16

The day after the second meeting, Lisa Mattei concluded her small sociological investigation. She had interviewed thirteen old Palme investigators, all of them men of course, of which six were retired, three were still working in the Palme group, and four had left for other assignments within the agency. Combined, her thirteen older colleagues had devoted almost a hundred years of their professional lives to searching for the perpetrator who just over twenty years earlier had assassinated the prime minister.

None of them seemed to have any problem with her explanation for wanting to talk with them. On the contrary, almost all of them thought it was an excellent idea. That it was high time someone did something about the mountain of papers that nowadays were mostly collecting dust. Several of them had also gone directly to what the actual purpose of her visit was, without her even having to ask.

“It’s an excellent idea. I saw your boss Johansson on TV when he read the riot act to those journalists. That’s a real cop for you. Not one of those paper pushers with a law degree. We’ve known each other since our time in the detective unit down in Stockholm, and if there was anyone who had the right feel for the job it was Lars Martin. Though he was just a young kid at that time. You can tell him from me that he can carry everything that’s not about Christer Pettersson down to the basement, and I guess the simplest thing to do would be just to burn it. You can tell him that too, while you’re at it. He’s never been a coward. I’ll be the first to testify to that…

The Kurds. It was the Kurds who shot Palme. Those terrorists within their so-called revolutionary workers party, PKK. I and many of our colleagues realized that right from the start, so all the piles of paper the group collected later are really not our fault, and now it’s too late to correct that mistake. The really big scandal is that we never got to finish our case. The politicians and the journalists took it away from us, for political reasons. It was the journalists who put the pressure on, and the prosecutors who couldn’t stand up to them, and the politicians just chimed in as usual. Even though Palme was a Social Democrat and we have a Social Democratic government. What they did to our first investigation leader, Hasse Holmér—he was county police chief in Stockholm as I’m sure you know, and I say that mostly because it was before your time—it was a pure scandal if you ask me. He got fired simply because he refused to let a lot of politicians and newspaper people run the investigation…”

“Sounds like an excellent suggestion. Start by subtracting everything that deals with those Kurds. They had nothing to do with the assassination of Palme. It was thanks to him that people like that could come here. Palme was pro-immigrant, and I have nothing to say about that per se. When people got riled up about him it was usually for other reasons that mostly had to do with his personality. I don’t believe someone like Christer Pettersson could have done it either. He was just too mixed up to manage a thing like that. Probably barely even knew who Palme was. Besides he’s been dead now a few years, so that alone is enough to take him out of the Palme case. Then there were all those political speculations about Iran and Iraq and India and the Bofors affair and South Africa and God knows what. I think, even if it were that way, that’s nothing we police can do anything about, is it? Besides, I don’t believe in it. I think the explanation is much simpler. Some ordinary citizen who got tired of Palme and his politics and maybe even believed he was working as a spy for the Russians. Quite a few did at the time, I’ll tell you. Someone who simply took matters into his own hands when he happened to run into him by chance outside the Grand on Sveavägen…”

There was an ongoing pattern in what Mattei heard. An expected pattern. You believed in what you had worked with or in any event what you’d worked with the most. On the other hand, you seldom set much store by anything you hadn’t been involved in investigating. On one point, however, with one very surprising exception, they were in agreement. All except one of those asked categorically rejected the so-called police track, and the one who believed in it the least was the investigator who at various times had devoted five years of his life as a police officer to trying to find out what his colleagues had actually been up to when Palme was murdered.

“I promise and assure you,” he said, nodding seriously at his visitor. “All those leads that the media inflated all those years. Once you sit down and figure out what it’s really about, at best it’s pure nonsense. I say at best because far too often there was real ill will on the part of a lot of extremists and criminals who fingered our colleagues.”

There’s still a certain something about old murder investigators, thought Mattei as she got into her service vehicle to leave the little red-painted Sörmland cottage where the last of her interview victims now enjoyed his rural retirement. Where she had been offered coffee and rolls and juice and cookies. Especially the retired ones, she thought. Retirement loosened the tongue and gave them both the time and the desire to talk about how things really were. Especially when they could do so for a younger female colleague who seemed both “quick-witted and humble.”

If they only knew, Mattei thought. Although it was mostly pretty harmless, and most of them were good storytellers at least. There was only one she dreaded meeting, and during that meeting she mostly sat gritting her teeth while her small tape recorder whirled and her interview subject expounded about Olof Palme and everything else under the sun.

Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström, “legendary murder investigator with thirty years in the profession and considered by many the foremost of them all,” according to the anonymous source that was frequently quoted in Dagens Nyheter’s most recent article about mismanagement at the national crime bureau. This in combination with the Swedish Envy was also, according to the same source, the only explanation for why just over a year ago the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had banished said Bäckström from the National Homicide Commission to the Stockholm police department’s property investigation squad.

“So that genius from Lappland needs help clearing up Palme,” said Bäckström, while leaning back in his chair and scratching his belly button through the biggest gap in the Hawaiian shirt that stretched across his stomach.

“No, that’s not how it is,” said Mattei. “We’ve been given the task of doing an overview of the registration of the material in the Palme investigation, and he was interested in your viewpoints. How the various parts of the material should be prioritized.”

“Sure, sure, like I believe that,” said Bäckström with a crafty look behind half-closed eyelids. “Imagine that, look over the registration.”

