The Laughing Policeman (18 page)

She looked at him with an entirely new expression; her eyes focused on him now with a clear, direct look.

'Go and sit down,' he said curtly. 'We're going to talk. This is serious.'

Åsa Torell said nothing. She went straight into the living room and sat down in the armchair.

Kollberg went out into the hall and put the revolver on the hat rack. Took off his jacket and tie. Unbuttoned his collar and rolled up his sleeves. Then he went into the kitchen, put some water on to boil and made some tea. Brought the cups in and set them on the table. Emptied the ashtrays. Opened a window. Sat down.

'First of all,' he said, 'I want to know what you meant by "lately". When you said that lately he liked to go armed.'

'Quiet,' said Åsa.

After ten seconds she added, ‘Wait'

She drew up her legs so that her feet in the big grey ski socks were resting against the edge of the armchair. Then she put her arms around her shins and sat quite still.

Kollberg waited

To be precise, he waited for fifteen minutes, and during the whole of this time she did not look at him once. Neither of them said a word. Then she looked him in the eye and said, 'Well?' 'How do you feel?'

'No better. But different Ask what you like. I promise to answer. Answer anything at all. There's only one thing I want to know first'

'Yes?'

'Have you told me everything?'

'No,' Kollberg replied. 'But I'm going to now. The reason why I'm here at all is that I don't believe in the official version - that Stenström merely chanced to fall victim to a crazy mass murderer. And quite apart from your assurances that he was not unfaithful to you or whatever you like to call it and what you base them on, I do not believe that he was on that bus for pleasure.'

'Then what do you believe?'

'That you were right from the outset. When you said that he was working. That he was busy with something in his capacity as policeman but for one reason or another didn't want to tell anybody, either you or us. One possibility, for instance, is that he had been shadowing someone for a long time, and that this someone at last grew desperate and killed him. Though I personally don't think that that theory is plausible.'

He paused briefly.

'Åke was very good at shadowing. It amused him.' 'Yes, I know.'

'You can shadow in two ways,' Kollberg went on. 'Either you follow a person as invisibly as possible, to find, out what he's up to. Or else you follow him quite openly, to drive him to desperation and make him do something rash and give himself away. Stenström had mastered the art of both methods better than anyone else I know.'

'Does anyone else besides you believe this?' Åsa Torell asked.

'Yes. Beck and Melander at least'

He scratched his neck.

'But there are several weaknesses in the argument. We needn't go into them now.' She nodded.

'What do you want to know?'

'I'm not sure. We'll have to feel our way. I haven't quite understood you on all points. What did you mean, for instance, when you said that lately he carried a gun because it amused him? Lately?'

'When I first met Åke over four years ago he was still a little boy,' she said calmly. . 'In what way?'

'He was shy and childish. When someone killed him three weeks ago he had grown up. That development took place not so much at his work together with you and Beck, but here. Here at home. The first time we were together, in that room and in that bed, the pistol was the last thing he took off.'

Kollberg raised his eyebrows.

'He kept his shirt on, you see,' she said. 'And he laid the pistol on the bedside table. I was staggered. To tell the truth, I didn't even know he was a policeman that time and I wondered what sort of madman had got into my bed.'

She looked gravely at Kollberg.

'We didn't fall in love that first time, but we did the next And then it dawned on me. Åke was twenty-five then and I had just turned twenty. But if either of us could be called grown up and more or less mature, it was I. He went about with a pistol because he thought it made him a tough guy. He was childish, as I said, and it gave him huge pleasure to see me lying there naked, staring idiotically at a man dressed in a shirt and shoulder holster. He soon grew out of all that, but by that time it had become a habit. Besides, he was interested in firearms — '

She broke off and asked, 'Are you brave? Physically brave?'

'Not especially.'

'Åke was physically a coward though he did everything to try and overcome it. The pistol gave him a feeling of security.'

Kollberg raised an objection.

'You said that he grew up. He was a policeman, and professionally it's not very grown up to let yourself be shot down from behind by the man you're shadowing. I said before, I find it hard to believe.'

