The Abominable Man (8 page)

He leafed through the paper as he ate.

Sweden had done badly in the international ice hockey championships, and the managers, trainers and players were now emphasizing their lack of sportsmanship by hurling accusations at each other in public. There was also a fight going on within the Swedish TV—the monopoly’s central management was apparently doing everything it could to maintain a tight hold on the news services of the different channels.

Censorship, thought Gunvald Larsson. With laminated plastic gloves. Typical of this meddlesome capitalist society.

The biggest piece of news was that the readers were being given the opportunity to christen three bear cubs at Skansen. The results of a military study showing forty-year-old reservists to be in better physical condition than eighteen-year-old recruits were noted with resignation in a less prominent place. And on the culture page, where there was no risk of its being seen by unauthorized readers, there was an article on Rhodesia.

He read it while he drank his tea and ate his eggs and six pieces of toast.

Gunvald Larsson had never been in Rhodesia, but many times in South Africa, Sierra Leone, Angola and Mozambique. He’d been a seaman then, and had already known his own mind.

He finished his meal, washed the dishes and threw the paper in the trash. Since it was Saturday, he changed the sheets before making the bed. Then with great care he selected the clothes he would wear that day and laid them neatly on the bed. Removed his robe and pajamas and took a shower.

His bachelor apartment bore witness to good taste and a feeling for quality. Furniture, rugs, drapes, everything, from his white leather Italian slippers to his pivoting Nordmende color TV, was first class.

Gunvald Larsson was an inspector at the Violence Division in Stockholm, and higher up the ladder he would never go. As a matter of fact it was odd he hadn’t been fired already. His colleagues thought him peculiar, and they almost all disliked him. He himself detested not only the men he worked with but also his own family and the upper-class background he came from. His own brothers and sisters regarded him with profound distaste. Partly as a result of his dissident views, but mostly because he was a policeman.

While showering, he wondered if he would die that day.

It was not a foreboding. He’d wondered the same thing every morning since he was eight years old and brushed his teeth before dragging himself reluctantly off to Broms School on Sturegatan.

Lennart Kollberg lay in his bed dreaming. It was not a pleasant dream. He’d had it before, and when he
woke from it he’d be dripping with sweat and he’d say to Gun, “Put your arms around me, I had such an awful nightmare.”

And Gun, who’d been his wife for five years, would put her arms around him and right away he’d forget everything else.

In the dream, his daughter Bodil is standing in the open window five stories above the street. He tries to run over to her, but his legs are paralyzed and she starts to fall, slowly, as if in slow motion, and she screams and stretches her arms out toward him and he fights to reach her, but his muscles won’t obey him and she falls and falls, screaming all the time.

He woke up. The scream in the nightmare became the drilling buzz of the alarm clock, and when he looked up he saw Bodil sitting astride his shins.

She was reading
The Cat Trip.
She was only three and a half and she couldn’t read, but Gun and he had read the story to her so many times they all knew it by heart, and he could hear Bodil whispering it to herself.

“A little old man with a big blue nose, all dressed up in calico clothes.”

He turned off the alarm clock and she immediately stopped whispering and said “Hi!” in a clear high voice.

Kollberg turned his head and looked at Gun. She was still asleep, with the quilt pulled up to her nose, and her dark ruffled hair was a tiny bit damp at the temples. He put his finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t wake Mommy. And don’t sit on my legs, it hurts. Come up here and lie down.”

He made room for her to creep down under the quilt between him and Gun. She gave him the book and arranged herself with her head in his armpit.

“Read it,” she ordered.

He put the book aside.

“No, not now,” he said. “Did you get the newspaper?”

She scrambled across his midriff and picked up the newspaper, which was on the floor beside the bed. He groaned, lifted her up and put her back in the bed beside him again. Then he opened the paper and started to read. He made it all the way to the foreign news on page twelve before Bodil interrupted.

“Papa?”

“Mmm.”

“Josha did a big job.”

“Mmm.”

“He took off his diaper and put it on the wall. All over the wall.”

