Leif GW Persson
Bäckström: He Who Kills the Dragon
Leif GW Persson has chronicled the political and social development of modern Swedish society in his award-winning novels for more than three decades. He has served as an adviser to the Swedish ministry of justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler. A professor at the Swedish National Police Board, he is considered the country’s foremost expert on crime.
ALSO BY LEIF GW PERSSON
Free Falling, As If in a Dream
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Another Time, Another Life
A VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2015
Translation copyright © 2013 by Neil Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
Originally published in Sweden as Den som dödar draken by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Leif GW Persson. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2013. This edition is published by agreement with the Salomonsson Agency.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Persson, Leif G. W.
[Den som dödar draken. English]
Bäckström : he who kills the dragon / by Leif GW Persson; translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith. — First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition.
pages cm
1. Detectives—Sweden—Fiction.
2. Murder—Investigation—Sweden—Fiction. I. Title.
PT9876.26.E7225D4613 2014 839.73′74—dc23 2014010368
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-95038-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-90768-4
“BACKSTROM” film artwork © 2015 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
www.weeklylizard.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
A wicked tale for grown-up children
A gravy-stained tie, a cast-iron saucepan lid, and a basic upholstery hammer with a broken wooden handle. These were the three most striking things found by the forensics team of the Solna Police during their preliminary investigation of the crime scene. But you didn’t have to be a forensics expert to work out that these three things had, in all probability, been used to kill the victim. Anyone with a pair of eyes and a strong stomach could figure that out.
As far as the upholstery hammer with the broken handle was concerned, it became clear relatively quickly that—with, if possible, even greater probability—those initial impressions had been wrong, and that the hammer at least hadn’t been used when the perpetrator killed his victim.
As the forensics team got on with their work, the investigating officers had done what they had to. They’d knocked on the doors of people living nearby, asking about the victim and if anyone had seen anything that could be connected to what had happened. One woman, a civilian under contract with the police, had set to work finding out whatever she could from her computer—contracted civilians usually took care of that line of inquiry.
It didn’t take long before they had uncovered the tragic story of the most common murder victim in Swedish criminal history during the one and a half centuries that records had been kept. Probably considerably longer than that, since court records from as far back as the early medieval period show the same picture as the legal records of industrialized society. The classic Swedish murder victim, if you like. In today’s terminology: “A single, middle-aged man, socially marginalized, with a serious alcohol dependency.”
“Your standard pisshead, basically” was how Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström, head of the preliminary investigation for the Solna Police, described the victim to his boss after the initial meeting of the team on the case.
2.
Even if there was more than enough proof in both the neighbors’ statements and the information pulled from various registers, the evidence provided by the two forensics experts had given further support to the argument.
“A typical drunken murder, if you ask me, Bäckström,” the older of the pair, Peter Niemi, summarized the case when he presented his and his colleague’s findings at the same preliminary meeting.
The tie, saucepan lid, and hammer all belonged to the victim and had been in the flat before the unfortunate sequence of events began. The tie had simply been found around the victim’s neck. Under the collar, as per usual, but in this case pulled a couple inches too tight and, just to be sure, tied across his throat with a basic reef knot.
Two people, one of them the victim himself, to judge by the fingerprints, appeared to have spent the hours leading up to the murder eating and drinking together in the same flat.
Empty bottles of spirits and export-strength lager, beer and vodka glasses, the remains of a meal on two plates on the table in the living room, together with matching scraps of food found in the small kitchen, all provided evidence that the victim’s last meal had consisted of that old Swedish classic, pork chops and kidney beans. The beans were evidently bought as a ready-meal, to judge from the plastic packaging found in the bin, from a local supermarket earlier that day. Then, before they were served, they had been heated up in the cast-iron pan whose lid the killer had used to hit his host repeatedly around the head later that same evening.
The coroner had reached much the same conclusions. He had passed these on to the forensics expert who had been at the postmortem, since he himself was busy with more important matters when the police team were due to hold their first meeting. His definitive findings would take another week or so to appear in writing, but the usual basic dissection and a trained eye were enough to provide a preliminary oral report.
