The Abominable Man (20 page)

“Where does he live?”

“On Dalagatan. In a brand-new building. He couldn’t find anything else when they tore down the place he was living before. And he was making better money then, of course, so he figured he could make it. But that doesn’t matter so much. The worst part was this thing with his little girl.”

“I’d like to know a little more about this business with the Child Welfare people,” said Martin Beck. “They don’t just take a child away from its father, not just like that.”

“Don’t they?”

“They claim, at least, that they make a thorough investigation first.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Some people came out here and talked to the wife and me and looked at the house and asked all sorts of questions about Åke. He wasn’t very happy, not after Marja died, but you can understand that, I guess. They said his depression—that he was so gloomy all the time—had an injurious effect on the child’s mental state. I remember that’s what they said, they always have to talk so fine. And that it wasn’t good he had so many different jobs and such funny hours. Yes, and then he had money troubles, couldn’t pay the rent and so forth, and then, of course, there were some of his neighbors in the building who complained to the Child Welfare that he left Malin alone too much at night and that she didn’t eat properly and so on.”

“Do you know who else they talked to?”

“The people he’d worked for. I think they tried to get hold of every boss he’d ever had.”

“The ones in the police department too?”

“Yes of course. That was the most important one. Apparently.”

“And apparently he didn’t give him much of a recommendation,” said Martin Beck.

“No, Åke said he wrote some sort of a letter that absolutely ruined his chances of keeping Malin.”

“Do you know who it was that wrote this letter?” asked Martin Beck.

“Yes. It was that Inspector Nyman, the same one who let Åke’s wife lie there and die without lifting a finger.”

Martin Beck and Rönn exchanged a quick glance.

Mrs. Eriksson looked from her husband to them, anxious about how they would react to this new accusation. This one was directed at one of their colleagues after all. She held out the cake dish, first to Rönn, who helped himself to a thick slab of sponge cake, then to Martin Beck, who shook his head.

“Did your son talk about Inspector Nyman when he was here last night?”

“He just said it was his fault that they’d taken Malin. Nothing else. He’s not very talkative, our Åke, but last night he was quieter than usual. Wasn’t he, Karin?”

“Yes,” said his wife, poking at some crumbs on her plate.

“What did he do while he was here? Last night, I mean,” said Martin Beck.

“He had dinner with us. Then we watched TV for a while. Then he went up to his room and we went to bed.”

Martin Beck had noticed the telephone in the front hall as they came in.

“Did he use the phone at any time during the evening?” he asked.

“Why are you asking all these questions?” the woman said. “Has Åke done anything?”

“I’m afraid I have to ask you to just please answer our questions first,” said Martin Beck. “Did he make any calls from here last night?”

The couple across from him sat silent for a moment.

“Maybe,” the man said then. “I don’t know. Åke can use the phone any time he wants to after all.”

“So you didn’t hear him talking on the phone.”

“No. We were watching TV. I think I remember he went out for a while and closed the door behind him, and he doesn’t usually do that if he’s just going to the toilet. The phone’s in the hall, and if the TV’s on you have to close the door so you won’t be disturbed. We don’t hear so well either, so we usually have the sound up pretty high.”

“What time would that have been? That he used the phone, I mean?”

“I don’t really know. But we were watching a movie, and that was right in the middle of it. About nine, maybe. Why do you want to know?”

Martin Beck didn’t answer. Rönn had gobbled down the sponge cake and now suddenly spoke up.

“Your son’s a very good shot, as I recall. Among the best in the department at that time. Do you know if he still has any guns?”

The woman looked at Rönn with something new in her eyes, and the man straightened up proudly. It would probably be easy to count the number of times in the last ten years these people had heard anyone praise their son.

“Yes,” the man said. “Åke’s won a lot of prizes. We don’t have them here, unfortunately. He keeps them in his apartment on Dalagatan. And as for guns …”

“He ought to sell those things,” the woman said. “They were so expensive, and he’s short of money.”

