about what she had said.

“The handsomest guy in town,” said Holt. “Niklas Holt, six years old. Generally known as Nicke.”

“Please send him my greetings,” said Jarnebring, and then they called it a day. And it was just in time if he was to have any hope of making peace with his fiancée before darkness settled far too deeply over the city.

6 Friday evening, December 1, 1989

When Wiijnbladh and his good friend the doctor finished their discussion, he borrowed the telephone and called home to find out if he should get anything for dinner on his way back. But his wife had evidently already gone out or else she wasn’t bothering to answer. Instead he drove past the office one more time, and on his desk he found a vomit-soiled, foul-smelling hand towel, bunched together and shoved into a paper bag from Lisa Elmquist in the Östermalm market, as well as a shameless letter from Bäckström. He remained at the office until far into the night.

First he had to complete a new form for the seizure of the hand towel. Then, after an initial preliminary inspection, he decided to conduct various chemical investigations of the same hand towel, and this too had required a tribute of forms. Last and finally he made sure the hand towel was packed correctly before it was sent on to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science in Linköping.

Then he made coffee and had the sandwich he had intended to have for lunch but that had remained sitting back at the office because he had simply forgotten about it. True, he was not particularly hungry now, but still he had paid for it. And when he finally mustered enough strength to get on the subway and go home, the usual thoughts started grinding in his already tired head.

I have to do something, thought Wiijnbladh. I can’t live like this. It can’t go on. He was thinking about his wife who had openly cheated on him and thereby robbed him of any possibility of a respectable life.

When Jarnebring arrived home he called his fiancée to mediate peace, but the conversation did not start particularly well. Icy voice on the other end.

“Hi honey,” said Jarnebring. “Your old man is home again after a long day’s struggle against crime. Soon to be a full day’s invigorating murder investigation.”

“So now my old man is hungry and wants me to cook dinner,” she answered, and the way she said it was enough for frost to form on the receiver he was holding against his ear.

“Are you nuts, honey?” said Jarnebring, who had planned the whole thing with care. “Just start powdering your little nose, I’ll be there in half an hour. I have a table reserved at your favorite dive, three courses, candles, and live music. I’ve arranged a tango orchestra, and I’m sure they’re already on their way.”

“You’re hopeless,” she said, “but all right.”

And there was something in her voice that definitely gave him hope for brighter, better times. Easy as pie. Now it’s only a matter of finding that tie she gave me the day after we met, thought Jarnebring, and hung up.

To be sure, the part about the tango orchestra wasn’t true, but otherwise it all added up. And what do you need an orchestra for when your whole heart is singing? thought Jarnebring as he twined his fingers through hers, which were only half as big.

“Listen, Bo,” she said, but because he already knew what was coming he just slowly shook his head, tested the old wolf grin, and took her other hand in his as well.

“In a few weeks it’s… well, you know… an even number if I may say so.” I can’t sit here and say that soon it’s four years, he thought. Never wake a sleeping badger.

“Yes?” She nodded seriously and looked at him.

“My suggestion is that we go away. Avoid having a lot of relatives and colleagues drinking up your money. I’ll invite Lars Martin, you can invite Karin. Isn’t she your best friend?”

“Is this a proposal?” she asked. Yet another, she thought.

“Yes, well,” said Jarnebring and nodded, and there must have been something in the food for it felt as if something was stuck in his throat. “I know it sounds a little corny, but that’s what it’s supposed to be. A proposal, that is.”

“In that case the answer is yes,” she said, nodding.

They didn’t bother with champagne. Instead they went home to his fiancée and future wife’s place and played the film backward to the first days of their relationship. When Jarnebring finally fell asleep he felt like the sun was already about to go up on the other side of the curtains, but he must have been wrong because the red digital display on the alarm clock on the nightstand only showed three, and she was resting with her back and behind pressed against his chest and stomach, like a coffee spoon against a soup ladle, Jarnebring thought contentedly. In his world this was exactly as it should be, her head resting on his right arm and his left arm over her side and his hand carefully against her stomach. And when a dream finally took him and led him away he sensed the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, fresh-squeezed juice, scrambled eggs and bacon.

It’s going to work out, thought Jarnebring between sleep and trance, and then he slept just as securely as when he was a little boy and summer vacation had just begun.

7 Saturday-Sunday, December 2-3, 1989

Criminal inspector Anna Holt, age thirty-one, had spent the weekend with her son, Niklas “Nicke” Holt, age six. They had gone skating in Kungsträdgården, had junk food at McDonald’s on Norrmalmsgatan, bought a new jacket for Nicke, played games, and been couch potatoes.

“This is the way it will always be for you and me, Mama,” Nicke summarized the weekend when it was time for a bedtime story on Sunday evening.

Criminal inspector Evert Bäckström, age forty-seven, didn’t wake up until Saturday afternoon with what was, even by his standards, a formidable hangover, which he attributed to all the alcohol he had unfortunately happened to pour into himself the evening before. First came malt whiskey, vodka, and cognac, and so far all was well and good. Unfortunately toward the wee hours he had also sampled-mostly out of curiosity-some bottles with contents unknown, which for philanthropic reasons he had rescued from the General Inheritance Fund.

When he went down to the convenience store to shop for a little late breakfast he was met by the major evening tabloid, which reported that an “insane serial murderer” had been running loose in the city for almost a year now and that he had just “butchered his fourth victim.”

Where the hell’d they get that from? Bäckström thought, and contrary to habit bought a copy.

As he read it he saw Jack Daniels before him. It was not a pleasant sight, and he realized it was high time to drag himself off to work and execute a number of preventive measures over the weekend.

Jarnebring didn’t even open a newspaper over the weekend. He and his future wife didn’t leave their bed any more than was absolutely necessary, and when she parted from him outside work on Monday morning he couldn’t remember when he had last felt so good. For breakfast he got fresh-brewed coffee with milk, fresh-squeezed orange juice, two fresh-baked rolls with a crisp crust, lettuce and ham, and a large plate of yogurt with fresh fruit.

I have to call Lars Martin and tell him, he thought as he went through the door to the detective squad.

8 Monday, December 4, 1989

“Have you seen the newspaper?” Bäckström asked, waving his copy of Saturday’s tabloid as he stepped into Danielsson’s office on Monday morning. Better to forestall than be forestalled. Go ahead, shit your pants, Jack Daniels, he thought with delight when he saw Danielsson’s expression.

There were a number of indications that Danielsson too had seen the newspaper. Among others, there was a copy of the same newspaper in front of him on his desk. But after Bäckström’s opening, the boss did not have much to say. Mostly he sat silently in his chair and glared at Bäckström, his swollen face purple and a vein as large as an earthworm wriggling back and forth on his left temple.

Soon his fuse will blow, thought Bäckström with delight, but of course he didn’t say that. Instead he arranged his face in a worried frown and kept talking according to his carefully prepared strategy.

“My first thought was that the leak came from someone inside,” said Bäckström, shaking his head. “As you know we have a number of new, unknown entities working with us. But then”-Bäckström shook his round head again-“then I actually read this crap, so now I don’t think so anymore.” Bäckström nodded for the third time and looked at his boss credulously.

“So why don’t you think so?” Danielsson grunted, looking askance at his colleague.

“It’s just too stupid,” said Bäckström. “That some religious maniac would run around butchering homos with a… what the hell was it?… samurai sword because he was sexually abused by a male father figure when he was a child. Or so says the psychologist the tabloid talked with.”

“Samurai sword?”

“Yeah, you know, one of those things the saffron monkeys have,” said Bäckström. “You and I and everyone else who knows anything know that Eriksson was stabbed with an ordinary kitchen knife. It’s sitting down in tech for examination.”

And there wasn’t much more to it than that.

“Unfortunately I’ve got to run,” said Bäckström. “I have a meeting with the investigation group.”

Danielsson didn’t say a word. Only stared at him.

“Okay,” said Bäckström, leaning forward in his chair and looking energetically at the detective team assembled in full force in the room. “Let’s start with Eriksson himself. What was he doing before he closed up shop? Jarnebring?”

Something must have happened to Bäckström, thought Jarnebring. Wonder if he’s going to AA.

“We’ve found out a few things,” said Jarnebring, pulling out a paper with handwritten notes summarizing what he and Holt had come up with.

On Thursday, November 30, Eriksson had first been at a SACO conference in City. Then, for reasons that were unclear, he had chosen to leave right before lunch, which was usually served at about ten minutes past twelve. At about three p.m. he had then shown up at the office in time for afternoon coffee. What he’d been up to in between was a blank. At work he had coffee for about half an hour with a number of coworkers, after which he went into his office, closed the door, and did some work. Shuffled papers and talked on the phone according to those sitting closest, if they were to hazard something that at the same time they couldn’t swear to. At five thirty-five, on the other hand, it was certain he left his office. This was shown by the stamp on his time card and was supported by his coworkers in the office next door who saw him on his way out.

Right before closing time-they closed at six-he went into the Östermalm market, where he shopped for a number of food items but none that indicated he was having guests for dinner. Normal weekend purchases for one of the market’s regular, single customers. Then there were a number of things that indicated he had walked directly home carrying his briefcase and a bag from the market: Humlegårdsgatan down to the corner of Sturegatan, then diagonally up through Humlegården to Engelbrektsgatan-Karlavägen, Karlavägen to Rådmansgatan and into the building where he lived. The customary police calculations indicated that he must have arrived home at about six-thirty and that he then began his solitary evening by having a portion of already prepared chicken with rice and curry, which he had purchased an hour earlier. With the chicken he had two bottles of German beer, and after the meal was finished he placed the dishes in the dishwasher and threw the empty bottles into the wastebasket.

At about seven, according to his closest neighbor, he had a visitor. Someone rings his doorbell, he opens the door and lets the visitor in. The witness’s story and the little that had been produced about Eriksson so far strongly indicated that the person who came to visit was someone he knew. Probably also that the visit was prearranged.

“We’ll have to see if we find any notes at his apartment or if his phone records might give us something. We can forget his office because all the calls go through the same switchboard. They’re working on dumping the records,” said Jarnebring.

“His office,” said Bäckström, who was suddenly struck by a thought that he had forgotten to investigate. “His office, was there anything there?” Efficient and managerial. Something must have happened to him.

Maybe he’s met someone, poor guy, thought Jarnebring.

“No,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head. “No private notes in any case. Some that dealt with his job, mostly meetings that were noted on his desk calendar. But nothing exciting that we can see.” Jarnebring exchanged a glance with Holt, who nodded in confirmation.

“So what’s next?” said Bäckström, leaning back comfortably in his chair.

A prearranged visit from someone he knew, but that was all they had. No witnesses or technical observations that pointed to any specific individual. Eriksson’s private socializing seemed exceedingly meager. Up to now two individuals had made contact and said that they were personal acquaintances. Both had known Eriksson for more than twenty years, both had met him at the university, and all three had spent time together. The one who made contact first by calling the homicide squad on Friday morning was named Sten Welander. He worked as a project coordinator at the TV editorial offices in the big building on Oxenstiernsgatan at Gärdet.

“I’m sure you all know who that is,” said Gunsan, looking delightedly at the others in the room.

The reactions to her comment were mixed and hesitant.

“It’s that red-bearded guy who produced that program about the police last spring,” Gunsan continued. “That terrible person…”

“Is it that creep who looks like Gustav Vasa?” Alm asked.

“But skinny,” Gunsan giggled. “Do you remember the ruckus after that program?”

“Leave it for now,” Bäckström interrupted. “If he’s the one who did it, I promise I’ll treat you to cake and coffee. Who’s the other one who called?”

Something definitely must have happened with Bäckström, thought Jarnebring. If he goes on like this there’s a major risk we’ll soon have someone sitting in the slammer.

The other one who had called was the director and principal owner of a stock brokerage firm with an office on Birger Jarlsgatan down at Nybroplan. Theodor Tischler, born and raised in Sweden but with a German name. Generally known as “Theo” among family and friends, and in financial circles, according to the all-knowing Gunsan, he was known as “TT.”

“He seems to be rich as hell,” said Gunsan.

“Good for him,” said Bäckström curtly. “Jarnebring, do you have anything else? What’s the story with our corpse after he chows his last meal?”

Eriksson’s visitor had arrived around seven. At around eight a quarrel broke out, according to the witness, Mrs. Westergren. What had the victim and the perpetrator been doing between seven and eight? They’d had coffee, according to the technicians, and one of them had also had cognac.

Then the coffee cups, cognac glass, and coffeepot had been carried out to the kitchen, placed in the sink, and rinsed off. After which one of the two had a gin and tonic with lemon. The traces were found partly in the kitchen-a lemon that had been cut into strips, the empty ice cube tray that was normally in the refrigerator, an empty tonic bottle-and partly on the floor in the living room, where a half-empty bottle of Gordon’s Gin was found with the cap screwed on, along with an unsealed bottle of tonic and a crystal highball glass. And the wet patch on the floor from gin, tonic, and perhaps melted ice.

“The drink was probably sitting on the table in front of the couch where they were drinking, and then ended up on the floor when the fight broke out and the table was overturned,” Wiijnbladh stated, while looking portentous.

“Bravo, Wiijnbladh,” Bäckström drawled. “Do we have any idea who was drinking these noble beverages?” Besides me, of course, but you can forget about that, thought Bäckström, giggling with self-satisfaction.

Judging by the fingerprints it was the host himself. On the other hand, whether his guest drank anything, and in that case what, was not clear from the evidence.

“Probably he took the glass, wiped off the fingerprints, and put it back in the cupboard. Eriksson had a very large collection of different glasses, by the way,” said Wiijnbladh.

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” said Bäckström. “How the hell could he see which glass was his if they’d ended up on the floor in the general confusion? There was only one lemon slice if I remember correctly. Did he wipe off and dispose of his own lemon slice too? Either he drank something else or it was out of a different glass or he didn’t drink anything at all. Compare that with the coffee cups. By the way, have you found any prints on them?”

Wiijnbladh looked offended.

“They were in the sink. They were rinsed off,” he said indignantly.

“There, you see,” said Bäckström contentedly.

The little fat boy has turned into a regular Sherlock Holmes, thought Jarnebring with surprise.

An hour together which, judging by the technical evidence, passed in at least relative harmony. You have coffee, one of you, probably Eriksson, has cognac as well, you clean up and proceed to further consumption. The host at least has a gin and tonic with ice and lemon. But then something must have happened.

“Thanks, Jarnebring,” said Bäckström without taking the least notice of Wiijnbladh. For a half-monkey you did really well, he thought. “Well, Wiijnbladh,” Bäckström continued, looking at his victim with delight, “may we hear what science has to say? What happened when things boiled over?”

“Quite a bit,” said Wiijnbladh indignantly. “We have already produced quite a bit and quite a bit is in progress, as I said. I have received a preliminary report from our forensic physician,” he continued, peeking in his folder. “The protocol is in process.”

“Did Esprit de Corpse do it?” asked Bäckström.

“Unfortunately no,” said Wiijnbladh. “It was some new, younger talent, some woman I’ve never seen before. But I contacted Engel. He and I have met and gone through the whole thing, and he has promised to keep a watchful eye on our case.”

“Sounds good.” Bäckström chuckled. “Esprit is supposed to have an eagle eye. What does he say?”

“That the victim Eriksson was killed with a violent knife thrust that was delivered from behind at an angle and struck him high in the back, penetrated into the chest cavity, cutting apart the heart, left lung, and aorta,” Wiijnbladh summarized.

“Nothing else?” Bäckström looked almost a little disappointed. “No signs of a struggle? No other observations about our corpse and his little body?”

“No signs of a struggle,” said Wiijnbladh, shaking his head. “No wounds at all except for the one that killed him.”

“This woman that peeked at him… does she have the same keen eyesight as Esprit?” Bäckström asked, grinning.

“I reserve judgment on that,” said Wiijnbladh stiffly. “Do you mean do either of them have any thoughts about the victim as a person?”

“Exactly,” said Bäckström expectantly. “Did either of them have any?”

“Yes, Engel was of the opinion that the victim was homosexual,” said Wiijnbladh.

“Imagine that,” said Bäckström. “The same thought struck me when I saw the crime scene and the way he lived.”

“Although his younger colleague, the woman who did the autopsy, thought that it was hard to find any physical signs of it,” said Wiijnbladh. Best to say what’s right, he thought.

“So I’ve heard,” said Bäckström. “As for how things really stand, our local policeman will surely figure it out.”

“I’m listening,” said Jarnebring, who had toyed with the same thought himself.

“My gut feeling tells me we have an ordinary homo murder here,” said Bäckström.

It’s nice that you’re starting to sound like yourself again, thought Jarnebring.

“I’m still listening,” said Jarnebring.

“Single man, forty-five years old, no children, not a woman as far as the eye can see. Lives like a queer, eats like a queer, drinks like a queer, dresses like a queer. By the way, did you see those berets on the hat rack out in the hall? A whole bunch of fairy caps. He sits on the little couch with his boyfriend and has a few drinks and then they have a falling out and the little fiancé fetches his knife and sneaks up from behind and sticks it in. Then the perpetrator waltzes off to the kitchen, throws the knife in the sink, and hops into the bathroom where he throws up.”

“Did he throw up in the bathroom?” said Jarnebring, looking questioningly at Wiijnbladh.

“We have secured a vomit-soiled hand towel,” said Wiijnbladh evasively. “It has gone to the lab for analysis.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘we,’ ” said Bäckström.

“I see,” said Jarnebring. There was actually a lot in what the fat little toad was saying, he thought. Eriksson did not exactly seem to have been a normal man, not like Jarnebring and the other guys on the squad. “You’re the boss,” said Jarnebring. “How do you want us to proceed?”

“Let’s do this,” said Bäckström, leaning on his elbows, balancing forward on his seat. For a moment he almost looked like a bulldog, thought Jarnebring.

“I think we’ll hold off on his social circle,” said Bäckström. “We have to try to get more meat on the bones first. It’s meaningless to go after types like this if you don’t have anything substantial to beat them up with.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, thought Jarnebring.

“You guys from tech done with the crime scene?” asked Bäckström, looking inquisitively at Wiijnbladh.

“Yes,” said Wiijnbladh. “We’ve been done since Saturday.” What is he looking for now? he thought.

“You seem to be a whiz at finding things, Jarnebring,” said Bäckström. “Take Holt with you and turn his pad inside out. Who was Eriksson, who did he get together with, and which of them stabbed him to death? It’s high time we find that out, and since we haven’t gotten anything for free, it’s probably best to start at his home.”

“Sure,” said Jarnebring. Just what I would have done myself, he thought.

