Anna Holt had no intention of sitting in the Palme room. Not at a wobbly card table they’d brought in themselves with barely enough room for the computers Lisa Mattei had set up for them. So Lisa, with the help of those same computers, located the documents Holt needed for her review of “Palme assassin” Christer Pettersson. Finally they carried the material over to Holt’s office themselves, where she intended to read in peace and quiet. A total of ten binders, only a small portion of the material on Pettersson. At the same time, those portions, according to Mattei, ought to cover the essentials about the suspect up to the indictment in May 1989, the sentence of life imprisonment in Stockholm District Court a few months later, and how all this had been turned on end when a unanimous court of appeals released him in November of the same year.
As Holt disappeared with her burden she noticed a worried glance from Jan Lewin. In Lewin’s world, files of that type were not something you stuck under your arm and simply walked away with. Not least the kind that were stored in the Palme room. Files that were removed should be signed for on a special list, returned as soon as you were done with them, and checked off on the same list. Date, time, signature. True, all his colleagues did the same as Holt, but this was also the sorry explanation for why meticulous individuals such as himself often had a terrible time finding the documents they needed for their work.
Pity that Jan is so anxious. He’s actually very good-looking, thought Holt as she and Lisa disappeared through the door, headed toward the peacefulness of Holt’s office.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” asked Lisa Mattei as she set the binders down on Holt’s desk.
“That’s plenty,” Holt said. “You’ve got a few things to do yourself.”
“I pulled this out for you,” said Mattei, giving Holt a plastic folder she’d carried squeezed under her arm.
“What’s in there?” asked Holt.
“A few interesting dates on Christer Pettersson plus his police and court records. I’m sure you’ll find it in one of the binders too, but an extra copy is never a bad thing if you want to make your own notes. Otherwise there’s nothing special about most of it as I’m sure you already know. But sometimes it’s good to have exact dates and so on.”
“When did you find time to do this?”
“Did it as soon as I knew what Johansson wanted to talk about.”
“But that was before we decided I should look at Pettersson.”
“One of us had to do it,” Mattei observed, shrugging her shoulders. “That much I could figure out anyway,” she said, smiling.
“Thanks,” said Holt. Dear, dear Lisa, she thought. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us in this place combined.
When she finally shut the door, Holt cleared her desk of everything else. Placed her binders within comfortable reach, took out notebook and pen, leaned back in her not at all uncomfortable desk chair, took out the plastic folder about Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her, and finally put her feet up on the desk. All in accordance with the general advice and life tips that her boss so regularly shared with his co-workers when he was in the mood.
According to Lars Martin Johansson, the “Genius from Näsåker,” as co-workers who didn’t think he could “see around corners” called him when they were sure he couldn’t hear them, this was the most ideal body position for engaging in “more demanding reading.” The feet and legs should be placed high in relation to the head in order to facilitate the flow of blood to the brain, and the very best choice was lying on a comfortable, sufficiently long couch equipped with the necessary number of pillows.
It was also important that it not be too warm in the room where the couch was. According to Johansson, who would usually make reference here to a major sociomedical study from Japan, including the names of the authors, this type of reading demanded approximately the same temperature as for the storage of fine wines.
The first time Johansson had expounded on this burning issue was when they were sitting in the bar toward the end of a nice staff party a few years earlier.
“That sounds really cold,” Holt objected.
“Depends on what you mean by cold,” Johansson snorted. “It should be cold around you. Then you think your best. It should be just cold enough that your noggin feels clear but without having to freeze your rear end off.”
“Well, I thought wine should be stored at about fifty degrees.”
“That depends,” said Johansson evasively. “But it can’t be more than sixty degrees in the room. For reading, that is,” he clarified. “If we’re talking about sleeping it should be a lot colder.”
“Too cold,” said Holt, shaking her head firmly. “Much too cold for me. Couldn’t even think if it were that cold in my office.” Wonder whether his poor wife is an Eskimo? she thought.
“Yes, I might have guessed that,” Johansson observed, and no more was said about it for the rest of the evening.
