The Laughing Policeman (21 page)

'Yes,' Martin Beck agreed. 'There may be something in what you say'

Gunvald Larsson was wrong. Nevertheless, he had just put the investigation on to the right track.

For three evenings in succession Ulf Nordin trudged about town trying to make contact with Stockholm's underworld, going in and out of the beerhalls, coffeehouses, restaurants and dance halls that Blonde Malin had given as Göransson's haunts.

Sometimes he took the car, and on Friday evening he sat in the car staring out over Mariatorget without seeing anything of more interest than two other men sitting in a car and staring. He didn't recognize them but gathered they belonged to the district's patrol of plainclothesmen or drug squad.

These expeditions did not provide one new fact about the man whose name had been Nils Erik Göransson. In the daytime, however, he managed to supplement Blonde Malin's information by consulting the census bureau, parish registers, seamen's employment exchanges and the man's ex-wife, who lived in Borås and said she had almost forgotten her former husband. She had not seen him for nearly twenty years.

On Saturday morning he reported his lean findings to Martin Beck. Then he sat down and wrote a long, melancholy and yearning letter to his wife in Sundsvall, now and then casting a guilty look at Rönn and Kollberg, who were both hard at work at their typewriters.

He had not had time to finish the letter before Martin Beck entered the room.

'What idiot sent you out into town,' he said fretfully.

Nordin quickly slipped a copy of a report over the letter. He had just written '... and Martin Beck gets more peculiar and grumpy every day.'

Pulling the paper out of the typewriter, Kollberg said, tYou.’

'What? I did?'

‘Yes, you did. Last Wednesday after Blonde Malin had been here.'

Martin Beck looked disbelievingly at Kollberg.

'Funny, I don't remember that. It's idiotic all the same to send out a northerner who can hardly find his way to Stureplan on a job like that.'

Nordin looked offended, but had to admit to himself that Martin Beck was right

'Rönn,' Martin Beck said. 'You'd better find out where Göransson hung out, whom he was with and what he did. And try and get hold of that guy Björk, the one he lived with.'

'OK,' Rönn said.

He was busy making a list of possible interpretations of Schwerin's last words. At the top he had written: Dinner record. At the bottom was the latest version: Didn't reckon.

Each was busier than ever with his own particular job.

Martin Beck got up at six thirty on Monday morning after a practically sleepless night He felt slightly sick and his condition was not improved by his drinking cocoa in the kitchen with his daughter. There was no sign of any other member of the family. His wife slept like a log in the mornings, and the boy had evidently taken after her; he was nearly always late for school But Ingrid rose at six thirty and shut the front door behind her at a quarter to eight. Invariably. Inga used to say that you could set the clock by her.

Inga had a weakness for cliches. You could make a collection of the expressions she used in daily speech and sell it as a phrase-book for budding journalists. A kind of pony. Call it, of course, If You Can Talk, You Can Write. Thought Martin Beck.

'What are you thinking about, Daddy?' Ingrid asked.

'Nothing,' he said automatically.

'I haven't seen you laugh since last spring.'

Martin Beck raised his eyes from the Christmas brownies dancing in a long line across the oilcloth table cover, looked at his daughter and tried to smile. Ingrid was a good girl, but that wasn't much to laugh at either. She left the table and went to get her books. By the time he had put on his hat and coat and galoshes she was standing with her hand on the door handle, waiting for him. He took the Lebanese leather bag from her. It was the worse for wear and had gaudy FNL labels stuck all over it

This, too, was routine. Nine years ago he had carried Ingrid's bag on her first day at school, and he still did so. On that occasion he had taken her hand. A very small hand, which had been warm and moist and trembling with excitement and anticipation. When had he given up taking her hand? He couldn't remember.

'On Christmas Eve you're going to laugh, anyway,' she said. 'Really?'

‘Yes. When you get my Christmas present'

She frowned and said, 'Anything else is out of the question.'

'What would you like yourself, by the way?'

'A horse.'

'Where would you keep it?'

'I don't know. I'd like one all the same.'

'Do you know what a horse costs?'

'Yes, unfortunately.'

They parted.

At Kungsholmsgatan Gunvald Larsson was waiting, and an investigation which didn't even deserve to be called a guessing game. Hammar had been kind enough to point this out only two days ago.

'How is Ture Assarsson's alibi?' Gunvald Larsson asked.

