The Hand that Trembles

EIGHTEEN

Berglund thought so much about his old murder case that his head started to hurt. An old headache becomes like new, he thought, and recalled all the days, evenings, and nights he had turned Nils Gottfrid Dufva’s life – and above all, death – inside out.

Nils Dufva’s death was due to blunt trauma to the head. A single blow would probably have sufficed, Kalle Modin observed. He was still in service then, before he was fired for ongoing alcohol abuse. That was actually the last service he performed in the name of law enforcement.

The strike had caught on the left side of the head, pushed in the skull bone, and caused a massive haemorrhage. Modin thought that Dufva had not died immediately, but later during the night.

When he was found – about twenty-four hours after the murder – he was lying prone on the floor, in front of his wheelchair. The remote control was in his hand. The TV was on.

The murder received a great deal of attention: The brutal slaying of a wheelchair-bound eighty-five-year-old was especially disturbing. The Letters to the Editor section of Upsala Nya Tidning was filled with agitated voices and the newspaper took the unusual step of interviewing a notorious thug, Runar Karlsson, who had been apprehended for assault a thirteenth time. ‘I only beat people who have a chance of defending themselves,’ he communicated proudly from the Norrtälje prison.

If Dufva had been sitting at his desk, and not in front of the television in the living room, he might have had a better chance of defending himself. In the uppermost, unlocked drawer of the desk there was a loaded army revolver, a Luger. No weapon license could be found, but Dufva could no longer be consulted.

A burglary was immediately suspected, but nothing appeared to have been touched or removed from the house. This did not rule out that the intruder may have originally been intent on robbing the old man, but ended up overcome by panic and fleeing the scene.

The front door was closed but not locked when the man’s niece – actually his first cousin twice removed – came by to visit him. She did so almost daily, although not on the day of the murder. The woman, who was in her twenties, was his closest relative in Uppsala. He had a cousin in Malmö and another who lived in southern Germany. The cousin in Skåne was seventy and had not met Nils Dufva for over twenty years. They had no contact whatsoever. It was the cousin who lived in Pforzheim who had arranged for his granddaughter, Jenny Holgersson, to look in on Nils.

There were a couple of clear prints on the glass pane of the outer door. The same fingers had left prints on an old-fashioned oak sideboard in the living room. It appeared that someone had pressed hard with the palm of their hand on the polished door of the sideboard. Berglund had always suspected that the owner of the hand had stumbled, or lost their balance, and steadied himself with his hand. In addition, the rug under the sideboard was noticeably wrinkled.

In the hall they secured the very unclear print from a men’s shoe, right foot, size ten.

That was all.

The motive was unknown. The most likely explanation was still a failed robbery attempt. There was around two thousand kronor in a kitchen drawer. There were few items of any value, a gold watch for long and faithful service, some antique sables, a set of tin plates from the seventeenth century, and three gold rings in a case in one of the desk drawers. There were also five medals, of which one originated from Finland and two from Germany.

In a small room off the living room there remained that which the intruder had probably been searching for: one of the most distinguished coin collections. The value was appraised at over three million kronor.

The entire collection was to go to the Uppland museum, according to Dufva’s will. Everything else – the house, furnishings, close to two million in a savings account in SEB, a stock portfolio worth almost as much – was to be shared equally between Jenny Holgersson and a scholarship fund that Dufva had written up the statutes for a couple of years earlier. It was an annual scholarship of at least 30,000 kronor for the ‘person or organisation who best serves to further the independence of the nation.’

For three months Berglund had basically spent all of his time on the case. Thereafter, it became more sporadic. Most of the murders that the Uppsala police had investigated in recent times had been solved, even if in one case, ‘the man from Dakar,’ they could not track down the perpetrator.

But Dufva’s killer was still on the loose. And it was Berglund’s case.

He sat at the window with a couple of folders in front of him. This was not really in accordance with regulations. The material was not supposed to leave police headquarters, but when Berglund pointed out that perhaps it was not completely kosher to peruse internal documents in a hospital room, Ottosson had lightly waved it away.

He had read everything, the forensic report, the interview transcripts, and everything else, several times.

