The Sword of Justice by Leif G.W. Persson

Author:Leif G.W. Persson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781473508903
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

74

A tiny contribution to the great investigative effort, and before Bäckström leaned back to listen to GeGurra, their admirable maître d’ had taken the opportunity to refill his glass. And he was quiet as well, Bäckström thought. Just appeared and topped him up, without saying a word, and without you having to tap the glass to get his attention.

On Friday, 17 May, some two weeks before he had been murdered, Thomas Eriksson had called GeGurra and asked to meet him to get help in valuing a small art collection that one of his clients had given to him to sell. Because GeGurra was due to travel to London that evening, they had met in his office in Gamla stan that same afternoon.

‘He was most insistent,’ GeGurra explained. ‘I had a number of things to do in advance of my trip, but when he heard that I was going to be gone for almost three weeks, he wanted to meet before I left, at all costs. Because he was so persistent, I gave in. He appeared at my office that afternoon.’

‘You already knew him,’ Bäckström said, more as a statement of fact than a question.

‘Not personally,’ GeGurra said, shaking his head. ‘I met him in connection to a court case some years ago. I had been called in as an expert witness. By the prosecutor, in case you were wondering. The case concerned a large art fraud in which Eriksson was defending the principal suspect. Fake pictures, supposed to be by Matisse and Chagall, lithographs, quite a catch.’ GeGurra sighed, shaking his head sadly.

‘You said he wanted help with a valuation.’

‘A small collection, twenty objects in all, mostly paintings. All Russian, items dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In total, there were fifteen paintings, all of them so-called iconographic images.’

‘Iconographic images,’ Bäckström repeated.

‘Yes, or icons, as they’re also known. I assume you’re familiar with the term?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Bäckström said, who had attended Sunday school as a child. ‘They’re those pictures of Christian saints? Angels and prophets and other holy figures from our biblical history?’

‘Within the Orthodox Church,’ GeGurra clarified with a nod. ‘In a purely descriptive sense, one might say that they are illustrations to the Bible and other religious texts, but they are also part of the holy message, not least a way of transmitting and expressing it, and often, just as you say, they are portraits of people who have been significant to the history of the Christian Church.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ Bäckström lied, nodding piously as he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘The tradition of painting icons dates back to the sixth century AD and, during the almost fifteen hundred years that have passed since then, there have been tens of millions of icons painted,’ GeGurra went on. ‘Throughout history, they have been a feature of practically every Orthodox home, one or more of them, assuming of course that people had the financial wherewithal to buy an icon to put in their own home.

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