“And in the meantime, we should see if the rest of us can’t produce something more about his so-called orientation.” Bäckström grinned and wiggled his fat little finger meaningfully. “You can bet your sweet ass that if we still had our old fag files we would have cleared this up already.”

“Talk with the parliamentary ombudsman,” said Jarnebring. “He’s the one who told us to toss them.”

“I should damn well think so,” said Bäckström. “Typical gay lawyers. If it had been me I’d have carried them down to the basement without letting on. Fifty years of police work gets sent to the dump because the fairies don’t want us to keep tabs on them.”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” said Jarnebring abruptly, making a move to get up. “If that’s everything… who has the keys to Eriksson’s pad?”

“You must have them, Wiijnbladh,” said Bäckström innocently. Which is why I gave them to you before the meeting, he thought with delight. So that you could give them to Jarnebring. He was already done with what he had to do, at Eriksson’s home at least.

“Okay then,” said Jarnebring, taking the extended keys from Wiijnbladh, nodding curtly, and leaving the room along with his new colleague Holt.

“Have you ever done a proper house search?” Jarnebring asked when he and Holt were on the scene in the hall of Eriksson’s apartment.

Holt shook her head.

“I’ve been around and helped out a few times but…” She shook her head again. “Nothing like this, no.”

“The whole thing is simple as hell,” said Jarnebring, “and there’s only one important part. It’s going to take time, because if we don’t do this properly we might just as well forget about it. When you and I leave here, there shouldn’t be a dead louse we haven’t found and checked.”

“I see what you mean,” said Holt, smiling.

“I’ll show you what I mean,” said Jarnebring. “Come here.” He went ahead of her to the door to the living room and pointed at the draperies over the two windows facing the street.

“You see those curtains?” said Jarnebring.

“Yes,” said Holt, nodding.

“Any idiot can peek behind the curtains and feel with his hand that there isn’t something stuffed into a fold. We’ll do that too, so don’t misunderstand me… but in contrast to all the lazy asses, of which there are thirteen to the dozen, you and I are also going to unscrew the knobs on the curtain rods and look to see if anything was stuffed inside. They’re hollow. See what I mean?”

“I see what you mean,” said Holt, nodding.

“Everything we need is in my bag,” said Jarnebring, tilting his head toward the large gym bag he had set down on the floor. “Drawings of the apartment with all the measurements indicated, flashlight, mirrors, folding rule so we can measure that the space we’re checking matches the drawing, carpet hammer for tapping out hollow places, jigsaw, regular saw, and everything else we need to peek behind something. Feel free to tear off wallpaper if you think we need to, but make sure you have plastic gloves on, and if you find anything interesting, yell at me first before we even poke at it. Everything of interest we gather up on the table in the living room, write down where it comes from, take it along to the office, and later on we’ll go through it in peace and quiet. Always allow for a margin of error. Better to be safe than sorry and have left anything behind. Report forms and bags and sacks are in the bag. Any questions?” Jarnebring looked at his new colleague and nodded.

“Strategy,” said Holt. “Where do I start?”

“I’ll start here at the outside door,” said Jarnebring. “I’ll take the coat closet, guest toilet, the hall, and the living room, in that order. You start in the bedroom, then take the bathroom, and when you’re done there it’ll be time for coffee. Then we take the kitchen and finally the office. I’m thinking that’s our best bet because he seems to have his papers in there.”

“And everything that can tell us something about Eriksson, who he was, how he lived, and who he associated with is of interest. Notes, notebooks, loose slips of paper, diaries, old calendars, photo albums, videos, books in his bookcase, the color of his socks,” Holt summarized.

“That’s not enough, Holt,” said Jarnebring, trying out his wolf grin. “When we leave here we’ll know how he thought. So help me God, we will have peeked into his head.”

“I see what you mean,” said Holt, and then they went to work.

Jarnebring and Holt had a late lunch at a nearby snack bar. Jarnebring was done with the coat closet, the hall, the guest toilet, and the living room minus the large bookcase, and he hadn’t even found a dead louse. Why would he have? The order was pedantic, everything was in its right place, and in the victim’s clothing in the coat closet he had found only an invitation to a gallery opening and a three-week-old, neatly folded receipt from the book department at NK.

Cheerless type, thought Jarnebring and sighed.

Holt was through with the victim’s bedroom and bathroom, and had gone through an antique dresser and his closets. Neat, clean, tidy and well organized, expensive and tasteful trousers, shirts, jackets, and suits. Underwear, undershirts, socks, sweaters, ties, suspenders, belts, cuff links, three different watches, and a gold money clip which, in light of everything else, was almost indecent. All of the best quality and arranged in a way that would have made an old submarine officer feel hope and enthusiasm.

Holt had made the find of the day. At the very back of the drawer in Eriksson’s nightstand was a neatly folded handwritten paper containing five hundred-krona bills, attached with a paper clip, and with a few notes made in a slightly crabbed but legible handwriting revealing that the person who kept things clean at Eriksson’s was probably named Jolanta, that she apparently cleaned for him under the table one day a week, that she was due twenty hours’ pay for the month of November, and that her compensation of twenty-five kronor an hour would hardly make her rich. She had a telephone and could probably be identified: “Give directions regarding Christmas cleaning,” Eriksson’s handwriting plus a phone number.

Jolanta, thought Holt. The neighbor Mrs. Westergren had not said a peep about her. Because she was a cleaning lady and didn’t, in Mrs. Westergren’s world, count as one of those Holt and Jarnebring had asked about? Because Mrs. Westergren wasn’t aware of her existence? But why hadn’t Jolanta herself made contact? Judging by the notes, Friday was her regular cleaning day. Had the police scared her away when she came to work? Or was there some other, much more tangible reason that she hadn’t come forward?

“Check this out,” said Holt, handing the paper to Jarnebring, who was trying to screw loose the mirror in the guest toilet.

“Good, Holt,” said Jarnebring. “Call Gunsan and ask her to start with the searches, then we’ll break for lunch. I’m about to starve to death.”

Five hours times two and they had already found a Polish woman who cleaned under the table. We’ll take care of this, thought Holt.

“Tell me about these ‘fag files,’ ” said Holt, pushing aside her coffee cup and looking expectantly at Jarnebring.

“That was before my time,” said Jarnebring evasively as he shook his head. “It’s an old story.”

“Tell me anyway,” said Holt.

Okay, thought Jarnebring, and then he did.

A very long time ago, in the forties or fifties-the history was vague-someone in the big police headquarters on Kungsholmen had set up a registry of male prostitutes and their customers. The reason was that the former sometimes robbed and assaulted the latter, and every year there would usually be at least one murder with such a pedigree.

“Seems to have been a popular sport among the hooligans at that time-knocking off gays,” Jarnebring said, taking a gulp of coffee and continuing.

The registry had consisted of a growing number of boxes with file cards. At first it had been kept in the crime department in the old police headquarters on Kungsholmen, then it had grown legs and wandered over to the homicide squad before finally ending up in the early seventies at the office of the central detective squad, at which stage it contained at least a few thousand names.

“A few thousand names,” said Holt. “Of individuals who amused themselves by knocking off gays?”

Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as that. Over the years maintenance of the registry had become a bit iffy, and toward the end, before the parliamentary ombudsman suddenly popped up like a bad omen, it mostly contained names of victims as well as any homosexual men who for some reason had attracted interest from at least one member of the force.

“Maybe they just wanted to do some preventive work,” said Holt with salt in her voice.

“It’s said that in the early fifties some playful colleague put Gustav V in the fag files… the old king, you know. It was in connection with those business deals the newspapers were rooting around in at the time. There was a real ruckus so of course they took him out again. But it’s clear… I understand that Bäckström is grieving.”

“Why?” asked Holt.

“He worked in the burglary squad before he wound up in homicide, and he was one of the most diligent suppliers of names to the old fag files. He must feel his work was in vain… Speaking of work by the way,” said Jarnebring, looking at his watch.

“What do we do about Eriksson’s cleaning woman?” said Holt as she got up, finished her coffee, and put on her jacket in a single coordinated motion.

“First we call Gunsan and see if she has produced anything. Then we take the rest of his apartment tomorrow. If there was any justice in this world, little Jolanta would already have been questioned.”

Gunsan had produced the address of the apartment that the telephone number belonged to. It was in Bredäng in the southern suburbs, and the tenant was a Polish woman who had come to Sweden about ten years earlier at the age of thirty and become a Swedish citizen just a few years ago. Her first name was Jolanta and as for her surname, it would not have made Danielsson happy in any event.

“Okay,” said Jarnebring. “Now we’ll go and question her.”

“I have to make a call first,” said Holt, looking at the clock. It’s almost five. What do I do now? she thought.

“In that case, I have a different proposal,” said Jarnebring. “You go and fetch Nicke at day care and I’ll go and question Eriksson’s cleaning woman. Then I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Are you sure?” said Holt, looking at him.

“Quite sure,” said Jarnebring.

“Watch out you don’t upset my worldview too much, Bo,” said Holt. “But thanks in any case.”

“It’s nothing,” said Jarnebring. I’ve had three kids myself and had to pick them up at day care all the time, he thought, which proved that his memory treated him with a large measure of indulgence. Bo, he thought. She actually used my first name.

First he had checked that she was at home. This he had done in the usual way, without needing to look into the barrel of a shotgun either.

Good-looking, smart, vigilant, he thought as she opened the door after the second ring.

“My name is Bo Jarnebring,” said Jarnebring, holding up his police ID. “I’m a police officer and would like to talk with you about an individual for whom you work.”

Jolanta smiled weakly, shrugged her shoulders, and held open the door.

“Police,” she said. “I never would have thought. Would you like some coffee?”

The rest had been like a dance.

When and how had she come into contact with Eriksson?

Two years ago through an acquaintance of Eriksson’s she was already cleaning for. He worked at TV. What his name was didn’t matter, did it?

“I know what his name is,” said Jarnebring, smiling his wolf smile. Welander, he thought.

“Let’s do this,” Jolanta suggested. “If you don’t tell him that you’ve talked with me, I won’t call him and tell him that I’ve talked with you.”

“Just what I was going to suggest,” said Jarnebring. “Tell me about Eriksson instead. What was he like?”

Apart from the fact that he had been her stingiest and most finicky client there wasn’t much she could say, for the simple reason that she almost never saw him. Their contacts had been managed primarily through the little messages that he posted in the drawer of his nightstand. On a few occasions he had been at home when she came to clean. A few times he had phoned her at home because he wanted to change the time when she would come. Any other practical matters he usually addressed to her answering machine, for she was seldom home.

“Why didn’t you quit if he was so stingy?” Jarnebring asked.

Because she had Friday morning free anyway, and an old, considerably better client later in the day who lived right in Eriksson’s vicinity. She cleaned his office, and he didn’t know Eriksson, and what his name was didn’t really matter.

“He never tried to make a pass at you?” Jarnebring asked with an innocent expression.

Not Eriksson. Never Eriksson, but of course it had happened and it happened all the time with men other than Eriksson.

“Why didn’t he?” Jarnebring asked. “I would have.”

“He wasn’t interested,” said Jolanta, giving Jarnebring an appraising look. “He wasn’t interested in women. He wasn’t like you or other men.”

You don’t say, thought Jarnebring, but before he had time to ask the next question she anticipated him.

“And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because he was interested in men instead of women.”

“What was he interested in then?” asked Jarnebring.

“Himself,” said Jolanta. “Power, money, bragging about how well he lived. Not sex. He simply wasn’t interested in sex. Some men are like that, you know.”

Actually I didn’t, thought Jarnebring. Not at Eriksson’s age in any case.

“I believe you,” said Jarnebring. Now it gets sensitive, he thought.

“How did you find out that Eriksson was murdered?” asked Jarnebring.

“You want to know what I was doing on Thursday evening,” said Jolanta.

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “What were you doing on Thursday evening?” Here we go, he thought.

“That’s a little sensitive,” said Jolanta. “I have an alibi,” she continued, “but it’s a somewhat sensitive alibi.”

Sigh, thought Jarnebring.

“What is his name and what does he do?” said Jarnebring.

“He’s someone like you,” said Jolanta. “Besides, he’s married.”

Jolanta’s alibi was a police officer who worked with the uniformed police, and where didn’t matter. About Jarnebring’s age, married to another police officer, two teenage children. No intention of getting a divorce. They had met three years earlier when Jolanta reported her car stolen. On Thursday the thirtieth of November, when Eriksson was murdered, they had been in Jolanta’s bed in the bedroom next to her living room, where she and Jarnebring were sitting drinking coffee. Before that they’d had dinner in her kitchen. When he left her it was already past midnight. At seven-thirty on Friday morning-she was about to go into town to clean at Eriksson’s-he had called her and told her. That’s why she hadn’t gone there that day.

“Though I suspected you’d show up,” said Jolanta, smiling. “Would you like more coffee?”

“Yes, please,” said Jarnebring, holding out his cup. “How did he get out of the general call-up?” Jarnebring asked. “I thought there wasn’t a single uniformed policeman who wasn’t in service last Thursday.”

“He didn’t have to work,” said Jolanta. “He had some kind of overtime cap. But his wife had to work.”

She smiled weakly, shaking her head.

“What’s his name?” asked Jarnebring.

“I would rather not say, as you understand,” said Jolanta.

“I understand,” said Jarnebring. “But unfortunately I need to know who he is. And if it’s as you say, I’ll do what I can so that this stays between you and me and him.”

“Okay,” said Jolanta. “I understand. Let me think.”

“Another thing while you’re thinking,” said Jarnebring. “Do you have any idea who might have murdered Eriksson?”

Not a clue apart from the fact that she hadn’t done it. She had never met anyone that Eriksson knew, apart from the man at the TV company she already cleaned for. She didn’t even know if Eriksson knew anyone else, but she had a definite idea that he didn’t know very many people. So she had no idea who might have done it. Not even who might conceivably have done it if it necessarily had to be someone who knew Eriksson. How could they be so sure, incidentally, that he hadn’t been robbed and murdered by someone completely unknown? Such things happened all the time in her old homeland.

Did she have any idea why someone would have murdered him? Now she took her time before she answered.

“Yes,” she said, nodding contemplatively. “I can imagine that someone wanted to get free of him. Someone he had power over. Someone he was pressuring. He was like that. He liked having power over people, and he liked letting them know it.”

No, not that too, thought Jarnebring. This should be simple and obvious.

“Okay,” said Jarnebring. “We have one small detail left, and then I might ask you for a small favor too, and after that I promise not to bother you anymore. Though if you think of something I suggest you call me.”

“A small favor,” said Jolanta, raising her well-plucked eyebrows.

“If you have time tomorrow to come over and look at his apartment. If there’s anything that’s missing, if someone has changed anything. I’m sure you understand why. Then the technicians want to take your fingerprints too in order to eliminate them from the investigation.”

“Sure,” said Jolanta, nodding. “That’s fine.”

“Then only the one small detail remains,” said Jarnebring, looking seriously at her.

“Only the one? Okay then,” she said, nodding.

She gave Jarnebring the name of her lover, and an hour later the married police officer confirmed her alibi.

“What the hell do I do now?” he said, looking unhappily at Jarnebring.

“If I were you I’d keep my mouth shut,” said Jarnebring, who knew what he was talking about from personal experience. “Personally, I’m going to try to find a place for this information way in the back of all our binders.”

“Thanks,” said his colleague, looking somewhat less unhappy.

“Although actually you deserve a kick in the ass,” said Jarnebring. “You never intended to call any one of us in the investigation.”

“No,” said the colleague, looking unhappy again. “I guess I screwed up.”

“Then we have to hope it doesn’t happen again,” said Jarnebring, grinning. Because one or the other of us would probably start to wonder, he thought.

Always mistrust chance-that was the third of his best friend’s golden rules for a murder investigation. I have to call Lars Martin and tell him about the wedding, thought Jarnebring, humming happily as he strode in through the door of his prospective wife’s apartment. But for various reasons, roughly the same ones that had occupied him the entire weekend, there was no time left over to do that tonight. It would have to be tomorrow, he thought, as he fell asleep with his prospective wife’s head resting against his right arm and his left arm carefully over her hip while he held his hand lightly pressed against her stomach.

9 Tuesday, December 5, 1989

Jolanta was already waiting in the entryway when Jarnebring and Holt arrived at Eriksson’s building early Tuesday morning, and when they went through Eriksson’s apartment together she was thorough and took her time. There were three, possibly four things she was struck by, and the first was completely trivial. The coffee table in the living room was not where it usually was. Normally it would be farther from the couch than it was now.

“We’re the ones who probably moved it,” said Jarnebring.

“I should have realized that,” Jolanta replied, noticing the abundant traces of dried blood still on the floor.

Her second observation was more interesting. The drawers in the desk in the office were unlocked. Usually they were locked.

“You’re sure about that,” said Jarnebring.

Jolanta smiled faintly and glanced at Holt, but when she saw that she was occupied by something else her smile became broader and she nodded resolutely.

“I’m sure. They’re always locked. Curious, you know,” she said, winking at Jarnebring.

When Jarnebring and Jolanta went through Eriksson’s clothes closet, things got really interesting.

“A suitcase is missing,” said Jolanta, nodding toward two other suitcases that were on the topmost shelf in the clothes closet.

“You’re sure of that,” said Jarnebring.

“They were there the last time I cleaned,” said Jolanta.

“Large, small?” Jarnebring asked.

“In between,” Jolanta replied, measuring a rectangle of about two feet by twenty inches between her hands. “Neither large nor small, light brown leather, nice looking. Definitely expensive. I’d like one myself-but I’m not the one who took it if you’re wondering.”

“No, why would you have done that,” said Jarnebring.

“Nice looking,” said Jolanta, shrugging her shoulders as she smiled a little. “I suppose you know what Swedish guys say about Polish women?”

“Anything else?” Jarnebring asked, pretending not to hear her question. “About the suitcase, I mean.”

“He had his initials on it,” said Jolanta. “Face-to-face monogram, KGE… only one letter that didn’t fit,” she added, shrugging her shoulders.

The final discovery Jolanta made was in the linen cabinet in Eriksson’s bathroom, but she wasn’t nearly as certain as she was about the suitcase.

“I think some hand towels are missing,” said Jolanta. “I’m almost certain.”

“You think so,” said Jarnebring. It can’t be a great quantity in any event, he thought as he looked at the well-filled shelves.

“May I look?” asked Jolanta, nodding toward the laundry basket on the bathroom floor.

“Sure,” said Jarnebring.

Jolanta took her time and even counted through the towels that were in the cabinet and in the laundry basket. When she was done she nodded and looked more sure.

