‘What about ten years ago?’
‘Up and down,’ Stålhammar said, shrugging. ‘So how much did he have?’ Stålhammar looked at her curiously as he turned his cognac glass between his coarse fingers.
‘Twenty-five million,’ Nadja said.
‘And you’re sure about that?’ Stålhammar said, having trouble concealing his surprise. ‘Kalle was pretty hot at accounts, you know. I remember Flash’s electricals business looked really shaky for a while, but Kalle sorted that out for him. He just had to go down to the bank and get out a fat loan, and he’d sort out the details. You make meringue from egg whites, Kalle used to say.’
‘Twenty-five million. Not meringue this time,’ Nadja said.
‘Fucking hell,’ Roly Stålhammar said, shaking his head.
79.
Alm was having trouble letting go of Seppo Laurén and the notion of patricide. He had talked to a friend in National Crime who was good with computers, and according to him there were several ways of creating a false alibi using your computer. You get someone else to sit there instead of you. If you were smart and cunning enough, that person didn’t even have to sit there in any physical sense.
‘You can connect to another computer, and sometimes it can be really difficult to trace that sort of thing,’ the expert said.
‘Really?’ said Alm, who was in the habit of shaking his computer when it didn’t do what he wanted.
‘Nowadays there’s even software that can do the job for you. Then you can go off and do whatever you like. The computer looks after itself, doing whatever the software tells it to.’
‘Like playing computer games for you, for instance?’ Alm asked.
‘Yes, for instance.’
Nadja wasn’t particularly impressed when Alm told her what one of the force’s ‘best computer nerds’ had just told him.
‘I hear what you’re saying, Alm,’ Nadja said. ‘But that isn’t the problem.’
‘What do you mean?’ Alm said.
‘Seppo likes playing computer games,’ Nadja said. ‘It’s pretty much the only thing he likes doing. So why would he get a piece of software to do it for him? Leaving aside the fact that he could probably put together that sort of software himself.’
‘Yes, well, there you are,’ Alm said. ‘Listen to what you just said, Nadja.’
‘Drop Seppo,’ Nadja said. ‘He didn’t kill Danielsson.’
‘How can you say that? How do you know that?’
‘Seppo can’t lie,’ Nadja said. ‘People like him are incapable of it. If he killed Danielsson, he would have said when you asked him. He would have told you in exactly the same way he’s replied to every other question we’ve asked him.’
What a complete idiot, Nadja thought, as Alm left her.
Not only is she a computer expert, but now she’s evidently a psychiatrist as well, Alm thought, as he closed her door.
Alm didn’t give up, and the next day he finally got his reward. On Wednesday, April 9, about a month before he was killed, Karl Danielsson was admitted to the ER at the Karolinska Hospital. At around eleven o’clock that evening one of his neighbors had found him lying unconscious by the entrance of number 1 Hasselstigen and had called an ambulance.
Because he didn’t have any obvious external injuries, the ambulance staff thought at first that he must have suffered a heart attack or a stroke, but the doctor who examined him found other injuries when they undressed him. Someone had knocked Karl Danielsson to the ground from behind. Severe bruising to his body indicated that he had suffered a number of blows to the backs of his knees, his back, and his neck. And had suffered a mild concussion and lost consciousness.
He had come round in the ER. The doctor had asked him whether he could remember what had happened. Karl Danielsson had replied that he must have tripped on the stairs.
‘But you don’t believe that?’ Alm said when he spoke to the doctor.
‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s out of the question. Someone attacked him from behind. Probably began by hitting his knees so that he fell forward. Then set about him when he was on the ground.’
‘Do you have any idea what his attacker might have used as a tool?’ Alm asked.
The doctor had fairly definite views on that matter. He had even put an entry in the notes.
‘A baseball bat, an ordinary cudgel, a long baton. The patient looked like people do when they’ve been attacked by football hooligans and the like. And there was actually a match at Råsunda that evening. AIK versus Djurgården, if I remember rightly.’
‘You remember that? Are you sure?’ Alm said.
‘You’d remember too if you’d been on duty that night,’ the doctor said with a wry smile. ‘This place looked like a field hospital.’
Then he had spoken to Seppo’s next-door neighbor. A very striking woman with a shapely and well-preserved figure even though she must have passed fifty several years ago, thought Alm, who had himself hit sixty a few months earlier.
‘You mostly just have to feel sorry for the poor lad,’ Britt-Marie Andersson said. ‘After all, he’s retarded, if I can put it like that.’
‘Mrs. Andersson, do you have any idea about how he got on with Karl Danielsson?’ Alm asked.
‘What, apart from the fact that he’s his son?’ Britt-Marie Andersson said with a faint smile.
‘So you know about that?’ Alm said.
‘Most people who’ve lived here long enough probably know. But I don’t know if the lad himself knows. His mom...’
‘Yes?’ Alm cajoled.
‘Well, even though she’s in the hospital,’ Mrs. Andersson said, pursing her lips. ‘His mom was very young thing. She didn’t make any secret of the fact that she and Danielsson were an item, even though he must have been at least twenty-five years older than her. But I’m not sure if Seppo knew about it.’
‘So how did Seppo get on with Karl Danielsson?’ Alm reminded her.
‘Mostly he seemed to be Danielsson’s errand boy. Do this, do that. And I suppose he usually did as he was told. But sometimes they fought like cat and dog, so in recent years it’s been a bit tricky, if I can put it like that.’
‘Could you give me an example, Mrs. Andersson?’
‘Well, there was one time last winter when I got home. I’d been out to let my little darling do his business. There was a terrible commotion in the entrance. Danielsson was drunk and was yelling and shouting, and suddenly Seppo flew at him and tried to strangle him. It was awful,’ Mrs. Andersson said, shaking her head.
‘I yelled at them, telling them to behave themselves, and they actually stopped.’
‘But before that Seppo had been trying to strangle him?’ Alm said.
‘Yes, if I hadn’t managed to stop them fighting I don’t know what would have happened,’ Mrs. Andersson sighed, her bosom heaving.
Hmm, Alm thought, and merely nodded.
Now the hawk takes the finch, Alm thought. As soon as he had left Mrs. Andersson he called his colleague Stigson on his cell phone and told him to get to Hasselstigen at once. Stigson was there within fifteen minutes. Seppo didn’t open the door until they had been ringing on his doorbell for a good two minutes.
‘I’m playing computer games,’ Seppo said.
‘You’ll have to stop for a while. We need to talk to you,’ Alm said, making an effort to sound friendly and authoritative at the same time.
‘Okay,’ Seppo said with a shrug.
The second time Seppo hit Karl Danielsson. Did he remember what day that was?
‘Don’t remember,’ Seppo said, shaking his head.
‘What if I say it was the same day that AIK played a match against Djurgården? Do you remember what day it was now?’