I don’t suppose I can even think about opening the window on a day like this, sighed Anna Holt, glancing at the sunshine behind the drawn blinds. She could also forget about a couch of her own. In any event Johansson hadn’t implemented any concrete measures in that direction, and he was the only one at the entire bureau, of course, who had a sufficiently large, comfortable couch. According to well-informed sources he used it exclusively for his regular midday slumber. So far no one had seen him reading on it.
That man is like a large child, thought Holt. She sighed again and started reading the papers on Palme assassin Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her.
Christer Pettersson was born on April 23, 1947, in Solna. He had passed away less than three years ago at the age of fifty-seven, on September 29, 2004. He showed up for the first time in the Palme investigation’s material on Sunday the second of March 1986, less than two days after the assassination of the prime minister.
By then Jan Lewin and his colleagues who were responsible for the internal investigation were done with their first compilations of previous violent crimes that had occurred in the vicinity of the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan, where the prime minister was shot. It was an extensive list that included thousands of crimes and more than a thousand persons. One of them was Christer Pettersson, who sixteen years earlier, in December 1970, had gotten into a quarrel with a man unknown to him down in the subway, only fifty yards from the place where the prime minister was murdered. Pettersson chased the man up to the street, where he finished the discussion by stabbing his victim through the heart with a bayonet he was carrying. Within the course of a week the police had arrested him, and in June the following year he was convicted of homicide and sentenced to a closed psychiatric ward.
To be sure, it was not the first time he’d run afoul of the Swedish legal system. In the court records there were notations on several hundred crimes, from the first time in 1964, when he was seventeen years old, and up to his death. The final notations were made in the crime registry during the summer of the year he died. Pettersson had spent almost half of his adult life in prisons, mental hospitals, and rehabilitation centers for addicts. Based on what was known about his criminal activity there was a strong element of violence. At the same time there were no notes indicating that he made use of a firearm, either before or after the murder of the prime minister. No signs either of any political or ideological motives. Pettersson’s violence seemed to have been vented on persons in the same social situation as himself or who were expected to maintain control of people like him. Men he’d argued with or robbed of money and drugs, women he’d known or lived with, whom he’d also assaulted. Plus police officers, watchmen, store security guards.
Ordinary theft and shoplifting charges dominated his criminality in terms of numbers, and the particular crime victim who appeared most often as the complainant in his record was the state liquor store. That was also how he acquired three of the four nicknames that the police had noted, “Hit-and-Run,” “Dasher,” and “Half Bend.”
Pettersson would go into the liquor store, order a bottle of vodka, schnapps, or cream liqueur, snatch the bottle as soon as the clerk set it down on the counter between them, and without further ado “run” or “dash” out of the store. A “half bend” was the body movement the liquor store employee was expected to execute when he pulled out the half-bottle of aquavit that for practical reasons was often stored under the counter near the cash register and that seemed to be one of the most common orders in Pettersson’s life.
Against this background his fourth alias was even more astonishing. Pettersson was also known as “the Count.” A title he often emphasized to his acquaintances. A real “count.”
Why he was called that did not appear in the police papers, but for Holt the mystery was already solved by the precise Lisa Mattei. Under an asterisk in the margin she’d made the following note in her neat handwriting: “CP born and grew up in Bromma. Middle-class home. Father self-employed. Mother a housewife. Dropped out of high school. Went to drama school for a few years. In his association with like-minded in the same situation often presented himself and his background as considerably finer than was actually the case.”
Heavy drug user, professional criminal of the simplest type—all these were known facts, thought Holt, but it wasn’t what she knew that made her feel less comfortable after the introductory reading. Already on day three, Sunday, March 2, 1986, he ended up on a list among thousands of similar types because of a knife murder that had happened sixteen years earlier. After that none of her colleagues seemed to have given a thought to either him or his doings for more than two years. Only during the summer of 1988 did they start to investigate him, and in December the same year he was arrested.
Why just then? thought Holt. And why in the name of God did it take so long?