He Who Kills the Dragon

21.

The following day, after lunch on Tuesday, the investigating team held their third meeting, and everyone, including the two forensics experts, was present. Just as the meeting was due to start, the head of the crime unit in Solna, Superintendent Toivonen, walked into the room. He nodded to the others with a grim glare before sitting down at the back of the room.

Nine people, one of whom is a proper police officer, Bäckström thought. Apart from him, one purebred bastard Finn, one idiot Lapp — practically a bastard Finn — one Chilean, one Russian, one pretty little darkie, one attack dyke, one retarded folk dancer, and dear old Lars Woodentop Alm, seriously mentally handicapped from birth. Where the fuck is this force heading? he thought.

‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘Let’s get going. How’s the search of Stålhammar’s flat going?’ Bäckström nodded encouragingly to Niemi.

It was almost finished, according to Niemi. To make a long story short, they hadn’t found anything that incriminated Stålhammar. No unexplained amounts of cash, no trousers with traces of blood on them, no briefcase showing any trace of an upholstery hammer.

He must have hidden everything and made sure to clean up after him. He’s probably buried the dough under a rock, Bäckström thought. Just what you’d expect from an idiot like him.

‘What little we have been able to find actually seems to back up Roly’s own version,’ Niemi said.

‘Like what?’ Bäckström asked. Who’d have thought it? So now we’re calling our suspect Roly, are we? he thought.

In the bedroom they had found evidence from Stålhammar’s trip to Malmö and Copenhagen on the bed. A half-unpacked sports bag containing clothes, clean and dirty all jumbled together; a shaving kit; and a half-empty bottle of Gammel Dansk. All the usual things that someone like Stålhammar might be expected to bring home after a short trip to Malmö and Copenhagen.

‘Plus a bundle of receipts,’ Niemi said. ‘Return train tickets to Malmö, then return tickets to Copenhagen. Receipts from five bars in Malmö and Copenhagen. A dozen or so taxi receipts, along with several others. In total they come to about nine thousand Swedish kronor. The times he gave us all match the evidence pretty well.’

‘All of which he collected to give to his good friend Karl Danielsson the receipt trader. As soon as he got home,’ Bäckström said with a grin. How fucking stupid can anyone be? he thought.

‘According to what he says,’ Alm interjected. ‘I’ve spoken to him about it, and that’s what he claims. But I can see what you’re thinking, Bäckström.’

‘So what did you do after that?’ Bäckström said with a smile.

‘I spoke to the woman down in Malmö who he was with. Telephone interview,’ Alm said. ‘I asked her the same thing. She said spontaneously that she had also noticed and had asked him about it when they were in Copenhagen. Why was Stålhammar suddenly hoarding a load of old receipts? He told her he had an old friend at home in Stockholm that he gives them to.’

‘Who’d have thought it?’ Bäckström said, smiling happily. ‘Roly-Stoly starts making a fuss about collecting receipts, whereupon his little girlfriend wonders what he wants them for. Because presumably he wasn’t saving them for his former employers.’

‘Like I said,’ Alm said, ‘I can see what you’re thinking.’

‘Have you got anything else?’ Bäckström asked. Before I roll up my sleeves and beat the shit out of Roly Stålhammar, he thought.

‘That business with the timings. Those fifty minutes when he says he was sitting at home thinking before he called Marja Olsson down in Malmö. He definitely made the call. At twenty-five minutes past eleven in the evening he called on his landline to Marja Olsson’s landline.’

‘Leaving forty-five minutes in which to think lofty thoughts,’ Bäckström concluded. ‘What have you come up with for them, then?’

‘To start with I did a test walk from number one Hasselstigen, via the trash bin on Ekensbergsgatan where the clothes were found, home to Stålhammar’s flat on Järnvägsgatan. It takes at least a quarter of an hour unless you want to jog.’

‘Leaving thirty minutes,’ Bäckström said. ‘More than enough to smash Danielsson’s skull in. Steal his money and change into clean clothes. Chucking the raincoat, slippers, and washing-up gloves on the way home.’

‘True enough,’ Alm agreed. ‘The problem is his neighbor. If he’s telling the truth, then it doesn’t fit,’ he said.

I knew it, Bäckström thought. The group effort to get legendary old Roly off the hook at any cost was evidently well under way.

The neighbor’s name was Paul Englund, seventy-three. A retired caretaker at the Naval History Museum in Stockholm, and the same man who had threatened to call the police about Bäckström and Stigson. Englund had one son, who worked as a photographer at the Expressen newspaper, and the previous evening he had called his dad and told him his next-door neighbor was being held on suspicion of murder. He didn’t suppose that the neighbor in question had just happened to leave a spare key with his dad, so that the son could take some nice pictures of the murderer’s pad?

