The Locked Room (22 page)

'I don't know whether I should tell you that,' the blonde said. 'Why do you ask?'

Gunvald Larsson laid his identity card on the counter. The girl looked at it, then at Gunvald Larsson, and said: 'I assume you mean Count von Brandenburg? He bought a ticket to Jönköping and reserved a seat on the 14.50 flight. He was plan¬ning to take the airport bus, because he asked what time it went. It leaves from Sergelstorg at five minutes to two. What has Count von ... ?'

'Thank you, that was all I wanted to know,' said Gunvald Larsson. 'Good day.'

He went towards the door, wondering what business Mauritzon might have in Jönköping. Then he recalled seeing in Mauritzon's file that he was born there and that his mother was still living in that town. So - Mauritzon was going home to hide away with his mum!

Gunvald Larsson emerged on to Sveavägen. At a distance he could see faithful Mauritzon Holm von Brandenburg slowly sauntering along the street in the sunshine. Gunvald Larsson went off in the opposite direction to find a phone and call Kollberg.

When he came to meet Gunvald Larsson at the appointed time and place, Lennart Kollberg had brought with him every conceivable jemmy and other tool for opening the door of the Armfeldtsgatan flat. What he should have been supplied with, however, but wasn't, was a search warrant issued by District Attorney Olsson. But neither he nor Gunvald Larsson were unduly troubled by the notion that they were about to commit an offence in the course of their duties. They were quietly counting on Bulldozer being so delighted if they found anything that could be of use that he'd forget all about the breach of regulations. And if they didn't find anything, there'd be no reason to tell him about it Anyway, the concept of a breach of regulations was without relevance nowadays. It was the regulations which were all wrong.

By this time Mauritzon would be on his way south; not to Africa, admittedly, but far enough to let them work in peace.

The front entrance to the flats was fitted with standard locks. So was Mauritzon's door; and it didn't take Kollberg long to open it On the inside, the door was equipped with two safety chains and a fox-lock, designed to lock only from within. These devices suggested that Mauritzon counted on receiving - or not receiving - guests a good deal more obstinate than the salesmen and pedlars whose visits he declined by means of a little enamel notice on the door.

His flat consisted of three rooms plus a kitchen, a hall, and a bathroom. In itself it was rather elegant. But though its furniture was quite expensive, the overall impression was of tasteless banality. They went into the living room. In front of them was a teak wall unit consisting of bookcases, cupboards, and a built-in writing desk. One shelf was full of paperbacks, while the others were heaped with all kinds of bric-a-brac: souvenirs, pieces of china, little vases and bowls, and other ornaments. On the walls hung a few imitation oil paintings and reproductions of the sort commonly sold on market stalls. The furniture, curtains, and carpets, though they seemed by no means cheap, appeared to have been selected at random, and their patterns, materials, and colours did not go together.

In one corner was a little cocktail bar. The mere sight of it would have been enough to make anyone feel sick, let alone the smell of the contents of the bottles behind the mirrored doors of the cabinet. The front of the bar was covered in oilcloth of a very peculiar pattern: yellow, green, and pink figures reminiscent of amoebas, or possibly highly magnified spermatozoa, were floating about on a black background. The same pattern, albeit on a consid¬erably smaller scale, was repeated on the plastic surface of the bar.

Kollberg went over and opened the cocktail cabinet. It contained a half-empty botde of Parfait d'Amour, a virtually empty bottle of Swedish dessert wine, an unopened half-bottle of Carlshamns Punch, and a completely empty bottle of Beefeater gin. Shuddering, he shut the doors of the cabinet and went into the next room.

There was no door between the living room and the next room, only an arch supported by two pillars. Presumably the space beyond was intended to serve as a dining room. It was fairly small and had a bay window overlooking the street. In here was a piano and, in one corner, a radio and record player.

'Aha, so here we have the music room,' said Kollberg, with a grand gesture.

'Somehow I find it hard to imagine that rat of a fellow sitting here playing the "Moonlight Sonata"' said Gunvald Larsson. He went over and lifted the piano lid, inspecting the instrument's interior. 'At least there are no corpses here,' he said

Having made the preliminary tour of inspection, Kollberg took off his jacket and they began going through the flat in detail. They started in the bedroom where Gunvald Larsson immediately began ransacking the wardrobe while Kollberg attacked the chest of drawers. For a while they worked in silence. It was Kollberg who broke it

'Gunvald,' he said.

A muffled reply came from the depths of the wardrobe.

Kollberg went on: 'They didn't have much success shadowing Roos. He flew out from Arlanda a couple of hours ago, and Bulldozer got in the final report just before I left. He was deeply disappointed'

Gunvald Larsson grunted. Then he stuck his head out and said: 'Bulldozer's optimism and wild expectations expose him to constant disappointments. But he soon gets over them, as no doubt you've noticed. Well, what was Roos up to on his days off?' He disappeared into the closet again.

