He Who Kills the Dragon

42.

The neighborhood police in Tensta and Rinkeby had throughout their history devoted the majority of their resources to fostering good relations with the people living in the area. Ninety percent of them immigrants from every hard-pressed corner of the world. The majority of them were refugees from countries where they were not allowed to think or even live. It hadn’t been easy, and the fact that ninety percent of those working for the neighborhood police were ordinary Swedes hadn’t made it any easier. Swedes going back generations, or possibly second- or third-generation migrants. Well established in Swedish society, already rooted in Swedish soil.

Crime fighting had got caught in the middle. All the usual business of policing had slipped behind. Here it was a question of building bridges between people, creating relationships, confidence. A question of the very simplest things, like just being able to talk to another.

‘We’ll get this sorted,’ the head of the neighborhood police said when he discussed the situation with Annika Carlsson. ‘We have good relationships with each other.’

Then he and his colleagues had spent two days talking to Akofeli’s neighbors. A total of a hundred people. They had put up posters of his face all the way from his flat on Fornbyvägen to the closest underground station. They had put posters up in entrance halls, on walls, lampposts, and notice boards within a wide radius. They even set up their mobile police station in the squares in both Rinkeby and Tensta, with murder victim Septimus Akofeli as special offer of the week.

No one had seen anything, no one had heard anything. The few who had actually talked just shook their heads. Most of them didn’t even understand what they were saying.

The door-to-door at number 1 Hasselstigen had gone relatively well in comparison. Pettersson and Stigson, led by Annika Carlsson and with backup from a couple uniformed officers from Solna, had spoken to everyone who lived in the building. With two exceptions, there was no one who recognized Akofeli. No one had seen or heard anything. A lot of them had had questions, a lot of them had been worried. Did they actually dare live in the building anymore?

The first exception was widow Stina Holmberg, seventy-eight.

Stina Holmberg was an early riser. She was convinced it was because of her age. The older you got, the less sleep you needed. The closer to death you got, the more you had to make the most of your time awake. She had seen Akofeli coming and going on a number of occasions over the past year. Between half past five and six o’clock in the morning. Unless something unusual had happened, like sudden heavy snow or problems on the underground.

She had even spoken to him on one occasion. It was the day after her neighbor had been murdered.

‘It was because I still hadn’t received any copies of Svenska Dagbladet,’ Mrs. Holmberg explained.

The week before Mrs. Holmberg had switched from Dagens Nyheter to Svenska Dagbladet, and she had been promised her new paper from the Monday of the following week. For the first four days she had continued to receive Dagens Nyheter. On that Friday she had got up early to be able to intercept the paperboy and talk to him directly. Naturally, she could have called the subscription departments of both DN and SvD, but because she didn’t have a push-button phone she had never been able to get through, and eventually she gave up.

Akofeli had promised to help her, although he had seemed a little stressed. He said he would talk to them himself. Then he had given her a copy of Svenska Dagbladet that he ‘had in reserve,’ without going into any details of how he happened to have it.

‘And now it’s all working splendidly,’ Mrs. Holmberg concluded.

Mind you, she hadn’t received a paper at all over the weekend, but there was evidently something wrong because none of her neighbors had received theirs either, but things had been fine for the past few days. The only criticism she had would perhaps be that the new paperboy usually turned up half an hour later than the one she had spoken to.

‘He seemed nice,’ Mrs. Holmberg said, shaking her head. ‘That dark-skinned boy, I mean. A bit stressed, like I said, but who wouldn’t be with a job like that, and he was so kind and accommodating. I can’t imagine that he would have hurt Danielsson,’ she added.

‘What makes you say that, Mrs. Holmberg?’ Stigson asked. ‘That he might have hurt your neighbor, I mean.’ She doesn’t know that Akofeli has been murdered, he thought.

‘Well, why else would you be looking for him? Any child could work that out,’ Mrs. Holmberg said in a friendly tone, patting him on the arm.

The other exception was Seppo Laurén, twenty-nine.

‘He’s the one who delivers the papers. He supports Hammarby,’ Seppo said, handing back the photograph of Akofeli to Sergeant Stigson.

‘How do you know that?’ Stigson asked. Poor bastard, he thought. Completely retarded, even though he looks entirely normal.

‘I had my AIK shirt on,’ Seppo said.

‘You had your AIK shirt on?’

‘I was playing a computer game. A football game. So I had my shirt on.’

‘So how did you meet the paperboy?’ Stigson said.

‘I was going down to the petrol station to get something to eat. They’re open all night.’

‘And you bumped into the paperboy?’

‘Yes, but I don’t get a paper. I don’t read papers.’

‘Did you bump into him inside the building?’

‘Yes,’ Seppo said with a nod. ‘My neighbor gets a paper.’

‘How do you know he supported Hammarby?’ Stigson asked.

‘He asked if I supported AIK. He saw my shirt.’

‘And so you said that you did. That you support AIK, I mean.’

‘I asked him who he supported.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘That he supported Hammarby,’ Seppo said, looking at Stigson in surprise. ‘I told you that was what he said. Hammarby.’

‘Is that the only time you spoke to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember when it was?’

‘No,’ Seppo said, shaking his head. ‘But there wasn’t any snow. Not winter.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘I would have been wearing a jacket. You can’t go out in winter in just a soccer shirt, can you?’

‘No, of course not,’ Stigson said. ‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘No, because then you’d catch a cold,’ Seppo concluded.

‘But you don’t remember more precisely? When it was, I mean? When you spoke to him?’

‘Must have been fairly recent, because Mom’s in the hospital. When she was home I wasn’t allowed to play computer games so much. And there was always food in the house.’

‘I see,’ Stigson said. ‘What did you think of him, then? The paperboy?’

‘He was kind,’ Seppo said.

The last person in the building that they spoke to was Mrs. Andersson. Annika Carlsson had provided Stigson with a chaperone, and Felicia Pettersson had gone a step further and said before they knocked on the door that this time she would be asking the questions.

Mrs. Andersson didn’t recognize Akofeli. Had never seen him before, which probably wasn’t unexpected, since she usually got up late.

‘The earliest I ever get up is eight,’ Britt-Marie Andersson said with a smile. ‘I usually have a cup of coffee and read the paper quietly for a while, then I take Little Sweetie out for a morning walk.

‘What’s happened here is so awful,’ she said. ‘You start to wonder what’s going on, and if you actually dare to carry on living here.’

She regarded the idea that her neighbor Karl Danielsson might have had any ‘dealings’ with Akofeli the paperboy as ‘out of the question.’

‘Not that I knew Danielsson particularly well, I certainly wouldn’t say that — the little we did have to do with each other was more than enough — but the idea that he might have had any dealings with that young man who seems to have been murdered is completely out of the question.’

‘What makes you say that, Mrs. Andersson?’ Felicia Pettersson asked.

‘Well, because Danielsson was a racist,’ Mrs. Andersson said. ‘You didn’t even have to know him particularly well to appreciate that.’

Nothing more to add, and she didn’t get a hug this time. Felicia Pettersson gave her colleague Stigson a warning glance as their witness held out her hand to him and leaned forward slightly with a big white smile and a heaving bosom.

‘Well, thank you so much for all your help, Mrs. Andersson,’ Stigson said, shaking her by the hand. ‘Thanks again.’

Good boy, Felicia thought, as they left.