“Our unfortunate victim was what I believe you gentlemen of the police call a pisshead,” the coroner had explained, because, in contrast to present company, he was an educated man who was expected to choose his words carefully.
Taken as a whole, all of this—the neighbors’ statements, the sad little notes about the victim in official files, the findings from the scene of the crime, the coroner’s initial report—provided the police with all they really needed to know. Two pissheads, previously acquainted with each other, had met for a bite to eat and considerably more to drink, then had fallen into an argument about one of the many pointless matters that made up their private shared history. And one of them had brought their evening together to an end by beating the other to death.
It was no more complicated than that. There was a reasonably good expectation of finding the culprit among the victim’s closest circle of like-minded acquaintances, and inquiries were already under way. Cases like this were cleared up nine times out of ten, and the papers were usually on the public prosecutor’s desk within a month.
A purely routine case, in other words, and it didn’t occur to any of the officers of the Solna Police who participated in that first meeting to call in specialist expertise from outside—from, for instance, the psychological profiling unit of the National Criminal Investigation Department, or even the National Police Board’s own professor of criminology, who happened to live just a few blocks away from the victim.
Nor had any of these experts been in contact of their own accord, which was a good thing, since they were bound to have certified that things were exactly as everyone already knew they were. Now at least there was no danger of their being caught with their trousers down in terms of scientific evidence.
But when it came down to it, it turned out that all of the above—everything that had been deduced from the accumulation of criminological evidence, tried and tested police experience, and the good old gut instinct that all real policemen develop over time—was completely and utterly wrong.
“Okay, give me the basics, Bäckström,” Anna Holt, Bäckström’s boss, the police chief of the Western District, said when Bäckström ran through the case for her the day after the murder.
“Just your average pisshead,” Bäckström said, nodding solemnly.
“Okay, you’ve got five minutes,” Holt said, and sighed. She had several other items on her agenda, at least one of which was considerably more important than Bäckström’s case.
3.
On Thursday, May 15, the sun had risen over number 1 Hasselstigen in Solna at twenty past three in the morning. Exactly two hours and forty-five minutes before Septimus Akofeli, twenty-five, arrived at that address to deliver the morning newspapers.
Septimus Akofeli was really a bicycle courier, but for about a year now he had been earning some extra money delivering morning papers to a few blocks along Råsundavägen, including the building at number 1 Hasselstigen. He also happened to be a refugee from southern Somalia, from a small village just half a day’s walk from the Kenyan border. He had arrived in his new homeland on the day of his thirteenth birthday, and the reason he ended up in Sweden rather than anywhere else was that his aunt, uncle, and a number of cousins had arrived there five years earlier, and all his other relatives were dead. Or murdered, one could say, because very few of them had died of other causes.
Septimus Akofeli wasn’t your average Somali refugee, somehow ending up in Sweden at random. He had close relatives who could look after him, and there were strong humanitarian reasons for letting him stay. And everything seemed to have turned out pretty well. Or at least as well as anyone had any right to expect, as far as someone like him was concerned.
Septimus Akofeli had worked his way through school and sixth form in Sweden with decent, not to say good, results in most subjects. Then he had studied for three years at Stockholm University. He had a degree in languages, with English as his main subject. He had a Swedish driving license and had become a Swedish citizen at the age of twenty-two. He had applied for a lot of jobs and had eventually got one of them. As a bicycle courier for Green Carriers—“couriers for people who care about the planet.” Then, when the first schedule of repayments on his student loan dropped through the letterbox, he found an extra job delivering newspapers. For the past couple years he had been living alone in a one-room flat on Fornbyvägen in Rinkeby.
Septimus Akofeli took care of himself. He wasn’t a burden on anyone. In short, he had accomplished more than most people, regardless of background, and had managed better than almost everyone who shared the same background as him.