“A few are missing,” she said. “Not a lot but at least five or six. Of the medium-size variety,” she said, pointing to the towel rack next to the washbasin.

“Half a dozen hand towels,” said Jarnebring. “Eriksson couldn’t have taken them to the laundry himself?” Fucking Wiijnbladh, he thought.

“No,” said Jolanta. “He never did. He was too good for that. Maybe your colleagues took them with them,” she suggested.

“We’ll have to check,” said Jarnebring. “It’ll work out.”

As soon as she left, Jarnebring and Holt checked Wiijnbladh’s report from the crime scene investigation. There was a notation that all the drawers in the desk were unlocked, that some of them contained “various papers,” and that the top middle drawer was empty.

“Maybe Eriksson locked them just before he went out,” said Holt. “I would too if that woman was cleaning my house.”

A total of seven different drawers, thought Jarnebring. She would be coming to clean the next morning anyway. That’s quite a lot of locking and unlocking, he thought. He might lock one or two maybe, because he needed something, but all seven?

“This may solve itself when we see what they contain,” said Jarnebring.

“There’s nothing about any laundry, nothing about any hand towels… apart from the one that Wiijnbladh mentioned at the meeting,” said Holt, shutting the binder with the technician’s report.

“We’ll have to talk with the little man,” Jarnebring decided.

After that Jarnebring decided that the bookcases in the living room could wait. The built-in bookshelves covered the entire long wall from floor to ceiling. In total there was more than 150 feet of shelf space and up to several thousand books.

“Think about it,” said Jarnebring. “It’s going to take the whole day.”

“I realize we don’t have to read them too,” said Holt, who seemed rather cheerful.

They finished off the kitchen instead. Expensive china, beautiful glassware, every imaginable cooking utensil. So far it was like the rest of the apartment. The fridge, freezer, and cupboards were impeccable. Even the vegetables still seemed fresh, despite the fact that it would soon be a week since Eriksson had died.

But in general they did not find anything of interest. Wiijnbladh had already rooted through the garbage bag under the sink on Thursday evening, and according to his report even that appeared to have made a neat and tidy impression. The most exciting thing they found was a glass jar of preserves with an old-fashioned lid and a rubber ring, in which Eriksson apparently stored currency in smaller denominations, coins, and various receipts for alcohol and groceries.

But it took time, and as they stood discussing whether they should have lunch before they tackled the bookshelves, Bäckström called the victim’s phone to ask if they had found any safe-deposit box keys.

“That fucking blind bat Wiijnbladh didn’t find any,” Bäckström explained. “But now I happen to know that there should be a couple.”

Jarnebring had taken a wild chance and looked in the top middle drawer in the desk in the office. The key was way at the back, wedged between the frame and the bottom of the drawer, which was otherwise empty.

Strange, Jarnebring thought. If I stored my things in a desk like that, I would have all the ordinary stuff in that drawer, so why was that one empty?

“I found it,” said Jarnebring when he returned to the phone.

“That’s great,” said Bäckström. “Bring it over right away. Then you can tag along on a search at Handelsbanken.”

Holt chose to stay at the apartment. She nodded at the bookshelves in the living room.

“You go ahead, I’ll start going through the books,” said Holt, and without Jarnebring really understanding why, he almost felt a little disappointed as he got into their service car alone and drove up to Kungsholmen.

Bäckström was in a splendid mood. He had received a tip on the phone that morning.

“I hate it when I don’t know what they’ve been up to,” Bäckström explained. “Maybe you recall that we have three empty hours when Eriksson is unaccounted for between twelve o’clock and three last Thursday. After he’d left his conference and before he showed up at work.”

“Yes, I have a faint recollection of that,” said Jarnebring. “It was Holt and I who found that out, as maybe you recall.”

“Sure,” said Bäckström, who hadn’t noticed to begin with. “But now that’s cleared up in any case. He evidently has a safe-deposit box at the Handelsbanken office on Karlavägen, halfway between his office and where he lives, and he showed up there at one-thirty last Thursday, sat down in the vault, and went through his box before he left the bank at quarter to three. An hour and fifteen minutes he sat there. It was a gal at the bank who called and gave us the tip. She’d seen in the papers that he was murdered. An hour and a quarter,” Bäckström repeated. “This is getting fucking interesting.”

One hour later Bäckström and Jarnebring were down in the Handelsbanken vault, monitored by a very proper bank manager, looking on while a female employee with the bank’s and Eriksson’s keys lifted out a safe-deposit box of the largest available size.

“If you’ll excuse us,” said Bäckström overbearingly, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves, “I would like to look myself first.”

Fucking idiot, thought Jarnebring.

The box was empty. There was nothing in it at all. Not even a dust bunny.

“Damn it,” Bäckström hummed as they sat in the car en route back to the police station on Kungsholmen. “He must have emptied the box.”

Congratulations, thought Jarnebring. Now I’m starting to recognize you.

“Doesn’t sound completely unlikely,” said Jarnebring. “Considering the fact that it was empty, I mean,” he continued innocently.

“It doesn’t take an hour and a half to empty a safe-deposit box, does it?” said Bäckström. “And five hours later some bastard kills him,” Bäckström continued, sounding as though he was thinking out loud.

Always mistrust chance, thought Jarnebring, but because this kind of thinking was certainly too advanced for the little tub of lard, he had chosen to express this in a different way.

“Considering that it had been more than a month since he was there the last time, this is undoubtedly a strange coincidence,” said Jarnebring.

“How the hell do you know that?” Bäckström asked suspiciously.

“I asked the manager,” said Jarnebring. While you were trying to hit on that little teller, he thought.

Then he dropped Bäckström off outside the homicide squad’s offices on Kungsholmsgatan, took the car down to the garage, hurried past his office at the squad to see if anything had happened-which it hadn’t-and because his stomach had started growling ferociously he chose the simple way out and went down to the police department’s restaurant and had a late lunch.

There he ran into a couple of his old colleagues who were now working at the national homicide squad. One thing led to another, they ended up in the break room at the squad, and when he finally returned to Eriksson’s apartment on Rådmansgatan it was already late afternoon.

“How’s it going with the books?” Jarnebring asked as he stepped into the living room in Eriksson’s apartment.

“Good that you came,” said Holt. “I just finished.”

I’ll be damned, thought Jarnebring, but of course he didn’t say that.

“That was quick work,” he said. “Find anything interesting?”

“I don’t know,” said Holt, “but it’s strange anyway. How did things go for you, by the way?”

“Eh,” said Jarnebring with feeling. “We’ll discuss that later. Tell me now.”

“I’ll take it from the start,” said Holt. “ ’Cause otherwise I’m afraid it’ll seem a little strange.”

Do that, thought Jarnebring. So that you’re quite certain that old uncle Bo understands what you’re saying.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Holt had leafed through all the books on the shelves to see if they contained notes or interesting inserted papers. None of them had. In purely general terms it was an ordinary, standard Swedish collection that could be found in any sufficiently prosperous, educated, middle-class home: all the great Swedish authors in bound collected editions, a number of classics such as Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Proust, Musil, Mann, Hemingway, and so on; a majority of the most celebrated modern Swedish and foreign literary authors; quite a bit of history with the emphasis on biographies of famous people, and obviously a few major reference works. In this respect everything was completely in harmony with Eriksson’s taste in decor and clothing, eating and drinking habits. Of course the books were arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s last name.

“What is so strange then?” asked Jarnebring.

“Those,” said Holt, pointing to a pile of about twenty books that she had set on the table in front of the couch.

Bäckström was not one to let himself be discouraged by the fact that he had drawn a blank in the bank vault, and as soon as he sat behind his desk he assured himself that the investigations he had initiated the day before were being pursued with undiminished force.

Because those fairies at the parliamentary ombudsman’s office had done away with that excellent fag file, for lack of anything better he told Gunsan to see if Eriksson could be found in the general plaintiff registry. Colleague Blockhead had been given the task of talking to the folks who worked at burglary, the detective squad, and the liquor commission about whether Eriksson showed up in any interesting, sexually deviant context. The three younger idiots from the uniformed police had finally been sent out to show pictures of Eriksson at the usual dives and clubs where the bum boys, butt princes, and all the other disease spreaders flocked together as soon as the lights were turned off. The results had been meager.

If Eriksson had been the victim of any crime during recent years he had not reported it. According to Gunsan, he was nowhere to be found in the police department’s register of plaintiffs. What the hell use are old ladies? thought Bäckström.

Colleague Blockhead had nothing to say whatsoever, so on that point it was exactly what Bäckström had expected from the get-go. Someone like that you should just kill, thought Bäckström.

One of the three little shits from the uniformed police did eventually come up with something. At a club on Sveavägen one of the customers seemed to recognize Eriksson by the photo he had been shown. He also gave a tip about a place Eriksson might be expected to have frequented.

“He thought he reminded him of a leather queen he met last summer,” the younger colleague explained. “They say they hang out at an S &M club up on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Söder. It’s for those types that like a little harder stuff,” he explained.

Fucking idiots, thought Bäckström, and those he had in mind were not the ones who featured in his clues but rather those sitting on the other side of his desk.

“I’ll do it myself,” said Bäckström. “Give me the paper with the address.”

All the books on Eriksson’s coffee table were dedicated by the respective authors to various recipients. All the authors were Swedish, and all the recipients also appeared to be Swedes. Or at least their names suggested that. The majority of the books were literary, but there were also a few biographies of famous Swedes, one historical work, and a few nonfiction books.

“Maybe he bought them at a used bookstore,” Jarnebring suggested. “Aren’t there people who collect dedication copies?”

“I thought so too at first,” said Holt as she shook her head. “But there’s something that doesn’t add up.”

“What’s that?” said Jarnebring, and he couldn’t keep from smiling as he said it.

“For one thing, all the books were written between 1964 and 1975,” said Holt. “Second, it seems like no one has read them or even turned the pages, with a few exceptions,” she continued. “And third-though I have to admit that I’m not a book collector-they cover extremely different areas. Aren’t collectors usually focused on certain particular subjects?”

“No idea,” said Jarnebring.

“Me neither,” said Holt, “so I thought I would take them to the office while I think about it.”

Whatever this has to do with the case, thought Jarnebring, for it did seem pretty far-fetched.

“Do that,” he said. “Put the shit in a sack, then we’ll call it a day and pick up again tomorrow.”

When Jarnebring returned home to his and his prospective wife’s cozy little den he had to eat dinner alone. No big deal in itself, because his beloved worked nights, but before she left the house she had prepared food for him, put a dish of delicacies in the oven and set a loving list of instructions on the kitchen table.

When he had eaten he sat down in front of the TV to watch sports after the news, but he didn’t get any real peace because Eriksson kept on showing up in his thoughts.

Strange character, thought Jarnebring. What had he really been up to? And having come that far in his thoughts he happened to think of his best friend, police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson. Have to call Johansson, thought Jarnebring. It had been over a month since they had seen each other and there was a lot to discuss.

But no one seemed to be home at Johansson’s, and apparently his friend had still not acquired an answering machine. I’ll have to call him at work tomorrow, Jarnebring decided. Wonder if he’s still at the Ministry of Justice. The last time they had met Johansson had told him he had an urgent investigation assignment for the department.

Before Bäckström left the homicide squad to scout for gays on his own, he had first considered taking his service revolver with him, but that was a weakness he almost immediately pushed aside. Besides, it would have been stupid considering that he’d decided to slink down to the usual dive afterward and knock back a beer or two and eyeball the ladies a little. If there’s trouble you can crumple the fairies with your left hand, thought Bäckström, flexing his fat shoulders before he pulled on his big coat and put a photo of Eriksson in his pocket.

He took a taxi. This was a murder investigation after all, and he had more than enough taxi coupons. For investigative reasons he told the taxi driver to stop a little way down the street so he could walk discreetly to the address in question. And what normal person would take a taxi to a gay club?

There was evidently an entrance directly from the street, but the windows were shuttered, and the place appeared to be closed with the lights off inside. Not being one to immediately fall for such simple tricks, he pushed the doorbell for a while, and just as expected a man finally came and opened the door. He was a big, burly type in a checked flannel shirt, worn blue jeans, and a crew cut. A little reminiscent of those boys on the Marlboro ads minus the hat and horse, so he was probably the building manager or something, thought Bäckström.

“We’re closed,” said the man, glaring at Bäckström.

“I’m a policeman, so leave it,” said Bäckström, glaring back. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

Apparently that was enough, for the man suddenly became interested and seemed almost exaggeratedly courteous as he held open the door for the detective inspector.

“Come in then,” said the type. “I’ll see if I can help you, Constable.”

Something doesn’t add up, thought Bäckström.

Oh hell, what a place, thought Bäckström, looking around the dark room. A real torture chamber. What kind of a country are we living in? Hooks on the ceiling, chains and cables and dangling shackles, the walls chock-full of whips and a lot of other shit the use of which he preferred not to guess. This kind of thing should be prohibited, Bäckström thought indignantly.

The man sat down on a thronelike chair, nodded toward a stool at his feet, and looked at the detective with interest. Something here is damn strange, thought Bäckström.

“Sit down,” said the man, nodding toward the stool.

“As I said, I’m a policeman,” Bäckström repeated. “And there’s something I’m wondering if you can help me with.” Who the hell does he take me for? he thought.

“I’ve helped a lot of policemen,” said the man, and suddenly he looked rather amused.

Maybe he’s a normal informant, thought Bäckström. This place must be a gold mine. Although there seems to be something mysterious going on.

“Do you recognize this person?” Bäckström asked, giving him the photo of Eriksson.

The man took a proper look. Even turned and rotated the picture. Then he shook his head and handed it back.

“Not my type,” said the man. “I have a hard time with anything that skinny. He looks like Jiminy Cricket, poor thing.”

“So this is not someone you recognize,” said Bäckström. Damn, he thought, glancing at the door behind his back, for there was definitely something here that didn’t add up.

“No,” said the man, devouring Bäckström with his eyes. “I like to have a little something to work with.”

“Let’s take it fucking easy here,” Bäckström shouted, holding up his hand to stop a possible attack. “Fucking easy!”

“I’m calm,” said the man, grinning. “It’s the little cop who is upset.”

What a fucking place, thought Bäckström, taking a deep breath as soon as he had escaped onto the street again. And just as he was standing there breathing out, that fucking Lars Martin Johansson came striding down the street with some dark broad on his arm. What the hell is he doing here? thought Bäckström confused. And if he was on his way here, this is no place you’d drag a broad to, is it?

Johansson stopped and looked at him, and for whatever reason Bäckström suddenly remembered that some of his colleagues in police headquarters called him the “Butcher from Ådalen.” Safest to lie low, thought Bäckström.

“Good evening, Bäckström,” said Johansson, and he was grinning too, the bastard. “Are you out cultivating your more sensitive side?” Johansson nodded meaningfully toward the closed door behind Bäckström’s back.

Bäckström collected himself lightning fast.

“Murder investigation,” Bäckström said curtly. “We’re working on a gay murder right now.” Bäckström nodded to give further emphasis to what he had just said.

“Yes, I thought I saw something in the newspapers,” said Johansson with a sneer. “You’d better take care, Bäckström.” And then the bastard simply nodded and kept going with the girl on his arm. And as if that wasn’t enough, she started giggling violently a little farther down the street, but what Johansson had said to her Bäckström never heard.

Lapp bastard, thought Bäckström with feeling, and then he hailed a taxi and went down to the bar.

10 Wednesday, December 6, 1989

Eriksson’s office held lots of papers, neatly arranged in binders, organized chronologically with small labels on the spine indicating what they contained. As far as his extensive stock holdings were concerned, there were twenty or more binders that took up two entire shelves on the bookcase in the office. Binder after binder with sales notes and account statements from his good friend Tischler’s brokerage firm, showing that in recent years he had made hundreds of stock trades large and small, and that he almost always managed to do so at a profit. Large trades with very small margins, and as a rule done in the course of a day.

“The guy seems to have been a real financial genius,” Jarnebring observed. “Buys and sells shares the same day for hundreds of thousands, even millions of kronor, and when he hits the sack in the evening he’s always earned a few thousand-kronor bills. Talk about taking risks.”

“We must have misjudged him,” said Holt smiling. “He seems to have been a real stock exchange matador. Completely unrestrained.”

“I have a friend who works in the fraud unit at the crime bureau,” Jarnebring said meditatively.

“Call him then,” said Holt, “and ask him to come here.”

“Brilliant, Holt,” said Jarnebring. “Then you won’t have to carry sacks of binders to the office.”

The colleague at the fraud unit had nothing better to do. He had been working on the same tax case for the past seven years, so the prosecutor he worked for should allow him a morning off here or there. Besides, he didn’t intend to tell her about it. Within an hour he was sitting at the kitchen table in Eriksson’s apartment, thumbing through his binders while Holt made coffee and Jarnebring snooped around in the victim’s office.

“Coffee’s ready,” said Holt, and evidently the colleague from the fraud unit was too.

“Is it okay to smoke in here?” he asked, nodding toward a crystal ashtray on the kitchen counter.

“Talk,” said Jarnebring, nodding and sipping his fresh-brewed coffee. “Go ahead and smoke,” he said. “I doubt if the corpse will have any objections, and my colleague Holt here is loaded with cigarettes.”

“I’m dying of curiosity,” said Holt, smiling. “No thanks, I’ve quit,” she said when the colleague from the fraud unit politely extended his own pack.

The whole thing was not particularly complicated according to the colleague from the fraud unit. For an ordinary person like Eriksson, over the long haul it was impossible in principle to earn any money on short-term stock deals.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” he explained, taking a thoughtful puff. “You can make a profit, or even several in a row, but sooner or later you take a loss, and over a longer period it evens out so that in the best scenario you avoid ending up in the poorhouse.”

“But if he was sitting on a lot of important information,” Holt objected, “then he should have been able to-”

“I thought you said he worked with labor market statistics at the Central Bureau of Statistics,” the colleague interrupted. “Forget that. That’s completely irrelevant for anyone involved with these kinds of deals.”

“His best friend owns the brokerage firm that he used,” said Jarnebring.

“Why didn’t you say that up front?” said the colleague from the fraud unit, sighing. “Then we could have done this on the phone.”

“I’m listening,” said Jarnebring.

“This operation is basically a player piano if you’re a broker,” the colleague explained. “You buy a block of shares. If the price goes up you sell them and take the money and all’s well and good. If the price goes down you dump them with one of your clients who put in a purchase order and let him make a bad deal. If you made a really lousy deal there’s probably some old endowment or foundation you manage where you can bury the shit. At least you’re holding the cards during the day, and sometimes the stock exchange can turn quite sharply.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Holt. “Say that-”

“I’ll give you an example,” said the colleague from the fraud unit. “Let’s assume that you’re my client and I’m your broker.” The colleague pointed his fingers at Holt and himself for emphasis.