“I understand you were involved in the initial stage and that it was you, among others, who ferreted out the thirty-three-year-old, Åke Victor Gunnarsson.”

“That’s right,” said Bäckström. “I was the one who found that little piece of shit, and if I’d just been allowed to run the case, then I would have seen to it that we got to the bottom of it. Instead some older so-called colleague came in and took over. Someone who’d licked his tongue brown up the backside of the so-called police leadership. If you’re wondering about all the question marks that still remain around Gunnarsson, then he’s the one you should go to. Not me.”

“Is there any particular track you think ought to be prioritized?” said Mattei to change the subject.

“Paper and pen,” said Bäckström, nodding encouragingly. “So you have something to take notes with,” he explained as he put his own ballpoint pen in his right ear to remove some irritating deposits of wax.

“In the material there’s quite a bit you can carry down to the basement,” said Bäckström, viewing the outcome of his hygienic efforts and wiping the pen on the desk blotter. “Start by taking out all the old ladies. Motive, modus operandi, and all conceivable perpetrators that are old ladies, whether or not they wear trousers. I won’t go into what I thought about the so-called victim, but an old lady would never have managed to take the wrapping off Palme in that way. Not even an old lady like Palme,” he clarified. “It was a competent bastard who was holding the ax-handle that time.”

After that Bäckström talked for almost an hour without letting himself be interrupted. About conceivable perpetrators, motives, and methods.

According to Chief Inspector Bäckström, for the most part everyone, that is to say completely normal Swedish men like himself, had a motive to assassinate the prime minister. The driving force—according to his definitive, professional experience—also would be stronger the more you had to do with the victim. At the same time the good thing about that was that the frequency of old ladies, regardless of whether they wore pants or skirts, was especially high around someone like Palme, which in turn provided more opportunities to do a thorough cleanup in all those papers.

“Tell me who you associate with, I’ll tell you who you are,” Bäckström summarized. “There’s a lot worth considering in our old Bible.”

“I interpret this to mean that you don’t believe in the often stated hypothesis of a solitary madman who by chance happened to catch sight of Olof Palme outside the Grand cinema,” Mattei alertly interjected.

Pure nonsense, according to Bäckström. First, you didn’t need to be crazy to have good reason to shoot Palme. On the other hand, secondly, you had to have “a fucking lot of spine,” and thirdly, it would naturally be the very best if you were sitting on a little inside information about what someone like Palme was up to.

“Forget about Christer Pettersson and all the other drunks,” Bäckström snorted. “Gooks, drunks, and common hoods. Why should they attack Palme? He was the type who supported them. What we’re talking about is a guy with first-class knowledge of the situation, primo sense of locale, handy with the rectifier, and a fucking lot of ice in his belly.”

“You mean, for example, a police officer or military man or someone with that background?” asked Mattei.

“Yes, or some old marksman or hunter. Or maybe that Gilljo even. Only author in this country who’s worth the name, if you ask me,” said Bäckström. “Besides, he’s actually there on the lists of conceivable suspects. We got a fucking lot of tips about him. So take a look at Johnny Gilljo if you don’t have anything better to do. I believe more in someone like him, or a military man, than in another police officer,” Bäckström summarized, nodding. “I mean, me and the other cops could always hope we would get the chance to arrest him when he was drunk,” he clarified. “Small consolation is still consolation, even when the general misery is at its greatest. As it was while Palme was alive.”

“Arrest Palme for drunkenness?” Mattei asked, sneaking a glance at her tape recorder to be on the safe side.

“The most common wet dream among our colleagues at that time.” Bäckström grinned, and for some reason looked at the clock. “Now you have to excuse me, Mattei, but I have a few things to do too.”

“Of course,” said Mattei, getting up with all the desired speed. “I really must thank you for participating.”

“A few more things,” said Bäckström. “For the sake of order. I see that this is a confidential conversation, and I assume that what I’ve said stays between us.”

“As I said by way of introduction, all interview subjects are anonymous.”

“Like I believe that,” said Bäckström with a sneer.

“There was something else you wanted to say,” Mattei reminded him as she put away the tape recorder, paper, and pen in her bag and closed the zipper.

“You don’t need to greet the surströmming eater from me,” said Bäckström.

“I promise,” said Mattei. “You don’t need to worry.”

“I never worry,” said Bäckström. “It’s not my thing.”

Lisa Mattei’s little investigation had taken five days, and she had drawn her conclusions even before she started. The material in the Palme room was the result of these colleagues’ work, and with two exceptions they believed in what they’d done.

The support for the police track was limited to Bäckström’s general musings, and the material collected was not particularly extensive.

The great exception was the so-called Kurd track, for which the police investigations generated even more paper than for Christer Pettersson. In round numbers, two hundred man-years for a year, and it turned out an enormous number of binders. One investigator out of thirteen was left who believed in what was there, and surely the proportion wouldn’t vary much with all the hundreds she hadn’t contacted.

In the evening after the final interview she stayed at work until late and wrote a short memo about what she had come up with. Two pages, in contrast to Jan Lewin’s twenty-five. Then she e-mailed it to Johansson. Only to Johansson, because she thought it was his business to decide whether anyone else should read it.

What do I do now? thought Mattei as she shut off her computer. It needs to be something quite specific, and it’s time I had a talk with my dear mom, she decided.