The Abominable Man (4 page)

At the far end of the grounds stand a number of older buildings that house the old people’s home. There is a little chapel here, and in the middle of a garden of lawns and hedges and gravel walks there is a yellow summerhouse with white trim and a spire on its rounded roof. An avenue of trees leads from the chapel to an old gatehouse down by the street. Behind the chapel the grounds rise higher only to come to a sudden stop high above Torsgatan, which curves between the cliff and the Bonnier Building across the way. This is the quietest and least frequented part of the hospital area. The main entrance is on Dalagatan where it was a hundred years ago, and next to it is the new central hospital building.

Rönn felt almost ghostlike in the blue light flashing from the roof of the patrol car. But it would soon get worse.

“What’s happened?” he said.

“Don’t know for sure. Something ugly.”

The patrolman looked very young. His face was open and sympathetic, but his glance wandered and he seemed
to be having trouble standing still. He was holding onto the car door with his left hand and fingering the butt of his pistol a little hesitantly with his right. Ten seconds earlier he’d made a sound that could only have been a sigh of relief.

The boy’s scared, Rönn thought. He made his voice reassuring.

“Well, we’ll see. Where is it?”

“It’s kind of hard to get there. I’ll drive in front.”

Rönn nodded and went back to his own car. Started the motor and followed the blue flashes in a wide swing around the central hospital and into the grounds. In the course of thirty seconds the patrol car made three right turns, two left turns, then braked and stopped outside a long low building with yellow plaster walls and a black mansard roof. It looked ancient. Above the weathered wooden door a single flickering bulb in an old-fashioned milkglass globe was fighting what was pretty much a losing battle against the darkness. The patrolman climbed out and assumed his former stance, fingers on car door and pistol butt as a kind of shield against the night and what it might be presumed to conceal.

“In there,” he said, glancing guardedly at the double wooden door.

Rönn stifled a yawn and nodded.

“Shall I call for more men?”

“Well, we’ll see,” Rönn repeated good-naturedly.

He was already on the steps pushing open the right-hand half of the door, which creaked mournfully on unoiled hinges. Another couple of steps and another door and he found himself in a sparsely lit corridor. It was broad and high-ceilinged and stretched the entire length of the building.

On one side were private rooms and wards, the other was apparently reserved for lavatories and linen closets
and examination rooms. On the wall was an old black pay phone of the kind that only cost ten öre to use. Rönn stared at an oval white enamel plate with the laconic inscription
ENEMA
and then went on to study the four people he could see from where he stood.

Two of them were uniformed policemen. One of these was stocky and solid and stood with feet apart and his arms at his sides and his eyes straight ahead. In his left hand he was holding an open notebook with black covers. His colleague was leaning against the wall, head down, his gaze directed into an enameled cast-iron washbasin with an old-fashioned brass spigot. Of all the young men Rönn had encountered during his nine hours of overtime, this one looked to be easily the youngest. In his leather jacket and shoulder belt and apparently indispensable weaponry, he looked like a parody of a policeman. An older gray-haired woman with glasses sat collapsed in a wicker chair, staring apathetically at her white wooden clogs. She was wearing a white smock and had an ugly case of varicose veins on her pale calves. The quartet was completed by a man in his thirties. He had curly black hair and was biting his knuckles in irritation. He too was wearing a white coat and wood-soled shoes.

The air in the corridor was unpleasant and smelled of disinfectant, vomit, or medicine, or maybe all three at once. Rönn sneezed suddenly and unexpectedly and, a little late, grabbed his nose between thumb and forefinger.

The only one to react was the policeman with the notebook. Without saying anything, he pointed to a tall door with light yellow crackled paint and a typewritten white card in a metal frame. The door was not quite closed. Rönn plucked it open without touching the handle. Inside there was another door. That one too was ajar, but opened in.

Rönn pushed it with his foot, looked into the room and gave a start. He let go of his reddish nose and took another look, this one more systematic.

“My, my,” he said to himself.

