The Laughing Policeman (23 page)

He seems to have started using narcotics some time during 1964. From that year until his death he had no fixed residence. In January 1965, he moved in with Gurli Löfgren, Skeppar Karlsgränd 3, and lived with her until the spring of 1966. During this time neither he nor Löfgren had any regular work. Löfgren was registered with the vice squad but considering her age and appearance, she cannot have earned much from prostitution during this time. Löfgren too was addicted to drugs. Gurli Löfgren died of cancer at the age of 47 on Christmas Day, 1966. At the beginning of March 1967 he met Magdalena Rosen (Blonde Malin) and lived with her at Arbetargatan 3 until 29.8.1967. From beginning of September until middle of October this year he had a temporary domicile with Sune Björk.

Was treated for venereal disease (gonorrhea) twice during October-November at St Göran's Hospital

The mother has remarried. She still lives in Helsinki and has been notified by letter of her son's death.

Rosén says that Göransson was never without money and that she doesn't know where this money came from. To her knowledge, he was not a pusher and did not carry on any other form of business.

Rönn read through what he had written. His handwriting was so microscopic that it all fitted on to less than one sheet of legal-sized paper. Putting the paper in his briefcase and the notebook in his pocket, he went off to see Sune Björk. The girl from the barge was waiting for him by the newspaper kiosk on Mariatorget

'I'm not coming with you,' she said. 'But I've talked to Sune, so he knows you're coming. Hope I haven't done anything stupid.'

She gave him an address on Tavastgatan and made off down towards Slussen.

Sune Björk was younger than Rönn had expected, he couldn't have been more than twenty-five. He had a blond beard and seemed nice enough. There was nothing about him to indicate that he was an addict, and Rönn wondered what he could have had in common with the much older and seedier Göransson.

The flat consisted of one room and kitchen and was poorly furnished. The windows looked on to an untidy courtyard. Rönn sat down in the only chair and Björk sat on the bed.

'I heard you wanted to know about Nisse,' Björk said. 'I must confess I don't know much about him myself, but I thought you could perhaps take care of his things'

He bent down and fished out a shopping bag from under the bed and gave it to Rönn.

'He left this here when he cleared out He took some stuff with him - that's mostly clothes. Worthless crap.'

Rönn took the bag and placed it beside the chair.

'Can you tell me how long you knew Göransson, where and how you met and how you came to let him stay here with you?'

Björk settled down on the bed and crossed his legs.

'I can if you like,' he said. 'Can I cadge a cigarette?'

Rönn took out a pack of Prince and shook out a cigarette for . Björk, who lit it after nipping off the filter.

'It was like this, see. I was down at Zum Franziskaner having a beer and Nisse was sitting at the next table. I'd never seen him before but we started talking and he stood me a glass of wine. I thought he seemed a nice guy so when they closed and he said he had no pad, I brought him back here. We got pretty loaded that night and the next day he stood me a couple of drinks and some grub at Södergard. This must have been the third or fourth of September, I don't remember exactly.'

'Did you notice he was an addict?' Rönn asked.

Björk shook his head.

'No, not at once. But after a couple of days he gave himself a fix in the morning as soon as we woke up and then, of course, I realized it He asked if I wanted one, by the way, but I don't dig that sort of thing.'

Björk had rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. Rönn cast a practised eye at the bends of his arms and noted that he was evidently telling the truth.

'You haven't much room here,' he said. 'Why did you let him stay here for so long? Did he pay for his keep, by the way?'

'I thought he was OK. He didn't actually pay any rent, but he had plenty of money and always brought home grub and booze and so on.'

‘Where did he get his money from?'

Björk shrugged.

'I dunno. It wasn't my business anyway. But he didn't have any job, I know that'

Rönn looked at Björk's hands, which were black with ingrained dirt

'What's your job?'

'Cars,' Björk replied. 'I've got a date with a bird in a while, so you'd better get a move on. Anything more you wanted to know?'

‘What did he talk about? Did he tell you anything about himself?'

