The Abominable Man (12 page)

The final petition appeared also to be the most interesting, in that it had been written by a policeman.

“Oh, him,” said Rönn to himself.

He went on to study the remarks, which for once were longer than the petition itself.

Rönn shook his head and wondered if he had read that correctly. Probably not. In any case the signature was illegible, and, what’s more, he knew something about the case of Patrolman Eriksson.

More than ever now, the writing had a tendency to flow together and distort, and when the woman put a new bundle of documents by his right elbow, he made a gesture as if to ward them off.

“Shall I go further back in time?” she asked pertly. “Do you want what there is on this man Hult too? And on yourself?”

“I’d rather not,” Rönn said meekly. “I’ll just take the names on these latest ones, and then we can go. Both of us.”

He blinked and scribbled some more in his notebook.

“I can get out Ullholm’s petitions too,” the woman said sarcastically. “If you really want.”

Ullholm was an inspector in Solna, notorious for a greater degree of cantankerousness and a greater number of written complaints to every imaginable authority than anyone else on the force.

Rönn drooped over the table and shook his head dejectedly.

On his way to Mount Sabbath, Lennart Kollberg suddenly remembered that he hadn’t paid the application fee for a correspondence chess tournament he wanted to enter. The deadline was Monday, so he stopped the car by Vasa Park and went into the post office across from Tennstopet.

When he’d filled in the money order, he stepped obediently into line and waited his turn.

In front of him was a man in a goatskin coat and a fur hat. As always when Kollberg stood in line, he found himself behind a person with about two dozen complicated errands. The man was holding a thick packet of postal orders and notices and correspondence in his hand.

Kollberg shrugged his massive shoulders, sighed and waited. A small piece of paper suddenly loosened from the man’s sheaf of papers and fluttered to the floor. A stamp. Kollberg bent down and picked it up. Then touched the man on the shoulder.

“You dropped this.”

The man turned his head and looked at Kollberg with brown eyes that registered surprise, recognition and antipathy, in that order.

“You dropped this,” Kollberg repeated.

“It’s too damned much,” the man said slowly, “when you can’t even drop a postage stamp but what the police come sticking their filthy noses in.”

Kollberg held out the stamp.

“Keep it,” the man said, and turned away.

Shortly afterwards he finished his postal chores and walked away without so much as a glance at Kollberg.

The episode bewildered him. It was probably some kind of a joke, but on the other hand the man hadn’t seemed the least bit jocular. Since Kollberg was a poor physiognomist and often failed to place faces he ought to have recognized, there was nothing remarkable in the fact that the other man had recognized him while Kollberg, for his part, hadn’t the vaguest idea who it was he’d spoken to.

He sent off his application fee.

Then he looked suspiciously at the stamp. It was rather pretty, with a picture of a bird. It belonged to a series of newly released stamps which, if he understood the thing correctly, guaranteed that letters bearing them would be conveyed with special sluggishness. The kind of subtlety so typical of the post office.

No, he thought, the post office really functioned pretty well and a person shouldn’t grumble, not now that
it had apparently recovered from the after-effects of the zip code system introduced a few years before.

Still lost in thought about the peculiarities of life, he drove on to the hospital.

The murder pavilion was still carefully cordoned off and nothing in particular had been altered in Nyman’s room.

Gunvald Larsson was there, of course.

Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson did not have any special weakness for one another. The people with a weakness for Gunvald Larsson could, for that matter, be counted on the index finger of one hand, and as easily named—Rönn.

The thought that they would be forced to work together was extremely uninviting to both Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson. At the moment there didn’t seem to be any great risk—it was merely that circumstances had brought them together in the same room.

The circumstances were Nyman, whose appearance was so disagreeable that Kollberg felt called upon to deliver himself of an “Ugh!”

Gunvald Larsson grimaced in reluctant agreement.

“Did you know him?” he said.

Kollberg nodded.

“So did I. He was one of the most glorious assholes ever to grace this department. But I never had to work with him much, thank God.”

Gunvald Larsson had never really served in the regular police, only belonged to it
pro forma
for a time. Before becoming a policeman he’d been a ship’s officer, first in the navy and then in the merchant marine. So unlike Kollberg and Martin Beck, he had not come up the so-called hard way.

“How’s the investigation going here?”

“I don’t think we’ll get anything beyond what’s already obvious,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Some crazy bastard came in through that window and butchered him. In cold blood.”

Kollberg nodded.

“But that bayonet interests me,” Gunvald Larsson muttered, more or less to himself. “And whoever used it knew what he was doing. Familiar with weapons. And who is that?”

“Exactly,” Kollberg said. “An army man for example, maybe a butcher.”

“A policeman,” Gunvald Larsson said.

Of all the men in the department, he was probably the least susceptible to camaraderie and false loyalty.

And that didn’t make him particularly popular.

“Come on, Larsson, now you’re exaggerating,” Kollberg said.

“Could be. Are you going to be working on this?”

Kollberg nodded.

“And you?” he said.

“Looks that way.”

They stared at each other without the slightest enthusiasm.

“Maybe we won’t have to work together,” Kollberg said.

“We can always hope,” said Gunvald Larsson.

It was almost ten o’clock in the morning and Martin Beck was sweating in the sunshine as he walked down the quay along Söder Mälarstrand toward Slussen. The
sun didn’t in fact give out much heat, and the wind from Riddarfjärden was biting cold, but he’d been walking fast and his winter coat was warm.

