He Who Kills the Dragon

66.

More or less at the same time as Bäckström had sat himself down in his beloved local bar on Kungsholmen in Stockholm, the police in Copenhagen received a tip-off. An anonymous male individual, a native Dane — middle-aged, to judge by his voice — had called the emergency number and left a message.

At the end of the large carpark on Fasansvejen, a couple of hundred meters from the old SAS hotel and just five minutes from the center of the city, stood a trash can. In the trash can there was now a body wrapped in an ordinary hessian sack that had once contained pig feed. The man in the sack hadn’t crawled in there of his own accord, and, to help even the Danish police to find him, the people who had put him in there had left his naked feet sticking out.

‘Well, I think that was everything,’ the man who had called said before ending the call, made from a pay-as-you-go cell phone, impossible to trace and the obligatory accessory for a certain type of call.

Three minutes later the first patrol car had arrived at the scene, and a half hour later the two uniformed officers had the company of a number of their colleagues from the crime and forensics units of the Copenhagen Police.

More or less at the same time as Bäckström ordered a little chaser to go with his double espresso, they reached the point where they could open the trash can and take a closer look at the naked body inside it. A perfectly ordinary address label had been tied round its neck with string: ‘Nasir Ibrahim, please forward to Stockholm Police.’ Someone had stuffed a parking ticket down the corpse’s throat, and to judge by the wounds on the body, his death had been both drawn out and painful.

As a message to a Muslim robber who had messed up when he abandoned his getaway vehicle, it could hardly have been any clearer, and because the police in Copenhagen had already been alerted in advance they called their Swedish colleague, Superintendent Jorma Honkamäki of the Stockholm riot squad. When Honkamäki took the call he was standing in the street outside the building where Bäckström lived, supervising the aftermath of Bäckström’s efforts.

Nasir’s eldest brother, Farshad, was being lifted into an ambulance. Two paramedics carrying the stretcher, a female nurse holding a drip, Farshad moaning in a language that Honkamäki couldn’t understand, his trousers round his ankles, drenched in blood.

His cousin Hassan Talib had just left in another ambulance. Unconscious, wearing a neck brace, carried by three paramedics, with a doctor and nurse trying to keep him alive.

The one who seemed to be in the best shape was Nasir’s other brother, Afsan. Admittedly, his nose was broken, he was covered with blood, his hands were cuffed behind his back, and he didn’t seem to want to walk, but otherwise he seemed pretty much the same as usual.

‘I’m going to fuck you in the ass, you fucking pigs,’ Afsan yelled as two of Honkamäki’s colleagues put him inside one of the riot squad’s vans.

What the fuck’s going on? Honkamäki thought, shaking his head.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Superintendent Toivonen repeated a minute later as he got out of his car and caught sight of Honkamäki.