Another Time, Another Life (18 page)

“I still think he’s holding something back,” Holt repeated.

“Possibly,” said Jarnebring. “If that’s so, I don’t think he intends to help by telling us in any event.”

“Gloomy type,” said Holt.

What do you know about that? You were never drafted, were you? thought Jarnebring.

“Where did you do your military service, Holt?” asked Jarnebring, smiling his wolf grin.

Despite what he had promised, Bäckström never had the chance to scare the shit out of anyone this gray afternoon at the beginning of December. When with his colleague Alm in tow he stepped unannounced into Tischler’s tastefully decorated office down at Nybroplan, the receptionist told him that the banker was not available. Because Bäckström wasn’t the type to take no for an answer, he persisted and finally got to speak with Tischler’s own secretary. A stylish woman in her fifties who went well with the decor. She apologized, but the banker himself was in New York at a meeting and was not expected home until Friday morning.

“I know he is very anxious to speak with you gentlemen,” said the secretary. “So I suggest that you call me on Friday at midday, and I will try to arrange a time for you as soon as possible.”

Fucking stuck-up bitch, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

He and Alm did not have much better luck when they visited the TV building on Oxenstiernsgatan where Welander was to be found. The guard in reception paid hardly any attention to their police IDs, and after some negotiating they were at last allowed to talk to yet another secretary,
but this time only on the phone. Sten Welander was occupied. He was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed. If they wanted to meet Sten Welander, she suggested they call to arrange a time, and it would surely be fine. After that she simply hung up.

Fucking communist cunt, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

In the car en route back to police headquarters that blockhead Alm started whining and coming up with a lot of suggestions about what they should have done instead.

“I told you, Evert, we should have called ahead,” Blockhead moaned.

Fucking idiot, thought Bäckström. Who the hell do you think you are?

When Alm was about to drive the car down into the garage Bäckström jumped out on the street, hailed a taxi, and went straight home. What a fucking society we live in and what fucking people there are, thought Bäckström, leaning his full weight back against the seat.

As soon as Jarnebring returned to his and his prospective wife’s pleasant little apartment on Kungsholmen he called up his best friend, police superintendent Lars Martin Johansson.

Johansson answered on the first ring and sounded almost elated when he heard who it was.

“Good thing you called, Bo,” said Johansson. “I’ve tried you a few times, but I suppose you’ve been working, as usual.”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “There’s been a—”

“What do you think about having a bite to eat on Friday?” interrupted Johansson. “My usual place at seven o’clock. Can you?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “I’d actually been thinking that—”

“Excellent,” said Johansson. “Then that’s settled. I have a few things to tell you.”

I see, thought Jarnebring. Wonder what that could be? He hasn’t heard anything, has he?

Holt was already at work before seven o’clock on Thursday morning. Nicke had spent the night with his dad, who would take him to day care. Holt woke up as usual, showered, had breakfast, and even managed to read the paper in peace and quiet, but when she was done with that she was still an hour ahead of her usual schedule. She went to work, and for lack of anything better to do while she was waiting for Jarnebring, she resumed her investigations of the mysteriously dedicated books she had found in Eriksson’s bookcase.

After half an hour of searching she found the addresses for all four of the recipients of dedication copies that she had been able to identify, and the mystery deepened further.

One of them, a woman born in 1935, had died a few years ago, but her husband was still living in the residence they had shared on Strandvägen. In the year 1974 a far-from-unknown author and member of the Swedish Academy had dedicated his newly published novel to her. The author was still alive, he was considerably older than his now dead “muse,” and the two of them had probably had a relationship at the time he had given her his book.

Oh my goodness, thought Holt, continuing to search in her files.

All the other three recipients lived in the same area. One, now an eighty-year-old bank executive on Narvavägen, had received a book about the Kreuger crash of 1932 written by another well-known financier. An executive on Djurgårdsvägen had received a book about Swedish chapbooks from a historian to whom he had evidently given a
research grant. Finally, a very well-known publisher who also lived on Djurgården had received a book of poems from a poet unknown to Holt; the poet did not make a secret of the fact that he was thinking of changing publishers.

