to do. And it was even more sensible of you to carry your client to the bathroom. These doors are so thin that the bullets would have gone clean through them if he had fired. What I'm trying to figure out is whether he wanted to attack you personally or whether he was just reacting to the fact that you were looking at him. You were the person nearest to him in the corridor."
"Apart from the two nurses."
"Did you get the sense that he knew you or perhaps recognized you?"
"No, not really."
"Could he have recognized you from the papers? You've had a lot of publicity over several widely reported cases."
"It's possible. I can't say."
"And you'd never seen him before?"
"I'd seen him in the lift, that's the first time I set eyes on him."
"I didn't know that. Did you talk?"
"No. I got in at the same time he did. I was vaguely aware of him for just a few seconds. He had flowers in one hand and a briefcase in the other."
"Did you make eye contact?"
"No. He was looking straight ahead."
"Who got in first?"
"We got in more or less at the same time."
"Did he look confused or - "
"I couldn't say one way or the other. He got into the lift and stood perfectly still, holding the flowers."
"What happened then?"
"We got out of the lift on the same floor, and I went to visit my client."
"Did you come straight here?"
"Yes... no. That is, I went to the reception desk and showed my I.D. The prosecutor has forbidden my client to have visitors."
"Where was this man then?"
Giannini hesitated. "I'm not quite sure. He was behind me, I think. No, wait... he got out of the lift first, but stopped and held the door for me. I couldn't swear to it, but I think he went to the reception desk too. I was just quicker on my feet than he was. But the nurses would know."
Elderly, polite, and a murderer, Erlander thought.
"Yes, he did go to the reception desk," he confirmed. "He did talk to the nurse and he left the flowers at the desk, at her instruction. But you didn't see that?"
"No. I have no recollection of any of that."
Erlander had no more questions. Frustration was gnawing at him. He had had the feeling before and had trained himself to interpret it as an alarm triggered by instinct. Something was eluding him, something that was not right.
The murderer had been identified as Evert Gullberg, a former accountant and sometime business consultant and tax lawyer. A man in advanced old age. A man against whom Sapo had lately initiated a preliminary investigation because he was a nutter who wrote threatening letters to public figures.
Erlander knew from long experience that there were plenty of nutters out there, some pathologically obsessed ones who stalked celebrities and looked for love by hiding in woods near their villas. When their love was not reciprocated - as why would it be? - it could quickly turn to violent hatred. There were stalkers who travelled from Germany or Italy to follow a 21-year-old lead singer in a pop band from gig to gig, and who then got upset because she would not drop everything to start a relationship with them. There were bloody-minded individuals who harped on and on about real or imaginary injustices and who sometimes turned to threatening behaviour. There were psychopaths and conspiracy theorists, nutters who had the gift to read messages hidden from the normal world.
There were plenty of examples of these fools taking the leap from fantasy to action. Was not the assassination of Anna Lindh[3] the result of precisely such a crazy impulse?
But Inspector Erlander did not like the idea that a mentally ill accountant, or whatever he was, could wander into a hospital with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a pistol in the other. Or that he could, for God's sake, execute someone who was the object of a police investigation - his investigation. A man whose name in the public register was Karl Axel Bodin but whose real name, according to Blomkvist, was Zalachenko. A bastard defected Soviet Russian agent and professional gangster.
At the very least Zalachenko was a witness; but in the worst case he was involved up to his neck in a series of murders. Erlander had been allowed to conduct two brief interviews with Zalachenko, and at no time during either had he been swayed by the man's