“Do you know what guns he’s got?” Rönn asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “I do. Did a lot of target shooting myself when I was younger. First of all, Åke’s got his weapons from the Home Guard or the Civil Defense or whatever they call it these days. He took night courses and got a commission too, not bad, if I do say so myself.”

“Do you know what kinds of weapons?” said Rönn stubbornly.

“First of all, his Mauser rifle. And then his pistol, he’s terrific with a pistol, won his first gold medal years ago.”

“What kind of pistol?”

“Hammerli International. He showed it to me. And then he’s got …”

The man hesitated.

“Got what?”

“I don’t know … he’s got a license for those two I mentioned, of course, as you gentlemen realize …”

“I assure you we’re not thinking of arresting your son for illegal possession of weapons,” said Martin Beck. “What else does he have?”

“An American automatic rifle. Johnson. But he must have a license for that one too, because I know he’s entered competitions with it.”

“Not a bad arsenal,” Martin Beck muttered.

“What else?” said Rönn.

“His old carbine from the Home Guard. But that’s not worth much. For that matter it’s upstairs in the closet. But the bore is worn, and then those carbines never were much good. But I think that’s the only one he keeps up here. He certainly doesn’t have all his other things here.”

“No, he keeps them at home of course,” Rönn said.

“Yes, I suppose he does,” the man said. “Of course he’s still got his room upstairs here, but naturally he’s got all his important stuff at home on Dalagatan. Well, if
they won’t let him stay in that nice apartment he can always move back in here until he can find something else. It isn’t very big, the attic I mean.”

“Would you mind if we took a look at his room?” said Martin Beck.

The man looked at them uncertainly.

“No, I guess that’s all right. But there’s not much to see.”

The woman stood up and brushed cake crumbs from her skirt.

“Oh my,” she said. “I haven’t even been up there today. It may be in a mess.”

“It’s not so bad,” her husband said. “I looked in this morning to see if Åke had slept there last night, and it didn’t look so bad at all. Åke’s very neat.”

The man looked away and went on talking in a lower voice.

“Åke’s a good boy. It’s not his fault he’s had a hard life. We’ve worked all our lives and tried to raise him as good as we could. But everything went wrong, for him and for us. When I was a young worker I had something to believe in, I thought everything would be fine. Now we’re old and no one bothers about us and everything’s all wrong. If we’d known what society was coming to, we wouldn’t have had any children at all. But they’ve just been leading us on all these years.”

“Who?” said Rönn.

“The politicians. The party bosses. The ones we thought were on our side. Just gangsters, all of them.”

“Please show us the room,” said Martin Beck.

“Yes,” the man said.

He walked ahead of them out into the hall and up a steep, creaking wooden staircase. Right at the top of the stairs was a door, which he opened.

“This is Åke’s room. Of course it was nicer looking
when he was a boy and lived at home, but he took most of the furniture when he got married and moved away. He’s here so seldom now.”

He stopped and held open the door, and Martin Beck and Rönn walked into the little attic room. There was a window in the sloping roof, and the walls were covered with faded flowered wallpaper. In one wall was a door covered with the same paper, probably to a closet or a storage room. A narrow folding bed with a gray army blanket for a spread stood against the wall. From the ceiling hung a pale yellow lampshade with a long dirty fringe.

On the wall above the bed there was a small picture in a frame with a broken piece of glass. It depicted a little golden-haired girl sitting in a green meadow and holding a lamb in her arms. Under the foot of the bed was a pink plastic pot.

There was an open weekly magazine and a ballpoint pen on the table, and someone had thrown down an ordinary white kitchen towel with a red border onto one of the wooden chairs.

There was nothing else in the room.

Martin Beck picked up the towel. It was worn thin from many washings and was somewhat stained. He held it up against the light. The stains were yellow and reminded him of the fat that comes on genuine pâté de foie gras. The shape of the stains suggested that someone had wiped off a knife on the towel. The yellow fat made the linen almost transparent, and Martin Beck rubbed the material thoughtfully between his fingers before bringing it to his nose to smell. At the very moment that he realized what the stains consisted of and how they had come about, Rönn interrupted him.