Kollberg put down the paper and groaned again, got out of bed and went into the children’s room. Joshua, who would soon be one, was standing up in his crib and when he saw his father he let go of the railing and sat down on the pillow with a little bounce. Bodil had not exaggerated his adornment of the wall.

Kollberg picked him up under one arm, carried him into the bathroom and rinsed him off with the shower hose. Then he wrapped him in a towel and went in and put him down beside Gun, who was still asleep. He rinsed out the bedclothes and the pajamas, cleaned the crib and the wallpaper and got out a clean diaper and a fresh pair of plastic pants. Bodil scampered along beside him through it all. She was very pleased that for once his irritation was directed at Joshua instead of at herself, and she clucked and fussed officiously at her brother’s bad behavior. When he’d finished cleaning up it was after seven thirty and there wasn’t any point in going back to bed.

His mood improved as soon as he walked into the bedroom. Gun was awake, playing with Joshua. She had
drawn up her knees and was holding him under the arms and letting him play roller coaster down her legs. Gun was an attractive and sensuous woman with both intelligence and a sense of humor. Kollberg had always imagined he would marry a woman like Gun, and though there had been quite a few women in his life, he’d been forty-one years old and had almost given up hope. She was fourteen years younger than he, and well worth waiting for. Their relationship had, from the very beginning, been uncomplicated, intimate and straightforward.

She smiled at him and held up their son, who gurgled with delight.

“Hi,” she said. “Did you already give him his bath?”

Kollberg described his labors.

“Poor dear. Come lie down for a while,” she said, throwing a glance at the clock. “You’ve got time.”

Actually he didn’t, but he was easy to convince. He lay down next to her with his arm under her neck, but after a while he got up again, carried Joshua in and put him down on his mattress, which was virtually dry, dressed him in a diaper and a pair of terrycloth overalls, threw some toys in the crib and went back to Gun. Bodil was sitting on the rug in the living room, playing with her barn.

After a while she came in and looked at them.

“Play horsey,” she said delightedly. “Daddy’s the horsey.”

She tried to climb up on his back but he got rid of her and closed the door. Then the children didn’t bother them for a long time, and when they’d made love he all but fell asleep in his wife’s arms.

When Kollberg walked across the street to his car the clock on the Skärmarbrink subway station said eight twenty-three. Before getting in, he turned and waved to
Gun and Bodil, who were standing in the kitchen window.

He didn’t have to drive into town to get to Västberga Avenue but could take the route through Arsta and Enskede and avoid the worst of the traffic.

As he drove, Lennart Kollberg whistled an Irish folksong very loudly and very much out of tune.

The sun was shining, there was spring in the air, and crocuses and Star-of-Bethlehem were blooming in the gardens he passed. He was in a good mood. If he was lucky, he’d have a short day and would be able to go home fairly early in the afternoon. Gun was going to go in to Arvid Nordquist’s and buy something good, and they’d have dinner after the children were in bed. After five years of marriage their idea of a really pleasant evening was to be at home, alone, help each other make a good dinner and then sit for a long time and eat and drink and talk.

Kollberg was very fond of good food and drink, and as a result had put on a little fat over the years, a little “substance” as he preferred to call it. Anyone who thought this fleshiness prejudicial to his agility, however, was making a serious error. He could be unexpectedly quick and lithe, and he was still in command of all the technique and all the tricks he’d once learned in the paratroops.

He stopped whistling and started thinking about a problem that had occupied him a lot these last few years. He liked his job less and less, and would really prefer to resign from the force. The problem was not easy to solve and had been complicated by the fact that a year earlier he’d been promoted to deputy chief inspector, with an appropriate raise in salary. It wasn’t easy for a forty-six-year-old deputy chief inspector of police to find a
different and equally well-paying job. Gun kept telling him to forget the money—the children were getting older and by and by she’d be able to go back to work. In addition to which, she’d been studying and had learned another couple of languages during the four years she’d been a housewife and would certainly draw a considerably higher salary now than she had before. Before Bodil was born, she’d been an executive secretary, and she could get a well-paid position whenever she wanted. But Kollberg didn’t want her to feel she had to go back to work before she really wanted to.

