On Tuesday Inspector Evert Bäckström was engaged in archival research.
The Stockholm police department’s old central archive was in the basement of the big police building and it was there his sensitive nose had led him. Following a scent no stronger than a vague hunch. Impossible to be detected by all his nasally congested colleagues. Concealed from everyone except a seasoned old bloodhound like him.
Besides, he had good memories of this archive. When he had worked overtime at the after-hours unit in the eighties, it was here he would make his way for a moment of reflection and rest. It was necessary so as not to capsize in the tidal wave of common gangsters, lunatics, drunks, and glowworms that the half-apes in the uniformed police ladled in through the duty desk.
A memory from another time. Before computers took over the fine old handiwork. A time when all real constables sorted their thugs in neat hanging folders with cardboard tabs. Where every thug had at least one file, and where the most diligent would be rewarded within a short time with several. Arranged in endless rows by social security number. In different colors over time. Brown, blue, green, light red, red…and already by the change in color Bäckström understood early on what was about to happen.
The dear old central archive. The wellspring of police knowledge, where he himself had both slaked his thirst and refreshed his soul on numerous memorable occasions. This final safeguard and stronghold of knowledge, where literally everything you put your mitts on was collected and never discarded. Regardless of unverified suspicions, dismissal with prejudice, withdrawn indictments, verdicts of acquittal, and all the other nonsense that attorneys were involved in. The crook remained in the central archive. For all time. Once in, you never got out.
Of course he’d been right, he was always right. There he hung, dangling in his blue sixties file. Now I have you, you little leather boy, thought Bäckström, releasing Waltin from his hook.
A thin file with copies of old typewritten forms. Initial report, interview with the plaintiff, personal information about the suspect, interview with the suspect, summons to new interview with the plaintiff, dismissal with prejudice, no crime, and if it hadn’t been for the central archive, Claes Waltin would have been lost to worldly justice for all time.
The night between April thirtieth and the first of May 1968, the twenty-three-year-old law student Claes Waltin had, according to the report, shoved a wooden candlestick into the vagina of a twenty-five-year-old woman who was a doctoral candidate in Nordic languages and supported herself working as a substitute teacher at a high school in the southern suburbs. They had met earlier in the evening at the Hasselbacken restaurant on Djurgården in connection with the students’ traditional celebration of Walpurgis Eve.
Assuming that you believed her, the following was said to have happened.
Waltin had gone home with her to her residence on Södermalm. There he had first assaulted her sexually by forcing her to have anal intercourse. Then he bound her, put a muzzle on her, and inserted the candlestick into her genital area. When he was done with that he left.
An hour later the woman suffered severe bleeding, called for an ambulance herself, and was taken to the Söder hospital. There she remained for over a week. A female social worker visited her, got her to talk, and saw to it that she filed a police report.
A forensic examination had been made and damage to the entry to her vagina, vaginal walls, and portio vaginalis had been observed. In conclusion the forensic doctor observed in his statement: “that the observed injuries appear to have arisen through physical impact from a hard, oblong object inserted into the vagina”; “that the insertion of this object probably required considerable force”; “that the injuries do not contradict the description the patient has given”; “that at the same time it may have arisen in some other way through comparable physical impact”; “that it cannot be ruled out either that they are self-inflicted.”
Not until a few weeks later was the young Waltin called for an interview with the police. He denied any form of assault against the plaintiff. They had met at the Hasselbacken restaurant, he had gone home with her, and it was on her own suggestion that they had had normal intercourse in which moreover she had taken the initiative.
An hour or so later he left her and walked home to his student apartment on Östermalm, because he would be getting up early the next morning. He had promised to visit his mother, who was sickly and needed regular checking by her only son.
In conclusion he also said that he was shocked and shaken by the horrible accusations he was being subjected to. He could never even imagine doing something like that and did not understand why the plaintiff said what she had.
A week later the plaintiff had been called to another interview. She never appeared. Instead she called the police and said that she wanted to withdraw her report. She never provided any more detailed explanation for this turnabout. A month later the prosecutor had written off the report. “The reported incident is not to be considered a crime.”
Typical police chief candidate, thought Bäckström, rolling up the file and putting it in his jacket pocket. Much simpler than wasting your precious time at that copy machine that never worked. Gold, Bäckström, he thought, patting his jacket pocket as he came out onto the street again, and because it was both simplest and safest he went straight home.
For lunch he took a few things out of his own refrigerator, where these days there were a number of delicacies, had a cold pilsner, even allowed himself a little drop of liquor. Then he lay down on the couch so he could think in peace and quiet about an ordinary leather boy’s motives for murdering a prime minister.
It must have been something sexual, thought Bäckström. The same motive, although a different modus operandi, so to speak. What remained was to link Waltin to his latest known victim. Perhaps they belonged to the same secret society of leather boys? Was it an ordinary little internal settling of accounts because they had a falling out over some little ass-whipping subject? It was about time that inspector Bäckström started smoothing out the perpetrator profile, he thought.
In the midst of these pleasant musings he must have fallen asleep, because when he woke up it was time for dinner.
One thing I know that never dies, and that is the reputation of a dead man, thought Bäckström when a while later he was walking at a slow pace to his usual place. That was straight talk. Not that liberal drivel about never speaking ill of the dead. It’s enough if it’s true, damn it, he thought.