There were three witnesses whom Berglund found trustworthy. Dufva’s neighbour on the other side of the street had seen a car stop and park outside Dufva’s house sometime between eight o’clock and half past eight on the night of the crime. She had only glanced out the kitchen window since she was preoccupied with preparations for a birthday celebration, and she had not seen more of the driver other than that he was a man. Later, when she went out with the dog at around nine, the car was gone.

Berglund had browsed through car models with the woman and finally she had picked out a Saab 9000, a ‘dark blue shiny car.’

Shortly before eight, a younger couple who were walking from their home on Tegelgatan and turned down toward Arosgatan had seen a dark car come driving up Norbyvägen. ‘Much too fast, there are so many children biking on these streets,’ the young woman had said.

They were almost certain it was a dark Saab, but neither of them had seen the driver nor been able to tell if he was alone in the car.

Early on in the case Berglund had decided that this was the car of the killer. It also fit the time frame. The pathologist had determined Dufva’s time of death to be between seven and nine in the evening.

This was where the case stood at the end of 1993, when Berglund reluctantly de-prioritised it. Nothing new had emerged since then. Everyone at the station was convinced it would never be solved, unless something extraordinary occurred.

What Berglund had been hoping for all these years was the fingers on the sideboard. Perhaps the perpetrator would be brought in on other charges, burglary for example, and then be tied to the old man’s murder.

Or was the crime a one-time act that would not be followed by others? There were those who said it was the work of an amateur. To drive over and park in full view indicated terrible planning. Moreover, it was perplexing that nothing had been stolen. Dufva had immediately been as good as dead, no one had heard any noise, so why not continue and search the house?

Panic, Berglund thought. Perhaps the intention had been to temporarily silence the old man, to muzzle him and take time in picking out the valuables. And then he died. One blow on the head had been enough. The unwilling murderer had fled the scene in a panic.

Five years after the murder, Sammy Nilsson had come into Berglund’s office. He held a book in his hand.

‘Turn to page 233,’ he said.

Berglund looked at the title, then turned to the page. The name ‘Nils Dufva’ was highlighted in yellow.

‘An unusual name,’ said Sammy Nilsson. ‘I read it last night and jumped. Is that our friend from Kungsgärdet with the crushed skull?’

‘What is it about?’

Sammy Nilsson explained that Nils Dufva was listed as one of the Swedes who had tried to rebuild the Nazi movement in Sweden after the Second World War. He had played a prominent role.

‘If he was a Nazi after the war, then he was probably one before and after as well,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘There are more Uppsala residents in here,’ Berglund exclaimed.

‘Yes, a furniture dealer, a builder, and a lieutenant at the regiment.’

‘That was the one, I’ve shopped there,’ Berglund went on. ‘We bought a dining table there in the sixties. If I had known…’

‘That was nothing they advertised,’ Sammy said. ‘“Buy the Himmler sofa” is not exactly a catchy slogan.’

‘He’s listed in here as “employed in defence”. What does that mean? Did he work in the warehouses of S1, or what?’

‘It’s mysterious. I think I remember him as having worked in an office before retirement,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘But we didn’t find anything at his home…’

Berglund broke off. He recalled the medals from Germany.

After that he put down a great deal of effort in trying to chart out Nils Dufva’s earlier life. He even contacted the author of the book that Sammy Nilsson had stuck in his hand.

The author, a historian from Göteborg, had no further information about Dufva other than that during the fifties and sixties he had probably been employed by some organisation within the defence department, maybe the military information service.

When Berglund wanted to keep researching this he came to a dead stop. Dufva was not listed in the defence registers. No one wanted to or could give him more meat on the bone. One theory was that Dufva had been subcontracted by the defence department through the private company who employed him.

The company was called Bohlin’s Agency and was dissolved in 1989. When Berglund started to delve into what Bohlin’s Agency had worked with and who had managed it, he found an August Bohlin, deceased that same year.

His son, Jerker Bohlin, who worked in Florida, had told him over the phone that his father had worked with tax declarations, accounting, and wills. He had not been a lawyer or accountant, but had always kept busy. If the company had been hired by the defence department he did not know, but found it hard to believe.