Mr. Englund had dashed his son’s hopes. He didn’t have a key. Stålhammar was a noisy alcoholic and the worst sort of neighbor. He was delighted with every minute he didn’t have to share the same building with him, and early the following morning he had called the Solna Police to share his observations of Stålhammar on the evening of Danielsson’s murder. Now that he finally had the chance to get rid of him for good. If he had realized the consequences of what he planned to say, it’s quite possible that he would have chosen to stay quiet instead.

‘What does he have to say, then?’ Bäckström asked.

‘That he saw Stålhammar come in through the door of the building they both live in at approximately quarter to eleven on Wednesday evening. He’s certain it was Stålhammar he saw, but because he doesn’t like him very much and usually avoids talking to him, he waited for a minute or so before going inside himself.

‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘How the hell can he be so sure, and what was he doing out in the middle of the night? How can he be so sure it was quarter to eleven? And was he even sober?’ Bäckström said. ‘It’s probably the same old story. He’s got his days mixed up. Or got the time wrong by an hour or so. Or seen someone else entirely. Or he’s just making the whole thing up because he wants to seem important, or because he wants to fuck up Stålhammar.’

‘Let’s not get carried away, Bäckström,’ Alm said, loving every second of this. ‘If what the witness says is true, then Stålhammar could hardly have murdered Danielsson. At the very least, things can’t have happened the way we’ve been assuming. Not immediately after half past ten that evening.

‘To work through this in order,’ Alm went on. ‘Every evening after the late news on TV Four, the one that ends with the weather at half past ten in the evening, Englund takes his dachshund out. He always goes for the same walk round the block, and it always takes him and the dog about quarter of an hour. But not that evening, because when he is about to turn right, up onto the esplanade, he gets stopped by a uniformed police officer who more or less shoos him back the way he came. So back he goes. Reluctantly, because he is as curious as the next man. But when nothing happens, he stops again down on Järnvägsgatan and listens for a few minutes, then carries on walking home. When he reaches the block next to his, some twenty meters from his own door, he sees Stålhammar go inside the building.’

‘What were our uniformed colleagues up to there, then?’ Bäckström asked.

‘They’d cordoned off the esplanade because they were preparing a raid on a flat a hundred meters down the road. The result of a tip-off about someone who was suspected of involvement in the shootings and armed robbery out at Bromma a couple days before.’

‘The timings,’ Bäckström said. ‘What does this tell us about the timings?’

‘To start with, it must have been after half past ten in the evening of Wednesday, May fourteenth. There’s no other possibility. The raid started then, with our uniformed colleagues trying to shut the area off.’

‘He could have stood there gawping with his dog for half an hour,’ Bäckström said. ‘How the hell can you be so certain that he didn’t?’

‘You can never be entirely certain,’ Alm said. ‘I just know what he says, and I sat for two hours questioning him about this.’

‘So what else has he got to say?’ Bäckström said. ‘It would be useful to know.’ Preferably before Christmas, he thought.

‘He says he waited a few minutes, then he went home, saw Stålhammar going in the door — he waited a couple minutes so that he wouldn’t have to talk to him, then he went in himself and took the lift up to his flat. As soon as he got through the door he calls his son. Calls from his cell to his son’s cell. Simply out of curiosity, and his son is already up on the esplanade when his dad calls, because the paper had received a tip-off about what was going on.

‘By then it was ten minutes to eleven, according to the phone records that we checked out this morning,’ Alm concluded.

‘So you say,’ Bäckström said, glowering crossly at his colleague. ‘Hasn’t the old goat got a landline in his flat?’

‘Yes,’ Alm said, ‘and I know what you’re thinking, Bäckström. I’m only telling you what he told me.’

‘You can’t help wondering why he called on his cell phone,’ Bäckström said. ‘A mean old prick like that. Why use his cell?’

‘Because he already had it in his hand when he walked into his apartment. That’s what he says,’ Alm said.

‘I’m sorry, Bäckström,’ Alm went on, but didn’t seem the slightest bit sorry. ‘Pretty much everything backs up what Iron Man says. That he left Danielsson at half past ten, went straight home, and was in his apartment at quarter to eleven.’

Bäckström suggested taking a break. The forensics experts had to leave. Had important things to get on with. And Toivonen had also taken the opportunity to go. For some reason he seemed considerably more cheerful than he had when he arrived. He even nodded encouragingly to Bäckström as he left.

‘Congratulations, Bäckström,’ Toivonen said. ‘Good to see that you’re back to your old self again.’