“In the morning, before the stock exchange opened, you called me and said that you wanted to buy a block of a thousand shares at a price of a hundred kronor maximum per share-let’s call the company Mutter & Son-a well-known Swedish engineering firm.” The colleague smiled.

“Sure,” said Holt. “It happens every day, though I usually use Nordbanken because they take care of my salary of ten thousand a month after taxes.”

“Let me make this simple for myself,” the colleague continued. “Naturally there are unlimited variations that are both smarter and more profitable, but if I were to make this easy on myself, I’d start by looking through a bunch of sales orders from other clients that are sitting on my desk. Assume that I find someone who wants to sell a block of a thousand shares in Mutter & Son for at least ninety kronor. If I make it easy for myself I’ve already earned five thousand.

“He’ll have his shares sold for ninety, you can buy them for a hundred. I keep the difference minus sales tax and commission, which comes to five thousand in round numbers.”

“I’d keep the dough myself,” said Jarnebring, grinning. “No way would I share it with someone like Eriksson.”

“And that is exactly what they’re doing the whole time,” said the colleague with feeling in his voice. “Except for those few occasions when they want to help a buddy. And maybe help themselves at the same time.”

“What do you mean?” asked Holt. “Help myself at the same time?”

“Say you earn a million per year for yourself like this. That’s about where Eriksson seems to have been during the eighties. After tax you have about seven hundred thousand left. You give me an under-the-table commission of half. Three hundred fifty thousand right into my own pocket.”

“This can’t be legal, can it?” Holt objected.

“No, but basically it’s risk-free,” their colleague stated. “As long as both keep their mouths shut the risk that both will wind up in the slammer is nonexistent. And if anyone were to start talking with someone like me, then he would have to count on keeping the other one company when it was time for jail-and, by the way, it almost never comes to that. There are no special penalties for this kind of thing.”

“Is this how Eriksson made his deals?” Holt asked. “Tischler was nice to an old buddy and made some cash on the side for himself.”

“Pretty much.” The colleague nodded.

“Tischler made use of Eriksson and gave him some cash for the trouble,” Holt clarified.

“Hardly likely,” said the colleague, shaking his head and lighting another cigarette. “Tischler must be good for at least a billion if the business pages can be believed. What would he do with a few hundred thousand? It would only be taking an unnecessary risk.”

“So he helped an old friend,” said Jarnebring. Wonder how much Lars Martin is good for, he thought. With all that old inherited forest money-and he did look out for himself where that was concerned-but it was probably not a question of a billion, far from it, thought Jarnebring.

“So people like us have picked the wrong friends, ’cause we only associate with each other,” said the colleague from the fraud unit, squinting down into his coffee cup. “Is there any more coffee, by the way?”

“Tell me about it,” said Holt as she poured. “My salary runs out on the twentieth and the month ends on the thirtieth. Why hasn’t the union done something about it?”

“The interesting question”-their colleague from the fraud unit nodded thoughtfully-“is of course why someone like Tischler helped someone like Eriksson. Everyone has a buddy, don’t they?”

“Maybe he was in love with him,” said Jarnebring, grinning.

“They must have played hide the sausage with each other,” said Bäckström when the investigation team met after lunch and Holt reported the latest results of their efforts.

“Tischler seems to have at least eight children, and he’s married for the fourth time,” said Gunsan, shaking her head doubtfully. “Not that I’ve met him, but it still doesn’t seem especially likely, does it?”

“He probably doesn’t know which locker room to use,” said Bäckström jovially. “Rich and horny and jumps on everything that moves regardless of what it is, and because little Eriksson couldn’t squeeze any kiddies out through his ass he slipped him a little dough as consolation. A million here or there is all the same to a billionaire, isn’t it?”

“Well,” said Gunsan, pursing her lips, “as far as that’s concerned Tischler’s ex-wives don’t seem to be lacking for anything either.”

“A generous earwig,” Bäckström decided. “What else do we have?”

A number of loose ends that had to be tied together, Jarnebring summarized. Plus a number of question marks that had to be straightened out. But nothing that seemed simple and obvious and good enough for them to pick up the phone and call the prosecutor.

“We estimate being done with his apartment soon,” he concluded. “This week we hope.”

“Then there are a few people we thought about talking to again,” said Holt. “A few people at his office, among others.”

“Do that,” said Bäckström, “then I’ll scare the shit out of both of his friends, that horny banker and the red-bearded one at socialist TV.”

There were four apartments on the floor where Eriksson lived. A few of the loose ends were also hanging there. The closest neighbor, Mrs. Westergren, was one of them, so Holt and Jarnebring went to talk to her again. Upon more careful consideration-and in answer to a direct question-Mrs. Westergren recalled that Eriksson had had a cleaning woman. She had even talked with her on one occasion. “I think she said she was from Poland,” she said, apologizing that she had completely forgotten about this. She had hardly seen her, and the natural explanation was that on Fridays Mrs. Westergren visited her ninety-year-old mother at the rest home. “Which was when you said that she was here and cleaned,” Mrs. Westergren declared, and otherwise she had not thought of anything since they had spoken the first time.

“You mentioned that you thought Eriksson had started drinking a lot recently,” said Holt. “Have you thought any more about that, Mrs. Westergren?”

It was an impression she had, that was all. One time a month ago she thought she smelled alcohol when he greeted her on the stairway. Another time a week or so later she saw him get out of a taxi and thought he’d walked a little strangely when he disappeared into the entryway. She was already outside so they hadn’t even said hello to one another. It had made her think because these were new observations that didn’t jibe with her previous image of her reserved, well-ordered, and clearly sober neighbor.

An elderly couple also lived on the same floor. Despite repeated attempts by younger colleagues from the uniformed police, they could not be reached. But by talking with their neighbors Holt and Jarnebring found out that they lived in Spain during the winter and left Sweden as early as the beginning of October.

“Not so hard to find out,” Jarnebring muttered.

“We did it,” said Holt happily. “Didn’t take us more than half an hour.”

The third and final neighbor took longer than that, despite the fact that their younger colleagues had already talked with him on the morning after the murder. Back then they had received the brief reply that he had neither seen nor heard anything because he hadn’t been home during the evening in question, and if there wasn’t anything else then he preferred to be left in peace. And he would have been if it hadn’t been for the meticulous Gunsan, who found his name in an investigation file that the Stockholm police had set up before the expected disturbances in connection with the celebration of the anniversary of the death of Charles XII.

The neighbor was born in 1920, retired major with the infantry. As a twenty-year-old he had served with the Swedish volunteer corps in the Finnish Winter War, and he had never made any secret of the fact that his political sympathies were quite far to the right. “Obviously not a Nazi but nationalistic like every true Swede,” as he himself put it at an interview in connection with his application for a position with the Ministry of Defense staff in Stockholm in the mid-1960s. He had of course not gotten this job, and in response he had requested, and immediately been granted, discharge from the military.

For the last twenty years he had been a retiree, and he had apparently used his free time to give expression to his “nationalist sympathies” by promoting various societies and organizations. Finances had never been a problem for him both because he had wealthy parents and because as a youth he had inherited a large sum of money from an unmarried aunt. As with every real officer and gentleman “the pay was for keeping a horse.” He was a rumor-shrouded, decorated hero from the Winter War and the main character in many stories of a highly doubtful nature that were still part of the standard fare in officers’ messes around the country.

On Thursday the thirtieth of November he had taken part in the laying of a wreath at the statue of Charles XII, and a number of photos that police detectives had taken supported this. As soon as the celebration itself was over, the responsible police commander ordered him and his sympathizers-“under protest”-to be packed into a couple of rented busses, whereupon they were driven to the subway station at Östermalmstorg at a fairly safe distance from the counterdemonstrators in Stockholm City. From there he had walked straight home to Rådmansgatan and had arrived there at a quarter to eight in the evening, according to the detective who had followed him just to be on the safe side, and whom the irreproachable Gunsan naturally had sniffed out, despite the fact that he had not intended to say anything himself. Whatever. The major had been at home and not out as he had said, and because of that there were very pressing reasons for further questioning.

At first everything went beyond expectations. He was at home and opened the door and let them in when they rang. How often does that happen? thought Jarnebring. A short, austere, and very fit man who looked considerably younger than his almost seventy years. Who nodded brusquely at them as he looked at his watch.

“Go ahead and ask. I don’t have all day,” said the major.

But then things came to a dead halt. He had neither seen nor heard anything, and he firmly rejected all insinuations that he had previously given misleading statements.

“I came home about eight o’clock, as I told the young constable, so I don’t understand what you’re after, Inspector,” the major said, training his eyes on Jarnebring.

Hadn’t he heard that something was happening in the building? Had he, for example, not perceived that the police were conducting a rather extensive and far from silent crime scene investigation right outside his own front door? Had he not heard his doorbell ringing on at least two occasions during the evening? Had he not even peeked out into the stairwell through the peephole in his door?

Answer: no. For one thing his hearing was a little bad, like so many others who had fired thousands of shots without ear protection during a long professional career. For another thing he had been watching TV and as usual he’d had the sound at a rather high volume.

“I was looking at the news to see how much of our royal capital the police had let the hooligans tear down this time,” said the major.

Then he had gone to bed and fallen asleep immediately as was his habit. He did not know Eriksson. He had only spoken with the fellow on one occasion, and after that conversation he had no reason to do so again. His neighbor had seemed generally unreliable and ingratiating, and his sudden demise left him cold. His own experiences were different.

“Which experiences?” Holt asked.

The major had seen better men than Eriksson cut down, and he himself had been wounded in the battle of Salla when he was only twenty years old, and had fought side by side with his Finnish brethren against the Russian Bolsheviks.

“No big deal in itself,” said the major modestly. “I was on my feet within a week, which wasn’t true of most anyone. It’s a strange experience getting shot,” said the major, and for some reason it was Jarnebring he looked at as he said that.

“I can believe it,” said Jarnebring.

“The bullet entered my left side,” said the major. “The outside of the rib. But it bled copiously, and blood stands out against the snow, especially when it’s your own.”

Jarnebring did not say anything, but for reasons that he did not at first understand he suddenly spotted the old-fashioned black telephone with a round dial that was on the major’s desk.

“It took a while before my comrades could carry me out of there,” said the major. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone,… and after what happened I became a different person. Neither better nor worse, but different.”

“I understand what you mean,” said Jarnebring.

“Yes, I suspected as much,” said the major. “People like me usually see these things.”

Given this and other experiences of a similar nature the major was not one to spend time agonizing over someone like Eriksson, who had obviously socialized in the wrong circles and had met his death in an unfortunate way that was causing trouble for those around him. But what else would you expect from someone like him?

“What do you mean by that?” It was Holt who asked the question.

“A run-of-the-mill disguised proletarian trying to play the gentleman,” said the major. “He didn’t fool me.”

How did he know that? Was he familiar with Eriksson’s background? Holt again.

“You can sense that sort of thing. The fellow was a wretch,” the major snorted.

“Nice old guy,” Holt giggled when they were in the car en route back to the office. “What do you think? I wonder, by the way, how many times he’s told that hero story for his audience in the officers’ mess.”

A time or two, even if that’s not what it’s really about, thought Jarnebring, but naturally he hadn’t said that to Holt, because she still wouldn’t have understood.

“I don’t think he killed Eriksson, even though he certainly could have managed it,” he said instead. “It’s as though there isn’t space for that, and Eriksson already had a visitor when the old man returned home after having said his Heils for the evening.”

“I get the feeling he knows something,” said Holt.

“Or else it’s just that you don’t like him,” said Jarnebring, who had been around considerably longer than Holt.

“I think he’s holding something back,” Holt persisted.

“Or else he’s just generally delighted that someone got rid of a guy like Eriksson,” Jarnebring countered.

“I still think he’s holding something back,” Holt repeated.

“Possibly,” said Jarnebring. “If that’s so, I don’t think he intends to help by telling us in any event.”

“Gloomy type,” said Holt.

What do you know about that? You were never drafted, were you? thought Jarnebring.

“Where did you do your military service, Holt?” asked Jarnebring, smiling his wolf grin.

Despite what he had promised, Bäckström never had the chance to scare the shit out of anyone this gray afternoon at the beginning of December. When with his colleague Alm in tow he stepped unannounced into Tischler’s tastefully decorated office down at Nybroplan, the receptionist told him that the banker was not available. Because Bäckström wasn’t the type to take no for an answer, he persisted and finally got to speak with Tischler’s own secretary. A stylish woman in her fifties who went well with the decor. She apologized, but the banker himself was in New York at a meeting and was not expected home until Friday morning.

“I know he is very anxious to speak with you gentlemen,” said the secretary. “So I suggest that you call me on Friday at midday, and I will try to arrange a time for you as soon as possible.”

Fucking stuck-up bitch, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

He and Alm did not have much better luck when they visited the TV building on Oxenstiernsgatan where Welander was to be found. The guard in reception paid hardly any attention to their police IDs, and after some negotiating they were at last allowed to talk to yet another secretary, but this time only on the phone. Sten Welander was occupied. He was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed. If they wanted to meet Sten Welander, she suggested they call to arrange a time, and it would surely be fine. After that she simply hung up.

Fucking communist cunt, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

In the car en route back to police headquarters that blockhead Alm started whining and coming up with a lot of suggestions about what they should have done instead.

“I told you, Evert, we should have called ahead,” Blockhead moaned.

Fucking idiot, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

When Alm was about to drive the car down into the garage Bäckström jumped out on the street, hailed a taxi, and went straight home. What a fucking society we live in and what fucking people there are, thought Bäckström, leaning his full weight back against the seat.

As soon as Jarnebring returned to his and his prospective wife’s pleasant little apartment on Kungsholmen he called up his best friend, police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson.

Johansson answered on the first ring and sounded almost elated when he heard who it was.

“Good thing you called, Bo,” said Johansson. “I’ve tried you a few times, but I suppose you’ve been working, as usual.”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “There’s been a-”

“What do you think about having a bite to eat on Friday?” interrupted Johansson. “My usual place at seven o’clock. Can you?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “I’d actually been thinking that-”

“Excellent,” said Johansson. “Then that’s settled. I have a few things to tell you.”

I see, thought Jarnebring. Wonder what that could be? He hasn’t heard anything, has he?

11 Thursday, December 7, 1989

Holt was already at work before seven o’clock on Thursday morning. Nicke had spent the night with his dad, who would take him to day care. Holt woke up as usual, showered, had breakfast, and even managed to read the paper in peace and quiet, but when she was done with that she was still an hour ahead of her usual schedule. She went to work, and for lack of anything better to do while she was waiting for Jarnebring, she resumed her investigations of the mysteriously dedicated books she had found in Eriksson’s bookcase.

After half an hour of searching she found the addresses for all four of the recipients of dedication copies that she had been able to identify, and the mystery deepened further.

One of them, a woman born in 1935, had died a few years ago, but her husband was still living in the residence they had shared on Strandvägen. In the year 1974 a far-from-unknown author and member of the Swedish Academy had dedicated his newly published novel to her. The author was still alive, he was considerably older than his now dead “muse,” and the two of them had probably had a relationship at the time he had given her his book.

Oh my goodness, thought Holt, continuing to search in her files.

All the other three recipients lived in the same area. One, now an eighty-year-old bank executive on Narvavägen, had received a book about the Kreuger crash of 1932 written by another well-known financier. An executive on Djurgårdsvägen had received a book about Swedish chapbooks from a historian to whom he had evidently given a research grant. Finally, a very well-known publisher who also lived on Djurgården had received a book of poems from a poet unknown to Holt; the poet did not make a secret of the fact that he was thinking of changing publishers.

One woman and three men, all fine people at fine addresses in the same limited area of Stockholm: Strandvägen, Narvavägen, Djurgården.

This is a real detective mystery, Holt was thinking just as Jarnebring came into the office, his large body positively quivering with zest for work, as can easily happen when you’ve started the day by first, at full throttle and high volume, having sex with the woman you love, and then gobbling down a perfectly formidable breakfast.

“Good morning, Inspector,” said Jarnebring. “Have we captured any suspects yet?”

“Not yet,” Holt replied, quickly hiding her papers under a pile of regular searches.

Why did I do that? she thought.

During the morning they talked with Eriksson’s coworkers again. The tongues of several of them had now loosened, and in all essentials they confirmed what the doorman had already told them, though their choice of words was different. Eriksson had not been a good person. He had been sufficiently bad that none of them had had any desire to associate with him, but at the same time not so terrible that there was any reason to kill him.

“Just an extremely unpleasant person,” one of Eriksson’s female coworkers summarized. “He really did nothing but snoop around.”

None of them had socialized with him, none of them even seemed to have known him outside of work, and none of them had had motive and occasion to bump off Eriksson at home in his own apartment.

How is this possible? No man is an island, thought Holt as they drove back to police headquarters on Kungsholmen.

When they returned to their office after lunch the excellent Gunsan had solved Holt’s mystery of the mysteriously dedicated books, despite the fact that she wasn’t even aware of the problem. On Jarnebring’s desk was a typewritten sheet of paper on which Gunsan had compiled what she, with the help of the police department’s telephones and computers, had produced about Eriksson’s background. Jarnebring took it and started reading while Holt-for the millionth time-started thumbing through her own piles of papers.

“Okay, it’s clear,” Jarnebring suddenly exclaimed. “Look at this,” he said, handing over the paper with Gunsan’s notes on Eriksson’s history.

It appeared that Eriksson had worked as a mail carrier in Stockholm during the years from 1964 to 1975. First as a substitute mail carrier and then as a temporary, at the two post offices whose delivery areas included Djurgården and the tonier parts of Östermalm. At the age of thirty-one, when he completed his part-time studies at the University of Stockholm with a degree in sociology, criminology, and education, he also quit the post office and got a job instead as an assistant statistician at the Central Bureau of Statistics.

“But why did he steal books?” said Holt, looking inquisitively at Jarnebring.

“Maybe he stole other things too,” Jarnebring sneered. “Who cares? This is already past the statute of limitations, and he’s dead anyway.”

“But books,” Holt persisted.

“I guess he liked to read,” said Jarnebring, smiling.

Holt shook her head.

“I think he was snooping,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that Eriksson was an extremely snoopy type.”

In the afternoon the detective team met as usual and again took stock of how the investigation was going. As of yet nothing had been produced that was even reminiscent of a breakthrough.

“I don’t understand this guy,” Jarnebring muttered. “He doesn’t seem to have known a soul. Well, besides those two you wanted to question,” he added, looking inquisitively at Bäckström. “How did that go, by the way?”