Björk rubbed his forefinger quickly to and fro under his nose and said, 'He said he'd been to sea, though I think that was years ago. And he used to talk about birds. Especially one he'd been living with who had kicked the bucket not long before. She was like mum, he said, only better.'

Pause.

'You can't screw your mum, you know,' Björk said gravely. 'Otherwise he wasn't so keen on talking about himself.' 'When did he clear out of here?'

'On the eighth of October. I remember because it was a Sunday and it was his nameday. He took his things, all except them there. He didn't have many, they all went into an ordinary bag. He said he had got himself another pad but that he'd come by and say hello in a day or two.'

He paused and stubbed out his cigarette in a coffee cup that was standing on the floor.

'After that I never saw him again. And now he's dead, Sivan said. Was he really one of those on the bus?'

Rönn nodded.

'Do you know where he went to from here?'

'Haven't a clue. He never looked me up and I didn't know where he was. He met several of my mates here, but I never met any of his. So I really know bugger all about him.'

Björk got up, went over to a mirror hanging on the wall and combed his hair.

'Do you know who it was?' he asked. The guy on the bus?' 'No’ Rönn replied. 'Not yet’ Björk pulled off his sweater. 'I have to change now; he said. 'My bird's waiting.' Rönn stood up, took the shopping bag and walked towards the door.

'So you've no idea what he did with himself after the eighth of October?' he asked. 'I said no, didn't I?'

He took a clean shirt out of the chest of drawers and tore off the laundry's paper strip.

'I only know one thing’ he said, ‘What?'

'He was as nervy as hell for a week or two before he cleared out Seemed to have something on his mind.' 'But you don't know what?' 'No, I don't'

When Rönn got home to his empty flat he went out into the kitchen and emptied the contents of the shopping bag on to the table. Then he picked the objects up cautiously and studied them before dropping them back into the bag, one at a time.

A spotted, threadbare cap, a pair of underpants that had once been white, a wrinkled tie with red and green stripes, an artificial leather belt with a yellow brass buckle, a pipe with a chewed stem, a wool-lined pigskin glove, a pair of yellow crepe nylon socks, two dirty handkerchiefs and a crumpled light-blue poplin shirt.

Rönn held the shirt up and was just going to put it back in the bag when he noticed a scrap of paper sticking out of the breast pocket Putting the shirt down, he unfolded the paper. It was a bill for Kr. 78:25 from Restaurant Pilen. It was dated 7 October and according to the sums stamped by the cash register, one was for food, six were for alcohol and three for soda water.

Rönn turned the bill over. In the margin on the back someone had written with a ball-point pen:

10.8 bf

3000

Morph

500

Owe ga

100

Owe mb

50

Dr P

650

1700

Bal

1300

Rönn thought he recognized Göransson's handwriting, of which he had seen several examples at Blonde Malin's. He took the jottings to mean that Göransson, on 8 October - the same day he left Sune Björk - was to get 3,000 kronor from somewhere, perhaps from a person with the initials BF. Out of this money he would buy morphine for 500, pay 150 in debts and give a Dr P 650, for drugs or something else. That would leave him 1,700. When he was found dead in the bus over a month later he had had over 1,800 kronor in his pocket So he must have received more money after 8 October. Rönn wondered whether this, too, had come from the same source, bf or BF. It needn't be a person, it could just as well be an abbreviation for something else.

Brought forward? Göransson didn't seem the type that would have a bank account The most likely thing after all was that bf was a person. Rönn looked at his notebook, but none of those he had talked to or heard about in connection with Göransson had the initials BF.

Rönn picked up the bag and went out into the hall. He put the bill in his briefcase and placed bag and briefcase on the hall table. Then he went to bed.

He lay wondering where Göransson had got his money from.

On the morning of Thursday, 21 December, it was no fun being a policeman. The evening before, in the midst of the Christmas hysteria in the city centre, an army of police in uniform and plainclothes had got caught up in a spectacular and utterly chaotic fight with a large number of workmen and intellectuals who were streaming out of a Vietnam meeting in the Trades Union Hall. Opinions as to what really happened were divided and would probably remain so, but there were very few laughing policemen on this dismal and chilly morning.