"Ture Assarsson's alibi is one of the most watertight in the history of crime,' Martin Beck replied. 'At the time in question he was at the City Hotel in Södertälje making an after-dinner speech to twenty-five people.'

'Hmm,' Gunvald Larsson muttered darkly.

'What's more, if I may say so, it's not very logical to imagine that Gösta Assarsson would not notice his own brother getting on the bus with a submachine gun under his coat.'

'Yes, the coat,' said Gunvald Larsson. 'It must have been pretty wide if he could have an M-37 under it If he wasn't carrying it in a case, that is.'

'You're right, there,' Martin Beck said.

'It does sometimes happen that I'm right'

'Lucky for you,' Martin Beck retorted. 'If you'd been wrong the night before last we'd have been sitting pretty now, I don't think.'

Pointing his cigarette at the other man he said, 'You're going to get it one of these days, Gunvald.'

'I doubt it'

And Gunvald Larsson stomped out of the room. In the doorway he met Kollberg, who stepped aside quickly, stole a glance at the broad back and said, 'What's wrong with the walking battering ram? Got the hump?'

Martin Beck nodded. Kollberg went over to the window and looked out.

'Jesus Christ,' he growled.

'Is Åsa still staying with you?'

'Yes,' Kollberg replied. 'And don't say, "Have you got yourself a harem?" because Mr Larsson has already asked that' Martin Beck sneezed.

'Bless you,' Kollberg said. 'I very nearly tossed him out of the window.'

Kollberg was about the only one who could have done it, Martin Beck thought. Aloud he said, 'Thanks.' 'What are you thanking me for?' 'For saying "bless you".'

'Oh yes. Not many people nowadays have the courtesy to say thank you. I had a case once. A press photographer who beat his wife black and blue and then flung her out in the snow naked because she hadn't thanked him when he said "bless you". On New Year's Eve. He was drunk, of course.'

He stood silent for a while, then said doubtfully, 'I doubt if I can get anything more out of her. Åsa, I mean.'

'Well, never mind, we know what Stenström was working on,' Martin Beck said.

Kollberg gaped at him. 'Do we?'

'Sure. The Teresa murder. Clear as daylight'

'The Teresa murder?'

'Yes. Hadn't you realized that?'

'No,' Kollberg said. 'I hadn't. And I've thought back over everything from the last ten years. Why didn't you say anything?'

Martin Beck looked at him and bit his ball-point pen thoughtfully. They both had the same thought and Kollberg put it into words.

'One can't communicate merely by telepathy.'

'No,' Martin Beck said. 'Besides, the Teresa case is sixteen years old. And you had nothing to do with the investigation. The Stockholm police had charge of it from start to finish. I think Ek is the only one left here from that time.'

'So you've already gone through all the reports?'

'By no means. Only skimmed through them. There are several thousand pages. All the papers are out at Västberga. Shall we go out and have a look?'

'Yes, let's. My memory needs refreshing.'

In the car Martin Beck said, 'Perhaps you remember enough to realize why Stenström took on the Teresa case?'

Kollberg nodded.

'Yes, because it was the most difficult one he could tackle/

'Exactly. The most impossible of all things impossible. He wanted to show what he was capable of, once and for all.'

'And then he went and got himself shot,' Kollberg said. 'Christ, how stupid. And where's the connection?'

Martin made no reply and nothing more was said until, after various difficulties and delays, they had threaded their way out to Västberga and parked in the sleet outside the southern police headquarters. Then Kollberg said, 'Can the Teresa case be solved? Now?'

'Shouldn't think so for a moment,' Martin Beck replied.

Kollberg sighed unhappily, as he listlessly and irrationally turned the pages of the reports piled in front of him.

'It will take a week to wade through all this,' he said.

'At least. Do you know the actual circumstances?’

'No, not even in broad outline.'

'There's a resume" somewhere. Otherwise I can give you a rough idea.'

Kollberg nodded. Martin Beck picked out one or two sheets and said, 'The facts are clear-cut. Very simple. Therein lies the difficulty.' 'Fire away,' Kollberg said.

