He Who Kills the Dragon

11.

At ten o’clock on Friday morning Bäckström had a visitor in his office. It was Niemi’s colleague, Jorge ‘Chico’ Hernandez, who asked for an audience with the head of the investigation.

Darkies, darkies, darkies, Bäckström thought, sighing heavily somewhere deep inside. He would never dream of saying it out loud. Not after all the stories he had heard about Peter Niemi, who was also a foreigner, a bastard Finn, and a northern foreigner, to be more precise, and evidently best friends with the twenty-years-younger Hernandez.

‘Sit yourself down, Chico,’ Bäckström said, nodding toward the chair on the other side of the desk as he leaned back in his own chair and knotted his hands over the sad remnants of his stomach. He must have lost at least ten kilos, he thought, as he experienced a certain vague anxiety about what was happening to the body that had always been his temple.

‘I’m listening,’ he went on, smiling and nodding encouragingly to his visitor. Even though darkies shouldn’t be allowed to become police officers. Maybe it was because of those cheese rolls, he thought.

Hernandez had a fair amount to report. During the previous evening he had been present when the coroner conducted the postmortem on their murder victim, and he began by confirming his colleague Niemi’s estimate of the body’s height and weight.

‘One hundred and eighty-eight tall, and one hundred and twenty-two kilos,’ Hernandez said. ‘Peter’s good at that sort of thing.’

Why the hell would I want to know that? Bäckström thought.

‘Which might be worth bearing in mind when we’re thinking about what our perpetrator is capable of,’ Hernandez concluded. ‘It takes a fair amount of strength to handle a body that large and that heavy.’

Apart from being overweight and having an impressively large liver, Danielsson had been in surprisingly good shape. No significant comments from the coroner about either his heart and lungs or his circulatory system. Normal prostate enlargement and all the other things that come with age. Otherwise not much, considering the life he had led.

‘If only he’d stopped drinking for a couple months each year and given his liver a chance to recover in between binges, he’d probably have lived past eighty,’ Hernandez said.

Like a mountain stream in spring, Bäckström thought, nodding in agreement. Maybe we ought to make sausages out of the bastard after all. Maybe cognac sausages, considering the number of years Director Danielsson had been marinating.

‘But we want to amend what we said about the upholstery hammer,’ Hernandez said. ‘Judging from the X-rays of the skull, there are no injuries matching the hammer, and that goes for both the head of the hammer and the other side, the curved bit with a split in it that you use to pull out nails. Not only that, but the break in the shaft is on the wrong side. Not on the side you use to hit nails in with. The break’s on the other side, the same side as the claw, and that suggests to us that the perpetrator managed to break the shaft when he was trying to pull something out using the claw. The problem is that we can’t find any evidence of this inside the flat.’

‘Something he took away with him?’ Bäckström suggested. ‘A cash box, maybe?’ Containing Danielsson’s old milk teeth and a two-kronor coin he was left by the kind tooth fairy, he thought.

‘Something like that, yes,’ Hernandez agreed with a nod. ‘For the time being we’re thinking it was probably one of those leather briefcases with a brass lock, hinges, and bolts, or some other gold-colored metal. There are traces on the claw of the hammer that suggest that. A small flake, maybe a millimeter long, that we’re pretty sure is leather. Light-brown leather. There’s a fragment of something that we think might be brass on the sharpened edge of the claw. It might have got there when the claw scratched the lock. We’ve sent it to the National Lab, since we don’t have the right equipment here to determine exactly what it is.’

‘But you didn’t find the briefcase itself?’

‘No,’ Hernandez said. ‘If we’re right, he probably took it with him to open it in peace and quiet.’

‘Noted,’ Bäckström said, making a note in his little black book, just to be on the safe side. ‘Anything else?’

‘To go back to the saucepan lid,’ Hernandez said. ‘It’s cast-iron, and the outside is covered with blue enamel. It matches a pan found on the stove in the flat. Twenty-eight centimeters in diameter, with a handle in the middle. It weighs almost two kilos. The victim received at least six heavy blows with the lid. The first one hit him high up on the right side of his head. It was administered from behind him, off to one side, and we believe the victim received the blow as he stepped out of the toilet door. Danielsson falls forward with his head toward the living room, his feet toward the front door, ending up on his stomach or possibly his side. Then he receives another two blows to the back of the head. Then the perpetrator must have turned him over and finished him off with three blows to the face—’

‘How can you be so sure of the order?’ Bäckström interrupted.

‘You can never be absolutely certain, but this is the picture that best matches the fractures on his skull and other observations of the part of the hall where it happened. The way the hall looks, the splatter pattern and so on. There are also blood, strands of hair, and fragments of bone on the saucepan lid. And the fact that the lid fits the injuries on the victim’s head. Our perpetrator isn’t just strong. To judge by the angle of the blows, he’s tall as well. And we think he was seriously upset with the victim. The first blow on its own was fatal. He may have administered the two to the back of the head and neck just to be sure, so to speak, so we’re prepared to let him get away with those. But the three to the face, at least three blows, just seem to be over the top. Especially as he must have put the saucepan lid down to roll the body over, and then picked it up once more before he started hitting him again.’

‘So how tall was he?’ Bäckström said.

‘Danielsson was one meter eighty-six. So at a guess, at least one meter eighty. If you ask me, another ten centimeters on that. One meter ninety.’

‘Assuming he wasn’t a professional basketball player,’ Bäckström teased. ‘He could have gone for him with his arm raised above his head, you know, the way they throw the ball? Or a tennis player. Serving a blow with a saucepan lid.’

‘The concentration of professional basketball players in the immediate vicinity is presumably relatively low,’ Hernandez stated without the slightest trace of a smile. ‘The same is probably true of tennis players,’ he added, puckering his lips slightly.

