The Abominable Man (17 page)

“Do you know what he stated as cause?” Martin Beck asked.

“That inspector was a decent man and apparently he’d closed his eyes to a great deal in Eriksson’s case. But in the end it just got to be too much, for the sake of the other men. He said that Eriksson spread disharmony around him, that he was difficult to work with, and that it would be better for Eriksson himself if he were transferred to a precinct where he might feel more at home. That’s more or less the way he put it. Anyway, Eriksson was transferred to a new precinct in the summer of ’62. He wasn’t especially popular there either, and his new chief didn’t back him up the way the other one had. The
other patrolmen complained about him and he picked up a few demerits.”

“What for?” asked Martin Beck. “Was he violent?”

“No, not at all. He was never brutal or anything, rather overly nice, a lot of people thought. He behaved correctly toward everyone he came in contact with. No, apparently the trouble was his ridiculous pedantry. He’d spend hours on things that shouldn’t really have taken more than fifteen minutes. He’d submerge himself in unimportant details, and occasionally he’d ignore specific instructions in order to do something completely different that he thought was more important. He overstepped his authority by getting involved in things other people had been assigned to deal with. He criticized both his colleagues and his superiors, in fact that’s what all his complaints and reports were about—the way people on the force neglected their jobs, from the cadets in his own precinct all the way up to the Chief of Police. I don’t doubt he made complaints about the Minister of the Interior, since he was the ultimate chief of police in those days.”

“Did he think he was perfect himself?” Rönn said. “Maybe he had delusions of grandeur.”

“Like I said, I’m no psychiatrist,” Melander said. “But it looks as if his wife’s death was something he blamed on the whole police force, not just on Nyman and his crowd.”

Martin Beck walked back to the door and assumed his favorite position with one arm on the filing cabinet.

“You mean he quite simply rejects a police force where a thing like that can happen,” he said.

Melander nodded and sucked on his pipe, which had gone out.

“Yes, at least I can imagine that’s roughly the way he reasoned.”

“Is anything known about his private life all this time?” asked Martin Beck.

“Not much. He was something of a lone wolf, after all, and didn’t have any friends on the force. He gave up officer’s training when he got married. He did a good deal of target shooting, but otherwise he didn’t take part in any police athletics.”

“His personal relationships then? He had a daughter, who ought to be … how old now?”

“Eleven,” Rönn said.

“Yes,” said Melander. “He took care of his daughter himself. They lived in the apartment he and his wife found when they got married.”

Melander didn’t have any children, but Rönn and Martin Beck pondered the practical difficulties of being a single parent and a policeman on top of it.

“Didn’t he have someone to take care of the kid?” said Rönn incredulously. “Like when he was at work, I mean?”

Rönn’s son had just turned seven. During those seven years, especially on vacations and weekends, he had often marveled at the fact that at certain periods of its life a single child was capable of occupying the entire time and energy of two full-grown adults virtually twenty-four hours a day.

“Up until 1964 he had the little girl at a day-care center, and since both of his parents were alive, they took care of her when he worked nights.”

“Then what?” Rönn said. “After ’64?”

“I guess after that we don’t know anything about him,” said Martin Beck, and looked questioningly at Melander.

“No,” Melander said. “He was fired in August that year. No one missed him. Everyone who’d had anything
to do with him just wanted to forget him as quickly as possible. For one reason or another.”

“Don’t we even know what kind of job he got next?” asked Martin Beck.

“He applied for a job as a night watchman in October that same year, but I don’t know if he got it. And then he vanishes from our picture.”

“When he was fired,” Rönn said, “was it just a question of the straw that broke the camel’s back?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean did he have too many demerits, or did he do something in particular?”

“Well the camel’s back was ready to break all right, but the direct cause of his dismissal was a breach of discipline. On Friday the seventh of August, Åke Eriksson had the afternoon watch outside the American Embassy. That was 1964, before the big demonstrations against the war in Vietnam had started. As you’ll recall, in those days there was only one man on routine watch outside the U.S. Embassy. It wasn’t a popular job, it was so dull just wandering back and forth out there.”

“But in those days you could still juggle your night stick,” said Martin Beck.