“It’ll work out, it’ll work out,” said Bäckström evasively, and instead launched into a lengthy exposition of his pet homo theory, on which he and his colleagues had evidently put in some comprehensive work. Gunsan had searched out a large number of conceivable murderers of gay men, identified those who according to the computer already had something else going, for example, were sitting in prison or in one of the mental institutions for the criminally insane, and turned the rest back to Bäckström, Alm, and the others who had already questioned a number of them. Without any results, however.

“We’ll find him,” said Bäckström credulously. “There’s some little fairy out there that Eriksson had contact with or just picked up when he had the chance, and sooner or later we’ll run into him.”

The hell we will, thought Jarnebring doubtfully, and if a murder investigation could be compared to a soup, then this was pretty thin.

The checks on Eriksson’s telephone were done and had not produced anything in particular. The calls he made from his home phone usually went to the switchboard at the brokerage firm that managed his stock transactions. There were also occasional calls directly to Tischler, Welander, or his cleaning woman’s home phone.

The autopsy was complete, but if you disregarded Esprit and Wiijnbladh’s so-called interpretations of the victim’s personality, it basically conveyed no more than what Jarnebring had understood with his own eyes when he found Eriksson dead on the floor in his living room.

Same thing with the technical investigations. Prints from a small number of persons of which the two most common samples had already been identified as Eriksson’s and his cleaning woman’s. But none that could be found in the police files, and other clues were sparse as well. The hand towel that had been found in the laundry basket in Eriksson’s bathroom was still at the crime lab. As usual they were overworked and a report was unlikely to arrive before Christmas, despite the fact that Wiijnbladh had called to nudge them.

Instead the team members sat around arguing about a lot of irritating details that would certainly prove to be completely uninteresting once things got to the point. A safe-deposit box key that was missing, for example. An entire half hour of sometimes animated discussion had been devoted to this, and it was Jarnebring who brought it up, although this had not really been his intention.

Supposing it was the case that Eriksson had been killed by a male prostitute he had picked up. Why was there nothing to indicate he had been robbed? As far as Jarnebring and Holt and even Wiijnbladh and his colleagues had been able to ascertain, nothing particular was missing from Eriksson’s apartment. Apart from a suitcase, probably a few hand towels, and possibly a number of papers. Despite the fact that there were various things that ought to have tempted an ordinary robber. Three expensive watches and a number of other personal items, such as a gold currency clip.

“We don’t actually know that,” Bäckström objected. “I’m a hundred percent sure that he emptied his safe-deposit box that day, so he could have had piles of dough at home.” Although it doesn’t need to be that bad, he thought, almost feeling a shudder as he did so. That would be simply too annoying, he thought.

“I don’t believe it,” said Jarnebring doubtfully. “If there’s anything that has disappeared it’s probably some of his papers that someone has taken. That thing with the hand towels is far from certain, and as for the suitcase it may just be that the perpetrator needed it to carry away the papers he may have taken.”

You really are a true detective, Jarnebring, thought Bäckström, nonetheless deciding to mess a little with the big ape-man, since he still had the victim’s suitcase in his possession, although he had always intended to put it back as soon as things had settled down.

“What papers?” asked Bäckström, suddenly seeming rather contentious. “What kind of papers would they be?”

Jarnebring just shrugged his shoulders. He had never brought up the empty drawer in Eriksson’s desk, though he had thought about it, while stupidly he had mentioned the missing safe-deposit box key instead. Eriksson had signed out two safe-deposit box keys from Handelsbanken. One had been found but one was still missing, despite Jarnebring’s and Holt’s dogged searching. Where was it?

The proffered suggestions ranged across the whole field, from that it had ended up in the murderer’s own pants pocket to that it had simply been lost. Which by the way was often how things turned out when you had two identical keys, despite the fact that you only needed one. Didn’t everyone know that from their own experience?

When they were finally done and everyone had had their say, the day was basically over. In a few hours it would have been a week since Eriksson had been murdered, and they still did not have their hands on any culprit worthy of the name.

12 Friday, December 8, 1989

On Friday morning Inspector Alm provoked his colleague Bäckström’s displeasure.

Without talking with Bäckström, he phoned TV reporter Sten Welander at the national television news to set a time for a conversation about Welander’s old acquaintance Kjell Eriksson.

Welander was friendly and businesslike; he looked forward to meeting with the police and pointed out in passing that he had called them first, as early as Friday morning a week ago, as soon as he had heard about the tragic event. Not because he thought he could contribute much in particular, but he could scarcely be the judge of that. If he himself could propose a time, it would be either within an hour or two or else in fourteen days, because he would be traveling abroad in connection with a major news story he was working on. And if they wanted to meet with him immediately it had to be at his office in the TV building as he had a number of other meetings later in the day that were already scheduled and could not be changed.

Alm excused himself and asked to call back within five minutes, after which he went into Bäckström’s office and gave him the available alternatives. Bäckström was naturally sour as vinegar, but as he did not have anything else to propose, he gave in after some grousing. A pleased Alm returned to the phone, called Welander, and said that he and a colleague by the name of Bäckström would be at Welander’s office within half an hour.

Welander met them down in the reception area and led them to a small conference room he had reserved for their meeting. He was a lean, sinewy fellow in his forties with a well-groomed, full beard and dark, intelligent eyes, and his first action when they sat down was to pull out a small tape recorder from his pocket and place it in front of him on the table. After that he leaned back, clasped his hands over his flat stomach, and nodded to them that he was ready to start.

It was Bäckström who had planned their tactics. He would run the questioning while Alm kept in the background and stepped in as needed. Alm had no objections whatsoever. He remembered Welander’s TV program about the police department and was really looking forward to seeing how Bäckström’s “interrogation victim” would massacre his fat little colleague.

Bäckström took his sweet time before he started. Arranged his own tape recorder, notebook, and pen, tested the recorder, asked Welander to say something, rewound it, and played it to check that everything was working.

“I’m going to talk roughly like this,” said Welander, leaning back comfortably and speaking in a normal, quiet conversational tone.

“Okay then,” said Bäckström, nodding curtly. “Interview for informational purposes with Sten Welander with regard to the murder of Kjell Eriksson. Welander will be questioned about-”

“Excuse me,” Welander interrupted, smiling courteously at Bäckström. “I forgot to ask whether you gentlemen would like anything to drink? Water, coffee? I don’t know if we have tea, actually…”

“What the-” said Bäckström, but before he even had time to answer, Welander had done it for them.

“If not, then I’m ready to begin,” said Welander, nodding suavely at Bäckström.

Welander versus Bäckström, 1-0. thought Alm delightedly as he noted that Bäckström’s face had already turned a shade redder.

How did Welander know the murder victim Kjell Eriksson? How long had he known him?

Welander had become acquainted with Eriksson more than twenty years ago, when he was teaching sociology at the university. Eriksson had been one of his students. A diligent one, so Welander had arranged a few side jobs for him at the department, in the mail room, as a test proctor. A little of everything.

“He was actually a few years older than me,” said Welander. “Worked part-time and studied on the side. Came from simple circumstances, so I tried to help him as best I could. He was really exerting himself; he really wanted to change his life.”

The friendship had persisted and even developed. Welander had worked less and less at the university and more and more as a researcher and reporter at the TV news department. By and by Eriksson finished his degree and got a job at the Central Bureau of Statistics.

How often did they see each other?

Not that often, according to Welander, but certainly considerably more often if viewed through Eriksson’s eyes.

“Kjell was a very solitary person,” Welander explained. “He didn’t really have too many friends. We saw each other from time to time. Went out and had a beer together, talked about old times at the university, had dinner now and then… and we’ve continued that over the years. How often we saw each other? Yes…” Welander looked as if he was thinking deeply. “Spread out over all the years then maybe it was once a month.”

“Once a month,” said Bäckström with palpable doubt in his voice.

“On one occasion I recall that he helped me by producing statistics for a series of programs on unemployment that we did. That must have been ten years ago, and then I think we saw each other considerably more often. Perhaps once or twice a week for a few months.”

“But otherwise you saw each other once a month,” Bäckström repeated. “Once a month? Always?”

“No, not really,” Welander objected, smiling and shaking his head. “There could be six months when I didn’t even talk to him. Once a month is an average. Say that I met him approximately two hundred times in twenty years. That’s two hundred and forty months. Two hundred divided by two hundred forty is approximately once a month. Less than once a month.”

“Thanks, I can count,” said Bäckström sourly.

“That’s nice to hear,” said Welander amiably.

Welander versus Bäckström, 2-0, thought Alm, noting the change of color in his colleague’s face.

Did Eriksson have any other close friends? Anyone he saw more often than he saw Welander?

Welander looked as though he was thinking deeply.

“I’m afraid I don’t really understand the question,” Welander said.

“Why’s that?” said Bäckström. “That shouldn’t be so hard, is it?”

“You say ‘close,’ then you say ‘more often,’ ” said Welander, almost sounding as if he were savoring the words.

“Yes? What’s the problem?”

“Closeness is a question of feelings while on the other hand ‘how often’ is a question of frequency, and in these kinds of contexts that’s far from the same thing, wouldn’t you say?”

Bäckström did not reply. He was content to glare at Welander who, however, seemed quite unaware of this.

“Take your colleague Alm, for example,” said Welander pedagogically, smiling at Alm, who took the opportunity to smile back. “I am certain that you see each other several times a day… on average… but are you best friends too?”

No, God help me, thought Alm.

Fucking asshole, thought Bäckström. Fucking assholes both of them, he thought.

Welander versus Bäckström, 3-0. This is a real walk-over, I should have brought along the white gloves and ammonia bottle, thought Alm delightedly, old amateur boxer that he was.

If it was frequency of contacts that Bäckström meant, then Welander could imagine that his and Eriksson’s mutual friend Theo Tischler met Eriksson more often than he did, because Theo Tischler helped Eriksson with various private financial questions. Obviously he was taking into account the fact that all three of them sometimes met, and it was he, by the way, who had introduced Eriksson to Theo Tischler. He and Theo had known each other since school days. They had been in the same class both in elementary school and in high school. Norra Real at Jarlaplan, if Bäckström was wondering.

On the other hand, as far as the emotional aspect was concerned he was less sure. His impression was that Eriksson did not have any really close friends whatsoever.

“I know that he was tremendously attached to his old mother,” said Welander, sounding almost mournful as he said it.

This guy is phenomenal; look at the footwork, thought Alm.

“No women?” said Bäckström slyly.

“Excuse me,” said Welander, as if he had not really understood the question.

“Eriksson,” Bäckström clarified, and suddenly his voice almost sounded friendly. “Do you know if Eriksson had any women? Did he meet any women?” Bäckström repeated.

“Socially?” Welander looked at Bäckström as if he still did not understand the question.

“Exactly,” Bäckström agreed smoothly. “Yes… sexual contacts… with women… if you understand what I mean.”

“No,” said Welander, shaking his head. “As far as I know, Kjell never met any women. Not in that way.”

“He didn’t,” said Bäckström. “Why didn’t he… do you think?”

“I guess he wasn’t interested,” said Welander.

“He wasn’t,” said Bäckström. “He wasn’t, not interested in women you say.”

“No,” repeated Welander. “To be honest I think he was completely uninterested in women… in that way.”

“Men then,” said Bäckström. “Was he interested in men?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Welander neutrally. “In any event he never expressed any such interest in either me or Theo.”

“But you must have wondered about it, didn’t you? Both you and Tischler must have talked about it,” Bäckström persisted.

“De mortuis nihil nisi bene,” said Welander, smiling to himself.

“Huh?” said Bäckström.

“De mortuis nihil nisi bene,” Welander repeated. “Say nothing but good about the dead,” he translated.

You don’t say, thought Bäckström contentedly, before he asked the routine last question.

Welander was obviously not a suspect in Eriksson’s sudden demise, but for the sake of formality and saving time and so forth, Bäckström was nonetheless compelled to ask what Welander had been doing on Thursday evening the thirtieth of November.

It seemed there was no problem whatsoever. Welander had had dinner at the Lidingöbro inn together with eight of his coworkers from the TV station, among them his immediate supervisor and the station manager. Dinner had begun with a welcome drink at seven o’clock and gone on until just after eleven, when they had moved on to the home of one of the participants for “a little follow-up gathering.” This had gone on until two, and then Welander had taken a taxi home to his wife and their two children in their townhouse out in Täby. If Bäckström spoke with the secretary at the TV office she would see to it that he received a list of all the dinner guests as well as their telephone numbers. Welander had already forewarned her to expect such a request.

The guy is a world-class champion, thought Alm.

Wonder what that idiot is grinning about, thought Bäckström as he and Alm were driving back to the police station.

Absolute massacre, thought Alm. This I have to tell Jack Daniels.

Jarnebring and Holt had devoted the day to routine business, which unfortunately took considerably longer than they had counted on.

“We’ll have to deal with the rest of the apartment on Monday,” Jarnebring decided as the clock started dragging toward five. It was Friday and he had to have time to shower and change before he met his best friend, police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson.

13 Friday evening, December 8, 1989

If Welander had stuck to the truth when Bäckström questioned him about his acquaintance with Kjell Eriksson, there would have been at least certain similarities between the relationship he had with Eriksson and the one Jarnebring had with his best friend, Lars Martin Johansson.

Johansson and Jarnebring had also known each other for more than twenty years; in the last ten years they had socialized on average once or twice a month, and when they did so they usually met at a restaurant. During the early years it had not been that way. They had met at work at the central detective squad at the Stockholm Police Department, each one being half of a team of two, and for several years they had spent more time with each other than with their own families. But then their paths had separated. Johansson had made a career and disappeared straight up to the top of the police pyramid while Jarnebring stayed put in the detective squad and was still working with the same sort of crimes and the same sort of crooks as he had been twenty years ago.

In contrast to Welander and Eriksson, they had a relationship that was grounded in a very strong, close friendship, and if anyone had asked either of them who his best friend was, they would have had no problem at all with the answer. And as is so often the case with close friends, they were like each other in everything that really counted and unlike each other in other respects that were mostly superficial, personal characteristics that didn’t really matter much when it came time to settle accounts.

Their most important common quality was that they were both-in an environment almost exclusively made up of police officers-unanimously described as “real policemen.” They were heroes in a large number of so-called police station stories of at best varying degrees of veracity, and in contrast to their colleagues in the world of fiction-who associate with female intellectuals, listen to opera and modern jazz, and prefer nouvelle French cuisine-Johansson and Jarnebring liked regular ladies, preferably female colleagues, dance band music, and Swedish home cooking.

But of course there were also differences. If anyone had asked Jarnebring, for example, if he could imagine stopping the bullet meant for his best friend with his bare chest, he would have flashed his wolf grin and said that if it was his friend they were after the question never would have come up-he would have shot first. And if Johansson got the same question he would probably have smiled evasively, said that the question was far too sentimental for his taste, but that he might possibly imagine loaning Jarnebring the money for a new car.

Johansson lived on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Söder. It was close to his regular place, an excellent Italian restaurant that served simple, well-prepared food. When he and Jarnebring met, he was almost always the one who paid the bill, without even thinking about it. In contrast to his best friend he had very good finances, and, true, he did look out for himself where money was concerned, but when it came to those near and dear to him he was generous in a highly spontaneous way. Besides being enthusiastic about both food and drink, especially in the company of Jarnebring.

“Have whatever you want, Bo,” said Johansson, handing over the menu. “This evening’s on me.”

“Thanks, Boss,” said Jarnebring. “In that case you can order a beer and a whiskey for me while I’m thinking.”

When Johansson and Jarnebring met at the restaurant, their time together would follow an almost ritual pattern. First a summation of the essentials of police life since they last met: colleagues, crooks, and crime. After appetizers they would naturally move on to the topic of fools not present and surprisingly often also active within the police, the prosecutor’s office, or the judicial system in general. Only later-over dessert, coffee, and cognac-would they concentrate on those more personal, intimate questions such as old buddies, their own children, and above all, women. Both those they had already met or were just meeting now and those they still only intended or hoped to meet.

Because Jarnebring had a purpose this evening, he had also decided on a certain approach so as not to disturb their time together unnecessarily. Even before he stepped into the restaurant he had concluded that the news about his impending marriage could suitably be deferred until the coffee and cognac. Possibly even until the highball and the often obligatory midnight snack at Johansson’s place on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan. That’s how it’ll be, Jarnebring decided. No need to excite Lars Martin before he has food in his stomach.

But this time that wasn’t how it turned out.

In recent years Lars Martin Johansson had led a transient existence within the police department. First he had taken a leave of absence for some university courses, and when he returned to the National Police Board, after having completed his academic work with customary efficiency, he had been immediately promoted to police superintendent and become a fill-in resource for the Board. After the murder of the prime minister a few years earlier, personnel turnover at the top of the police pyramid had increased dramatically, and Johansson was now a fixed point in a changeable and uncertain world.

For that reason he also had to wander between brief temporary positions as police chief filling in for whichever colleague had most recently bit the dust, as well as serve on more and more study commissions and accept recurring assignments as an expert in the Ministry of Justice and the prime minister’s office. He had certainly not lacked for work, and for the past few months he had been sitting in the Ministry of Justice with a new investigation that Jarnebring had only heard rumors about, despite the extensive police station gossip.

“Tell me, how are things in the corridors of power? Or is it secret?” said Jarnebring with curiosity as soon as they had finished the first schnapps with the baked anchovies au gratin their Italian restaurateur served as an appetizer. Presumably for lack of herring, but damned good anyway, thought Jarnebring.

“It’s not really a secret,” said Johansson in his contemplative Norrland dialect. “You only have to watch TV or read the papers. Although this one came up a bit quickly of course.”

One month earlier the Iron Curtain had suddenly been raised with a bang, just like when you fiddle with an old-fashioned window shade that has stuck. On any TV channel whatsoever in the Western world you could follow, day after day, the stream of refugees from the former Soviet satellite states who were pouring westward and the story about how the inhabitants of the former East Berlin had torn down the wall with their own hands.

“The socialist paradise,” said Jarnebring, smiling contentedly. “Can you imagine how wrong it turned out.”

“Oh well,” said Johansson. “The idea was good in and of itself, and you hardly needed the gift of prophecy to realize that sooner or later something like this would happen. But maybe it went a little fast. A little too fast for my taste,” said Johansson. He smiled and shook his head, seeming despite everything rather contented.

“Yes, up till now we seem to have managed,” said Jarnebring, who preferred not to wind up in any political quarrel with his best friend despite the fact that he certainly was the closet social democrat the majority of his colleagues suspected. “Those Eastern Bloc hooligans we’ve taken in seem mostly to have shoplifted at NK and Åhléns.”

