He Who Kills the Dragon

2

Even if there was more than enough proof in both the neighbors’ statements and the information pulled from various registers, the evidence provided by the two forensics experts had given further support to the argument.

‘A typical drunken murder, if you ask me, Bäckström,’ the older of the pair, Peter Niemi, summarized the case when he presented his and his colleague’s findings at the same preliminary meeting.

The tie, saucepan lid, and hammer all belonged to the victim and had been in the flat before the unfortunate sequence of events began. The tie had simply been found around the victim’s neck. Under the collar, as per usual, but in this case pulled a couple inches too tight and, just to be sure, tied across his throat with a basic reef knot.

Two people, one of them the victim himself, to judge by the fingerprints, appeared to have spent the hours leading up to the murder eating and drinking together in the same flat. Empty bottles of spirits and export-strength lager, beer and vodka glasses, the remains of a meal on two plates on the table in the living room, together with matching scraps of food found in the small kitchen, all provided evidence that the victim’s last meal had consisted of that old Swedish classic, pork chops and kidney beans. The beans were evidently bought as a ready-meal, to judge from the plastic packaging found in the bin, from a local supermarket earlier that day. Then, before they were served, they had been heated up in the cast-iron pan whose lid the killer had used to hit his host repeatedly around the head later that same evening.

The coroner had reached much the same conclusions. He had passed these on to the forensics expert who had been at the postmortem, since he himself was busy with more important matters when the police team were due to hold their first meeting. His definitive findings would take another week or so to appear in writing, but the usual basic dissection and a trained eye were enough to provide a preliminary oral report.

‘Our unfortunate victim was what I believe you gentlemen of the police call a pisshead,’ the coroner had explained, because, in contrast to present company, he was an educated man who was expected to choose his words carefully.

Taken as a whole, all of this — the neighbors’ statements, the sad little notes about the victim in official files, the findings from the scene of the crime, the coroner’s initial report — provided the police with all they really needed to know. Two pissheads, previously acquainted with each other, had met for a bite to eat and considerably more to drink, then had fallen into an argument about one of the many pointless matters that made up their private shared history. And one of them had brought their evening together to an end by beating the other to death.

It was no more complicated than that. There was a reasonably good expectation of finding the culprit among the victim’s closest circle of like-minded acquaintances, and inquiries were already under way. Cases like this were cleared up nine times out of ten, and the papers were usually on the public prosecutor’s desk within a month.

A purely routine case, in other words, and it didn’t occur to any of the officers of the Solna Police who participated in that first meeting to call in specialist expertise from outside — from, for instance, the psychological profiling unit of the National Criminal Investigation Department, or even the National Police Board’s own professor of criminology, who happened to live just a few blocks away from the victim.

Nor had any of these experts been in contact of their own accord, which was a good thing, since they were bound to have certified that things were exactly as everyone already knew they were. Now at least there was no danger of their being caught with their trousers down in terms of scientific evidence.

But when it came down to it, it turned out that all of the above — everything that had been deduced from the accumulation of criminological evidence, tried and tested police experience, and the good old gut instinct that all real policemen develop over time — was completely and utterly wrong.

‘Okay, give me the basics, Bäckström,’ Anna Holt, Bäckström’s boss, the police chief of the Western District, said when Bäckström ran through the case for her the day after the murder.

‘Just your average pisshead,’ Bäckström said, nodding solemnly.

‘Okay, you’ve got five minutes,’ Holt said, and sighed. She had several other items on her agenda, at least one of which was considerably more important than Bäckström’s case.