“I remember one guy in particular,” Rönn said. “He was fantastic. If Eriksson was as good as that, he maybe got a job in a circus.”

Melander threw a tired glance at Rönn. Then he looked at his watch.

“I promised Saga to be home for lunch,” he said. “So if I might continue …”

“I’m sorry. I just happened to think of that guy,” muttered Rönn, offended. “Go on.”

“As I was saying, Eriksson was supposed to be watching the embassy, but he just simply said the hell with it. He went out there and relieved the man on the preceding
watch. And then he just left. The fact was that a week or so earlier Eriksson had gotten a call to a place on Fredrikshofsgatan where they’d found the janitor dead in the cellar. He’d put a rope around a pipe in the furnace room and hanged himself, and there was no reason to doubt it was suicide. In a locked room in the basement they found a cache of stolen goods—cameras, radios, TV’s, furniture, rugs, paintings, a whole bunch of stuff from burglaries committed earlier that year. The janitor had been a fence, and within a few days they’d arrested the men who were using the cellar as a hiding place. Well, all Eriksson really had to do with it was that he’d gone out on the call, and once he and his partner had roped off the area and called in some people from down here, all they had to do was report the suicide and that was that. But Eriksson got the idea that the thing hadn’t really been cleared up. As I remember, he thought, for one thing, that the janitor had been murdered, and for another, he was hoping to catch some more members of the gang. So instead of going back to the embassy, which of course he never should have left, he spent the whole afternoon at Fredrikshofsgatan questioning the tenants and snooping around. On an ordinary day maybe no one would even have noticed he wasn’t on duty, but as luck would have it one of the first real demonstrations against the embassy took place that very afternoon. Two days before, on the fifth of August, the U.S. had attacked North Vietnam and dropped bombs all up and down the coast, and so now several hundred people had gathered to protest the aggression. Since the demonstration was completely unexpected, the embassy’s own security people were taken by surprise, and since on top of that our friend Eriksson was nowhere in sight, it was quite a while before the police arrived in any strength. The demonstration was peaceful, people were chanting slogans and
standing around with their picket signs while a delegation went in to deliver a written protest to the ambassador. But as you know, the regular police weren’t used to demonstrations and acted the way they always do at a riot, and there was one hell of an uproar. Crowds of people were hauled into the station and some of them had been treated pretty badly. All of this was blamed on Eriksson, and since he was guilty of a grave dereliction of duty he was immediately relieved of his duties and a couple of days later officially dismissed. Exit Åke Eriksson.”

Melander stood up.

“And exit Fredrik Melander,” he said. “I’m not planning to miss my lunch. I sincerely hope you won’t need me again today, but if you do you know where I am.”

He put away his tobacco pouch and pipe and got into his coat. Martin Beck walked over and sat down in his chair.

“Do you really think it’s Eriksson who cut down Nyman?” said Melander from the door.

Rönn shrugged his shoulders and Martin Beck didn’t answer.

“I think it seems unlikely,” Melander said. “In that case he should have done it back then when his wife died. Revenge and hate can cool off quite a bit in ten years. You’re on the wrong track. But good luck. So long.”

He left.

Rönn looked at Martin Beck.

“He’s probably right.”

Martin Beck sat silently, shuffling at random through the papers on the table.

“I was thinking of something Melander said. About his parents. Maybe they still live where they lived ten years ago.”

He started shuffling more purposefully in the pile of documents. Rönn didn’t say a word, but he looked at
Martin Beck without enthusiasm. Martin Beck finally found what he was looking for.

“Here’s the address. Gamla Södertäljevägen in Segeltorp.”

The car was a black Plymouth with white fenders and two blue lights on the roof. As if that weren’t enough, the four words
POLICE, POLICE, POLICE
, and
POLICE
were written on the hood, trunk and both sides in large and extremely legible white letters.

Despite the “B” on the license plate, which meant it was registered outside Stockholm, the car was at the moment moving at a good speed across the city limits at Norrtull. Headed away from the road to Uppsala and, more importantly, away from the Solna police station.

The patrol car was new and well provided with modern equipment, but technical refinements could do nothing significant to improve its crew. This consisted of Patrolmen Karl Kristiansson and Kurt Kvant, two blond giants from Skåne whose nearly twelve years of adventure as radio policemen included several successful and a vast number of entirely unsuccessful actions.