“Yes,” said Johansson. “Although a few of us have an idea that this might be different.”

Continuing along that track they talked politics far into the marinated pork with garlic and pesto that was their entrée, and it was only when Johansson asked what Jarnebring himself was up to now that the conversation returned to normal.

“Now let’s forget about politics,” Johansson decided. “Tell me! What are you doing these days?”

“I’m in the middle of a murder investigation,” said Jarnebring, and just as he said that he saw the momentary regret in his best friend’s eyes.

“I would happily trade with you,” said Johansson. “If it’s not Palme, of course,” he added quickly and smiled. “I have had enough of that mess as it is. I could keep investigating colleagues until I was put in my grave.”

“No, God help me,” said Jarnebring. “No, this is a completely regular Joe Six-Pack, apart from the fact that he seems to have been a nasty character. But it’s hardly the first time.”

“Sounds good,” said Johansson. “Joe Six-Pack and a real character. If I haven’t forgotten everything I learned it sounds a lot like something we usually clear up.” Why don’t I do something smart with my career too? he thought suddenly.

“There are certain problems, however,” said Jarnebring, leaning forward.

“Tell me,” said Johansson. “Start with the biggest one and don’t make things unnecessarily complicated,” he added, suddenly looking rather pleased.

“Bäckström,” said Jarnebring with a sneer.

“Bäckström,” said Johansson. “Do you mean Bäckström at homicide?”

“One and the same,” said Jarnebring. “Bäckström is the leader of the investigation.”

“Sweet Jesus,” said Johansson with feeling. “I ran into that nitwit the other evening, by the way. He came flying out of that club, you know, that’s farther down on the street where I live, and if it hadn’t been him I would have thought he was involved in indecent activities.”

“He has the idea that this is a so-called gay murder,” said Jarnebring.

“I seem to recall he mentioned that too,” Johansson recalled. “Why does he think that? Because it’s Bäckström, or is there any factual reason?”

“There is a noticeable lack of women in the vicinity of the victim,” said Jarnebring. “So the thought even occurred to me-”

“But,” said Johansson, leaning closer too.

“I have the wrong feeling in my fingertips,” said Jarnebring, holding up his big right hand and rubbing his thumb against his fingers. “In gloomy moments I get the idea that this is more complicated than that.”

“Aye, aye, aye,” said Johansson, shaking his head in warning. “Watch yourself carefully now, Jarnie. Don’t complicate things. Never, never complicate things.”

“I get the idea this isn’t about sex at all,” said Jarnebring.

“What is it about then?” asked Johansson.

“Money,” said Jarnebring. “What do you think about money?”

“Money is good,” Johansson agreed. “Intoxication and ordinary insanity are best, then comes sex, and then comes money. Money is not bad at all,” said Johansson, who for some reason raised his wineglass as he smiled and nodded.

“Although my new colleague thinks that it could be more about power. Well, not political power but power over people that you know and mostly for power’s own sake. It’s a woman of course.”

“Imagine that,” said Johansson delightedly, for this had just been his own thought.

“Yes indeed,” said Jarnebring. “Although when I was on my way here I got the idea that maybe she’s right. This victim of ours is actually a really strange little creep. Not anyone I’d want to share an office with.”

“Is she good-looking?” asked Johansson. “Your new colleague, is she good-looking?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “You might say so, a little too thin for my taste maybe… but sure.”

Of course she is, he thought. Anna Holt was a very enticing woman, and the fact that she wasn’t his type wasn’t exactly her fault.

“Thin women are an abomination,” Johansson decided, although he had never met Jarnebring’s new colleague. “What do you think about a little dessert, by the way?”

For dessert they had almond torte. Johansson had some kind of sweet Italian dessert wine, but because Jarnebring did not drink wine on principle and could not really have yet another beer, not with almond torte, he jumped the gun with an ample cognac. As the waiter set it down in front of him he decided that now it was high time to let the marital bomb explode. Johansson seemed to be in a splendid mood-he always was when he got to sit and talk about some old murder that he was now too fine to investigate-and personally Jarnebring felt both calm and collected despite the fact that this was a very serious story. A life-changing step, Jarnebring thought solemnly.

It turned out completely wrong. It was his own fault, and it lay in the fact that he got the idea he should warm Johansson up further, despite the fact that things were fine as they were.

“You seem damned chipper, by the way,” said Jarnebring. “It’s almost as if you’ve lost a few pounds. Have you started working out?” Oh well, thought Jarnebring, the things you won’t do for your best friend.

“Working out,” said Johansson with surprise.

“Your fist,” Jarnebring clarified, nodding toward Johansson’s left hand, which was adorned with an ample adhesive bandage around his ring finger. “I thought you’d caught your little fist in a barbell.”

“Oh that,” said Johansson self-assuredly, holding up a hand that in size could almost compare with his best friend’s. “Depends on what you mean by little… no… not an exercise injury exactly… It’s more like it concerns my heart, I guess.”

“You haven’t been sick, have you?” said Jarnebring, exerting himself not to show how worried he had suddenly become. “I’ve told you, you have to think about getting some exercise.” Advice which of course you’ve completely ignored, he thought.

“Never felt better,” said Johansson, pulling away the adhesive bandage and showing the broad gold ring on his left ring finger. “I just didn’t want to spoil your appetite, so I decided to wait until we were through eating.”

“Huh,” Jarnebring exclaimed. “Are you engaged?” What the hell is happening? he thought in confusion. Is this Candid Camera or what?

“No,” said Johansson, shaking his head contentedly. “I got married.” Engagements are for the cowardly and irresolute, he thought, but naturally he would never dream of saying that to his best friend, who more or less made a habit of getting engaged to avoid taking the great, life-changing step.

“You got married?” Jarnebring repeated with equal emphasis on every word and syllable in that short question.

“Yes,” said Johansson, with manly firmness.

“Is it anyone I know, a colleague?” This is not true. Say that it’s not true, thought Jarnebring.

“No,” said Johansson. “No one you know, not a colleague.”

“When did you meet her then?” asked Jarnebring incredulously.

“Fourteen days ago,” said Johansson with delight.

“Fourteen days ago? Are you pulling my leg?” In his haste Jarnebring was about to treat his best friend to the same look that he normally reserved for the worst sort of hooligans.

“I talked to her briefly a few years ago; it was in the line of duty,” Johansson said evasively. “But then I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her until I ran into her down at the grocery store fourteen days ago and then we got married a week ago. I actually called to tell you but you weren’t home.”

This is not true, thought Jarnebring. What the hell do I do now?

Jarnebring did not get home until the wee hours and he wasn’t sober, not drunk either for that matter, but rather considerably sloshed.

“You seem to have had a good time,” his impending wife giggled.

“Yeah,” said Jarnebring, sounding even more absent than he felt.

“Did you tell him about us?” asked his impending wife curiously.

What the hell do I say now? thought Jarnebring, and suddenly, when he needed it the most, his poor head was completely empty.

“No,” said Jarnebring. It’s as though there never was the right time for it, he thought.

14 Monday, December 11, 1989

This time Bäckström took no chances. He personally called Tischler’s secretary and set up a time for a meeting on Monday morning, and as he was sitting in the taxi on his way there with his tape recorder as his only companion, he congratulated himself on getting rid of that grinning idiot Alm.

The interview was held at Tischler’s lavish office, and their conversation flowed easily and was unforced as happens so often when two men of the world meet to converse with one another, allowing for the fact that in this case they had gathered their experiences from somewhat varying spheres of human activity, Bäckström philosophized.

Tischler proved to be a pleasant fellow. He was sitting in shirtsleeves with his collar unbuttoned, tie loosened, and dressed in wide red suspenders where he evidently placed his flat thumbs while he pondered. A rugged, slightly balding man in his prime, certainly accustomed to being in the thick of things and not completely unlike himself, thought Bäckström. Not reminiscent in the slightest of that pansy he had met at the TV station the week before.

In contrast to Welander, Tischler was also both frank and open, confirming in all essentials what Bäckström had already understood from the very start, and he was not one to toss out a lot of rubbish in Latin either. When Bäckström brought up the subject of Eriksson’s sexual orientation, Tischler winked at Bäckström, leaned back in his leathered desk chair, and almost compassionately shook his head.

“I can imagine what Sten said. It can’t be easy to work at a place where the hags wear both trousers and skirts.”

Then he quoted an Icelandic saga.

“I’m sure you know what the Icelandic Vikings said: One thing I know that never dies… the reputation of a dead man. That’s the unvarnished truth,” Tischler declared.

Personally he could very well imagine that Eriksson lived a secret life in his own little closet, but because he did not understand the sort of people who had such inclinations he didn’t waste his time wondering about their motives or how they arranged their business.

“I’ve been to his home a few times and seen how he lives.” Tischler smiled wryly and wiggled the palm of his hand a little. “Not really my taste, if you know what I mean.”

“You don’t have the name of anyone he may have spent time with?” Bäckström asked carefully.

Tischler shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Kjell was a secretive type, so if he was doing any butt-surfing at home in the bedroom then I’m sure he was careful to pull down the shades first.”

An amusing fellow, and rich as a troll, Bäckström thought with delight.

Then Bäckström naturally brought up Eriksson’s finances, and there was nothing strange there at all according to Tischler. It was clear that he was the one who had helped Eriksson. No big deal about that either, and he had done it despite the fact that Eriksson had really been Welander’s friend to begin with. If he could help someone with such simple means then he made no distinction between friends and those who were only friends of a friend.

“You shouldn’t exaggerate the level of difficulty,” said Tischler. “Up to this point in the eighties the companies on the Swedish stock exchange have increased in value by almost a thousand percent. That’s what you would have earned if you had closed your eyes and thrown a dart at the stock exchange list. Personally I usually squint a little with one eye,” said Tischler, “so those companies that we’ve worked with here at the firm have doubtless improved on that.”

Why am I not a buddy of this man? thought Bäckström with genuine regret.

“Kjell was a rather frugal type, if I may say so,” Tischler continued, grinning. “When he came to me about ten years ago he had scraped together ten, twenty thousand that he had in a savings account-watch out for savings accounts, by the way, because they’re pure robbery. I loaned him some money and bought a few shares for him. Of course he had to leave those as security-and then I guess it has just rolled on from there. We have bank confidentiality at this place, but if you just pick up the papers from the prosecutor, I’ll tell my coworkers to give you a proper analysis of his finances.”

It would be better if you loaned me some money and gave me some good tips, thought Bäckström, and for a brief moment he even thought about asking Tischler flat out.

“That probably won’t be necessary,” he said instead. “It’s not that he’s suspected of anything.”

“It’s never a mistake to have a little money,” Tischler grunted, looking as though he knew what he was talking about. “You and I both know what women cost… and without knowing about it in detail-I haven’t seen this with my own eyes-then I imagine that if one were to prefer little boys in sailor suits that’s not free either.”

Fucking nice guy, thought Bäckström, who almost forgot to ask the customary routine question about Tischler’s alibi until Tischler himself reminded him.

“Well then,” said Tischler, looking at his watch. “It was nice to meet you, even if the reason is sad to say the least… So if you don’t have anything else, I have a few things to take care of. There’s a lot of money out there that I have to place in the right hands,” said Tischler, winking.

A purely formal matter, and Bäckström truly hoped that Tischler would not take offense. What kind of alibi did he have for Thursday evening the thirtieth of November?

“That was when those damned hooligans tried to tear down the city,” Tischler declared. “I read about it in the newspapers the following day. I was in London the whole day. I flew home the morning after. If you speak with my secretary she can give you the details.”

At the meeting of the investigation group that afternoon Holt reported what she, Jarnebring, and the meritorious Gunsan had produced about the victim Kjell Eriksson’s background. For the sake of simplicity Holt had compiled half a page with the most important information, which she handed out to all those present.

Eriksson, Kjell Göran, born 1944, single, no children, father unknown, grew up in Hjorthagen in Stockholm with a single mother who died in the mid-1980s, no siblings. The mother worked as a cleaning lady, building manager, etc.

E. completed secondary school in 1961 and then began university-track high school studies, which however were interrupted in 1962. Completed military service ’62-’63, so-called fatigue duty with the air force with placement in the Barkaby wing. Started working as a substitute mail carrier in 1964 and was hired permanently a few years later as a mail carrier.

Began adult studies at night school in 1965, finished his degree in 1967. Politically involved in the Swedish Communist Party (SCP) and the so-called NLF movement at the end of the 1960s. Took part in the occupation of the student union building in 1968.

Studied sociology, pedagogy, and criminology at the university. Received his degree in 1974. While studying at the university he met Sten Welander, who was his instructor in sociology. Through Sten Welander he also got to know Welander’s schoolmate Theo Tischler in the early 1970s.

In the fall of 1975 he applied to and was given work as an assistant statistician at the Central Bureau of Statistics where he worked with labor market statistics. In 1984 he was given the position of assistant director at the Bureau.

At the end of the 1970s, exact time not known, Eriksson left the SCP to join the Social Democratic Party, and had been a member since the spring of 1979. Eriksson had been active in the union at his place of employment since he started there and held several union positions, including safety representative on TCO’s behalf.

Apart from the above-mentioned Welander and Tischler, Eriksson seems to have had few friends and for the most part lacked private social interaction. According to what several of his coworkers have reported, he was not especially popular at his place of employment. He is described as antisocial, conceited, unreliable, gossipy, etc.

Eriksson had very good private finances considering his income. A preliminary calculation indicates that during the last ten years he built up a fortune of about four million kronor. The apartment on Rådmansgatan where he lived is a condominium that he purchased about ten years ago and that currently is estimated to have a market value of over a million kronor. Other assets consist primarily of stocks plus bank balances of about 300,000 kronor.

All of these assets seem to originate from extensive stock market investment activity, in which according to reports he received advice and help from his acquaintance Theo Tischler. These transactions he has also conducted at the latter’s brokerage firm.

“Well then,” said Holt, looking around. “This is in brief what Gun, Bo, and I have been able to produce about Eriksson’s background. If anyone has any questions I will gladly answer them.”

No one had any particular questions, so Bäckström took over and started developing his homo lead, which had been confirmed for him by “two sources independent of each other,” namely Welander and Tischler, who were also the only acquaintances worth the name that Holt and her coworkers had managed to produce.

“To me this is fucking simple,” said Bäckström. “The guy was a closet fairy-there’s not the least doubt on that point. What we have to do is to find the little boyfriend he was drinking with that evening, before they started fighting with each other and his bum boy stuck the knife in him. Am I right or am I right?”

At first no one said anything. Not even Jarnebring, who only sighed and looked at the ceiling.

Finally Holt spoke up. Clearly no one else intended to do so, she thought.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said.

“It doesn’t seem to have been that fucking simple,” snorted Bäckström. “I’m still waiting for you all to give me a name.”

“Do both of his buddies confirm that he had that disposition?” asked Jarnebring, who naturally enough had not read the as yet unwritten interview reports.

“Of course they do,” said Bäckström with a certain vehemence. “In the way those sort of people talk. Welander spoke in tongues, but between the lines at least I understood what he was muttering about.” For some reason Bäckström glowered sourly at Alm at the far end of the table.

“And what does Tischler say?” asked Jarnebring.

“He talks almost like a normal person,” said Bäckström. “Sure enough he thought Eriksson was a queer, one of those secretive types that mostly stay in the closet.”

“And they themselves have alibis?” asked Jarnebring for some reason.

“Of course, and they’re chiseled in stone, so to me this whole thing is fucking simple and has been all along.” Bäckström glowered at Holt and Jarnebring in succession, and thus they were no further along on this particular Monday in the middle of December.

Soon it would be eleven whole days since the death and still no perpetrator. This is going down the toilet, Jarnebring thought gloomily. As far as he was concerned Bäckström could stick his so-called homo lead up his own fat ass. But you didn’t say that sort of thing. Not even to someone like Bäckström, not when there were other colleagues present. It was the sort of thing you said face-to-face to the person it concerned. At least Jarnebring would do it that way.

15 Tuesday, December 12, 1989

On Tuesday Jarnebring and Holt concluded their careful search of Eriksson’s residence. The results were thin, bordering on nil. In the desk in the office a telephone book had been found, including even the number for his old mother, although she had been dead for several years. Also Welander’s and Tischler’s numbers obviously, but otherwise basically nothing.

In the desk and bookcase there were also twenty or so pages and scraps of paper with notes written in Eriksson’s finicky handwriting. Mostly he seemed to have devoted time to calculating how many kronor and öre he had earned on one stock trade or another. Why he did this was unclear. The same information would arrive with the sales note from his broker the next day.

Seems to have been extremely anxious, thought Holt. A very lonely person struggling all the time to have absolute control of those sorts of things over which control was possible, she thought.

In the desk they also found a photo album bound in a pair of simple green covers of stiff cardboard. It contained a total of twenty-one photos. Eriksson’s mother when she was young, middle-aged, and old. A picture of the house in Hjorthagen where they had lived when he was growing up. Mostly pictures of Eriksson himself. As a little baby who didn’t smile, from first grade in school, in the back row and at the far end, without a smile and with a shy look toward the camera, surrounded by happy classmates. Group photos and a portrait when he got his high school diploma, the same from his college graduation, in which he actually smiled for the first time. A pasted-in official letter from the Central Bureau of Statistics, which stated that Eriksson, Kjell Göran, had been given a position as temporary assistant director at the agency. And basically that was all.

Poor thing, Holt thought gloomily. He doesn’t seem to have had it easy.

But there was one photo that stood out from the others. It was not even pasted into the album, just loosely inserted between two pages in the middle. It was a summer picture of three young men about twenty-five years of age and a little girl who seemed to be ten years old at the most. Green grass and glistening water in the background. The three men were in short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sandals. Two of them smiled openly at the camera, one seemed more reserved. The pluckiest was the little girl. She had her hair put up in Pippi Longstocking braids and stuck her tongue out happily at the photographer.

Swedish archipelago, late sixties or early seventies, thought Holt. Welander, Tischler, and Eriksson, she thought, and was reasonably confident. The little girl held Tischler by the hand, and despite the differences in size and age there was a striking resemblance between them. Something in the posture itself, the self-assured expression in body and face.

That could hardly be his child, thought Holt. Probably a sibling, or half sibling perhaps, and in the back of her head she had a vague memory that Gunsan had said something about Theo Tischler having inherited not only the brokerage firm but also his view of marriage from his long-dead father.

On the back side someone had written in a childish handwriting, “The gang of four. Sten, Theo, Kjell, and me.”

“You know what we’re going to do now?” said Jarnebring as he sealed the door to Eriksson’s apartment.