The only one to have derived any profit from the incident was Månsson. He had unsuspectingly said that he had nothing to do and had immediately been sent out to help keep order. At first he had hidden in the shadows around Adolf Fredrik's Church on Sveavägen in the hope that disturbances, if any, would not spread in that direction. But the police pressed in on all sides, unsystematically, and the demonstrators, who had to go somewhere, began also to force their way towards Sveavägen. Månsson retired swiftly northward and came at last to a restaurant. He went in to warm himself and do a little investigating. On his way out he took a toothpick from the cruet stand on one of the tables. It was wrapped in paper and tasted of menthol.

Presumably he was the only one in the entire police force who was happy on this miserable morning. He had already called up the stock-keeper of the restaurant and got the address of the supplier.

Einar Rönn was not happy. He stood in the wind on Ringvägen, gazing at a hole in the ground and a taurpaulin; some of the highway department's trestles had been placed around about them. The hole was quite uninhabited. Not so the service truck which was parked over fifty yards away. Rönn knew the four men who sat inside fiddling with their thermos flasks and merely said, 'Hello, there.'

'Hello. Shut the door. But if you were the one who clubbed my boy on the head on Barnhusgatan last night, then I'm not talking to you.'

'No,' Rönn said. 'It wasn't me. I was at home looking at TV. The wife has gone up north.'

'Sit down, then, like some coffee?' 'Thanks, don't mind if I do.'

After a while one of the men said, 'Want anything special?'

'Yes... A man named Schwerin - he was born in America. Was it noticeable when he talked?'

'Was it! He had an accent just like Anita Ekberg's. And when he was drunk he spoke English.'

'When he was drunk?'

‘Yes. And when he lost his temper. Or forgot himself.'

Rönn took No. 54 back to Kungsholmen. It was a red doubledecker Leyland Atlantean model with a cream-coloured top and a grey-lacquered roof. Despite Ek's assertion that the doubledeckers took only seated passengers, the bus was packed with people who stood clutching for support with one hand and grasping packages and shopping bags with the other.

He thought hard all the way. Then he sat down at his desk for a while. Went into the next room and said, 'He didn't recognize him,' and went out again.

'Now he's gone crazy too,' Gunvald Larsson growled.

'Wait a second,' Martin Beck said. 'I think he's got something there.'

He got up and went after Rönn. The room was empty. Hat and coat were gone.

Half an hour later Rönn once again opened the door of the truck on Ringvagen. The men who had been Schwerin's co-workers were sitting in exactly the same place as before. The hole in the road looked untouched by human hands.

'Christ, you scared me,' one of them said. 'I thought it was Olsson.'

'Olsson?'

‘Yes. Or "Oleson", as Alf used to say.'

Rönn did not produce his results until the next morning, two days before Christmas Eve.

Martin Beck stopped the tape recorder and said, 'So you think it should go like this: You say, "Who did the shooting?" And he answered in English, "Didn't recognize him.'"

Yes.'

'And then you say, "What did he look like?" And Schwerin answers, "Like Olsson."'

'Yes. And then he died.'

'Splendid, Einar,' Martin Beck said.

'Who the hell is Olsson?' Gunvald Larsson asked.

'A sort of inspector. He goes around between the different working sites and checks that the men aren't loafing.

'And what the hell does he look like?'

'He's next door in my office,' Rönn said modestly.

Martin Beck and Gunvald Larsson went in and stared at Olsson. Gunvald Larsson for only ten seconds, then he said, 'Uh-huh.'

And went out Olsson stared after him, mouth agape.

Martin Beck stayed for thirty seconds while he said, 'I gather you've taken all the particulars, Einar?'

'Yes,' Rönn said.

"Thank you, Mr Olsson.'

Martin Beck went out. Olsson looked more puzzled than ever.

When Martin Beck returned from lunch, having managed to get down only a glass of milk, two pieces of cheese and a cup of coffee, Rönn had put a sheet of paper on his desk. It bore the brief title: Olsson.

Olsson is 46 years old and is an inspector for the highway department.

He is 6 feet tall and weighs 170 pounds stripped.