Two large cups of coffee with lots of milk, two cheese rolls, all without his even realizing how it had happened. Then he had thanked his savior, perilously close to giving him a hug but coming to his senses just in time, and making do with a manly handshake and a slap on the back.
Then he had gone down to the gym and showered, put on a fresh Hawaiian shirt that he kept in his office, and by half past nine in the morning Superintendent Bäckström was sitting behind his desk in the crime division of the Solna police station. For the first time in two days he felt somewhere close to half human.
11.
At ten o’clock on Friday morning Bäckström had a visitor in his office. It was Niemi’s colleague, Jorge ‘Chico’ Hernandez, who asked for an audience with the head of the investigation.
Darkies, darkies, darkies, Bäckström thought, sighing heavily somewhere deep inside. He would never dream of saying it out loud. Not after all the stories he had heard about Peter Niemi, who was also a foreigner, a bastard Finn, and a northern foreigner, to be more precise, and evidently best friends with the twenty-years-younger Hernandez.
‘Sit yourself down, Chico,’ Bäckström said, nodding toward the chair on the other side of the desk as he leaned back in his own chair and knotted his hands over the sad remnants of his stomach. He must have lost at least ten kilos, he thought, as he experienced a certain vague anxiety about what was happening to the body that had always been his temple.
‘I’m listening,’ he went on, smiling and nodding encouragingly to his visitor. Even though darkies shouldn’t be allowed to become police officers. Maybe it was because of those cheese rolls, he thought.
Hernandez had a fair amount to report. During the previous evening he had been present when the coroner conducted the postmortem on their murder victim, and he began by confirming his colleague Niemi’s estimate of the body’s height and weight.
‘One hundred and eighty-eight tall, and one hundred and twenty-two kilos,’ Hernandez said. ‘Peter’s good at that sort of thing.’
Why the hell would I want to know that? Bäckström thought.
‘Which might be worth bearing in mind when we’re thinking about what our perpetrator is capable of,’ Hernandez concluded. ‘It takes a fair amount of strength to handle a body that large and that heavy.’
Apart from being overweight and having an impressively large liver, Danielsson had been in surprisingly good shape. No significant comments from the coroner about either his heart and lungs or his circulatory system. Normal prostate enlargement and all the other things that come with age. Otherwise not much, considering the life he had led.
‘If only he’d stopped drinking for a couple months each year and given his liver a chance to recover in between binges, he’d probably have lived past eighty,’ Hernandez said.
Like a mountain stream in spring, Bäckström thought, nodding in agreement. Maybe we ought to make sausages out of the bastard after all. Maybe cognac sausages, considering the number of years Director Danielsson had been marinating.
‘But we want to amend what we said about the upholstery hammer,’ Hernandez said. ‘Judging from the X-rays of the skull, there are no injuries matching the hammer, and that goes for both the head of the hammer and the other side, the curved bit with a split in it that you use to pull out nails. Not only that, but the break in the shaft is on the wrong side. Not on the side you use to hit nails in with. The break’s on the other side, the same side as the claw, and that suggests to us that the perpetrator managed to break the shaft when he was trying to pull something out using the claw. The problem is that we can’t find any evidence of this inside the flat.’
‘Something he took away with him?’ Bäckström suggested. ‘A cash box, maybe?’ Containing Danielsson’s old milk teeth and a two-kronor coin he was left by the kind tooth fairy, he thought.
‘Something like that, yes,’ Hernandez agreed with a nod. ‘For the time being we’re thinking it was probably one of those leather briefcases with a brass lock, hinges, and bolts, or some other gold-colored metal. There are traces on the claw of the hammer that suggest that. A small flake, maybe a millimeter long, that we’re pretty sure is leather. Light-brown leather. There’s a fragment of something that we think might be brass on the sharpened edge of the claw. It might have got there when the claw scratched the lock. We’ve sent it to the National Lab, since we don’t have the right equipment here to determine exactly what it is.’
‘But you didn’t find the briefcase itself?’
‘No,’ Hernandez said. ‘If we’re right, he probably took it with him to open it in peace and quiet.’
‘Noted,’ Bäckström said, making a note in his little black book, just to be on the safe side. ‘Anything else?’
‘To go back to the saucepan lid,’ Hernandez said. ‘It’s cast-iron, and the outside is covered with blue enamel. It matches a pan found on the stove in the flat. Twenty-eight centimeters in diameter, with a handle in the middle. It weighs almost two kilos. The victim received at least six heavy blows with the lid. The first one hit him high up on the right side of his head. It was administered from behind him, off to one side, and we believe the victim received the blow as he stepped out of the toilet door. Danielsson falls forward with his head toward the living room, his feet toward the front door, ending up on his stomach or possibly his side. Then he receives another two blows to the back of the head. Then the perpetrator must have turned him over and finished him off with three blows to the face—’
‘How can you be so sure of the order?’ Bäckström interrupted.
‘You can never be absolutely certain, but this is the picture that best matches the fractures on his skull and other observations of the part of the hall where it happened. The way the hall looks, the splatter pattern and so on. There are also blood, strands of hair, and fragments of bone on the saucepan lid. And the fact that the lid fits the injuries on the victim’s head. Our perpetrator isn’t just strong. To judge by the angle of the blows, he’s tall as well. And we think he was seriously upset with the victim. The first blow on its own was fatal. He may have administered the two to the back of the head and neck just to be sure, so to speak, so we’re prepared to let him get away with those. But the three to the face, at least three blows, just seem to be over the top. Especially as he must have put the saucepan lid down to roll the body over, and then picked it up once more before he started hitting him again.’
‘So how tall was he?’ Bäckström said.
‘Danielsson was one meter eighty-six. So at a guess, at least one meter eighty. If you ask me, another ten centimeters on that. One meter ninety.’
‘Assuming he wasn’t a professional basketball player,’ Bäckström teased. ‘He could have gone for him with his arm raised above his head, you know, the way they throw the ball? Or a tennis player. Serving a blow with a saucepan lid.’
‘The concentration of professional basketball players in the immediate vicinity is presumably relatively low,’ Hernandez stated without the slightest trace of a smile. ‘The same is probably true of tennis players,’ he added, puckering his lips slightly.
Funny lad, Bäckström thought. Finally, a darkie with a sense of humor.
Hernandez changed the subject. He started to talk about the Polish carpenter’s discovery in the trash bin.
‘We’re waiting to hear from the National Forensics Lab if the blood matches that of the victim. If it does, then the find is undoubtedly very interesting indeed. But we didn’t manage to find any prints. Not on the raincoat, the washing-up gloves, or the slippers. The size of the raincoat and slippers fits Danielsson. Large, broad across the chest, size-forty-four shoes.’