He Who Kills the Dragon

22.

Another crazy witness, Bäckström thought, a quarter of an hour later, when the investigating team had reconvened. At worst, it just meant that Stålhammar had gone back to Hasselstigen later that night to kill and rob Karl Danielsson. Just what you’d expect from someone like Iron Man. Sitting there thinking at home in Järnvägsgatan as he drank the last few drops, then suddenly the alcoholic haze inside his head lifted and it dawned on him that twenty thousand is twice as much as ten thousand. Whereupon he rolled back to Danielsson’s and suggested that they carry on partying. He dressed himself up in the raincoat, slippers, and washing-up gloves, then whacked him with his own saucepan lid. That could very easily have been what happened, he thought.

‘Thoughts?’ Bäckström said, looking round at the other five people in the room. Five mental cases, if you asked him. One Russian, one pretty little darkie, one attack dyke, one retarded folk dancer, and one Woodentop. The curse of being in charge, he thought.

‘Well, I for one am not prepared to let go of Stålhammar,’ Annika Carlsson said, smiling encouragingly at her boss.

And it takes a dyke to say it, Bäckström thought.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘Wouldn’t it be a bit weird if someone entirely new just appeared in Danielsson’s flat right after Stålhammar left?’ Carlsson said, looking at Alm.

‘Maybe he stood and waited for him to go,’ Alm said. ‘So that he could be alone with his victim.’

‘And he was let in too,’ Detective Inspector Carlsson persisted. ‘Which surely suggests that it must have been another of Danielsson’s old friends? Have we had time to go through them all yet, by the way?’ she asked, nodding toward Alm.

‘Still working on it,’ Alm said, shrugging uncomfortably.

‘I’m probably inclined to agree with Bäckström and Annika,’ Nadja Högberg said. ‘If you grew up in the old Soviet Union like I did, you stop believing in coincidence, and we’ve got no information that suggests that anyone was watching Danielsson’s flat. And I’m not really too keen on our witness either. How can he be so sure that it was Stålhammar he saw? A man he seems to dislike so intensely. Can we really rule out that he was seeing what he wanted to see? And the fact that he called his son just before eleven doesn’t have to have anything at all to do with our case. It might well be that he was just curious about all the police he saw up on the esplanade. Maybe he just wanted to tip off his son that something was going on. Considering the son works as a photographer on a newspaper, I mean. And whyever would he phone him on his cell if he was inside his flat? We mustn’t forget that. This witness doesn’t feel sound.’

One dyke plus one Russian, Bäckström thought. Mind you, she’s shrewd for a Russian.

‘I don’t think we’re going to get any further with this. Not right now, anyway,’ Bäckström said. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘That would be Danielsson’s other old friends, I guess,’ Alm said. ‘Like you were wondering, Annika.’ Alm nodded toward Annika Carlsson.

‘So what do we know about them, then?’ Bäckström said.

There were some ten or so ‘Solna boys,’ according to Alm. Who had grown up, gone to school, and worked in Solna and Sundbyberg. The same age as Danielsson or even a bit older, and hardly your typical murderers in light of their age.

‘We shouldn’t forget that a murderer over the age of sixty is extremely unusual,’ Alm said. ‘And that applies to the murder of so-called pissheads as well.’

‘Well, on that point I have no problem at all with Stålhammar,’ Bäckström said.

‘Granted,’ Alm said. ‘In a purely statistical and criminological sense, he feels like the best fit.’

Coward, Bäckström thought.

‘I’m a police officer,’ he said. ‘Not a statistician or a criminologist.’

‘Old men, lonely, drinking too much, their wives have left them, their children never get in touch, some of them have got criminal records, mainly drunk driving or drunk and disorderly, but one of them caused a scene in a bar and was found guilty of actual bodily harm even though he was over seventy when it happened.’ Alm sighed. He sounded like he was thinking out loud.

‘A real firecracker,’ Bäckström said. ‘What’s that one’s name, then?’

