This is a phrase that I needed translating into English. It comes in The Mask of Zorro, a deeply crappy film that my daughter and her friend found on video in a Swedish B&B. They just loved it, and claimed to be learning Swedish from the subtitles. I learnt, from the subtitles, that “Bag the head” means “Put the head in a sack”. In Swedish, that’s “Stoppa huvudet i säcken”, a phrase which seemed enormously funny to the girls.
So this morning, when I was rambling around Swedish newspaper sites, looking for local colour, I was delighted to find a headline in one tabloid that says, “Hon hade sitt offers huvud i ryggs
This is amazingly similar to the back story of Mickey Ballou in the Matt Scudder books by Lawrence Block (one of the finest continuing works of hard boiled, or some closely related sub genre). Admittedly, he was an irish gangster in hells kitchen, not a swedish body builder, and his victim was another fellow in the same walk of life, not a compuer programmer. But the going to many bars and the different stories about whether the head was show or just referred to or just hinted at is just the same — as is the silence of the drinkers.
You probably wouldn’t get away with this in Greenwich. Woolwich might be a different matter.