Then he took a step backwards, let the outer door swing back to its former position, put on his glasses and examined the nameplate.

“Jesus,” he said.

The policeman had put away the black notebook and had taken out his badge instead, which he now stood fingering as if it had been a rosary or an amulet.

Police badges were soon to be eliminated, Rönn remembered, irrationally. And with that, the long battle as to whether badges should be worn on the chest as forthright identification or hidden away in a pocket somewhere had come to a disappointing as well as surprising conclusion. They were simply done away with, replaced by ordinary ID cards, and policemen could safely go on hiding behind the anonymity of the uniform.

“What’s your name?” he said out loud.

“Andersson.”

“What time did you get here?”

The policeman looked at his wristwatch.

“At two sixteen. Nine minutes ago. We were right in the neighborhood. At Odenplan.”

Rönn took off his glasses and glanced at the uniformed boy, who was light green in the face and vomiting helplessly into the sink. The older patrolman followed his look.

“He’s just a cadet,” he said under his breath. “It’s his first time out.”

“Better give him a hand,” said Rönn. “And send out a call for five or six men from the Fifth.”

“The emergency bus from Precinct Five, yes sir,” Andersson
said, looking as if he were about to salute or snap to attention or some other dumb thing.

“Just a moment,” Rönn said. “Have you seen anything suspicious around here?”

He hadn’t put it so awfully well perhaps, and the patrolman stared bewilderedly at the door to the sickroom.

“Well, ah …” he said evasively.

“Do you know who that is? The man in there?”

“Chief Inspector Nyman, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Though you can’t hardly tell by looking.”

“No,” Rönn said. “Not hardly.”

Andersson went out.

Rönn wiped the sweat from his forehead and considered what he ought to do.

For ten seconds. Then he walked over to the pay phone and dialed Martin Beck’s home number.

“Hi. It’s Rönn. I’m at Mount Sabbath. Come on over.”

“Okay,” said Martin Beck.

“Quick.”

“Okay.”

Rönn hung up the receiver and went back to the others. Waited. Gave his handkerchief to the cadet, who selfconsciously wiped off his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It can happen to anyone.”

“I couldn’t help it. Is it always like this?”

“No,” Rönn said. “I wouldn’t say that. I’ve been a policeman for twenty-one years and to be honest I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Then he turned to the man with the curly black hair.

“Is there a psychiatric ward here?”

“Nix verstehen,”
the doctor said.

Rönn put on his glasses and examined the plastic name badge on the doctor’s white coat.

Sure enough, there was his name.

DR. ÜZK ÜKÖCÖTÜPZE.

“Oh,” he said to himself.

Put away his glasses and waited.

The room was fifteen feet long, ten feet wide, and almost twelve feet high. The colors were very drab—ceiling a dirty white and the plastered walls an indefinite grayish yellow. Gray-white marble tiles on the floor. Light gray window-frames and door. In front of the window hung heavy pale-yellow damask drapes and, behind them, thin white cotton curtains. The iron bed was white, likewise the sheets and pillowcase. The night table was gray and the wooden chair light brown. The paint on the furniture was worn, and on the rough walls it was crackled with age. The plaster on the ceiling was flaking and in several places there were light brown spots where moisture had seeped through. Everything was old but very clean. On the table was a nickel silver vase with seven pale red roses. Plus a pair of glasses and a glasses case, a transparent plastic beaker containing two small white tablets, a little white transistor radio, a half-eaten apple, and a tumbler half full of some bright yellow liquid. On the shelf below lay a pile of magazines, four letters, a tablet of lined paper, a shiny Waterman pen with ballpoint cartridges in four different colors, and some loose change—to be exact, eight ten-öre pieces, two
twenty-five-öre pieces, and six one-crown coins. The table had two drawers. In the upper one were three used handkerchiefs, a bar of soap in a plastic box, toothpaste, toothbrush, a small bottle of after-shave, a box of cough drops, and a leather case with a nail clipper, file and scissors. The other contained a wallet, an electric razor, a small folder of postage stamps, two pipes, a tobacco pouch and a blank picture postcard of the Stockholm city hall. There were some clothes hanging over the back of the straight chair—a gray cotton coat, pants of the same color and material, and a knee-length white shirt. Underwear and socks lay on the seat, and next to the bed stood a pair of slippers. A beige bathrobe hung on the clothes hook by the door.

