‘That seems to fit,’ Alm interjected. ‘I got the first lists of calls through just before this meeting. According to the list of calls made from the victim’s phone — I haven’t received the neighbors’ yet — he made a call from his phone to another landline at 22.27 that evening. Just before half past ten, in other words. Let me see the interview with Andersson,’ Alm said.
‘There you go,’ Stigson said, passing Alm a printed sheet of A4.
‘Yes,’ Alm said with a nod, after glancing at the sheet. ‘It’s Andersson’s home phone number. That’s the last number Danielsson called, in fact.’
Because then he was beaten to death and robbed by our old hero Roly Stålhammar, Bäckström thought, finding it hard to conceal his delight.
‘There’s something else that’s bothering me. I might as well mention it now before I forget,’ Alm said, and for some reason he looked at Bäckström.
‘Yes, perhaps that would be best,’ Bäckström said, smiling amiably.
‘When I looked up Stålhammar’s details I found out that he lives on Järnvägsgatan in Sundbyberg. That’s only a few hundred meters from Ekensbergsgatan, where that Polish bloke found the raincoat and so on, the slippers and gloves. It’s more or less on the right route, so to speak. If you want to take the shortest route home from Hasselstigen to Järnvägsgatan, you pass Ekensbergsgatan more or less at the point where the Pole found the clothes.’
‘Well, I never,’ Bäckström said with a sly smile. ‘Who’d have thought it of a onetime youth worker?
‘Stigson,’ he went on. ‘That woman, Andersson? She never saw who Danielsson’s guest was? Unless you forgot to ask her, what with all the other stuff, I mean?’
‘No. Of course I asked,’ Stigson said, glancing nervously at Detective Inspector Annika Carlsson. ‘Of course I did. No. She never saw who he was. But when she spoke to Danielsson, she could hear someone else in the living room. But of course she never went inside the flat, so she didn’t see who it was.’
‘I’ve thought of something else,’ Bäckström said, for some reason looking at Alm.
‘What?’
‘You started off by saying that lots of Danielsson’s old friends got in touch as soon as they heard that he’d been murdered.’
‘Yes.’
‘But not Roland Stålhammar?’
‘No,’ Alm agreed. ‘He hasn’t been in touch.’
‘Surely he out of all of them should have been? A former policeman and all that. Who was sitting getting pissed with the victim just before he died?’ Bäckström elaborated, with evident satisfaction.
‘Yes, that’s been bothering me too, in case you were wondering,’ Alm said. ‘Assuming that he knows Danielsson was murdered, and assuming it was him who was there that evening, because we can’t be entirely certain in spite of what Jockey Gunnar says. If that is the case, then it bothers me a very great deal.’
‘Mmh,’ Bäckström said, nodding. The net’s closing, he thought. I wonder if I’ve got time to reward myself with a little marzipan cake and some coffee with a splash of cream?
‘How about taking a short break to stretch our legs?’ Bäckström said, looking at the time. ‘Shall we say quarter of an hour?’ Perhaps now isn’t the time to talk about respect and authority, he thought, as Carlsson, her eyes narrowed, stormed out of the room at once.
No one raised any objections.
16.
Right, then, Bäckström thought, once he and his colleagues had settled back down again. Now all we need to do is tie things up, without getting too excited and rushing the job.
‘Nadja,’ Bäckström said, nodding genially at Nadja Högberg, ‘have you found out anything else about our victim?’
According to Nadja Högberg, most of her work was done now. Apart from Danielsson’s old limited company, which she was planning to look into over the weekend. But there also seemed to be a safe-deposit box that she hadn’t yet found. The keys fitted a box in a branch of Handelsbanken located on Valhallavägen in Stockholm, that much was straightforward. The problem was that neither Danielsson nor his company, according to the bank, had a box at that branch. The number of the box wasn’t clear from the keys, and because there were hundreds of boxes at that branch alone, finding the box wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
‘The bank and I are still grappling with that,’ Nadja Högberg said. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it.’
One thing that she had already sorted out was the bundles of slips and receipts that the forensics team had found in Danielsson’s flat.
‘There are loads of them,’ Nadja said. ‘Winning slips from Solvalla totaling more than half a million; taxi receipts, restaurant receipts, and loads of other invoices for everything from office furniture to paintwork in an old storehouse out in Flemingsberg, south of the city. In total, the invoices and receipts come to more than a million, and they’re all dated from the last few months.’
‘The bastard must have been a demon with the horses,’ Bäckström said. He had been only half listening. Half a million in a few months, he thought.
‘I don’t believe that for a moment,’ Nadja said, shaking her head. ‘Betting on the horses is a zero-sum game. If you’re lucky and know a bit about horses, you might just break even in the long run. He was trading in winning slips, that’s all. It’s no more complicated than that, but I daresay a few of them are his own. He sold them on to someone who needed to explain to the tax office how he had been able to buy a new Mercedes even though he didn’t have any income. The same with the receipts. He sold them to people who used them as tax-deductible expenses for their businesses. Presumably he had the contacts from when he was active as an accountant and auditor, but it doesn’t really demand any particular skills.’
Better than collecting empties like all the other pissheads, Bäckström thought.
‘Excuse me,’ Alm said, with an apologetic gesture as his cell phone started to ring.
‘Alm,’ Alm said, then he sat and mostly listened for a couple minutes as Bäckström glared at him with growing anger.
‘Sorry,’ Alm said when the call was over.
‘Not at all,’ Bäckström said. ‘Don’t let us bother you. I’m sure it was vitally important.’
‘That was Niemi,’ Alm said. ‘I took the opportunity to call him during the break, to let him know about Roly Stålhammar.’
‘Are Stålhammar’s prints in the register?’ Bäckström asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this before?’
‘No,’ Alm said, shaking his head. ‘Stålhammar’s prints aren’t on file officially, but he did give Niemi a set of prints in conjunction with an old murder in Stockholm years ago. Stålhammar and his partner — wasn’t his name Brännström? — had gone to see an old junkie living on Pipersgatan, more or less next door to police headquarters. There was no one home, but they took the opportunity to go through his lodgings, since they were there anyway. Brännström thought there was a funny smell in the flat and pulled out the bottom half of an old sofa bed in the living room. And that’s where they found the tenant. Stuffed into his sofa bed with an ice pick in his skull. So when the forensics team arrived, Roly and Brännström had to provide a full set of prints so that theirs could be ruled out from the search.’