The Abominable Man (16 page)

“Get ’em, boys,” the officer yelled. “That’ll be enough of that.”

More white nightsticks came into sight.

“Hold it!” demanded Gunvald Larsson in a stentorian bellow.

All activity ceased.

Gunvald Larsson walked toward the crowd.

“What’s this all about?”

“I’m clearing the area in front of the cordon,” said the older policeman.

The gold stripe on his sleeve indicated that he was a captain.

“But there’s nothing here to cordon off, for Christ’s sake,” said Gunvald Larsson angrily.

“No, Hult, that’s true enough,” Kollberg said. “And where did you get these fellows?”

“An emergency squad from the Fifth Precinct,” said the man, coming automatically to attention. “They were here already and I assumed command.”

“Well stop this nonsense at once,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Put a guard on the steps to keep unauthorized people out of the building itself. I doubt even that’s really necessary. And send the rest of them back to the precinct station. I’m sure they need them more back there.”

From inside the police bus came the sound of shortwave static and then a metallic voice.

“Captain Harald Hult is requested to contact central and report to Chief Inspector Beck.”

Hult still had his nightstick in his hand and looked sullenly at the two detectives.

“Well,” said Kollberg. “Aren’t you going to contact central? It sounds like someone’s looking for you.”

“All in good time,” the man said. “Anyway I’m here voluntarily.”

“I don’t think we need any volunteers here,” said Kollberg.

He was wrong.

“What a lot of bullshit,” said Gunvald Larsson. “But at least I’ve done my bit around here.”

He was also wrong.

Just as he took the first long stride toward his car, a shot rang out and a shrill, frantic voice started calling for help.

Gunvald Larsson stopped in bewilderment and looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after twelve.

Kollberg also responded at once.

Maybe this was what he’d been waiting for.

“As to Eriksson,” Melander said, putting down the bundle of papers, “it’s a long story. You must know some of it already.”

“Assume we don’t know anything and tell it to us from the beginning,” said Martin Beck.

Melander leaned back in his chair and started to fill his pipe.

“Okay,” he said. “From the beginning then. Åke Eriksson was born in Stockholm in 1935. He was an only child, and his father was a lathe operator. He left high school in ’54, did his national service the following year, and when he got out he applied to the police force. He started OCS night school and the Police Academy at the same time.”

He lit his pipe elaborately and blew small clouds of smoke across the tabletop. Rönn, who was sitting across from him, reproached him with an ostentatious cough. Melander took no notice and went on puffing.

“Okay,” he said, “that’s a short resume of the earlier and comparatively less interesting half of Eriksson’s life. In 1956 he started as a patrolman in Katarina precinct. There’s not much to be said about the next few years. As far as I can understand, he was a pretty average policeman, neither awfully good nor awfully bad. There were no complaints about him, but on the other hand I can’t recall that he distinguished himself in any way.”

“Was he in Katarina that whole time?” asked Martin Beck, who was standing by the door with one arm on the filing cabinet.

“No,” Melander said. “He was stationed in probably three or four different precincts those first four years.”

He stopped and furrowed his brow. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at Martin Beck.

“Correction,” he said. “I said he didn’t distinguish himself in any way. That’s wrong. He was an excellent shot, always placed very high in the matches.”

“Yes,” Rönn said. “I remember that myself. He was good with a pistol.”

“He was excellent at long range too,” Melander said. “And all this time he went on with his voluntary officer’s training. He used to spend his vacations at OCS camps.”

“You said he was in three or four different precincts those first years,” said Martin Beck. “Was he ever in Stig Nyman’s precinct?”

“He was for a while, yes. Fall of ’57 and all of ’58. Then Nyman got a new precinct.”

“Do you know anything about the way Nyman treated Eriksson? He could be pretty rough on the ones he didn’t like.”

“There’s nothing to indicate he was harder on Eriksson than on the other young men. And Eriksson’s complaints against Nyman don’t have much to do with that period. But knowing something about Nyman’s methods for ‘making men out of mama’s boys,’ as he used to put it, I think we can assume that Åke Eriksson got his share.”

