It was impossible to talk to Hassan Talib at all. His doctors merely shook their heads. Even if the patient survived, he wouldn’t be able to contribute much, even in the future. Extensive brain damage. Permanent damage.
‘Superintendent, you’re going to have to drop any hopes of that,’ the doctor said, nodding to Toivonen.
Farshad and Afsan Ibrahim could at least talk. The problem was that neither of them wanted to talk to the police.
Fredrik Åkare had already been questioned. He had been good-humored, had brought his usual lawyer, but had been completely uncomprehending. He and his friends were supposed to have murdered Nasir Ibrahim? A person that Åkare had never met, would never dream of meeting? And in Copenhagen? It must be at least a year since the last time he visited the Danish capital to see old friends and acquaintances.
‘Sometimes I almost worry about you, Toivonen,’ Åkare said with a smile. ‘You haven’t started drinking, have you?’
Peter Niemi had submitted a new forensic report, which, in any ordinary case, would have been a breakthrough in the investigation.
‘The pistol Bäckström took off Hassan Talib matches the bullets that were pulled out of Kari Viirtanen’s skull by the pathologist,’ Niemi said. ‘Although fuck knows what we do with that now.’
Toivonen had made do with a loud sigh. That fucking fat little bastard, he thought.
‘What do we do?’ Niemi repeated.
‘Make sure the prosecutor gets something to read,’ Toivonen said. ‘Preferably before Bäckström holds his next press conference.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Niemi said. ‘Do you want to, or shall I?’ he went on.
‘What?’
‘Strangle the fat fucker with our bare hands,’ Niemi said with a grin.
78.
Nadja Högberg hadn’t gone to the press conference, and had also declined an invitation to attend the lunch, even though Bäckström himself had asked her. She had a lot to do, since earlier that day she had discovered a storage facility run by Shurgard just half a kilometer from the Solna police station. A friendly colleague had snapped at one of the many hooks Nadja had set out. She compared the list of the company’s tenants with the list she had got from the crime section of Solna Police, and had found that one of the smaller storage spaces was leased to Flash’s Electricals.
Nadja had set off to take a look, taking young Stigson with her. Inside the storage space were ten boxes containing the accounts of Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. But not a trace of Flash’s Electricals.
In the box at the bottom of the pile she had also found a twenty-nine-year-old handwritten will, signed and witnessed on Christmas Eve 1979. It contained the following:
At the top was one word, in the middle of the lined page, which seemed to have been torn out of an ordinary pad. Ballpoint pen.
Will
Then a double-line space, followed by the text itself.
I, Karl Danielsson, being of sound mind and body, and on a day like today in a damn good mood after a decent lunch, hereby declare that it is my last will and testament that everything I own should be inherited upon my death by Ritwa Laurén and her and my firstborn son, Seppo.
Solna, December 24, 1979.
The will was signed by Karl Danielsson, in grandiose handwriting, and witnessed by Roly Stålhammar and Halfy Söderman.
I suppose they were drunk. Nadja, who had an old-fashioned attitude to matters of this nature, sighed.
Nadja and Stigson had taken the boxes and the will with them back to the police station.
She spent the first couple hours leafing through the bookkeeping files. Mostly statements from various deals, with shares and other certificates, and thick bundles of receipts for costs incurred in the line of business, principally entertainment and travel.
After that she had a fair idea of how Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. made all its money. Not because he was a genius at investment, but because someone had most likely handed him a load of black-market money, which he then whitewashed with the help of various financial transactions.
Eight years earlier, the almost penniless company had been granted a remarkably generous loan of five million kronor from a foreign loan company. The only security given to the lender was a personal guarantee from Karl Danielsson, who by then had a taxable income of just two hundred thousand a year. Movements on the world’s stock markets had taken care of the rest. The loan had evidently been repaid within three years, and the company now had its own declared capital of just over twenty million and an actual value that was several million higher than that.
Nadja had sighed and called the Financial Crime Unit to remind them of their promise to take over that part of the investigation as soon as she had uncovered the basics. They promised to get back to her. Right now things were a bit chaotic, but things were bound to have improved by next week.
Nadja looked at the clock. High time to go home and prepare the meal that she usually ate on her own in front of the television.
Instead she called Roland Stålhammar on his cell, explained who she was, and asked if she could invite him for a bite to eat. She had some questions she wanted to ask him.
Stålhammar was unwilling to start with. He thought the police had fucked about with him and his friends quite enough by now. Living and dead friends alike, come to that.
‘I’m not thinking of fucking about with you,’ Nadja said. ‘It’s about Karl Danielsson’s old will. Besides, I’m a good cook, you know.’
‘I’ve always had a weakness for that sort of woman,’ Stålhammar said.
Two hours later Stålhammar was ringing on the door of her flat on Vintervägen in Solna. The pies were in the oven, the beetroot soup on the stove, and the Russian soused herring already on the kitchen table together with beer, water, and the world’s finest vodka.
Nadja herself was flushed from cooking, and Roly Stålhammar had begun by handing her a small bunch of flowers. He was also wearing a smart jacket, smelled of aftershave, and seemed completely sober.
‘You’re a damn fine cook, Nadja,’ Stålhammar declared an hour later when they were sitting in the living room drinking coffee and even a small glass of Armenian cognac.
‘I’m sorry if I was rude on the phone.’
Roly Stålhammar remembered Kalle Danielsson’s will very well.
‘There must have been half a dozen of us lads who decided to celebrate Christmas together, and Mario was in charge of the food. We all knew about Seppo, that he was his and Ritwa’s boy, I mean. The lad was only a few months old then, of course. So I suppose we started teasing Kalle and asking who was going to pay for his little lad, us or him. Things were up and down for Kalle in those days, and if I remember rightly he was completely broke that Christmas. I’m sure you know better that me what things were like when he died. He still had a few decent things that could probably be sold, but I don’t suppose the lad should expect millions. Awful business about his mother, as well.’
‘What would you say if I told you Kalle Danielsson was good for at least twenty-five million when he died?’ Nadja asked.
‘I’d say you sounded just like Kalle when he’d been on the drink in the last few years,’ Stålhammar said, with a wry smile and a shake of the head.
‘Kalle was an artistic soul, a bohemian,’ he went on. ‘If he had money in his pocket, he was generous to a fault. Okay, he never seemed to want for much. Partly because he had various pensions, some of those private investments too, but he’d also calmed down a lot when he was out at Valla. Things have actually gone fairly well for us this year. We gambled together a lot of the time, as I’m sure you know. We actually had one V65 this spring that came in at almost one hundred to one.’