‘No,’ Holt said with a reluctant smile. ‘What?’
‘If they did it anyway — killed Danielsson because he tried to steal their money, I mean — then surely they would have thought about all their money that was left in Danielsson’s safe-deposit box?’
‘Do you know what, Bäckström? I have a feeling that you may have a point there. Maybe you’ve even got an idea of who did do it, who killed Danielsson and Akofeli?’
‘Yes,’ Bäckström said. ‘Just give me another week.’
‘Well, that all sounds excellent,’ Anna Holt said. ‘I look forward to hearing more. Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve actually got a lot to do.’
Just as well to kill two dykes with one stone, Bäckström thought, and went straight to Annika Carlsson to find out how things were going.
‘Not great just now,’ Carlsson said, and sighed. ‘The door-to-door didn’t turn up anything. Forensics are lying low and we haven’t heard anything from the National Lab or forensic medicine. And as for us, we’re short on ideas and leads.’
‘Akofeli,’ Bäckström said, shaking his round head. ‘There’s something not quite right there.’
‘But I thought Felicia had sorted that?’ Annika Carlsson said, looking at him in surprise. ‘Mainly thanks to you, actually, since you put her on the trail.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of his phone calls,’ Bäckström said, shaking his head. ‘There’s something else bothering me.’
‘But you don’t know what it is?’ Annika Carlsson said.
‘No, I don’t,’ Bäckström said. ‘It’s in here somewhere, but I just can’t put my finger on it.’
‘And you think it might be important to the case?’
‘Important?’ Bäckström snorted. ‘When I work out what it is, we’ll have this case cracked. Danielsson and Akofeli.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Annika Carlsson said, looking at him, wide-eyed.
Thank you and goodbye, Bäckström thought. How fucking stupid can you get?
‘You’ll have to help me, Annika,’ Bäckström said, nodding seriously at her. ‘I have a feeling that you’re the only one who can.’
‘I promise,’ Annika Carlsson said.
And that gave you something to chew on, while I go off and enjoy the weekend, he thought.
After that Bäckström had followed his usual Friday routine. Switched his phone’s message to ‘official business.’ Turned off his cell phone. Left the police station. Took a taxi to a safe location on Kungsholmen, where he ate a decent lunch. Then a short walk home to his cozy abode, a well-earned siesta, and, as the final part of his routine Friday program, he had visited his new masseuse.
An unusually body-conscious Polish girl, Elena, twenty-six, who had her health care practice close to his home, and who had Bäckström as her last client each Friday. She always ran through the whole program and usually concluded by giving the Bäckström super-salami a little taste of the delights to come over the weekend.
That evening he was going to have dinner with an old acquaintance. A renowned art dealer, Gustaf Gustafsson Henning, to whom Bäckström was pleased to have been of assistance on a number of occasions, and who had asked if he could take Bäckström to dinner.
‘How about the main dining room of Operakällaren at half past seven?’ Henning had asked.
Well-to-do, silver-haired, tailored, famous from antiques shows on television, and over seventy. Out and about, and in the circles that mattered, he was known by the nickname GeGurra, and he bore not the slightest resemblance to the notorious teenage gangster Juha Valentin Andersson-Snygg, born in 1937, whose records had disappeared from the archive of the Stockholm Police many years ago.
‘How about eight o’clock?’ Bäckström said, since he preferred to allow himself plenty of time for important matters of bodily and personal health.
‘Let’s say eight, then,’ GeGurra agreed.
50.
Superintendent Toivonen didn’t have thirty men to investigate the murder of his security guard, as Bäckström believed. By Friday morning the reinforcements had arrived. He had been authorized to borrow people from National Crime, the National Rapid-Response Unit, and the riot squad. From Stockholm County Crime and from the other district covered by the county. Even the police down in Skåne had sent him three investigators from the county’s special armed robbery unit. For the time being he was in charge of almost seventy officers and detectives, as well as his own unit, and he could have had more if he wanted. Nowadays Toivonen got everything he asked for, and he and his group leaders had spent the whole day planning their strategy.
Now the whole operation had to come together. Internal surveillance, outdoor surveillance, monitoring, telephone interception, cell surveillance, bugging, increasing the pressure, stirring up and bringing in the hang-arounds and wannabes in the groups around the Ibrahim brothers and their cousin Hassan Talib. Lock them up, question them, stop their cars, subject them to body searches whenever the opportunity arose, and, if necessary, beat the shit out of them if they said anything inappropriate, made any rapid movements, or simply showed any signs of normal behavior.
‘Okay, let’s get to it. The Ibrahims are heading for prison,’ Toivonen said with a stern expression and a nod to all his colleagues.
Starting from six o’clock in the evening, Superintendent Jorma Honkamäki and his colleagues from the National Rapid-Response Unit and the Stockholm Police riot squad had carried out a total of ten raids on homes and premises in Huddinge-Botkyrka, Tensta-Rinkeby, and North Järva. They hadn’t asked for permission to enter first. The doors had been uniformly smashed in. Anyone found in the flats and premises had been carried out in handcuffs. Drug-detection dogs, bomb-detection dogs, and ordinary police dogs had been sent in; the furnishings and fittings had been turned upside down; the interior walls of some offices in Flemingsberg were torn down; and money, drugs, weapons, ammunition, explosives, detonators, smoke grenades, caltrops, balaclavas, overalls, handcuffs, loose number plates, and stolen vehicles had all been found. When the sun rose on a new day in the world’s most beautiful capital city, thirty-three people were in custody, and the whole thing was only just starting.
Linda Martinez was the recently appointed superintendent of National Crime’s surveillance unit, brought in by Toivonen and responsible for the outdoor surveillance of the Ibrahim brothers and their cousin. She had chosen her team carefully and she was well aware of her opponents’ weaknesses.
‘Not an ordinary Swede as far as the eye can see,’ Martinez concluded as she surveyed her forces. ‘Nothing but black, brown, and blue,’ she said with a delighted grin.
Before Toivonen left the Solna police station he had met with his boss, Anna Holt, to inform her of the latest from the Criminal Investigation Service on possible connections between Karl Danielsson, the Ibrahim brothers, and Hassan Talib. Now that they knew what they were looking for, everything had been much easier to find. Among other things, a nine-year-old report about Karl Danielsson’s involvement in money laundering in the wake of the major armed robbery in Akalla, to the north of Stockholm. Because the tip-off could never be backed up with firm evidence, the case had been put to one side and eventually forgotten.
In March 1999, some nine years earlier, at least six masked and armed men had raided the depot of a security transport company out in Akalla. They drove a fifteen-ton forklift truck straight through the wall of the depot. They forced the staff onto the floor, and when they disappeared five minutes later they took with them some hundred million kronor in unmarked notes.