Melander had directed most of his remarks to Martin Beck. Now he looked at Rönn, who sat crumpled in the visitor’s chair and looked as if he might fall asleep at any moment. Martin Beck followed his glance.

“A cup of coffee doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, does it, Einar?” he said.

Rönn straightened up.

“No, I guess not,” he mumbled. “I’ll get it.”

He shambled out of the room and Martin Beck watched him and wondered if he looked that miserable himself.

When Rönn had come back with the coffee and collapsed in his easy chair again, Martin Beck looked at Melander.

“Go on, Fredrik,” he said.

Melander put down his pipe and slurped his coffee thoughtfully.

“Jesus,” he said. “That’s awful.”

He pushed away the plastic mug and went back to his beloved pipe.

“Well, at the beginning of 1959, Åke Eriksson got married. The girl was five years younger than he, and her name was Marja. She was Finnish, but she’d lived in Sweden for several years and had a job as an assistant in a photographic studio. Her Swedish wasn’t very good, which may have something to do with what happened later. They had a baby in December the same year they were married, and she then quit her job and became a housewife. When the child was a year and a half old, that is, in the summer of ’61, Marja Eriksson died under circumstances you can hardly have forgotten.”

Rönn nodded in sad assent. Or was it simply that he was about to doze off?

“No, but don’t worry about that,” said Martin Beck. “Tell us anyway.”

“Well,” said Melander, “this may be where Stig Nyman comes into the story. And Harald Hult, who at that time was a sergeant in Nyman’s precinct. Marja Eriksson died at their precinct station. In a drunk cell, the night between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of June, 1961.”

“Were Nyman and Hult at the station that night?” asked Martin Beck.

“Nyman was there when they brought her in, but he went home later on, at some hour that hasn’t been determined exactly. Hult was out on patrol that night, but it’s quite certain that he happened to be at the station when she was discovered dead.”

Melander straightened out a paper clip and started to clean out his pipe into the ashtray.

“There was an investigation eventually, and the chain of events was reconstructed. What happened seems to have been the following. During the day on June twenty-sixth, Marja Eriksson and her daughter went out to visit a friend of hers in Vaxholm. The photographer she’d worked for previously had asked her to help him with a two-week assignment, and Marja’s girl friend was going to take care of the child. Late in the afternoon she went back into town again. Åke Eriksson finished work at seven that evening, and she wanted to be home ahead of him. It’s worth noting that Eriksson was not assigned to Nyman’s precinct at that time.”

Martin Beck’s legs were starting to get tired. Since the only two chairs in the room were taken, he left the filing cabinet and walked over to the window and half sat against the sill. He nodded to Melander to go on.

“Marja Eriksson had diabetes and needed regular injections of insulin. There weren’t many people who knew about that—the girl friend in Vaxholm, for example, did not. Marja Eriksson never used to be careless about her injections—for that matter she wasn’t in a position where she could afford to be careless—but on that particular day, for some reason, she’d left her syringe at home.”

Both Martin Beck and Rönn now looked at Melander intently, as if they meant to weigh his version of the story very carefully.

“Two patrolmen from Nyman’s precinct discovered Marja Eriksson just after seven o’clock in the evening. She was sitting on a bench, and looked to be on her last legs. They tried to talk to her and became convinced that she was under the influence of narcotics, or maybe just blind drunk. They dragged her to a taxi and drove her to the police station. They said themselves at the hearing that they didn’t quite know what to do with her when they got her there, since she was virtually helpless. The cabdriver said later that she had said something in a foreign language, that is, Finnish, and it’s possible there was some sort of a ruckus in the taxi. The two patrolmen denied it, of course.”

Melander paused a long while as he fussed ceremoniously with his pipe.