On top of that he had a hard time picturing himself as a homemaker.

He was by nature somewhat lazy, but needed a certain amount of activity and change around him.

As he drove his car into the garage at Södra police station he remembered that Martin Beck had the day off.

First of all that means I’ll have to stay here all day, Kollberg thought, and secondly that I won’t have anyone sensible to talk to. His spirits immediately sank.

In order to cheer himself up, he started whistling again while he waited for the elevator.

Kollberg hadn’t even had time to take off his overcoat when the telephone rang.

“Yes, Kollberg here … what?”

He stood by his littered desk and stared absently out the window. The switch-over from the pleasures of private life to the ugliness of the job wasn’t as easy for him as it was for some, for example Martin Beck.

“What’s it about? … You don’t? Well okay, tell them I’m coming.”

Down to the car again, and this time no way to avoid the traffic.

He arrived at Kungsholmsgatan at a quarter to nine and parked in the yard. Just as Kollberg was getting out of his car, Gunvald Larsson got into his and drove away.

They nodded to each other but didn’t speak. He ran into Rönn in the corridor.

“So you’re here too,” Rönn said.

“Yes, what’s up?”

“Somebody sliced up Stig Nyman.”

“Sliced up?”

“Yeah, with a bayonet,” said Rönn mournfully. “At Mount Sabbath.”

“I just saw Larsson. Is that where he was headed?”

Rönn nodded.

“Where’s Martin?”

“He’s in Melander’s office.”

Kollberg looked at him more closely.

“You look just about done in,” he said.

“I am,” said Rönn.

“Why don’t you go home and go to bed?”

Rönn gave him a doleful look and walked on down the corridor. He was holding some papers in his hand and presumably had work to do.

Kollberg rapped once on the door and walked in. Martin Beck didn’t even look up from his notes.

“Hi,” he said.

“What’s all this Rönn was talking about?”

“Here. Take a look.”

He handed him two typewritten sheets of paper. Kollberg sat down on the edge of the desk and read.

“Well,” said Martin Beck. “What do you think?”

“I think Rönn writes a god-awful report,” said Kollberg.

But he said it quietly and seriously, and five seconds later he went on.

“This sounds unpleasant.”

“Right,” said Martin Beck. “I think so too.”

“What’d it look like?”

“Worse than you can imagine.”

Kollberg shook his head. There was nothing wrong with his imagination.

“We’d better get our hands on this guy pretty damned quick.”

“Right again,” said Martin Beck.

“What do we have to go on?”

“Something. We’ve got a few prints. Footprints, maybe some fingerprints. No one saw anything or heard anything.”

“Not good,” Kollberg said. “That can take time. And this guy’s dangerous.”

Martin Beck nodded.

Rönn came into the room after a discreet knock on the door.

“Negative so far,” he said. “The fingerprints I mean.”

“The fingerprints aren’t worth a damn,” Kollberg said.

“I’ve got a pretty good casting too,” Rönn said. “Of a boot or a heavy work shoe.” He was looking surprised.

“That’s not worth a damn either,” Kollberg said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. That can all be essential later on, as evidence. But right now it’s a question of getting our hands on whoever slaughtered Nyman. We can tie him to the crime later on.”

“That sounds illogical,” Rönn said.

“Okay, but don’t worry about it now. We’ve still got another couple of important details.”

“Yes, the murder weapon,” said Martin Beck thoughtfully. “An old carbine bayonet.”

“And the motive,” said Kollberg.

“The motive?” Rönn said.

“Of course,” said Kollberg. “Revenge. It’s the only conceivable motive.”

“But if it’s revenge …”

Rönn said, and left the sentence hanging.

“Then it’s possible whoever stabbed Nyman is planning to take revenge on other people too,” Kollberg said. “And therefore …”

“We have to find him fast,” said Martin Beck.

“Exactly,” said Kollberg. “Now what’s your reasoning been?”

Rönn looked unhappily at Martin Beck, who in his turn looked out the window.

Kollberg looked at them both admonishingly.