'On the morning of 10 June 1951, that's to say more than sixteen years ago, a man who was looking for his cat found a dead woman in some bushes near Stadshagen sports ground on Kungsholmen here in town. She was naked, lying on her stomach with her arms by her sides. The forensic medical examination showed that she had been strangled and that she had been dead for about five days. The body was well preserved and had evidently been lying in a cold-storage room or something similar. All available evidence pointed to a sex murder, but as such a long time had elapsed, the doctor who did the postmortem could not find any definite signs that she had been sexually assaulted.'

'Which on the whole means a sex murder,' Kollberg said.

‘Yes. On the other hand, the examination of the scene of the crime showed that the body could not have been lying there for more than twelve hours at the most; this was also confirmed later by witnesses, who had passed the shrubbery the previous evening and who could not have helped seeing the body if it had been there then. Further, fibres and textile particles were found indicating that she had been transported there wrapped in a grey blanket It was therefore quite clear that the crime had not been committed in the place where the body was found, and that the body had just been slung into the bushes. Little or no attempt had been made to hide it with the help of moss or branches. Well, that's about all... No, I was forgetting. Two more things: She had not eaten for several hours before she died. And there was no trace of the murderer in the way of footprints or anything.'

Martin Beck turned over the pages and skimmed through the typewritten text.

'The woman was identified the very same day as one Teresa Camarão. She was twenty-six years old and born in Portugal. She had come to Sweden in 1945 and the same year had married a fellow countryman called Henrique Camarão. He was two years older than she and had been a radio officer in the merchant marine but had gone ashore and got a job as radio technician. Teresa Camarão was born in Lisbon in 1925. According to the Portuguese police she came from a good home and a very respectable family. Upper middle class. She had come to study, rather belatedly because of the war. That's as far as her studies got She met this Henrique Camarão and married him. They had no children. Comfortably off. lived on Torsgatan.'

'Who identified her?'

'The police. That's to say the vice squad. She was well known there and had been for the last two years. On 15 May 1949 -circumstances were such that it was in fact possible to determine the exact date - she had completely changed her way of life. She had run away from home - so it says here - and since then she had circulated in the underworld. In short, Teresa Camarão had become a whore. She was a nymphomaniac and during these two years she had gone with hundreds of men.' ‘Yes, I remember,' Kollberg said.

'Now comes the best part of it Within the space of three days the police found no less than three witnesses who, at half-past eleven the evening before, had seen a car parked on Kungsholmsgatan by the approach to the path beside which the body was found. All three were men. Two of them had passed in a car, one of them on foot. The two witnesses who had been driving had also seen a man standing by the car. Beside him on the ground lay an object the size of a body, wrapped in something that seemed to be a grey blanket. The third witness walked past a few minutes later and saw only the car. The descriptions of the man were vague. It was raining and the person had stood in the shade; all that could be said for sure was that it was a man and that he was fairly tall. Pressed for what they meant by tall, they varied between 5 feet 9 and 6 feet 1 inches, which included ninety per cent of the country's male population. But...'

'Yes? But what?'

'But as regards the vehicle, all three witnesses were agreed. Each said that the car was French, a Renault model CV-4, which was put on the market in 1947 and which turned up year after year with no changes to speak of.'

'Renault CV-4,' Kollberg said. 'Porsche designed it while the French kept him prisoner as a war criminal They shut him up in the gatekeeper's house at the factory. There he sat designing. Then, I think, he was acquitted. The French made millions out of that car.'

'You have a staggering knowledge of the most widely differing subjects,' Martin Beck said drily. 'Can you tell me now what connection there is between the Teresa case and the fact that Stenström was shot dead by a mass murderer on a bus four weeks ago?'

'Wait a bit,' Kollberg said. ‘What happened then?'

'The police here in Stockholm carried out the most extensive murder investigation ever known in this country. It swelled to gigantic proportions. Well, you can see for yourself. Hundreds of individuals who had known and been in touch with Teresa Camarão were questioned, but it could not be established who had last seen her alive. All trace of her came to an abrupt end exactly one week before she was found dead. She had spent the night with a guy in a hotel room on Nybrogatan and parted from him at twelve thirty next day outside a wine bar on Master Samuelsgatan. Period. After that every single Renault CV-4 was tracked down. First in Stockholm, since the witnesses said that the car had an A licence plate. Then every car in the whole country of that make and model was checked, with the idea that it might have had a false licence plate. It took almost a year. And at last it could be proved, actually proved, that not one of all those cars could have stood at Stadshagen at eleven thirty on the evening of 9 June 1951.'