‘Halvar Söderman, seventy-two this autumn. It was at his local bar, and it looks like he got into a fight with the owner about some food he had there the week before. He claimed they were trying to poison him. Söderman’s an old car salesman, known as Halfy. The bar owner was Yugoslavian, twenty years younger, but that evidently didn’t stop Söderman from breaking his jaw. Halfy Söderman is a legendary figure among the old Solna drinkers, according to our older colleagues here at the station. He used to be a rocker, sold cars, had a removal company, traded in white goods and pretty much everything else between heaven and earth. He appears in the criminal record register several times. He’s been found guilty of most things, from fraud to ABH. I went back in the records, and he’s been cropping up in our files for the past fifty years. He’s served five stretches in prison. The longest was two and a half years. That was in the mid-sixties when he was found guilty of bodily harm, serious fraud, drunk driving, and a few other things besides. But over the past twenty-five years he’s calmed down a lot. Age seems to have mellowed him. Well, apart from the Yugoslavian, that is.’

‘Well, you see?’ Bäckström said with a benevolent look on his face. ‘If you put a saucepan lid in the hands of someone like Halfy, he could probably bring down a whole riot squad on his own. Just curious: Has he got an alibi for the evening of Wednesday, May fourteenth?’

‘He says he has,’ Alm said. ‘I’ve only spoken to him over the phone, but he says he’s got an alibi.’

‘What is it, then?’ Annika Carlsson asked, apparently out of genuine curiosity.

‘He didn’t want to go into it, he said,’ Alm said. ‘He told me to go to hell and hung up on me.’

‘And what were you thinking of doing about that?’ Bäckström grinned.

‘I was thinking of going round to see him and interview him officially,’ Alm said, not showing much enthusiasm at the prospect.

‘Let me know when, and I’ll come along,’ Annika Carlsson said with a frown.

Poor Halfy, Bäckström thought.

‘Anything else?’ he asked, mostly to change the subject.

‘Most of them have alibis,’ Alm said. ‘Gunnar Gustafsson and Björn Johansson, or Jockey Gunnar and Flash, as they’re known to their friends, have an alibi, for instance. They were sitting in the restaurant out at Valla until eleven o’clock. Then they went to the home of a third friend and played poker. He lives in a villa out in Spånga.’

‘Does he have a name?’ Bäckström said. ‘The one who lives in Spånga?’

‘Jonte Ågren. Known as Bällsta Jonte. Former metalworker, seems to have had a small business down by the Bällsta River. Seventy years old. No criminal record, but a well-known tough guy. Used to be one of those guys who set about pieces of pipe and sheet metal with his bare hands when he was younger. He’s also one of the few who are still married, but on the evening that they were playing poker his wife was away, apparently. Visiting her sister down in Nynäshamn. I’m guessing she’s learned from past experience, if you ask me, Bäckström.’

‘Any others?’ Bäckström said, starting to get interested against his own will.

‘Mario Grimaldi, sixty-five,’ Alm said. ‘An Italian immigrant. Came here in the sixties when he worked for Saab down in Södertälje. Ended up best friends with Halfy Söderman, the car salesman, and with his ten-years-older brother, also a car salesman, for that matter. Mind you, he’s been dead for the past ten years, so I think we can rule him out. But Mario’s still alive. He left Saab a few years later and opened a pizza restaurant. According to what I’ve heard, he’s still got a couple pizzerias and a bar out here in Solna and Sundbyberg, but if that’s true, then his name isn’t on any official paperwork.’

‘Has he got a nickname, then?’ Bäckström wondered.

‘Apparently his friends call him the Godfather.’ Alm shook his head miserably. ‘I haven’t managed to get hold of him yet, but we’ll track him down.’

‘There, you see?’ Bäckström said cheerfully. ‘There are plenty of gray panthers for us to sink our teeth into, and speaking personally, I’m still putting my money on our former colleague, Stålhammar. Anything else?’ he added, glancing at the time.

‘I’ve found Danielsson’s bank box,’ Nadja said. ‘It wasn’t easy, but I’ve found it.’

‘Well done,’ Bäckström said. She was a shrewd old thing. Typical Russian. They could be almost uncannily shrewd, those Russian bastards.

‘I’ve left a key to the box on your desk,’ Nadja said.

‘Excellent,’ Bäckström said, seeing before him a little trip into the city and a nice pint of beer.