He Who Kills the Dragon

3

On Thursday, May 15, the sun had risen over number 1 Hasselstigen in Solna at twenty past three in the morning. Exactly two hours and forty-five minutes before Septimus Akofeli, twenty-five, arrived at that address to deliver the morning newspapers.

Septimus Akofeli was really a bicycle courier, but for about a year now he had been earning some extra money delivering morning papers to a few blocks along Råsundavägen, including the building at number 1 Hasselstigen. He also happened to be a refugee from southern Somalia, from a small village just half a day’s walk from the Kenyan border. He had arrived in his new homeland on the day of his thirteenth birthday, and the reason he ended up in Sweden rather than anywhere else was that his aunt, uncle, and a number of cousins had arrived there five years earlier, and all his other relatives were dead. Or murdered, one could say, because very few of them had died of other causes.

Septimus Akofeli wasn’t your average Somali refugee, somehow ending up in Sweden at random. He had close relatives who could look after him, and there were strong humanitarian reasons for letting him stay. And everything seemed to have turned out pretty well. Or at least as well as anyone had any right to expect, as far as someone like him was concerned.

Septimus Akofeli had worked his way through school and sixth form in Sweden with decent, not to say good, results in most subjects. Then he had studied for three years at Stockholm University. He had a degree in languages, with English as his main subject. He had a Swedish driving license and had become a Swedish citizen at the age of twenty-two. He had applied for a lot of jobs and had eventually got one of them. As a bicycle courier for Green Carriers — ‘couriers for people who care about the planet.’ Then, when the first schedule of repayments on his student loan dropped through the letterbox, he found an extra job delivering newspapers. For the past couple years he had been living alone in a one-room flat on Fornbyvägen in Rinkeby.

Septimus Akofeli took care of himself. He wasn’t a burden on anyone. In short, he had accomplished more than most people, regardless of background, and had managed better than almost everyone who shared the same background as him.

Septimus Akofeli wasn’t your usual Somali refugee. To begin with, Septimus was a very unusual first name for a Somali, even among the small Christian minority in Somalia. And his skin was also considerably lighter than that of most of his compatriots. There was a simple explanation for this: A pastor with the Church of England’s mission to Africa, Mortimer S. Craigh — S as in Septimus — had broken the Seventh Commandment. He had got Septimus’s mother pregnant, realized the enormity of his sin, asked the Lord for forgiveness, and returned more or less forthwith to his home parish of Great Dunsford in Hampshire, located in the most pastoral surroundings imaginable.

On Thursday, May 15, at five minutes past six in the morning, Septimus Akofeli, twenty-five, had found the murdered body of Karl Danielsson, sixty-eight, in the hall of his flat on the first floor of number 1 Hasselstigen in Solna. The door of the flat was wide open and the dead body was lying just a meter or so inside the door. Septimus Akofeli had put down the copy of Svenska Dagbladet that he was about to put through Danielsson’s mail slot. He had leaned forward and taken a good look at the body. He had even squeezed its cheeks gently. Then he had shaken his head and dialed 112 on his cell phone.

At six minutes past six in the morning he had been put through to the emergency control room of the Stockholm Police on Kungsholmen. The radio operator had asked him to stay on the line, then put him on hold while he put the call out, and got a response immediately from a patrol car from the Western District that was on Frösundaleden, just a few hundred meters from the address in question. ‘Suspected murder at number one Hasselstigen in Solna.’ And the ‘male individual’ who had called sounded ‘suspiciously calm and collected,’ which could be useful to know if it wasn’t just someone playing a prank on the police but suffering instead from ‘more serious mental problems...’

What the radio operator did not know, however, was that the fact of the matter was much simpler than that. That Septimus Akofeli was particularly well suited to make the type of discovery he had just made. Even as a small boy, he had seen more murdered and mutilated bodies than most of the other nine million inhabitants of his new homeland.

Septimus Akofeli was short and thin, 167 centimeters tall and weighing just 55 kilos. But he was toned and athletic, the way you are when you run up and down staircases for a couple hours every morning and then spend the rest of the day rushing around on a bicycle taking letters and parcels to anxious customers, the sort of people who care about the planet and who shouldn’t be made to wait any longer than strictly necessary.

Septimus Akofeli was good-looking, with dark, olive-colored skin, a classic bone structure, and a profile that could have been lifted straight from an ancient Egyptian vase. And of course he had absolutely no idea of the sort of thing that might be going through the head of a middle-aged Swedish police officer working as a radio operator in the emergency control room of the Stockholm Police, and he had done his level best to forget his childhood memories.

To start with, he had done what he was told and stayed on the line. After a couple minutes he had shaken his head, clicked to end the call — the police had evidently forgotten about him — then had put his bag of newspapers aside and sat down on the staircase outside the door of the flat, remaining in the building just as he had promised.

A couple minutes later he had company. First someone had carefully opened and then closed the front door. Then steps padded up the stairs. Two police officers appeared: first a man in his forties, then, just behind him, his considerably younger female colleague. The male officer had his right hand on the butt of his pistol and was pointing at him with his left arm and outstretched hand. His younger female colleague, standing right behind him, was holding an extended collapsible steel baton in her right hand.

‘Okay,’ the male officer said, nodding toward Akofeli. ‘This is what we’re going to do. First we put our hands above our head, then we get up slowly and calmly, then we turn round with our back toward us, with our legs spread...’

Who’s this we? Septimus Akofeli wondered, doing as he had been told.