'Exacdy,' Åsa Torell agreed. 'And I definitely don't believe it Something doesn't add up.'

Kollberg pondered this. After a while he said, 'The fact remains. He was working on something and no one knows what. I don't. Nor do you. Am I right?'

'Yes.'

'Did he change in any way? Before this happened?' She didn't answer. Raised her left hand and passed her fingers through her short dark hair. 'Yes,' she said at last 'How?'

'It isn't easy to say.'

'Have these pictures anything to do with the change?' 'Yes. I'll say they have.'

Stretching out her hand, she turned the photographs over and looked at them.

'To talk to anyone about this calls for a degree of confidence that I'm not sure I have in you,' she said. 'But I'll do my best'

Kollberg's palms had begun to sweat and he wiped them against the legs of his trousers. The roles had been reversed. She was calm and he was nervous.

'I loved Åke,' she said. 'From the start But we didn't suit each other very well sexually. We were different as regards tempo and temperament. We didn't have the same demands.'

Åsa gave him a searching look.

'But you can be happy just the same. You can learn. Did you know that?' 'No.'

‘We proved it. We learned. I think you understand this.'

Kollberg nodded.

'Beck wouldn't understand it,' she said. 'And certainly not Rönn or anyone else I know.' She shrugged.

'In any case, we learned. We adjusted ourselves to each other, and we had it good.'

Kollberg forgot, for a moment, to listen. This was an alternative that he had never even thought existed.

'It's difficult,' she said. 'I must explain this. If I don't, I can't explain in what way Åke changed. And even if I give you a lot of details pertaining to my private life, it's not certain you'll grasp it But I hope you will.'

She coughed and said in a matter-of-fact tone, 'I've been smoking far too much this last week or two.'

Kollberg could feel that something was about to change. Suddenly he smiled. And Åsa Torell smiled back, a trifle bitterly, but still.

'Anyway, let's get this over,' she said. "The quicker the better. Unfortunately, I'm rather shy. Oddly enough.'

'It's not in the least odd,' Kollberg replied. 'I'm as shy as hell. It's part of the rest of one's emotions.'

'Before I met Åke. I began to think I was a nymphomaniac or something,' she said swiftly. 'Then we fell in love and learned to adjust to each other. I really tried hard, and so did Åke, and we succeeded. We had it good together, better than I ever dreamed of. I forgot that I was more highly sexed than he was, we talked it over once or twice at the beginning, then we never talked any more about sexuality. There was no need. We made love when he felt like it, which was once or twice a week, three times at the most we did it very well and never needed anything else. That is, we were not unfaithful to one another, as you so wittily put it But then ...'

'... suddenly last summer,' Kollberg said.

She gave him a swift, approving glance.

'Exactly. Last summer we went to Mallorca on vacation. While we were away you all had a difficult and very nasty case here in town.'

'Yes. The park murders.'

'By the time we got home they had been cleared up. Åke was quite put out about it'

She paused, then went on, just as quickly and fluently, 'It sounds bad, but so does a lot of what I've said and am going to say. The fact is he got upset because he had missed the investigation. Åke was ambitious, almost to a fault I know that he always dreamed of coming upon something big that everyone else had overlooked. Moreover, he was much younger than the rest of you and in the early days, at any rate, he often felt pushed around at work. I know, too, that he thought you were one of those who bullied him most'

'He was right, I'm afraid.’

'He didn't like you very much. He preferred Beck and Melander. I didn't but that's neither here nor there. About the end of July or beginning of August he changed - suddenly, as I said, and in a way that turned the whole of our life together upside down. That's when he took these pictures. Lots more, come to that, dozens of them. We had a sort of routine in our sex life, as I said, and it was fine. Now it was upset all of a sudden, and he was the one to upset it not I. We ... we were together ...'

'Made love, you mean,' Kollberg said.

'OK, we made love as many times in a day as we normally did in a month. Some days he wouldn't even let me go to work. There's no use denying that it was a pleasant surprise to me. I was amazed. You see, we'd been living together for over four years, but...'