Funny lad, Bäckström thought. Finally, a darkie with a sense of humor.

Hernandez changed the subject. He started to talk about the Polish carpenter’s discovery in the trash bin.

‘We’re waiting to hear from the National Forensics Lab if the blood matches that of the victim. If it does, then the find is undoubtedly very interesting indeed. But we didn’t manage to find any prints. Not on the raincoat, the washing-up gloves, or the slippers. The size of the raincoat and slippers fits Danielsson. Large, broad across the chest, size-forty-four shoes.’

‘How many months do you think it’ll be before we hear back from the lab, then?’ Bäckström wondered.

‘We’ve managed to nag them into making this a priority,’ Hernandez said. ‘After the weekend, is the latest our colleagues in Linköping have told us. To summarize what we’ve got so far,’ Hernandez went on, ‘we’re probably talking about a perpetrator who is physically strong, well above average height, with a serious dislike of his victim. If the clothes turn out to match, and if they belonged to Danielsson like the saucepan lid and the upholstery hammer, he seems to be pretty experienced. He puts on the victim’s raincoat to avoid getting blood on his clothes. He takes off his own shoes and puts on the victim’s slippers for the same reason. He puts on the victim’s washing-up gloves so that he doesn’t leave fingerprints. The only thing that bothers us is the behavior of the victim’s dinner guest, because at an earlier stage of the evening he left a mass of prints all over bits of crockery, glasses, cutlery. And he doesn’t seem to have made any effort to get rid of those at all.’

‘Doesn’t bother me. Not in the slightest,’ Bäckström said, shaking his head. ‘Because that’s what pissheads are like. First he sits and has a drink with Danielsson. Then he suddenly turns on him and when Danielsson goes to the toilet he kicks off his shoes; grabs a pair of slippers, a raincoat, and washing-up gloves; picks up the saucepan lid; and sets to work as soon as Danielsson steps out of the bathroom and is standing there swaying and trying to do up his fly. He’s probably already forgotten everything that went before.’

‘Peter and I were also thinking along those lines,’ Hernandez said, nodding. ‘But we’ve also been wondering whether this is more than just a question of spontaneous anger — if there’s a more rational motive.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the fact that he stole from him,’ Hernandez said.

‘Exactly,’ Bäckström agreed with heavy emphasis. ‘Which just goes to show what a fucking moron he is. Stealing from someone like Danielsson. It’s like trying to cut a bald man’s hair.’

‘I’m afraid that probably wasn’t the case on this occasion,’ Hernandez said. ‘In the top right-hand drawer of Danielsson’s desk we found a bundle of winning slips from Solvalla. All of them cashed in and held together neatly in date order with an elastic band. The top slip is from the meeting out at Valla the same afternoon and evening that Danielsson was murdered — the day before yesterday, in other words. He won twenty thousand six hundred and twenty kronor, and the winnings were paid out from the cashier at Solvalla immediately after the race. It was the first race of the V65 coupon, to be precise, at half past six that evening. But we haven’t found the money. His wallet, for instance, which was on the desk in his bedroom, was completely empty, apart from a few business cards.’

‘Well, I never,’ Bäckström said. ‘Well, I never,’ he repeated. Must have been a serious win for someone like Danielsson, he thought.

‘A couple more things,’ Hernandez said. ‘Things we’ve found, and things we haven’t found but should have.’

‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said, grabbing a pen and his little black book.

‘We’ve found a betting slip but no money, we’ve found traces of what we think was a briefcase but no briefcase. We’ve found one open and one sealed carton of Viagra. Written out to Karl Danielsson using a repeat prescription that we’ve also found. Six pills remaining out of eight. According to the details on the prescription, he’s had another eight pills since the start of April. We also found a box of condoms, containing ten originally, but there were only two left.’

‘So our victim had at least two strings to his bow. Even if he needed help getting his instrument tuned,’ Bäckström said with a grin.

‘We found two keys to a safe-deposit box, but we haven’t located the box yet,’ Hernandez went on. ‘But we didn’t find a cell phone, or a computer, or any credit cards. No bills for any of those either, for that matter. We found an ordinary pocket diary with a few notes in it. But no other diary, no photos, no personal correspondence.’

‘A typical drunk,’ Bäckström said. ‘What would someone like that want a cell for? To call and order home delivery of drink? And who’d give a credit card to an old lush? They’re not that stupid, even in Social Services. Anything else?’ he added.

‘There were several bundles of taxi receipts on his desk,’ Hernandez said.

‘Mobility allowance. I daresay all alcoholics get that in our glorious socialist paradise, and the rest of us have to pay for it.’

‘No,’ Hernandez said. ‘No chance. They’re just normal receipts. I have an idea that he used to trade in them.’

‘What, taxi receipts? What on earth for? Are they edible?’ Bäckström said.

‘I think he knew a taxi driver, and bought his unclaimed receipts for maybe twenty percent of the amount on them, and then sold them on for fifty percent or so to someone who could claim them as tax-deductible expenses for their business. Presumably something he learned during all those years he spent working as an accountant, and he’s bound to have a few contacts left from those days,’ Hernandez said.

‘I thought old drunks collected empty bottles and cans,’ Bäckström said.

‘Maybe not this one,’ Hernandez said.

Whatever the hell this has to do with anything or the cost of vodka, Bäckström thought with a shrug.

‘Was that everything?’ he asked.

‘Yes. That’s pretty much everything so far,’ Hernandez said, standing up. ‘You and your colleagues will be getting a written report covering what Peter and I have come up with to date, including a number of pictures of the crime scene and the postmortem later today. You’ll get it by e-mail.’

‘Good,’ Bäckström said. Astonishingly good, considering it was the result of collaboration between a bastard Finn and a strutting tango dancer, he thought.