There was only one completely dissident color in the room. And that was a shocking red.

The dead man lay partly on his side between the bed and the window. The throat had been cut with such force that the head had been thrown back at an angle of almost ninety degrees and lay with its left cheek against the floor. The tongue had forced its way out through the gaping incision and the victim’s broken false teeth stuck out between the mutilated lips.

As he fell backwards a thick stream of blood had pumped out through the carotid artery. This explained the crimson streak across the bed and the splashes of blood on the flower vase and night table.

On the other hand it was the wound in the midriff that had soaked the victim’s shirt and provided the enormous pool of blood around the body. A superficial inspection of this wound indicated that someone, with a single blow, had cut through the liver, bile ducts, stomach, spleen and pancreas. Not to mention the aorta.

Virtually all the blood in the body had welled out in the course of a few seconds. The skin was bluish white
and seemed almost transparent, where, that is, it could be seen at all, for example on the forehead and parts of the shins and feet.

The lesion on the torso was about ten inches long and wide open; the lacerated organs had pressed out between the sliced edges of the peritoneum.

The man had virtually been cut in two.

Even for people whose job it was to linger at the scenes of macabre and bloody crimes, this was strong stuff.

But Martin Beck’s expression hadn’t changed since he entered the room. To an outside observer it would have seemed almost as if everything were part of the routine—going to the Peace with his daughter, eating, drinking, getting undressed, pottering with a ship model, going to bed with a book. And then suddenly rushing off to inspect a slaughtered chief inspector of police. The worst part was that he felt that way himself. He never allowed himself to be taken aback, except by his own emotional coolness.

It was now three ten in the morning and he sat on his haunches beside the bed and surveyed the body, coldly and appraisingly.

“Yes, it’s Nyman,” he said.

“Yes, I guess it is.”

Rönn stood poking among the objects on the table. All at once he yawned and put his hand guiltily to his mouth.

Martin Beck threw him a quick glance.

“Have you got some sort of timetable?”

“Yes,” Rönn said.

He pulled out a small notebook where he’d made some industrious jottings in a tiny, stingy hand. Put on his glasses and rattled it off in a monotone.

“An assistant nurse opened those doors at ten minutes
after two. Hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual. Making a routine check on the patients. Nyman was dead then. She dialed 90-000 at two eleven. The patrolmen in the radio car got the alarm at two twelve. They were at Odenplan and made it here in between three and four minutes. They reported to Criminal at two seventeen. I got here at two twenty-two. Called you at two twenty-nine. You got here at sixteen minutes to three.”

Rönn looked at his watch.

“It’s now eight minutes to three. When I arrived he’d been dead at the most half an hour.”

“Is that what the doctor said?”

“No, that’s my own conclusion, so to speak. The warmth of the body, coagulation—”

He stopped, as if it had been presumptuous to mention his own observations.

Martin Beck rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

“So then everything happened very fast,” he said.

Rönn didn’t answer. He seemed to be thinking about something else.

“Well,” he said after a while, “you understand why it was I called you. Not because—”

He stopped, seeming somehow distracted.

“Not because?”

“Not because Nyman was a chief inspector, but because … well, because of this.”

Rönn gestured vaguely toward the body.

“He was butchered.”

He paused for a second and then came up with a new conclusion.

“I mean, whoever did this must be raving mad.”

Martin Beck nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “It looks that way.”

Martin Beck was beginning to feel ill at ease. The sensation was vague and hard to trace, somewhat like the sneaking fatigue when you’re falling asleep over a book and go on reading without turning any pages.

He’d have to make an effort to gather his wits and get a grip on these slippery apprehensions.