'Go on,' Kollberg urged.

She took a deep breath.

'Sure, I thought it was just great. That he walked me about like a wheelbarrow and woke me up at four in the morning and wouldn't let me sleep or have any clothes on or go to work. That he wouldn't leave me alone even in the kitchen and took me on the sink and in the bathtub and from in front and from behind and upside down and in every chair there was. But he himself hadn't really changed and after a while I got the idea that he was trying out some sort of experiment on me. I asked him, but he only laughed.' 'Laughed?'

'Yes, he was in a very good mood all this time. Right up to ... well, until he was killed.' 'Why?'

'That's what I don't know. But one thing I did understand, as soon as I'd got over the first shock.' 'And that was?'

'That he was using me as a kind of guinea pig. He knew everything about me - everything. He knew that I'd get ridiculously horny if he made the slightest effort. And I knew all about him. For instance, that basically he wasn't particularly interested, other than now and again.'

'How long did this go on?'

'Until the middle of September. That's when he suddenly had so much to do and began to be away such a lot' 'Which doesn't fit in at all.'

Kollberg looked steadily at her, then added, 'Thanks. You're a great kid. I like you.'

She gave him a surprised and rather suspicious glance.

'And he didn't tell you what he was working on?'

She shook her head.

'Didn't even hint?'

Another shake of the head.

'And you didn't notice anything special?

'He was out a lot. I mean, out of doors. I couldn't help noticing that He would come home wet and cold.'

Kollberg nodded.

'More than once I was woken up in the small hours when he came home and got into bed, as cold as an icicle. But the last case he talked to me about was one he had in the first half of September. A man who had killed his wife. I think his name was Birgersson.'

'I remember it,' Kollberg said. 'A family tragedy. A very simple, ordinary story. I don't really know why we were brought into it -_ the case might have been taken out of the textbooks. Unhappy marriage, neuroses, quarrels, money troubles. In the end the man killed his wife more or less by accident. Was going to take his own life but didn't dare to and went to the police. But you're right, Stenström did have charge of it. He did the interrogating.'

'Wait - something happened during those interrogations.'

‘What?'

'I don't know. But one evening Åke came home very cheerful.'

'Not much to be cheerful about. Dreary story. Typical welfare-state crime. A lonely man with a status-poisoned wife who kept nagging at him because he didn't earn enough. Because they couldn't afford a motorboat and a summer cottage and a car as upmarket as the neighbours'.'

'But during the interrogations this man said something to Åke.'

'What?'

'I don't know. But it was something he considered very important I asked the same as you, of course, but he only laughed and said I'd soon see.'

'Did he say exactly that?'

'"You'll soon see, darling.'' Those were his exact words. He seemed very optimistic.' 'Odd.'

They sat in silence for a while. Then Kollberg shook himself, picked up the open book from the table and said, 'Do you understand these comments?'

Åsa Torell got up, walked round the table and put her hand on his shoulder as she looked at the book.

'Wendel and Svensson write that the sex murderer is often impotent and attains abnormal satisfaction from committing a crime of violence. And in the margin Åke has written "or the reverse"

Kollberg shrugged and said, 'He means, of course, that the sex murderer may also be oversexed.'

She took her hand away suddenly. Looking up at her, he noticed to his surprise that she was blushing again.

'No, he doesn't mean that,' she said.

'Then what does he mean?'

'The very opposite. That the woman - the victim, that is - may lose her life because she is oversexed.' 'How do you know that?'

'Because we once discussed the matter. In connection with that American girl who was murdered on the Göta Canal.' 'Roseanna,' Kollberg said.

He thought for a moment, then said, 'But I hadn't given him this book then. I remember that I found it when I was clearing out my drawers. When we moved from Kristineberg. That was much later.'

'And that other comment of his seems rather illogical,' she said.

‘Yes. Aren't there any pads or diaries in which he used to write things down?'

'Didn't he have his notebook on him?'

'Yes. We've looked at it. Nothing of interest there.'

'I've searched the flat,' she said.