Hesitant head shakes.
‘The Anchor, Annika Carlsson,’ Toivonen said, his smile stretching from ear to ear.
‘Poor bastard,’ Peter Niemi said, shaking his head. ‘We’ll have to take his service revolver away from him so that he doesn’t do himself any mischief.’
A quarter of an hour later Bäckström had personally placed the paper bag containing the money on Niemi’s desk. Annika Carlsson had faithfully clung to his side all the way from the garage to Niemi’s office. Was the dyke trying to scare him? Suddenly she was walking like a fucking bodybuilder, thought Bäckström, who by this point hated every single fiber of Annika Carlsson’s well-honed body.
‘How much money do you think we’re talking about, Bäckström? Are we talking millions, or what?’ Niemi had asked with an innocent expression.
‘I thought you might be able to tell us,’ Bäckström said. Get hold of some bastard who can count and just give me a receipt for the bastard box. I have to get out of here, Bäckström thought. I have to get out of this building. I need a stiff drink.
Two hours later he was sitting in the bar on his block with his second stiff drink and his second pint of beer. It hadn’t helped, at least not yet, and it hadn’t got any better when Niemi called him with the news.
‘Two million, nine hundred thousand kronor,’ Niemi said. ‘Twenty-nine bundles, each worth a hundred thousand, and that was all,’ Niemi said, sounding as disinterested as if he were reading from a report in front of him. ‘No prints, and no other evidence either, but he must have been careful and worn gloves when he was touching the money. Anyway, congratulations.’
‘What?’ Bäckström said. Now the bastard Lapp’s just making fun of me, he thought.
‘On finding all that money. Maybe Danielsson wasn’t just your ordinary pisshead after all,’ Niemi concluded. ‘Was there anything else I can help you with?’
‘Hello? Hello? I can hardly hear you,’ Bäckström said, switching off his phone and ordering another drink.
‘A large one,’ Bäckström said.
‘Vojne, vojne, Bäckström,’ his Finnish bartender said, smiling and nodding maternally.
28.
Another meeting of the investigating team. Arranged at short notice for eight o’clock that morning. Toivonen wanted to be updated about the new state of affairs. Bäckström had been forced to get up in the middle of the night to get there in time. Taxi, crashing headache, stopping en route to take on more fluids and get another pack of cough drops, two more headache pills, and almost a week since Danielsson had been murdered. By now he could have been sitting on the beach at Copacabana with a single malt in one hand and a nice local lass on each knee, Bäckström thought. If it hadn’t been for that dyke.
When he was sitting in the taxi the public prosecutor had called and told him that unless some ‘new, compelling evidence regarding Roland Stålhammar’ emerged during the course of the meeting, she was intending to release him after lunch.
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Bäckström said. ‘The only thing bothering me is that he might have a decent amount of money for his travels when he gets out.’
‘People like Stålhammar don’t usually manage to keep themselves hidden,’ the prosecutor retorted. ‘If they go to Thailand, and that’s where they usually go, they usually end up coming home of their own accord after a month or so.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Bäckström said. ‘I don’t socialize with people like Stålhammar. But if you say so. Was there anything else?’ he asked.
‘I think that was everything. By the way, I think you and your colleagues have done a good job so far,’ the prosecutor said comfortingly.
And what would you know about police work, you tight-snatched little bitch? Bäckström thought, switching off his cell.
At eight o’clock precisely Toivonen had walked into the room, and in contrast to the last time he appeared to be in an excellent mood.
‘How’s things, Bäckström?’ Toivonen said, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘You look like you’re raring to go; hope you had a good night.’
Fucking fox, Bäckström thought.
‘Perhaps you’d like to start, Nadja?’ Bäckström said, nodding in her direction. Not only had he lost almost three million, but the Russian had won a bottle of vodka off him, and how the hell am I going to get out of that one? Bäckström thought.
Nadja Högberg had spoken to the two women who had set up the Writer’s Cottage Ltd. twenty years ago. One of the first things they had done had been to set up a safe-deposit box for the company on Valhallavägen in Stockholm.
‘They both worked in an advertising agency nearby,’ Nadja explained, ‘so it was a practical solution. The whole thing was only ever supposed to provide them with a bit of extra money.’
Which was an idea that hadn’t turned out very well. There hadn’t been enough customers right from the start, and when their boss at the advertising agency discovered what they were doing, he had objected. Either they resigned from the agency or they gave up the company.
By that point the capital they had got from shares, fifty thousand kronor, was more or less exhausted. They had spoken to the man who looked after their accounting, Karl Danielsson, and asked for his help. Danielsson had done so, selling their business to one of his other clients for one krona. Someone that they had never met, and whose name they didn’t even know. Danielsson had prepared all the paperwork. They had met him in his office and signed everything. They had waived the single-krona fee. And that was that.
‘But apparently he did offer,’ Nadja said. ‘He took out one krona and put it on the desk.’
‘A nice gesture,’ Bäckström said. ‘Anything else, Nadja?’
‘Quite a lot more,’ Nadja said. ‘Putting aside the two-point-nine million in his safe-deposit box, I think we’ve got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick as far as our victim is concerned,’ she said in the colloquial language that she sometimes fell into.
‘What do you mean, putting aside?’ Bäckström said. Two-point-nine million and I could have been in Rio by now, he thought.
‘In his other company, Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd., there seems to be considerably more than that,’ Nadja Högberg said.
‘The pisshead had even more dough? How much more?’ Bäckström said suspiciously.
‘I was going to come back to that,’ Nadja said. ‘First I thought I’d say something about how much he might have got out from the safe-deposit box on the day he was murdered.
‘The box is the smallest model, thirty-six centimeters long, twenty-seven centimeters across, and about eight centimeters deep. Space for seven thousand, seven hundred, and seventy-six cubic centimeters, or almost eight liters,’ she went on. ‘If you imagine filling it with thousand-kronor notes in bundles of a hundred thousand, it’s got room for roughly eight million.’
‘Eight million, the little foxy bastard,’ Bäckström said. Fuck, that’s criminal, he thought.
‘If it had been euros, in the largest denomination of five hundred euros — and they’re considerably smaller than our thousand-kronor notes, even though they’re worth almost five times as much — there’d be space for something like fifty million,’ Nadja said with a wry smile. ‘And if it had been dollars in the highest denomination, five thousand dollars, you know, the one with President Madison on the front — I think they’re called Madisons — then there would have been almost half a billion Swedish kronor in Danielsson’s safe-deposit box,’ Nadja said with a broad smile.