Hult had offered to drive him to Kungsholmsgatan, but he had turned him down. He was afraid of falling asleep in the car and hoped a brisk walk would wake him up. He unbuttoned his coat and slowed his pace.

When he got to Slussen he went into a telephone booth, called headquarters and was told that Rönn hadn’t yet returned. He didn’t really have anything to do until Rönn came back, and that would be at least another hour, he thought. If he went straight home, he could be lying in bed in ten minutes. He was really awfully tired, and the thought of his bed was very tempting. If he set the alarm, he could get an hour’s sleep.

Martin Beck walked determinedly across Slussplan and into Järntorgsgatan. When he came out into Järntorget he started walking slower. He could imagine how tired he would still be when the alarm went off in an hour, how tough it would be to get up, and how hard to get dressed and on his way to Kungsholm. On the other hand, it would be nice to get out of his clothes for a while and wash or maybe take a shower.

He came to a stop in the middle of the square, as if paralyzed by his own indecision. He could blame it on exhaustion of course, but it irritated him nonetheless.

He changed course and headed toward Skeppsbron. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there, but when he caught sight of a taxi he made a quick decision. He would go somewhere and have a sauna.

The driver looked to be about Methuselah’s age—doddering, toothless and obviously deaf. Martin Beck, who’d gotten into the front seat, hoped that he at least still had his sight. The man was presumably an old taxi owner who hadn’t driven his own cab for many years. He
took wrong turns incessantly and on one occasion wound up on the left side of the street as if he’d forgotten about the introduction of right-hand traffic. He muttered darkly to himself and his dry old body was periodically shaken by a hacking cough. When he finally brought the car to a halt in front of the Central Baths, Martin Beck gave him much too large a tip in his consternation at having arrived in one piece. He looked at the old man’s violently shaking hands and decided not to ask for a receipt.

Martin Beck hesitated for a moment at the ticket window. He usually bathed downstairs where there was a swimming pool, but the thought of a swim didn’t appeal to him right now. Instead he bought a ticket to the Turkish section one flight up.

To be on the safe side, he asked the bath attendant who gave him his towels to wake him at eleven o’clock. Then he went into the hottest room and sat there until the sweat ran streaming from his pores. He showered and took a quick dip in the ice-cold water in the tiny pool. Toweled himself dry, wrapped himself in an enormous bath sheet and lay down on the bunk in his cubicle.

He closed his eyes.

He tried to think of something soothing, but his thoughts kept coming back to Harald Hult, sitting there in his desolate impersonal apartment, alone and with nothing to do, wearing his uniform on his day off. A man whose life was filled with one thing—being a policeman. Take that away from him and there’d be nothing left.

Martin Beck wondered what would happen to Hult when he retired. Maybe he would just sit quietly by the window with his hands on the table until he withered away.

Did he even own civilian clothes? Probably not.

His eyes burned and stung beneath their lids, and
Martin Beck opened them and stared up at the ceiling. He was too tired to sleep. He put his arm over his face and concentrated on trying to relax. But his muscles stayed taut.

From the massage room came rapid cracking noises and the sound of a bucket of water being dumped on a marble bench. Heavy, rattling snores came from someone in a cubicle nearby.

In his mind’s eye, Martin Beck suddenly saw a picture of Nyman’s mutilated body. He thought about what Kollberg had told him. About how Nyman had taught him to kill.

Martin Beck had never killed a human being.

He tried to imagine what it would feel like. Not shooting someone—he didn’t think that would be hard, maybe because the force it takes to pull a trigger is out of all proportion to the force of the bullet that does the killing. Killing with firearms didn’t require any great physical effort, and the distance to the victim ought to make the act feel less immediate. But killing someone directly, with your hands, with a piece of rope, or a knife, or a bayonet, that was another matter. He thought of the body on the marble floor of the hospital, the gaping wound in the throat, the blood, the entrails welling out of the belly, and he knew he’d never be able to kill that way.

During his many years as a policeman, Martin Beck had often asked himself if he was a coward, and the older he got the more certain he was of the answer. Yes, he was a coward. But the question didn’t bother him the way it had when he was young.

He didn’t know for sure if he was afraid of dying. It was his profession to pry into the way that other people died, and that had blunted his own fear. He rarely thought about his own death.

When the attendant knocked on the wall of the cubicle and announced that it was eleven o’clock, Martin Beck hadn’t slept a wink.

He looked at Rönn and felt profoundly guilty. To be sure, they had had about equal amounts of sleep during the last thirty hours, that is to say none at all, but by comparison with his colleague, Martin Beck had passed the time quite pleasantly, in fact to some extent luxuriously.

The whites of Rönn’s eyes were by now as red as his nose, while his cheeks and forehead were unwholesomely pale, and the bags beneath his eyes were heavy and dark blue. Yawning uncontrollably, he fumbled his electric razor out of the drawer in his desk.

The tired heroes, thought Martin Beck.

True, he was forty-eight and the elder of the two, but Rönn was forty-three, and the time when they could skip a night’s sleep and go unpunished lay irrevocably, and several years, behind them.

On top of it all, Rönn still stubbornly refused to offer information of his own accord, and Martin Beck had to force himself to ask a question.

“Well, what did you find?”

Rönn pointed unhappily at his notebook, as if it had been a dead cat or some other repulsive, shameful thing.

“There,” he said thickly. “About twenty names. I only read through the complaints from Nyman’s last year as a precinct captain. Then I wrote down the names and addresses of the people who reported him for a couple of
years before that. If I’d gone through everything it would have taken all day.”