According to the son, his father’s clients were mostly elderly women. One summer he worked at his father’s company and said it might as well have been a nursing home. He visited old people in Luthagen who had to sign documents. Company papers were probably no longer in existence.

Jerker Bohlin had a faint memory of the fact that he, after his father’s death, had stored a couple of boxes with folders in a storage unit in Boländerna where he kept a few things he wanted to save but not ship across the Atlantic. He still retained a storage unit.

He had naturally met Nils Dufva many times over the years but had no idea what tasks he had undertaken or how he had been as a person. Dufva was not a talkative sort. Bohlin remembered, however, that Dufva collected old coins.

Berglund had the feeling that no one wanted to dig in all of this, at least no one who had any information, but he still received permission to look through the remaining documents in the storage unit.

These turned out to be an unholy blend of copies of agreements, contracts, and estate inventories, spanning a period of twenty years. Berglund looked through the papers without encountering anything out of the ordinary. August Bohlin had clearly maintained his papers in an exemplary order; everything was sorted and numbered. On many of the documents, in his beautiful and delicate handwriting, he had made comments of an exceedingly personal character. In an estate inventory he might have said ‘a most honourable person who unfortunately passed away at too young an age’, whereas another one received the appraisal ‘a scrooge who never made anyone really happy except on aforementioned date’.

Berglund had still taken the trouble to write down all the names that appeared in the documents, without nursing any real hope about its usefulness, and attached the list of names to the case files. Then he had returned the five boxes to the storage unit, contacted Jerker Bohlin, and asked him to keep the documents from his father’s agency.

Now here he was, seven years later, at the Akademiska Hospital, looking through the materials. The leads were colder than ever. The ones who could talk were either old or gone for good, or simply unwilling to cast any light on Nils Dufva’s career.

Whether Dufva’s past had anything to do with his murder was as unclear as before. If the intention had actually been to take out the old man then the deed was almost macabrely amateurish. A natural preventive measure would have been to try to conceal such a motive by stealing such items as could have been carried off, in order to make the whole thing appear as a straightforward robbery-killing.

‘Saab 9000,’ he muttered. ‘It pulls up, parks, drives away.’

He could picture the whole scene: the curious neighbour, her hands in the dough, peeks out but turns away to take a tray of cinnamon buns out of the oven. The man gets out of the car and walks up to Dufva’s door. The concrete walkway is five, six metres long, the stairs have three steps.

Does he walk straight in, does he ring the doorbell, or does he even have keys? Whichever it is, he gets inside. Dufva is in a wheelchair and defenceless against his attacker, who rushes toward him and hits him in the head. The power of the blow sends him tumbling to the floor with enough force to kill him instantly.

Did the murderer bring the weapon or simply pick an object at the scene? Jenny Holgersson, the cousin twice removed, did not believe that anything had gone missing, but admitted that she did not have an exact inventory of all the items in the house. The murder weapon had never been located.

The film played in Berglund’s head in meaningless reprise, but the sequences rolled of their own accord.

His headache intensified. The effect of the tablets he had been given in the morning had worn off. He was still worried, although less so with each passing hour, that the operation would cause permanent damage, that he would lose his sense of balance, speech, or memory, or anything else that would happen to make a normal life impossible.

He had attempted to walk in a straight line from the door to the window following a seam in the flooring. That he could manage. He had recited the names of all the towns in Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland, the capital cities of Europe, and the English football teams in the highest league. He had managed that too. He understood all the words in the Dufva files and when he read aloud to himself his tongue did not slip once. His handwriting was as even and legible as before.

He would make a complete recovery. What was a little headache compared to when they carved in his head?

He was going to struggle through the Dufva files one more time and find the despicable individual who had clubbed a defenceless eighty-five-year-old to death.

Berglund got up and went back over to the window. He stood there for a long time looking down at the people in the street below and the small parking lot for which there was so much competition. Now they could come, the rascals from Violent Crimes.

He glanced at the stack of papers on the night table and smiled to himself.