‘It’s missing,’ Bäckström said.
‘Oh,’ Stålhammar said with a shrug. ‘It was there when I left. It was still on top of the television.’
‘When we got there the next morning it was gone,’ Bäckström said. ‘You haven’t got any ideas about where it might have got to?’
‘Come on, Bäckström, give it up!’ Stålhammar said, glaring at him with his deep-set eyes.
‘I think we’ll take a break now,’ Bäckström said, nodding toward his colleague.
‘Fine by me,’ Stålhammar said. ‘I could do with going home and getting a shower.’
‘You’re probably going to have to give us a few more minutes, Roland,’ Annika Carlsson said with a friendly smile. ‘We’re going to have to have a word with the prosecutor before you get out of here.’
‘Okay,’ Roland Stålhammar said, shrugging.
One hour later the chief public prosecutor, Tove Karlgren, had decided to remand former detective inspector Roland Stålhammar in custody. Bäckström and Carlsson had persuaded her, and although there had been a fair amount of muttering she had eventually agreed with them. Stålhammar would have had plenty of time to beat Karl Danielsson to death and get rid of the clothes and so on while he was on his way home. He had a lot going against him, and there were still plenty of things to chase up. So he was justifiably suspected of murder, and while the investigating team checked what he had told them and searched his apartment, it was best for all involved if Stålhammar remained behind bars.
Just before Bäckström left for the day, Peter Niemi telephoned him. The first results from the National Forensics Lab about the bloodstained clothes had just come through on Niemi’s fax.
‘Danielsson’s blood,’ Bäckström said, as a statement of fact rather than a question.
‘Yep, no doubt about it,’ Niemi said.
But nothing that didn’t come from Danielsson himself, according to both the lab and Niemi. No fibers, no strands of hair, no fingerprints. There was a possibility that they might find some traces of DNA, but that would take longer to look into.
Who gives a fuck? Bäckström thought, calling for a taxi.
21.
The following day, after lunch on Tuesday, the investigating team held their third meeting, and everyone, including the two forensics experts, was present. Just as the meeting was due to start, the head of the crime unit in Solna, Superintendent Toivonen, walked into the room. He nodded to the others with a grim glare before sitting down at the back of the room.
Nine people, one of whom is a proper police officer, Bäckström thought. Apart from him, one purebred bastard Finn, one idiot Lapp — practically a bastard Finn — one Chilean, one Russian, one pretty little darkie, one attack dyke, one retarded folk dancer, and dear old Lars Woodentop Alm, seriously mentally handicapped from birth. Where the fuck is this force heading? he thought.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘Let’s get going. How’s the search of Stålhammar’s flat going?’ Bäckström nodded encouragingly to Niemi.
It was almost finished, according to Niemi. To make a long story short, they hadn’t found anything that incriminated Stålhammar. No unexplained amounts of cash, no trousers with traces of blood on them, no briefcase showing any trace of an upholstery hammer.
He must have hidden everything and made sure to clean up after him. He’s probably buried the dough under a rock, Bäckström thought. Just what you’d expect from an idiot like him.
‘What little we have been able to find actually seems to back up Roly’s own version,’ Niemi said.
‘Like what?’ Bäckström asked. Who’d have thought it? So now we’re calling our suspect Roly, are we? he thought.
In the bedroom they had found evidence from Stålhammar’s trip to Malmö and Copenhagen on the bed. A half-unpacked sports bag containing clothes, clean and dirty all jumbled together; a shaving kit; and a half-empty bottle of Gammel Dansk. All the usual things that someone like Stålhammar might be expected to bring home after a short trip to Malmö and Copenhagen.
‘Plus a bundle of receipts,’ Niemi said. ‘Return train tickets to Malmö, then return tickets to Copenhagen. Receipts from five bars in Malmö and Copenhagen. A dozen or so taxi receipts, along with several others. In total they come to about nine thousand Swedish kronor. The times he gave us all match the evidence pretty well.’
‘All of which he collected to give to his good friend Karl Danielsson the receipt trader. As soon as he got home,’ Bäckström said with a grin. How fucking stupid can anyone be? he thought.
‘According to what he says,’ Alm interjected. ‘I’ve spoken to him about it, and that’s what he claims. But I can see what you’re thinking, Bäckström.’
‘So what did you do after that?’ Bäckström said with a smile.
‘I spoke to the woman down in Malmö who he was with. Telephone interview,’ Alm said. ‘I asked her the same thing. She said spontaneously that she had also noticed and had asked him about it when they were in Copenhagen. Why was Stålhammar suddenly hoarding a load of old receipts? He told her he had an old friend at home in Stockholm that he gives them to.’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Bäckström said, smiling happily. ‘Roly-Stoly starts making a fuss about collecting receipts, whereupon his little girlfriend wonders what he wants them for. Because presumably he wasn’t saving them for his former employers.’
‘Like I said,’ Alm said, ‘I can see what you’re thinking.’
‘Have you got anything else?’ Bäckström asked. Before I roll up my sleeves and beat the shit out of Roly Stålhammar, he thought.
‘That business with the timings. Those fifty minutes when he says he was sitting at home thinking before he called Marja Olsson down in Malmö. He definitely made the call. At twenty-five minutes past eleven in the evening he called on his landline to Marja Olsson’s landline.’
‘Leaving forty-five minutes in which to think lofty thoughts,’ Bäckström concluded. ‘What have you come up with for them, then?’
‘To start with I did a test walk from number one Hasselstigen, via the trash bin on Ekensbergsgatan where the clothes were found, home to Stålhammar’s flat on Järnvägsgatan. It takes at least a quarter of an hour unless you want to jog.’
‘Leaving thirty minutes,’ Bäckström said. ‘More than enough to smash Danielsson’s skull in. Steal his money and change into clean clothes. Chucking the raincoat, slippers, and washing-up gloves on the way home.’
‘True enough,’ Alm agreed. ‘The problem is his neighbor. If he’s telling the truth, then it doesn’t fit,’ he said.
I knew it, Bäckström thought. The group effort to get legendary old Roly off the hook at any cost was evidently well under way.
The neighbor’s name was Paul Englund, seventy-three. A retired caretaker at the Naval History Museum in Stockholm, and the same man who had threatened to call the police about Bäckström and Stigson. Englund had one son, who worked as a photographer at the Expressen newspaper, and the previous evening he had called his dad and told him his next-door neighbor was being held on suspicion of murder. He didn’t suppose that the neighbor in question had just happened to leave a spare key with his dad, so that the son could take some nice pictures of the murderer’s pad?
Mr. Englund had dashed his son’s hopes. He didn’t have a key. Stålhammar was a noisy alcoholic and the worst sort of neighbor. He was delighted with every minute he didn’t have to share the same building with him, and early the following morning he had called the Solna Police to share his observations of Stålhammar on the evening of Danielsson’s murder. Now that he finally had the chance to get rid of him for good. If he had realized the consequences of what he planned to say, it’s quite possible that he would have chosen to stay quiet instead.