One woman and three men, all fine people at fine addresses in the same limited area of Stockholm: Strandvägen, Narvavägen, Djurgården.

This is a real detective mystery, Holt was thinking just as Jarnebring came into the office, his large body positively quivering with zest for work, as can easily happen when you’ve started the day by first, at full throttle and high volume, having sex with the woman you love, and then gobbling down a perfectly formidable breakfast.

“Good morning, Inspector,” said Jarnebring. “Have we captured any suspects yet?”

“Not yet,” Holt replied, quickly hiding her papers under a pile of regular searches.

Why did I do that? she thought.

During the morning they talked with Eriksson’s coworkers again. The tongues of several of them had now loosened, and in all essentials they confirmed what the doorman had already told them, though their choice of words was different. Eriksson had not been a good person. He had been sufficiently bad that none of them had had any desire to associate with him, but at the same time not so terrible that there was any reason to kill him.

“Just an extremely unpleasant person,” one of Eriksson’s female coworkers summarized. “He really did nothing but snoop around.”

None of them had socialized with him, none of them even seemed to have known him outside of work, and none of them had had motive and occasion to bump off Eriksson at home in his own apartment.

How is this possible? No man is an island, thought Holt as they drove back to police headquarters on Kungsholmen.

When they returned to their office after lunch the excellent Gunsan had solved Holt’s mystery of the mysteriously dedicated books, despite the
fact that she wasn’t even aware of the problem. On Jarnebring’s desk was a typewritten sheet of paper on which Gunsan had compiled what she, with the help of the police department’s telephones and computers, had produced about Eriksson’s background. Jarnebring took it and started reading while Holt—for the millionth time—started thumbing through her own piles of papers.

“Okay, it’s clear,” Jarnebring suddenly exclaimed. “Look at this,” he said, handing over the paper with Gunsan’s notes on Eriksson’s history.

It appeared that Eriksson had worked as a mail carrier in Stockholm during the years from 1964 to 1975. First as a substitute mail carrier and then as a temporary, at the two post offices whose delivery areas included Djurgården and the tonier parts of Östermalm. At the age of thirty-one, when he completed his part-time studies at the University of Stockholm with a degree in sociology, criminology, and education, he also quit the post office and got a job instead as an assistant statistician at the Central Bureau of Statistics.

“But why did he steal books?” said Holt, looking inquisitively at Jarnebring.

“Maybe he stole other things too,” Jarnebring sneered. “Who cares? This is already past the statute of limitations, and he’s dead anyway.”

“But books,” Holt persisted.

“I guess he liked to read,” said Jarnebring, smiling.

Holt shook her head.

“I think he was snooping,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that Eriksson was an extremely snoopy type.”

In the afternoon the detective team met as usual and again took stock of how the investigation was going. As of yet nothing had been produced that was even reminiscent of a breakthrough.

“I don’t understand this guy,” Jarnebring muttered. “He doesn’t seem to have known a soul. Well, besides those two you wanted to question,” he added, looking inquisitively at Bäckström. “How did that go, by the way?”

“It’ll work out, it’ll work out,” said Bäckström evasively, and instead
launched into a lengthy exposition of his pet homo theory, on which he and his colleagues had evidently put in some comprehensive work. Gunsan had searched out a large number of conceivable murderers of gay men, identified those who according to the computer already had something else going, for example, were sitting in prison or in one of the mental institutions for the criminally insane, and turned the rest back to Bäckström, Alm, and the others who had already questioned a number of them. Without any results, however.

“We’ll find him,” said Bäckström credulously. “There’s some little fairy out there that Eriksson had contact with or just picked up when he had the chance, and sooner or later we’ll run into him.”

The hell we will, thought Jarnebring doubtfully, and if a murder investigation could be compared to a soup, then this was pretty thin.