“Look here, Martin,” he said.

He was standing by the table, pointing at the magazine.
Martin Beck leaned down and saw that something had been written with a ballpoint pen in the upper margin above the crossword puzzle on the right-hand page. Nine names, arranged in three groups.

The names were unevenly printed, and had been gone over several times. His gaze locked on the first column.

STIG OSCAR NYMAN
†

PALMON HARALD HULT
†

MARTIN BECK
†

He managed to notice that among the other names were those of Melander, the Superintendent, the National Chief of Police. And Kollberg.

Then he turned to the man by the door. He stood with his hand on the doorknob and looked at them questioningly.

“Where on Dalagatan does your son live?” said Martin Beck.

“Thirty-four,” said the man. “But—”

“Go down to your wife,” Martin Beck interrupted him. “We’ll be right there.”

The man went slowly down the stairs. On the bottom step he turned around and looked in bewilderment at Martin Beck, who waved at him to go on into the living room. Then he turned to Rönn.

“Call Strömgren or whoever the hell’s there. Give them the number here and tell him to get in touch right away with Kollberg at Mount Sabbath and tell him to call here immediately. Have you got anything in the car so we can take some prints up here?”

“Yes, sure,” Rönn said.

“Good. But make that call first.”

Rönn went down to the telephone in the hall.

Martin Beck looked around the cramped little attic
room. Then he looked at his watch. Ten minutes to one. He heard Rönn come up the stairs in three great leaps.

Martin Beck looked at Rönn’s pale cheeks and unnaturally wide-open eyes and knew that the catastrophe he’d waited for all day had taken place.

Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson were still inside the Eastman Institute when the sirens began their chorus. First they heard the sound of a single vehicle that seemed to come from Kungsholm and drive across St. Erik’s Bridge. Then other cars in other parts of the city joined the song; their howling seemed to come from every direction, it filled the air but never came really close.

They found themselves in the center of a silent circle. Something like walking out onto a meadow on a summer night and the crickets stop chirping all around you but only right where you’re standing, Kollberg thought.

He had just taken a look out toward Dalagatan and noted that nothing had changed for the worse, while a few things had gotten better. The two policemen still lay in the round basin, but there were no other dead or wounded on the street. The people who’d been there before had disappeared, even the ones who’d been lying on the ground. So apparently they’d not been wounded.

Gunvald Larsson still hadn’t answered the question about how they were going to get across the street. Instead, he was chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip and staring past Kollberg at a row of white dentist’s smocks hanging on hooks along one wall.

The alternatives were obvious.

Go straight across the flagstone square and across the street, or sneak out through one of the windows onto Vasa Park and take a detour.

Neither one seemed very appealing. The first was a little too much like suicide, and the second took too much time.

Kollberg looked out again, carefully and without moving the curtains.

He nodded toward the fountain with its somewhat surreal ornamentation—a globe with a child kneeling on Scandinavia and two crossed policemen.

“Did you know those two?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Radio patrolmen from Solna. Kristiansson and Kvant.”

Silence for a moment.

“What were they doing here?”

And then Kollberg asked a more interesting question.

“And why should anyone want to shoot them?”

“Why does anyone want to shoot us?”

That was a good question too.

Someone obviously took a great interest in the matter. Someone equipped with an automatic rifle with which he’d dropped two uniformed patrolmen and done his very best to shoot down Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson. But someone who didn’t seem to care to shoot at anyone else, despite the fact that to start with there’d been plenty of live targets.

Why?

One answer presented itself immediately. Whoever did the shooting had recognized Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson. He knew who they were and really wanted to kill them.

Had whoever it was also recognized Kristiansson and Kvant? Not necessarily, but the uniforms made them easy to identify. As what?

“It seems to be someone who doesn’t like policemen,” muttered Kollberg.