“Now then, according to what these patrolmen first said, Nyman had a look at her and told them to put her in a drunk cell for the time being. Nyman denied ever having seen the woman, and at a later hearing the patrolmen changed their story and said they guessed Nyman must have been busy with something else when they brought her in. They themselves had been forced to leave again immediately on some urgent mission. According to the cell guard, it was the patrolmen themselves who decided to lock her up. That is to say, everyone blamed everyone else. There wasn’t a sound from her cell, and the guard thought she was asleep. There hadn’t been any chance of getting a transport to Criminal for nearly three hours. When his relief came, the night guard unlocked the cell and found she was dead. Hult was at the station right then, and he called an ambulance but couldn’t get them to take her to the hospital because she was already dead.”

“What time did she die?” asked Martin Beck.

“She appeared to have died about an hour earlier.”

Rönn straightened up in his chair.

“When you’ve got diabetes,” he said, “I mean, don’t people with diseases like that carry a card or something that says what it is that’s wrong with them …”

“Yes indeed,” Melander said. “And Marja Eriksson had one, too—in her purse. But as you probably know, part of the whole problem was that she was never searched. They didn’t have any female personnel at the precinct, so she would have been searched here at Criminal. If she’d ever arrived.”

Martin Beck nodded.

“Later, at the hearing, Nyman said he’d never seen either the woman or her purse, so the two patrolmen and the guard had to take the whole responsibility. As far as I know, they got off with a warning.”

“How did Åke Eriksson react when he found out what had happened?” asked Martin Beck.

“He fell apart and had to go on sick leave for a couple of months. Lost all interest in everything, apparently. When his wife didn’t come home, he finally discovered she hadn’t taken her syringe. First he called around to all the hospitals and then took his car and went out looking for her, so it was quite some time before he found out she was dead. I don’t think they told him the truth right away, but eventually he must have found out what had happened, because in September he sent in his first written complaint against Nyman and Hult. But by then the investigation was already closed.”

Melander’s office grew quiet.

Melander had clasped his hands behind his neck and
was staring at the ceiling, Martin Beck was leaning against the windowsill looking pensively and expectantly at Melander, and Rönn was just sitting.

Finally Martin Beck broke the silence.

“What happened to Eriksson after his wife’s death? I mean, not the external events, but what happened to him psychologically?”

“Well, I’m no psychiatrist,” Melander said, “and there’s no expert opinion, because as far as I know he never went to a doctor after going back to work in September ’61. Which he maybe should have done.”

“But he was different afterwards, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Melander said. “It’s obvious he underwent some sort of personality change.”

He put his hand on the bundle of papers that Strömgren had gathered from various files.

“Have you read through this?” he asked.

Rönn shook his head.

“Only part of it,” said Martin Beck. “That can wait. I think we can get a clear picture faster if you’ll summarize it for us.”

He thought of adding a word of praise, but didn’t, since he knew Melander was immune to flattery.

Melander nodded and put his pipe between his teeth.

“Okay,” he said. “When Åke Eriksson went back to work again, he was uncommunicative and quiet and kept to himself as much as possible. The other fellows on his watch tried to cheer him up, but without success. To begin with they were patient with him. They knew what had happened, after all, and they felt sorry for him. But since he never said a word unless it was absolutely necessary, and since he never listened to anyone else either, they all finally tried to avoid having to work with him. He’d been popular before, and they probably hoped he’d
be his old self again when the worst of his grief was over. Instead he only got worse—touchy, sullen and downright priggish in his work. He started sending letters full of complaints and threats and accusations, and that went on periodically for years. We’ve all gotten one or more, I suppose.”

“Not me,” Rönn said.

“Maybe you haven’t gotten any personally, but you’ve seen his letters to the Violence Squad.”

“Yes,” Rönn said.

“He started out by reporting Nyman and Hult to the J.O. for breach of duty. He sent in that complaint several times. Then he started reporting everyone in sight for breach of duty, even the governor. He’s reported me, and you too, Martin, hasn’t he?”

“Oh yes,” said Martin Beck. “For not opening an investigation into the murder of his wife. But that was a long time ago, and as a matter of fact I’d forgotten about him.”

“By about a year after his wife’s death, he’d made himself so impossible that the chief in his precinct asked to have him transferred.”