The checks on Eriksson’s telephone were done and had not produced anything in particular. The calls he made from his home phone usually went to the switchboard at the brokerage firm that managed his stock transactions. There were also occasional calls directly to Tischler, Welander, or his cleaning woman’s home phone.

The autopsy was complete, but if you disregarded Esprit and Wiijnbladh’s so-called interpretations of the victim’s personality, it basically conveyed no more than what Jarnebring had understood with his own eyes when he found Eriksson dead on the floor in his living room.

Same thing with the technical investigations. Prints from a small number of persons of which the two most common samples had already been identified as Eriksson’s and his cleaning woman’s. But none that could be found in the police files, and other clues were sparse as well. The hand towel that had been found in the laundry basket in Eriksson’s bathroom was still at the crime lab. As usual they were overworked and a report was unlikely to arrive before Christmas, despite the fact that Wiijnbladh had called to nudge them.

Instead the team members sat around arguing about a lot of irritating details that would certainly prove to be completely uninteresting once things got to the point. A safe-deposit box key that was missing, for example. An entire half hour of sometimes animated discussion had
been devoted to this, and it was Jarnebring who brought it up, although this had not really been his intention.

Supposing it was the case that Eriksson had been killed by a male prostitute he had picked up. Why was there nothing to indicate he had been robbed? As far as Jarnebring and Holt and even Wiijnbladh and his colleagues had been able to ascertain, nothing particular was missing from Eriksson’s apartment. Apart from a suitcase, probably a few hand towels, and possibly a number of papers. Despite the fact that there were various things that ought to have tempted an ordinary robber. Three expensive watches and a number of other personal items, such as a gold currency clip.

“We don’t actually know that,” Bäckström objected. “I’m a hundred percent sure that he emptied his safe-deposit box that day, so he could have had piles of dough at home.” Although it doesn’t need to be that bad, he thought, almost feeling a shudder as he did so. That would be simply too annoying, he thought.

“I don’t believe it,” said Jarnebring doubtfully. “If there’s anything that has disappeared it’s probably some of his papers that someone has taken. That thing with the hand towels is far from certain, and as for the suitcase it may just be that the perpetrator needed it to carry away the papers he may have taken.”

You really are a true detective, Jarnebring, thought Bäckström, nonetheless deciding to mess a little with the big ape-man, since he still had the victim’s suitcase in his possession, although he had always intended to put it back as soon as things had settled down.

“What papers?” asked Bäckström, suddenly seeming rather contentious. “What kind of papers would they be?”

Jarnebring just shrugged his shoulders. He had never brought up the empty drawer in Eriksson’s desk, though he had thought about it, while stupidly he had mentioned the missing safe-deposit box key instead. Eriksson had signed out two safe-deposit box keys from Handelsbanken. One had been found but one was still missing, despite Jarnebring’s and Holt’s dogged searching. Where was it?

The proffered suggestions ranged across the whole field, from that it had ended up in the murderer’s own pants pocket to that it had simply been lost. Which by the way was often how things turned out when you
had two identical keys, despite the fact that you only needed one. Didn’t everyone know that from their own experience?

When they were finally done and everyone had had their say, the day was basically over. In a few hours it would have been a week since Eriksson had been murdered, and they still did not have their hands on any culprit worthy of the name.

On Friday morning Inspector Alm provoked his colleague Bäckström’s displeasure.

Without talking with Bäckström, he phoned TV reporter Sten Welander at the national television news to set a time for a conversation about Welander’s old acquaintance Kjell Eriksson.

Welander was friendly and businesslike; he looked forward to meeting with the police and pointed out in passing that he had called them first, as early as Friday morning a week ago, as soon as he had heard about the tragic event. Not because he thought he could contribute much in particular, but he could scarcely be the judge of that. If he himself could propose a time, it would be either within an hour or two or else in fourteen days, because he would be traveling abroad in connection with a major news story he was working on. And if they wanted to meet with him immediately it had to be at his office in the TV building as he had a number of other meetings later in the day that were already scheduled and could not be changed.