“I’m listening,” said Holt, looking almost as plucky as the little girl in the photo.

“We’re going to go back to the office, unplug the phone, lock the door, and sit down in peace and quiet and try to work out what the hell this is really about.”

“Sounds good,” said Holt. “Only I get to make coffee first.”

First they discussed Bäckström’s so-called homo lead in detail. On that they had somewhat different ideas. Holt simply didn’t believe in it. She was convinced that the murder was not about sex at all, regardless of what orientation anyone wanted to ascribe to their victim. Jarnebring was in agreement with her “in principle,” while at the same time he had a hard time letting go of the idea that Eriksson could have been completely uninterested in sexual matters.

“Personally I have a very hard time understanding that,” said Jarnebring. Despite what that Polish woman said, he thought.

“I can very well imagine that,” said Holt cheerfully. “But if you disregard yourself-”

“Wait now,” said Jarnebring. “Don’t interrupt me. I’ll buy what you’re saying about Eriksson being a disagreeable bastard who was snooping around all the time to try to get power over people-you only have to listen to his coworkers-but the one thing doesn’t rule out the other, does it?”

“I don’t really know,” said Holt. “I guess I’m not particularly good at guys.”

“You’ll just have to work on that,” said Jarnebring unperturbed. “Where was I… yes… there’s something about the act itself that I have a hard time letting go of. It’s completely obvious that the person who stabbed Eriksson was someone he both knew and trusted. Or in any case was not the least bit afraid of. But that can hardly have been Welander, Tischler, or his cleaning woman. Who was it then? We haven’t found anyone.”

“Some neighbor that we’ve missed,” Holt suggested. “Some casual acquaintance that we’ve also missed.”

“It doesn’t appear to be so,” said Jarnebring, shaking himself uncomfortably. “Eriksson seems to have been one highly suspicious bastard, not to mention anxious as hell. Here he sits on the couch drinking a highball in peace and quiet while our perpetrator calmly and quietly stabs him from behind, and then he crawls around on the floor and raises holy hell-if we’re to believe his neighbor-before he folds up and dies. Who the hell would he let get that close to him?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Holt, “but aren’t so-called gay murders usually dreadful stories? With a lot of aggravated assault, lots of emotions and hatred?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “As a rule it’s like that but far from always. They’re just like all other stoned, jealous, crazy people. But it wasn’t like that here.”

“What do you mean?” asked Holt.

“The whole thing seems both cowardly and random. Just a stab from behind… normally he wouldn’t even have died from it. And then the perpetrator darts into the bathroom and vomits, making a nice little mess. Doesn’t seem to be one of our motorcycle-riding friends exactly.”

“No,” said Holt, who had been thinking along the same lines.

“So what have we got?” Jarnebring continued.

A lonely person, a scared and suspicious person, a dissatisfied person, a person who felt unjustly treated by life, a person who should have had considerably more if there had been any justice in this world and if he himself had been the one to decide.

“A snoop,” said Jarnebring.

“Someone who wanted to acquire power through snooping, to get emotional power over people around him by ferreting out their weaknesses,” Holt continued.

“Who exploited the friendship and feelings of others, who even profited from them if he got the chance,” Jarnebring added.

“It’s certainly not out of the question that he extorted money from them if he felt sufficiently confident,” Holt concluded.

“Snoop, profiteer, extortionist,” Jarnebring summarized. Not the type I’d want to share an office with, he thought.

“I have a buddy,” said Jarnebring, sounding pretty much as if he was thinking out loud. “He’s also my best friend. We shared a front seat here on the squad a helluva lot of years ago… and a lot of other things for that matter, but we can leave that aside.”

“I can almost guess who it is,” said Holt. “What is it our colleagues at the riot squad call him? The Butcher from Ådalen? Police superintendent at the National Police Board, Lars Martin Johansson.”

“People here in the building talk too much shit,” said Jarnebring. “Do you know what’s remarkable about Lars Martin?”

“No,” said Holt. “Tell me. I’m listening.”

“He’s downright fiendish at figuring out how things stand,” said Jarnebring. “Sometimes it’s uncanny.”

“What are we waiting for?” said Holt, nodding toward the telephone. “Call him and get him over here.” It’s never too late to meet God, she thought, and if only half of what she had heard about Johansson were true then it was high time.

“I don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. Even if it would be fun to see Bäckström’s face, he thought. “One thing that Lars Martin always used to nag about where murder investigations are concerned is that you should forget about the motive.”

“You shouldn’t worry about the motive?” Holt was surprised.

“Nope,” said Jarnebring. “According to Lars Martin, the motive is either something obvious or else some out-and-out craziness that you would never figure out in a million years no matter how much you thought about it, and uninteresting in any event. Johansson used to say that it’s like the cherry on the cake, and the court can put it there if it’s really necessary once the cake is baked and ready. It doesn’t help us police officers. Other than in thrillers and TV series and that kind of shit.”

“Sounds maybe a little too simple,” Holt objected, being seriously fond of at least two police series that were showing on TV.

“Lars Martin is a very simple man,” said Jarnebring, smiling contentedly. “That is what’s so strange about the whole thing. I mean with the head that he has. Lars Martin is almost always right,” said Jarnebring. “We’ve talked through dozens of these kinds of cases over the years and I cannot think of a single time when he was wrong.”

“But,” said Holt noncommittally.

“But this time it seems to me that he actually is wrong,” said Jarnebring.

“What do you mean?” said Holt.

“What I mean is that just this once it suddenly seems to me that if we can only figure out why Eriksson was murdered then we’re also going to find who did it,” said Jarnebring. “Simple and obvious and in the twinkling of an eye we just go pick him up.”

“You think so,” said Holt.

“Yes,” Jarnebring repeated. “And do you know what’s even more annoying?”

“No,” said Holt. “Tell me.”

“I’m convinced we’ve already stumbled across our perpetrator, but we’ve simply missed him,” said Jarnebring.

“But there isn’t anyone,” said Holt with surprise. “Not Welander, Tischler, or Eriksson’s cleaning woman or-”

“Of course’s there’s someone,” Jarnebring interrupted. “It’s just that we haven’t seen him. It’s no more difficult than that.”

16 Wednesday, December 13, 1989

Up at the homicide squad they celebrated Lucia Day according to ancient custom, and during the rest of the day, also according to custom, not much was accomplished. With the exception of Gunsan, who was diligently active at her computer, most of the staff seemed to have sought isolation in their offices.

The flame of diligence was not shining with any marked intensity among the detective squad either. True, Jarnebring had seemed chipper enough when he arrived in the morning, but then he excused himself with a “I have to help the guys with something” and that’s the way it was.

Which left a somewhat listless Holt, who even before lunch was starting to feel the effects of the Lucia celebration at Nicke’s day care, and mostly for lack of anything better was going through the box with Eriksson’s telephone book, photo album, and other private notes.

If the perpetrator is here he’s hidden himself well, Holt thought gloomily, for she had a hard time letting go of what Jarnebring had said when they had been talking the day before. It would be simplest to go through the victim’s notes with someone who knew him, thought Holt, and because it was Bäckström who was the boss and careful about police etiquette, he was the one she would have to ask for permission.

Bäckström sounded surly and distant. But sure, if she wanted to waste her life on that kind of shit then he wasn’t going to stop her. True, he had personally investigated the whole matter, but if that had escaped her… then sure.

“Don’t forget to look extra carefully from A to Y,” said Bäckström. “On the other hand, you can forget about Z.”

“A to Y,” said Holt.

“Yes, in his telephone book. From anal acrobat on up. Look extra carefully under B, F, G, H, P, Q, R, S and-”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Holt interrupted guardedly.

“As in butt-surfer, fairy, gay boy, homophile, pederast, queen, rump gnome, sausage prince… and under V… V as in Vaseline. Call me right away if you find anything,” said Bäckström, who suddenly sounded a good deal more energetic.

“Thanks for the tip,” said Holt, hanging up the receiver. That man is not all there, she thought.

She could forget Welander. She spoke with the secretary at his office, and according to her he was away in connection with a feature story he was working on. He would be home right before Christmas. Thanks for that, thought Holt.

She had better luck with Tischler. When she called the number she found in Eriksson’s telephone book, he was the one who answered. Holt explained her business and asked him to suggest a time because he was certainly a very busy man.

“Now,” said Tischler. “Just give me five minutes so I have time to powder my nose. Do you have the address?”

Five minutes later she had arranged a lift with one of the detective squad’s cars, and in another ten minutes she was walking into his office.

“Please have a seat,” said Tischler, pointing to the antique armchair on the other side of his large desk. “Are you Inspector Anna Holt?”

“Yes,” said Holt. Strange man, she thought. Small, balding, at the same time rugged, his body almost square, with completely attentive eyes that looked at her with undisguised appreciation and without seeming to be the least bit embarrassed on that account.

“I’m Theo,” he said. “May I call you Anna?”

“That’s fine,” said Holt, smiling faintly. Watch yourself, Anna, she thought.

“What can I do for you, Anna?” said Tischler. “You can ask whatever you want, and keep in mind that I am immeasurably wealthy, extraordinarily talented, extremely entertaining, and when need be even quite charming.”

“I want you to help me go through these papers,” said Holt, taking out the file box with Eriksson’s telephone book, photo album, and private notes and setting them on his desk.

“That sounds so dreary,” said Tischler, sighing. “But we certainly have to start somewhere, and if it’s Kjell’s private notes that shouldn’t take all of our life together.

“I forgot to ask if you’d like anything to drink,” said Tischler as he glanced quickly through Eriksson’s handwritten notations. “Champagne, wine… perhaps a glass of fresh springwater.”

“Later,” said Holt. He’s rather dashing in his particular way, she thought.

“Ah,” said Tischler. “A ray of hope scatters the darkness around my unhappy, solitary soul, and as far as these notes are concerned,” he continued soberly, “it looks like Kjell’s own compulsive calculations of the most recent deals he’s made with us here at the firm. He has shown me hundreds of similar calculations over the years, and if you go through all those binders in his little office I’m sure you will find corresponding statements from us. And if you just give me a note from the prosecutor I’ll let our computers do it for you at once.”

“This is good enough,” said Holt. “You confirm what I already thought.”

“The harmony of souls,” said Tischler, sighing romantically. “The harmony of souls.”

The telephone book didn’t take much longer than that.

“This number in Hjorthagen was his old mother’s,” Theo explained. “Although she’s been dead for many years.”

“Did you ever meet her?” asked Holt.

“One time I actually ran into her and Kjell in town,” said Tischler. “He was on his way with her to the clinic at Odenplan. The old lady must have been over eighty. She was certainly no spring chicken when she had little Kjell.”

“Did you get any impression of her?” Holt asked.

“Frightful hag,” said Tischler, smiling happily. “I talked with her for only five minutes but that was enough for me.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Holt.

“Let me put it like this,” said Tischler. “She held her little Kjell in a veritable iron grip. If there’s anyone who puts a face on the dominating mother it would have been Kjell’s dear mama. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to understand that. Strong enough that he would still have had her telephone number even though it’s been many years since she died.”

“Do you have any idea who Eriksson’s father was?” Holt asked.

“No,” said Tischler. “If I were to venture a guess, I’d think after the coupling the old lady immediately murdered him and then devoured him.”

“Well then,” said Holt.

When Tischler saw the photo of the gang of four, he looked like a happy little schoolboy. Extremely charming, thought Holt.

“This is me, Sten, and Kjell. The little lady in braids is my delightful cousin-this must have been during her Pippi Longstocking period-and the photo was taken at the family’s so-called summer paradise out on Värmdö-an establishment completely in August Strindberg’s taste as far as family relationships are concerned.”

“Do you remember when this was taken?” Holt asked. He actually is rather entertaining, she thought.

“End of the sixties, early seventies. I don’t really recall. If you want we can drive out and take a look at the guest book. If we find Kjell then the mystery is solved. He was there only one time as far as I remember. We sailed out to the island on Papa’s boat. It was in Saltsjöbaden. Sten, Kjell, and I and a frightening quantity of jars and bottles.”

“So little Pippi wasn’t along,” said Holt.

“What a sight that would have been,” said Tischler. “No, not really, she was on land with her mom and dad and all the other relatives from nine to ninety who were always hanging around out there.”

“The gang of four?” asked Holt.

“Ah,” said Tischler. “You intend to convict me of youthful radicalism, Inspector. Chinese opposition politicians, conspiracies against the Great Helmsman Mao, and so on.”

“Why would I do that?” said Holt, letting her gaze sweep across the furniture in the room in which they were sitting.

“But here I’m afraid it was much simpler,” Tischler interrupted. “My dear cousin was at that time insanely fond of mysteries and adventure novels, she was rather precocious for her age, and the gang of four, I think, alludes to that novel by Conan Doyle… The Sign of the Four, I believe it’s called. The gang of four was a secret society that the master detective Sherlock Holmes was tracking down.”

“Who took the picture?” Holt asked, mostly to change the subject.

“It was taken with a self-timer, and my dear cousin got the camera from her kind uncle Theo, as she called me. She ran around for days taking the most unflattering pictures. At times there seems to have been sheer panic out there. I remember that her mother-my aunt, that is-scolded me. Personally I kept away as much as possible. It was hardly suitable for a young radical to spend his summer in the country villas of the bourgeoisie. But certainly sometimes I was weak, much too weak.”

“Maybe it’s not really so bad,” said Holt, smiling, “but I know what you’re talking about.” Maybe a little tedious, she thought.

“I know what you mean too and I confess unreservedly,” said Tischler. “All reasonable young people were radical at that time. We were socialists and communists with all the imaginable acronyms. We were always marching to the American embassy, and then there was quite a lot of balling too. Excellent for the health, both of them, and driving your old father up the wall was a pure bonus.”

“I saw in our papers that Kjell Eriksson was politically committed,” said Holt. Balling, she thought. When had she last heard someone use that word? A hundred years ago?

“Oh well,” said Tischler, smiling. “We actually called him the wet thumb, so maybe it wasn’t just commitment.”

“What do you mean?” asked Holt.

“There was a certain amount of opportunism, perhaps,” said Tischler thoughtlessly, “and perhaps certain problems with timing. I remember when he became a social democrat in the spring of 1979 and went on and on for a whole evening about how as soon as the election was over his union fortune would finally be made and now the bourgeoisie would be gone. Whereupon they won with a tie-breaking vote in parliament and stayed until 1982.”

“You were all young socialists at that time,” said Holt.

“I’m still a socialist,” said Tischler, sounding almost offended. “I’ve always had my heart to the left… and my wallet to the right,” he added with a broad smile. “As I said, we were all radicals back then, socialists or communists. For the same reason that today all reasonable people have left that behind them as soon as they realized where it was going.”

“But you’re not an opportunist,” said Holt.

“That is patently absurd,” said Tischler solemnly. “Hell, I was born with a whole set of silverware in my mouth. I’ve never needed to be an opportunist.”

“But Kjell Eriksson needed to be,” said Holt.

“Yes,” said Tischler, suddenly sounding serious. “And the way things were for him when he was growing up I have a very hard time holding that against him. People try to adapt themselves to the time they live in, and when times change their lives change too. There are very few of us for whom things are so ordained that we, like a strong current, can ride our own waves through the sea.”

“Nicely put,” said Holt.

“I know,” said Tischler, grinning. “I have to confess I swiped it from a book.”

“What do you say about having dinner in Paris, this evening?” said Tischler, keeping hold of Holt’s hand in his when she was about to leave.

“Unfortunately,” said Holt, smiling, “I’m afraid that won’t work. In another time and another life maybe,” she said.

“I live in hope,” said Tischler, looking at her with his very attentive eyes.

17 Thursday, December 14, 1989

At the investigation team’s last meeting before the weekend the opposing factions came into the open.

Out-and-out fucking mutiny, thought Bäckström as he marched out of the room, his face bright red, after they were through quarreling.

Bäckström started pushing his homo lead again, for the umpteenth time, and now even the three younger colleagues who were on loan from the uniformed police were starting to give audible expression to their doubts.

“You don’t think there’s a risk we’ll get locked in?” the first one of them began cautiously. She was the only woman of the three. “In school we learned that it was crucial to have a broad and open attitude to this sort of thing.”

Stick it up yours, you little sow, thought Bäckström, but he wasn’t going to say that when there were witnesses present, so it had to be something else instead.

“I’m listening,” Bäckström said smoothly. “What did you mean to propose instead?”

“I don’t know,” she continued hesitantly, “but what is there that actually indicates that Eriksson was homosexual?”

“Apart from what the forensic doctor and his two best friends for twenty years say,” sneered Bäckström, “is there anything in particular you’re missing? Sailor costume, Vaseline jar, mesh stockings way back in the dresser drawer? Some good porno tapes with well-oiled butt princes?” Or maybe you want Uncle Evert to grease your little mouse for you, he thought.

“Hang on,” said Jarnebring, giving Bäckström the same look he always did when he had decided that enough was enough. “Me and my colleague Holt here,” said Jarnebring, nodding toward her, “have turned Eriksson’s apartment inside out. If anyone thinks we’ve missed something, then he or she is welcome to try themselves. We haven’t found a damn thing that clearly indicates that Eriksson had any sexual orientation whatsoever. We’ve even checked his sheets-because colleague Wiijnbladh apparently forgot that small detail-and just like his cleaning woman for the past two years-because we’ve also talked with her-we haven’t found the slightest little trace of sperm whatsoever. Much less a strand of hair from anyone other than Eriksson himself, or anything that indicates that any sexual activity whatsoever has occurred in that bed or in that bedroom or in that apartment.

“Personally,” Jarnebring continued, raising his right hand slightly when he saw that Bäckström was thinking about saying something, “I would have felt considerably more comfortable if we’d found something of the sort you usually find. Not to mention all those accessories you keep carrying on about all the time.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Bäckström, “but wasn’t it you who had the idea that someone had cleaned up and removed some stuff from Eriksson’s apartment? A whole suitcase if I remember rightly?”

“I don’t know,” said Jarnebring. “That may be so, doesn’t need to be, but I think it was papers in any case. Not his old sheets or his corset, if he had something like that.” Jarnebring smiled wryly and exchanged a glance with Holt.

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Bäckström defensively, for there was something in the eyes of the gorilla-like psychopath that made him feel extremely ill at ease. “If you hear me, all I’m saying is what his two closest acquaintances have said-and what the forensic doctor said.”

“When I read the interviews,” said Jarnebring, “I wonder what was actually said. Welander possibly makes an insinuation, and that applies to Tischler too, even if otherwise he appears to be a motor mouth, but neither of them knows anything. One of them possibly thinks something; the other may possibly imagine something. After twenty years’ acquaintance. Talk about buddies.”