Septimus Akofeli wasn’t your usual Somali refugee. To begin with, Septimus was a very unusual first name for a Somali, even among the small Christian minority in Somalia. And his skin was also considerably lighter than that of most of his compatriots. There was a simple explanation for this: A pastor with the Church of England’s mission to Africa, Mortimer S. Craigh—S as in Septimus—had broken the Seventh Commandment. He had got Septimus’s mother pregnant, realized the enormity of his sin, asked the Lord for forgiveness, and returned more or less forthwith to his home parish of Great Dunsford in Hampshire, located in the most pastoral surroundings imaginable.
On Thursday, May 15, at five minutes past six in the morning, Septimus Akofeli, twenty-five, had found the murdered body of Karl Danielsson, sixty-eight, in the hall of his flat on the first floor of number 1 Hasselstigen in Solna. The door of the flat was wide open and the dead body was lying just a meter or so inside the door. Septimus Akofeli had put down the copy of Svenska Dagbladet that he was about to put through Danielsson’s mail slot. He had leaned forward and taken a good look at the body. He had even squeezed its cheeks gently. Then he had shaken his head and dialed 112 on his cell phone.
At six minutes past six in the morning he had been put through to the emergency control room of the Stockholm Police on Kungsholmen. The radio operator had asked him to stay on the line, then put him on hold while he put the call out, and got a response immediately from a patrol car from the Western District that was on Frösundaleden, just a few hundred meters from the address in question. “Suspected murder at number one Hasselstigen in Solna.” And the “male individual” who had called sounded “suspiciously calm and collected,” which could be useful to know if it wasn’t just someone playing a prank on the police but suffering instead from “more serious mental problems …”
What the radio operator did not know, however, was that the fact of the matter was much simpler than that. That Septimus Akofeli was particularly well suited to make the type of discovery he had just made. Even as a small boy, he had seen more murdered and mutilated bodies than most of the other nine million inhabitants of his new homeland.
Septimus Akofeli was short and thin, 167 centimeters tall and weighing just 55 kilos. But he was toned and athletic, the way you are when you run up and down staircases for a couple hours every morning and then spend the rest of the day rushing around on a bicycle taking letters and parcels to an
xious customers, the sort of people who care about the planet and who shouldn’t be made to wait any longer than strictly necessary.
Septimus Akofeli was good-looking, with dark, olive-colored skin, a classic bone structure, and a profile that could have been lifted straight from an ancient Egyptian vase. And of course he had absolutely no idea of the sort of thing that might be going through the head of a middle-aged Swedish police officer working as a radio operator in the emergency control room of the Stockholm Police, and he had done his level best to forget his childhood memories.
To start with, he had done what he was told and stayed on the line. After a couple minutes he had shaken his head, clicked to end the call—the police had evidently forgotten about him—then had put his bag of newspapers aside and sat down on the staircase outside the door of the flat, remaining in the building just as he had promised.
A couple minutes later he had company. First someone had carefully opened and then closed the front door. Then steps padded up the stairs. Two police officers appeared: first a man in his forties, then, just behind him, his considerably younger female colleague. The male officer had his right hand on the butt of his pistol and was pointing at him with his left arm and outstretched hand. His younger female colleague, standing right behind him, was holding an extended collapsible steel baton in her right hand.
“Okay,” the male officer said, nodding toward Akofeli. “This is what we’re going to do. First we put our hands above our head, then we get up slowly and calmly, then we turn round with our back toward us, with our legs spread …”
Who’s this we? Septimus Akofeli wondered, doing as he had been told.
4.
Hasselstigen is a short side street off Råsundavägen, only a couple hundred meters long, about half a kilometer from the national football stadium and next to where Svensk Filmindustri’s old studio complex, Filmstaden, used to be. These days the studios have been turned into luxury housing for people quite unlike those who live at number 1 Hasselstigen.
The building at number 1 Hasselstigen had been built in the autumn of 1945, six months after the end of the war. Locals used to say it was the building that God, or at least its landlord, had given up on. It was a five-story brick building divided into thirty small apartments, each containing just one or two rooms and a kitchen. It was more than sixty years old and had long been in dire need of external renovation, rewiring, and pretty much everything in between.