He Who Kills the Dragon

7.

By three o’clock that afternoon Bäckström had already held his first meeting with the team investigating his new murder case. It wasn’t exactly the sharpest team he had led in his twenty-five years in violent crime. Nor the largest either, come to that. Eight people in total, if you counted him and the two forensics officers, who would soon move on to other cases as soon as they had finished the most important work on Karl Danielsson. Which left one plus five, and considering everything he had seen and heard of his colleagues so far, it all boiled down to just one man, Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström himself. Who else, really? That was what usually happened, after all. Bäckström left standing alone as the last hope of the grieving family. Even if it was most likely that the state-run alcohol monopoly was closer than anyone to Danielsson.

‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘Well, welcome to this investigation, and for the time being that goes for all of you. If there any changes on that score, I promise to let you know. Does anyone want to kick things off?’

‘We do, my colleague and I,’ the older of the two forensics experts, Peter Niemi, said. ‘We’ve hardly had a chance to get started on the flat, so we’ve got loads to be getting on with.’

Peter Niemi had been with the police for twenty-five years or so and had worked in forensics for fifteen of them. He was over fifty but looked considerably younger than he was. Fair, in good shape, slightly above average height. He had been born and raised in the Torne Valley in the far north of Sweden. He had lived in Stockholm more than half his life but still had his regional dialect. He smiled easily and his blue eyes expressed both friendliness and reserve at the same time. You didn’t have to be an idiot to see what he did for a job, and the fact that he hadn’t worn a uniform for the past fifteen years was completely irrelevant. It was the message his eyes gave off that made all the difference. Peter Niemi was a police officer, and he was nice and kind as long as you behaved. If you didn’t, then Niemi wasn’t the sort of man to back down, and there was more than one person who had come to realize that in a rather painful way.

‘Fine,’ Bäckström said. ‘I’m listening.’ A fucking Lapp, a bastard Finn, sounds like he’s just tumbled off the bus from Haparanda, and the sooner I don’t have to listen to him, the better, he thought.

‘Well, then,’ Niemi said, leafing through his papers.

The victim’s name was Karl Danielsson. Retired, sixty-eight years old. According to the passport that the forensics officers had found in his flat, he was 188 centimeters tall and weighed something like 120 kilos.

‘Heavily built and badly overweight, I’d guess maybe thirty kilos too much,’ said Niemi, who had himself grabbed the body by the arms when it was loaded onto a cart. ‘You’ll get the exact figures from the medical report.’

Whatever the fuck we might need them for, Bäckström thought sourly. We’re hardly going to mince him down and make sausages out of our murder victim, he thought.

‘The crime scene,’ Niemi went on. ‘The victim’s own apartment. To be precise, the hall. My hunch is that he’d been to the toilet and received the first blow as he was coming out, still doing up his fly. That matches both the splatter pattern and his half-closed zip, in case anyone’s wondering. Then he was struck several times in quick succession, and the decisive blows were struck when he was already lying on the hall floor.’

‘What was he hit with?’ Bäckström asked.

‘A blue enameled cast-iron saucepan lid,’ Niemi said. ‘It was on the floor beside the body. The saucepan is on the stove in the kitchen, no more than three meters away.

‘As well as that,’ he went on, ‘the perpetrator also seems to have used an upholstery hammer with a wooden handle. The handle broke off right by the head, and both parts were found on the hall floor. Alongside the victim’s head.’

‘Our perpetrator’s a thorough little bastard.’ Bäckström sighed, shaking his big round head.

‘I don’t think he’s that little. Not to judge by the angle of the blows, at any rate. But he was certainly thorough, even if it was hard to see at first because Danielsson’s face and chest were so covered in blood,’ Niemi said. ‘He was actually strangled as well. With his own tie. When he was lying on the floor, and by then he must have been unconscious and pretty close to death, the perpetrator tightened his tie and finished the job with a reef knot. Completely unnecessary, if you ask me. But I suppose it’s better to err on the side of caution, if you want to be absolutely sure.’ Niemi shrugged.

‘Do you have any ideas about who might have done it, then?’ Bäckström asked, even though he already knew the answer.

‘A typical pisshead murder, if you ask me, Bäckström,’ Niemi said, smiling amiably. ‘But it’s worth bearing in mind, Bäckström, that you’re asking someone from the Torne Valley.’

‘What about the timing, then?’ Bäckström said. So he wasn’t entirely thick after all, he thought.

‘I’m getting to that. All in good time, Bäckström,’ Niemi said.

‘Before the victim was killed, he and another individual, someone who left his fingerprints at the scene but who we haven’t yet been able to identify, sat in the living room eating pork chops with kidney beans. The host probably sat in the only armchair, his guest on the sofa. They had the meal on the coffee table but had time to clear it away. We’ve found a number of prints from both of them, if you’re wondering, and we should have the answers sometime tomorrow. If we’re lucky, the perpetrator will be in the fingerprint register already. With their meal they drank five half-liter cans of export-strength lager and more than a bottle of vodka. We’ve got one empty bottle and one just started. The usual size, seventy centiliters, and it’s probably worth pointing out that they were that esteemed brand, Explorer. Both bottles were found on the floor in front of the television, where they had been sitting and eating, and the evidence suggests that the bottles were unopened when they started. For one thing, the seals are still there. You know, the perforated bit at the bottom of the bottle top. The bit that makes that nice cracking sound when you unscrew it.’

Every now and then this bastard Lapp sounds completely normal, Bäckström thought, even though he could feel a great vacuum in his chest. Almost like a near-death experience. Where had that come from?

‘Anything else? About the perpetrator, and what happened before the murder?’

‘I think the man who did this was physically strong,’ Niemi said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That business with the necktie takes a lot of strength. And he turned the body over as well, because to start with, the victim was on his side, or possibly his stomach — we can tell that because of the way the blood spread — but when we found him, he was lying on his back. I think he turned the victim onto his back when he decided to strangle him.’

‘And when would that have been?’ Annika Carlsson asked suddenly, before Bäckström had a chance to ask that very question.

‘If you’re asking a medical layman like me — the postmortem on the body won’t be done until this evening — I’d probably guess at yesterday evening,’ Niemi said. ‘Chico and I got there at almost exactly seven o’clock this morning, and by then the victim had developed complete rigor mortis, but of course we’ll know much more about this and a lot more besides tomorrow.’ Niemi nodded, looked at the others in the room, and made a move to get up from his chair. ‘We’ve already sent a whole load of material for analysis to the National Forensics Lab in Linköping, but it’ll probably be a few weeks before we get any answers. But I’m not sure it will make too much difference in a case like this. Having to wait, I mean. This perpetrator isn’t going anywhere. Our forensics colleagues in the county crime unit have promised to help with the fingerprints, so with a bit of luck that’ll be done by the weekend.

‘We need the weekend,’ Niemi repeated as he stood up. ‘On Monday I think we should be able to give you a decent description of what happened inside the flat.’

‘Thanks,’ Bäckström said, nodding to Niemi and his younger colleague. As soon as we lay our hands on Danielsson’s dinner partner, this one’s done and dusted, he thought. One pisshead killing another pisshead, there’s no more to it than that.

As soon as the forensics experts had left the room his lazy and inadequate investigating team started making a fuss about needing to stretch their legs and have a cigarette break. If he’d been his usual self he would have told them to shut up, but Bäckström felt strangely apathetic and merely nodded his consent. More than anything he would have liked to walk out, but in the absence of better options he had headed straight for the toilets and must have drunk at least five liters of cold water.