“The forensic doctor then,” said Bäckström. I didn’t know you could even read, thought Bäckström sourly, and who the hell gave that half-ape my interviews anyway?

“Don’t interrupt me,” said Jarnebring. “I’m getting to her. First let’s finish with our witnesses, and the way I see it there are three possibilities. Either it’s the way at least one of them suggests, in which case we’ve missed something. Or else it’s just that they’ve imagined things. Or else they’ve tried to get us to believe that their friend Eriksson was… well, homosexual. And if that’s the way it is, then it suddenly becomes damned interesting, considering what you’ve said to them.”

Never underestimate a colleague, even if he looks like something that lives in a cave and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, Holt thought, smiling almost sweetly at Jarnebring.

“My colleague Jarnebring and I are in complete agreement,” said Holt. “We’ve both read the interviews, and as you know I’ve talked with Tischler myself. He was not exactly taciturn, but it was mostly noise and little substance.” My colleague Jarnebring, thought Holt, who a moment earlier and in a most unequal manner felt that she had received a major distinction.

“Glad to hear you’re in agreement,” said Bäckström. “To return to reality for a moment, what do you say about the forensic doctor’s report? Has he only been imagining things too?”

“I’ve actually talked to her,” said Jarnebring. “I happened to be in the neighborhood on another errand and I ran into her at the forensic lab. Briefly, she hadn’t the faintest idea of what either Esprit or Wiijnbladh are running around fabricating. Esprit hasn’t had anything to do with Eriksson whatsoever. And he’s on sick leave. Because she is Esprit’s boss, she needs to talk to him as soon as he locates his cane and finds his way back to work.”

“You’ve talked with the forensic doctor?” said Bäckström. This is complete mutiny, he thought.

“Yes,” said Jarnebring, looking at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” said Bäckström quickly. The guy is lethal, he thought. How could someone like that run around loose? And what the hell was going on when he became a cop?

“Good,” said Jarnebring. “Where was I now… yes,” he continued. “She had also spoken with Wiijnbladh, and he simply asked her if there was anything to indicate that Eriksson might have been homosexual in the sense that it actually showed up in the forensic inspection and the autopsy. Do you know what she said?”

“No,” said Bäckström. Where the hell was Wiijnbladh anyway? Typical of the little rat to sneak away in a situation like this, he thought.

“No,” said Jarnebring. “She said no. And if you want I can trot over to Wiijnbladh and take it up directly with him.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Bäckström. Even if it would be funny because he would probably shit his pants, he thought.

“That’s good,” said Jarnebring. “Glad to know we’re in agreement.”

“I’m listening,” said Bäckström. “Give me a name.”

“He’s here,” said Jarnebring, tapping his finger on the investigation files binder on the table in front of him. “You can bet your sweet ass he’s here, but we’ve missed him because we’ve been looking for the wrong things.”

The guy is completely insane, thought Bäckström.

18 Friday, December 15, 1989

The reason that Wiijnbladh had been absent from the meeting the day before was that he was saddled with a poisoning. A medical student who lived at home with his elderly father had been having problems with his studies. He had missed a number of exams, fallen seriously behind, and after a period of brooding decided to solve his academic problems by lacing his dad’s breakfast yogurt with an ample dose of thallium. His success far exceeded the progress of his studies. Considered as a motive, this was an excellent illustration of Lars Martin Johansson’s thesis of the cherry on the cake.

Now the former future doctor was sitting in the jail at Kronoberg. On Wiijnbladh’s workbench at the tech squad was the bottle of thallium that the perpetrator had swiped from the chemistry department at the Karolinska Institute, and there was enough poison remaining to depopulate half the police headquarters on Kungsholmen. In Wiijnbladh’s pleasure-filled fantasies, this enchanted bottle with its death-bringing genie was a gift from above that probably, within the not too distant future, would solve his problems as well.

Wiijnbladh’s difficulties were not related to his studies, for he had never really devoted himself to any such things. Apart from six years of elementary school, less than a year at the old police academy, and a few weeklong courses for crime technicians, Wiijnbladh had studiously avoided all theoretical extravagances, and just like the majority of his colleagues on the squad he was firmly convinced that the only abilities worth the name were those he had acquired by practice.

“We have to distinguish between theory and practice the same way we distinguish between imagination and reality,” as his legendary boss Commissioner Blenke had so eloquently summarized the matter when, in connection with a review of the squad’s operations, he explained to the inspectors from the National Police Board why the entire library appropriation was spent on fingerprint powder.

Wiijnbladh’s problem was different, and relatively simple in the sense that it made up approximately 99 percent of all his problems.

It was bad enough that Wiijnbladh’s wife cheated on him quite openly, which was contrary to the basic idea. Worst of all, however, was that she preferred to do it with other police officers, and because this had been going on for a number of years there was not a division nowadays within the Stockholm Police Department that didn’t contain one or more coworkers who had put horns on their colleague Wiijnbladh.

Like his spiritual brother, the former medical student, after lengthy speculations Wiijnbladh had come to the conclusion that the only way to solve the problem was to eliminate his wife. Because Wiijnbladh deeply disliked both blunt trauma and knife attacks, was nauseated by their consequences, and obviously did not want to go to jail, he had decided to poison her. Murder by poison was a completely unknown practice at the tech squad where he worked, and the fact that the case of the medical student was solved was not due to dogged fieldwork by the squad’s collaborators but rather to the perpetrator himself, who in complete confidence had told an even larger number of classmates about his little caper with his dad.

What could be more certain than using poison, thought Wiijnbladh, for it was common knowledge that lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Wiijnbladh was now a rich man. He had had both motive and opportunity for a long time, but only one day ago he had secured the means required. So he was also a happy man and decided it would be best to wait for a long weekend or perhaps even until summer when all police officers worth the name were on vacation and only Bäckström and his constantly moonlighting fellow prisoners were left behind.

Chief Inspector Danielsson at the homicide squad did not sound equally happy when he called Jarnebring and asked if he wanted to have lunch with him out in town. Jarnebring had immediately figured out why he sounded like he did. But sure, lunch was still lunch. They had mashed potatoes and rutabaga with pickled pork and each had a light beer. Apart from the latter this was food for real policemen, and even before Danielsson stuck the fork into the large piece of meat on his plate he got to the point.

“You don’t need to say anything, Bo,” Danielsson grunted. “I talked with Gunsan this morning and she told me what happened at the meeting. I haven’t managed to get hold of that fat little shit because he’s hiding out as usual. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have done something to him I would regret.”

“Have you read the material?” asked Jarnebring.

“Some of it,” Danielsson nodded. “Then Gunsan filled in the rest. If I understood it right both Welander and Tischler have alibis. It’s completely ruled out that either of them were holding the knife?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head. “There isn’t a chance. Welander’s witnesses are too good for that, regardless of what you might think about their TV programs, and as far as Tischler is concerned Holt has checked with the airline and the personnel out at Arlanda.”

“Could they have used an accomplice?” asked Danielsson.

“Don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. “That seems both unlikely and far-fetched.”

“Why are you so in love with those two?” Danielsson wondered.

“Because I think they’re both lying,” said Jarnebring. “Even if they themselves are innocent of Eriksson’s murder, and perhaps didn’t even know that it would happen, I still get the idea that they know what went on.”

“Why do you think they’re lying then?” asked Danielsson. Perjury, conspiracy, protecting a criminal, he thought unhappily.

“Why in the name of common sense would two people like them keep associating year after year with a miserable character like Eriksson if it wasn’t because he had some kind of hold over them?” Jarnebring countered. “Take Tischler, for example. As far as I’m concerned he can have all the money in the world. I still don’t believe he helped Eriksson earn a few million just because he wanted to be nice to him. Without even having met Tischler, I really don’t think he’s the type.”

“Eriksson blackmailed them?” Danielsson looked questioningly at Jarnebring.

“I think that at the very least he had some kind of hold over them,” said Jarnebring.

“How do we open this up?” said Danielsson.

“Bring them in, lock them up, and pound the shit out of them,” said Jarnebring, smiling like a wolf. While the prosecutor climbs the walls, he thought.

“That won’t work,” said Danielsson, “and you know that as well as I do. So what do we do instead?”

“Don’t know,” said Jarnebring. Because if I had any idea we wouldn’t be sitting here, he thought.

“Let’s think about it,” said Danielsson. “We’ll talk after the weekend.”

19 Monday, December 18-Friday, December 22, 1989

For a Swedish police officer-which was the standard by which he should be measured-Detective Inspector Bo Jarnebring had been involved in a great many murder investigations. On a few occasions he had also happened to be present when a breakthrough occurred. That blessed moment when all the question marks straightened themselves out, when you went from total darkness to radiant insight, when the entire investigation force could bask in glory. All within the course of a few hours.

Even more often, and especially in recent years, he had been involved with just the opposite. The laborious, hopeless, drawn-out process by which you didn’t move forward no matter how long you kept trudging; in which suggestions and tips, initiatives, drive, and ordinary, simple, routine work dried up and ran out, and everyone’s combined efforts, all the good suggestions and sure tips as well as ordinary delusions, wild chances, pure shots in the dark, and completely excusable mistakes were transformed at last into mere paper, all of which ended up in the name of justice in the same binders on the shelf for unsolved crimes.

So too this week in December 1989 Jarnebring once again experienced how a murder investigation quietly went dormant and died, and his new colleague, Inspector Anna Holt, was involved in the same thing for the first time.

As early as Tuesday morning their boss at the detective squad called Danielsson and said he had to have his detectives back. That he completely understood his colleague Danielsson’s problems, but he cared even more about the ones that were being heaped on his own desk in a growing mass. Danielsson didn’t even try to protest. He just took a quick glance at his bookshelf and ascertained that there would surely be room to squeeze in one more binder.

On Wednesday evening the twentieth of December yet another murder occurred in a porn shop on Söder. The next day the tabloids had already made it the fifth in a series in which Eriksson appeared as victim number four. During the past year an unknown perpetrator had knifed three men, all of whom had in common that they worked in various stores that sold sex merchandise, showed porno films, and sometimes went the whole way and broke the law against procurement. This was bad enough in itself, especially as most of the details argued for it being the same perpetrator on all three occasions, but every thinking police officer also realized that the murder of Kjell Eriksson did not belong in that grouping because-simply put-there “was zero in common with the porn murders.”

With one exception no one on the homicide squad even considered linking the lapsing Kjell Eriksson investigation with the porn murder investigation. The exception was Bäckström, who went head-to-head with Danielsson in his office on Thursday morning. Bäckström had discovered that the porn murderer’s third victim (a) was working in a shop that catered to homosexual customers, and (b) was homosexual himself, and for the detective inspector the whole thing was suddenly as plain as the nose on his face.

During the first five minutes Danielsson just sat quietly and glared at Bäckström while the vein on his temple wriggled like a worm just set on a hook. Then he suddenly got up and despite his bad knees leaped over the desk to grab his coworker by the throat, finally put an end to the madness, and get a little needed calm in his own existence. Bäckström managed to dodge him, wriggled out through Danielsson’s door, was transformed into a gazelle, and fled down the corridor of the squad offices while Danielsson was hanging on to the door handle and howling at him as he disappeared into the stairwell of the police station.

“I’m going to kill you, you fat little bastard!” Danielsson roared, and despite the fact that this actually had nothing to do with it, in reality it also put an end to the investigation of the murder of Kjell Eriksson.

Danielsson put yet another binder on his shelf, but considering “all the old shit that was already there” it was basically more of the same. Besides, it would soon be time to take off for the holidays. Personally he would be going away over Christmas and New Year’s, and when he came back he could start counting the days until retirement.

20 Wednesday, December 27, 1989

On Wednesday the twenty-seventh of December, Wiijnbladh received a courier package from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science in Linköping. In it was the hand towel that his colleague Bäckström had found at the bottom of the laundry basket in Eriksson’s apartment on Rådmansgatan.

With the package also came a written report that confirmed what Wiijnbladh had already figured out by using his nose, namely that someone had vomited in the hand towel. Knowing that a relatively short time before vomiting this individual evidently had consumed a meal consisting of fish, potatoes, vegetables, and a cup of coffee would scarcely advance the investigation, thought Wiijnbladh. Nor would the findings that the hand towel also bore traces of a lot of chemical rubbish that no normal person would have the faintest idea about, but that he, through practical experience, knew was always found on hand towels and similar places where people dried themselves off.

Stuck-up academics. What use are such people in the police department? thought Wiijnbladh sourly, setting both the package and the report aside. He himself had more important things to do. For some time he had been gathering considerable information about the element thallium. Unfortunately this research was still only theoretical and thereby unusable in a purely practical sense, but soon… soon, thought Wiijnbladh, it would be time to take the next step.

Criminal Inspector Bo Jarnebring went to work on Wednesday morning and would be filling in as the on-duty chief inspector until the day before New Year’s Eve, after which he had requested vacation to make the life-changing move and enter into marriage with his beloved fiancée. He had forgiven his best friend for secretly getting there ahead of him, and police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson and his spouse would be witnesses and honored guests at the wedding.

Jarnebring had not given further thought to the now dormant investigation of the murder of Kjell Göran Eriksson. Naturally he’d heard the story about Bäckström, who had unfortunately saved his skin owing to Danielsson’s bad knees; it was already a classic in the Kronoberg block. Jarnebring had even called Danielsson to offer his own legs in the event Danielsson considered it necessary to try again. Even though it had been more than twenty years since he last represented Sweden on the national team in the four-hundred-meter relay, he did not think catching Bäckström would pose any serious problems.

“On one condition,” Danielsson had chuckled. “That you just catch the bastard for me. I want to tear him apart myself.”

Because there was a lot to do despite the Christmas week lull, Jarnebring had lunch at the restaurant in the courtyard of police headquarters. It was basically empty, so he chose a table in a far corner where he could leaf through the newspaper in peace and quiet with his coffee. As he was sitting there an older colleague who worked with the patrol cars came up and asked if he might sit down and exchange a few words.

Wasn’t his name Stridh? thought Jarnebring, searching in his memory files. He never forgot a face but it was starting to take longer to come up with the names.

“Stridh,” said Stridh and sat down. “We met when you were the head of the bureau at Östermalm, if you remember that.”

“Have a seat,” said Jarnebring, nodding at a vacant chair.

Stridh had an errand. Jarnebring had figured that out even before his colleague sat down, but it had taken a good deal of hemming and hawing and beating around the bush before he spit it out.

“Do you remember our colleague Persson who worked in break-ins, who went to SePo later?” Stridh asked.

Do I remember? thought Jarnebring, nodding. A real policeman and one of the surliest colleagues he’d ever met.

“I remember him,” said Jarnebring. “Why do you ask?”

“I had a visit from him last week,” said Stridh, leaning forward as he said this. “Strange,” he added, shaking his head.

“I’m listening,” said Jarnebring, setting aside his newspaper.

Stridh twisted uncomfortably and looked around.

“Actually I can’t say anything,” said Stridh, “but I thought I should talk to you anyway.”

Do it then, thought Jarnebring, even if he wouldn’t have done it if he had been in Stridh’s place and Persson had told him to keep his mouth shut. Persson was not the type you did that sort of thing to, thought Jarnebring.

“Am I suspected of spying?” Jarnebring asked, grinning.

“No, not at all,” said Stridh deprecatingly. “It wasn’t about you at all.”

“What did he want then?” said Jarnebring. I don’t have all day, he thought.

“He wanted to talk about the West German embassy,” said Stridh. “Yes, you were there too, I guess,” he added. “Didn’t you almost get shot by the way?”

“People talk a lot of shit,” said Jarnebring.

“Yes, that was a dreadful story,” said Stridh, almost looking as though he was thinking out loud.

“What does this have to do with me?” asked Jarnebring. There must still be a hundred officers here in the building who were there at the West German embassy, he thought.

“Nothing so far as I understand,” said Stridh, shaking his head. “It was about another matter. That homosexual murder on the thirtieth of November,” said Stridh. “Isn’t that your investigation?”

“Bäckström’s,” said Jarnebring curtly. It’s just senseless how much shit gets talked about here in the building, he thought. “It’s Bäckström’s investigation. If you want to talk about it, then he’s the one you should take it up with. I’ve been taken off the case.”

“Bäckström,” said Stridh hesitantly. “Isn’t that a real misfortune?”

“Do Turks have brown eyes?” said Jarnebring, smiling.

“I know what you mean,” said Stridh, and he smiled too. “Although I actually read somewhere that lots of Turks have blue or gray eyes.

Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

No, thought Jarnebring.

“What can I help you with?” said Jarnebring briefly, sneaking a glance at the clock to be on the safe side.

“Here I sit taking up your time,” said Stridh, shaking his head. “Most of what you hear is just gossip,” he continued. “But this is still not cleared up… that murder from the thirtieth of November I mean,” Stridh clarified.

“No,” said Jarnebring. If it had been, I’d have heard about it, he thought.

“Was he homosexual then,” asked Stridh, “the victim, that is?”

“People talk too much,” said Jarnebring, shrugging his shoulders, “but if you ask our colleague Bäckström, he has no doubt had that thought.”

“Him, yes,” said Stridh. “But what about you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” asked Jarnebring.

Stridh sighed again and looked almost unhappy.

“You don’t think it was something political then?” Stridh asked carefully.

Political, thought Jarnebring. “What do you mean?” he asked. What is this guy after? he thought.

“Whatever. Let’s forget it,” Stridh said, shaking his head deprecatingly.

I see, thought Jarnebring, looking at the clock. We’ll forget it. What’s five minutes when you have an entire life, he thought.

“Well,” said Stridh, sighing. “That West German business was a shocking story. They were caught napping out there at the embassy. The ones who worked there I mean.”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “I guess it was all a little too easy for my taste.”

“It was in the newspapers that the guys at SePo had received a tip long before that something was up,” said Stridh. “But apparently the Germans didn’t pay attention.”

“No,” said Jarnebring, getting up. “That doesn’t seem to have worked too well.” Or else the guys at SePo forgot to mention it to them, he thought.

“Yes, really,” said Stridh, moving his head and sounding mostly as though he was talking to himself. “I was thinking what Churchill used to say during the war…”

“Well,” said Jarnebring. “If you’ll excuse me-”

“Sure,” said Stridh, and he got up too. “I’m the one who should say excuse me for disturbing you during your break. What I was thinking of was what Churchill used to say: ‘He who is forewarned is also forearmed.’ ‘He who is forewarned is also forearmed,’ ” Stridh declaimed again. “Although that doesn’t seem to have applied to the Germans exactly,” he declared, shaking his head.