He Who Kills the Dragon

4.

Hasselstigen is a short side street off Råsundavägen, only a couple hundred meters long, about half a kilometer from the national football stadium and next to where Svensk Filmindustri’s old studio complex, Filmstaden, used to be. These days the studios have been turned into luxury housing for people quite unlike those who live at number 1 Hasselstigen.

The building at number 1 Hasselstigen had been built in the autumn of 1945, six months after the end of the war. Locals used to say it was the building that God, or at least its landlord, had given up on. It was a five-story brick building divided into thirty small apartments, each containing just one or two rooms and a kitchen. It was more than sixty years old and had long been in dire need of external renovation, rewiring, and pretty much everything in between.

Even the tenants had seen better days. About twenty of them were single, and most of those were pensioners. There were eight old couples, all of them retired, and one middle-aged woman of forty-nine who lived in a two-room flat with her twenty-nine-year-old son, who was on disability. The neighbors thought he was a bit odd. Nice, harmless, even helpful when called upon, but he had always lived at home with his mom. Recently he had been living there alone, ever since his mother had a stroke and had spent the last few months in a convalescent home.

Eleven of the tenants had a morning paper delivered, six Dagens Nyheter and five Svenska Dagbladet, and for the past year or so Septimus Akofeli had been the person who made sure they got delivered each morning. Regular as clockwork, at about six o’clock every morning — he’d never missed a single delivery.

A total of forty-one people lived in the building on Hasselstigen. Or forty, to be precise, since one of them had just been murdered, and by Thursday afternoon the police in Solna had got hold of a list of everyone in the building, including the victim.

In the hours between that first call being received by the emergency control room and the list being supplied, a fair amount had happened. Among other things, the head of the investigating team from the Solna Police, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström, had arrived at the scene of the murder at twenty minutes to ten that morning. Just three and a half hours after his colleagues in ‘the pit’ got the call, and, frankly, a lightning-quick response, considering that this was Bäckström.

There was a very personal explanation for this. The previous day, the staff medical officer of the Stockholm Police had made him promise to make changes in his private life and had listed the medicinal alternatives that — if Bäckström carried on being Bäckström — had scared the life out of even this particular patient. And this had at least led to a sober evening and a sleepless night, after which Bäckström had decided to walk to his new job in the crime unit of the Western District.

An endless road to Calvary, some four kilometers long. Under a merciless sun, the whole way from his cozy abode on Inedalsgatan on Kungsholmen, right out to the main police station on Sundbybergsvägen in Solna. And in temperatures that were beyond human endurance and which would have beaten an Olympic marathon runner.