He Who Kills the Dragon

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A gravy-stained tie, a cast-iron saucepan lid, and a basic upholstery hammer with a broken wooden handle. These were the three most striking things found by the forensics team of the Solna Police during their preliminary investigation of the crime scene. But you didn’t have to be a forensics expert to work out that these three things had, in all probability, been used to kill the victim. Anyone with a pair of eyes and a strong stomach could figure that out.

As far as the upholstery hammer with the broken handle was concerned, it became clear relatively quickly that — with, if possible, even greater probability — those initial impressions had been wrong, and that the hammer at least hadn’t been used when the perpetrator killed his victim.

As the forensics team got on with their work, the investigating officers had done what they had to. They’d knocked on the doors of people living nearby, asking about the victim and if anyone had seen anything that could be connected to what had happened. One woman, a civilian under contract with the police, had set to work finding out whatever she could from her computer — contracted civilians usually took care of that line of inquiry.

It didn’t take long before they had uncovered the tragic story of the most common murder victim in Swedish criminal history during the one and a half centuries that records had been kept. Probably considerably longer than that, since court records from as far back as the early medieval period show the same picture as the legal records of industrialized society. The classic Swedish murder victim, if you like. In today’s terminology: ‘A single, middle-aged man, socially marginalized, with a serious alcohol dependency.’

‘Your standard pisshead, basically’ was how Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström, head of the preliminary investigation for the Solna Police, described the victim to his boss after the initial meeting of the team on the case.