At this particular moment they seemed once again well on their way to trouble.

To be specific, Kristiansson had found himself compelled to arrest the Rump some four minutes earlier. This misfortune could be blamed neither on bad luck nor overzealousness. On the contrary, it had been occasioned by an unusually flagrant and thoughtless provocation.

It had started with Kvant’s pulling up and stopping
in front of the newsstand at Haga Terminal. He had then taken out his wallet and lent Kristiansson ten crowns, whereupon the latter got out of the car.

Kristiansson was always broke, which was a result of the fact that he squandered all his money on the soccer pools. Only two people knew of this overwhelming mania. One of them was Kvant, since two men in a radio car are very much dependent on each other and can hardly keep secrets except the ones they have in common. The other was Kristiansson’s wife, whose name was Kerstin and who suffered from the same addiction. In fact they had even begun to neglect their sex life, since all of their time together was spent filling in the soccer coupons and working out incredibly complicated systems based on a combination of calculated odds and random selections supplied by their two minor children, aided by a pair of dice manufactured specifically for this purpose.

At the newsstand, Kristiansson bought copies of
Sports News
and two other special newspapers, as well as a stick of licorice for Kvant. He took the change in his right hand and stuffed it in his pocket. He held the papers in his left, and as he turned toward the car he was already devouring the first page of
All Right
with his eyes. His mind was completely occupied by the question of how Millwall, one of his key teams, would fare in its difficult match against Portsmouth, when he suddenly heard a wheedling voice behind him.

“You forgot this, Inspector.”

Kristiansson felt something brush the sleeve of his coat, and he automatically drew his right hand from his pocket and closed his fingers around something strikingly cold and slimy. He gave a start and looked up, to his horror, directly into the face of the Rump.

Then he looked at the object in his hand.

Karl Kristiansson was very much on duty, standing
in a crowded public place. He was wearing a uniform with shiny buttons and a shoulder belt, plus a pistol and a nightstick in white holsters at his waist. In one hand he was holding a pickled pig’s foot.

“To each his own! Hope you like it! Otherwise you can cram it!”

Howled the Rump and burst into roaring laughter.

The Rump was a vagabond beggar and peddler. His name had been given him for obvious reasons, since the portion of anatomy in question was quite overwhelming and made his head, arms and legs look like immaterial afterthoughts. He was just under five feet tall, that is, more than a foot shorter than Kristiansson and Kvant.

What made the man so uninviting, however, was not his physical constitution but his clothing.

The Rump was wearing two long overcoats, three suit jackets, four pairs of pants and five vests. This means a good fifty pockets, and he was known among other things for carrying considerable amounts of cash, always in coin of the realm and never in denominations larger than ten öre.

Kristiansson and Kvant had apprehended the Rump exactly eleven times but had taken him into the station only twice. Namely, the first two times, and then only due to lack of judgment and experience.

On the first occasion he had had 1,230 one-öre pieces, 2,780 two-öre pieces, 2,037 five-öre pieces and one ten-öring in forty-three pockets. The search had taken three hours and twenty minutes, and at the subsequent trial he was indeed sentenced to pay a fine of ten crowns for insulting an officer of the law, and true enough the pig snout he had affixed to the radiator of the patrol car was confiscated by the crown, but on the other hand Kristiansson and Kvant had been forced to appear as witnesses, and that on their day off.

They weren’t so lucky the second time. On that occasion, the Rump had had no less than three hundred and twenty crowns, ninety-three öre in sixty-two pockets. The search had taken all of seven hours, and to make their misery complete he was later found not guilty by an idiotic judge who utterly failed to appreciate the niceties of the
skånsk
idiom and could hear nothing disparaging or slanderous in the expressions
fubbick, mögbör, gåsapick
and
puggasole.
When Kvant, with great difficulty, managed to translate
mögbör
(to “vehicle for the transport of fertilizer”), the judge had remarked sourly that it was Kristiansson and not the patrol car who was the plaintiff, and that the court considered it as good as impossible to insult a Plymouth sedan, particularly not by comparing it with some other practical conveyance.