Kollberg shoved in the lower drawer and straightened his back. 'Well, he didn't meet up with Malmström and Mohrén, as Bulldozer hoped,' he said. 'The first evening, day before yesterday that is, he went to a restaurant with some woman and went skinny-dipping with her afterwards.'

'Yes, I heard about that,' Gunvald Larsson said. 'And then?'

'He stayed with this woman until the afternoon and then drove into town and wandered about, apparently aimlessly and all by himself. Yesterday evening he went to another restaurant with another girl but didn't go for a swim, at least not outdoors. He took her home with him to Märsta. Yesterday he took her in a taxi to Odenplan, where they parted. Then he drifted about on his own, went into a few shops, drove home to Märsta again, changed his clothes, and drove out to Arlanda Airport. Not very exciting! And above all not particularly criminal.'

'If the skinny-dipping isn't to be regarded as an offence against public decency,' Gunvald Larsson said, 'and Ek, who was sitting there in the bushes watching, doesn't report him for committing a nuisance.' He came out of the wardrobe and shut the door. 'Nothing in there except for a lot of incredibly ugly clothes,' he said, going out to the bathroom.

Kollberg went on to study a green cabinet that did duty as a bedside table. The two uppermost drawers contained a welter of objects, all more or less used: crumpled Kleenex, cufflinks, a few empty matchboxes, half a bar of chocolate, safety pins, a therm¬ometer, two packages of cough drops, restaurant bills and till receipts, an unopened pack of black condoms, ball-point pens, a postcard from Stettin with the message: 'Here's vodka, women, and song, what more can one want? Nils,' a cigarette lighter that didn't function, and a blunt peasant knife without a sheath.

On top of the bedside table lay a paperback, the cover of which showed a bandy-legged cowboy holding a smoking revolver in his hands.

Kollberg leafed through the book, which was entitled The Gunfight at Black Ravine, and a photo fell out on to the floor. A colour snapshot, it showed a young woman sitting on a jetty wearing shorts and a short-sleeved white jumper. She was dark, and her appearance was nondescript. Kollberg turned the photo over. Along the top edge was written in lead pencil: 'Möja, 1969,' and under it in blue ink and another handwriting, 'Monita'. Kollberg stuck the photo back among the pages and pulled out the lower drawer.

It was deeper than either of the others, and when he'd pulled it out he called for Gunvald Larsson. They looked down into the drawer.

'Odd place to keep a grinding machine,' said Kollberg. 'Or maybe it's some advanced kind of a massage apparatus?'

'Wonder what he used it for?' said Gunvald Larsson thought¬fully. 'He doesn't quite seem the type to have hobbies, does he? Though of course he could have stolen it or been given it in payment for drugs.' He went back to the bathroom.

Little more than an hour later their search of the flat and its contents was finished. They had found little of special interest: no money stowed away, no incriminating correspondence, no weapons, and no medicines stronger than aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.

Now they were standing in the kitchen, where they had rummaged through all the drawers and cupboards. The refriger¬ator, they noticed, had not been turned off and was full of food, which meant that Mauritzon wasn't intending to stay away for long. Among other things, a smoked eel lay staring up challengingly at Kollberg, who ever since the day he'd decided to get his weight down had suffered continuously from hunger. However, he got control of himself and with a grumbling stomach turned away from the refrigerator and its temptations. He caught sight of a key ring with two keys, which was hanging from a hook behind the kitchen door. 'Keys to the roof,' he said, pointing.

Gunvald Larsson went up to the key ring and unhooked it. He said: 'Or to the basement Come on, let's take a look.'

Neither of the keys fitted the door to the roof, so they took the lift down to the ground floor and went downstairs to the base¬ment. The largest of the keys opened the lock of the fire door.

First they entered a short hallway with doors on either side. Opening the door on the right they looked into the refuse room. The building had a refuse chute, at the mouth of which stood a metal skip on wheels, lined with a large yellow plastic bag. Three more skips with bags - one filled to the brim with rubbish and two empty - stood by the wall. In one corner stood a brush and pan.

The door opposite was locked, and a notice said it led to the bathroom.

The corridor led into a long passageway stretching in both directions. Along its walls were rows of numbered lockers, all fitted with various types of padlocks.

Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson tried out the smaller key in several of them and finally found the right one. There were only two things in Mauritzon's locker: an ancient vacuum cleaner without a nozzle, and a large chest, which was locked. While Kollberg picked the lock Gunvald Larsson opened the vacuum cleaner and looked inside.

'Empty,' he said.

Kollberg opened the lid of the chest and said: 'But not this one. Take a look.'

Inside the chest were fourteen unopened bottles of 130 proof Polish vodka, four cassette tape recorders, an electric hair drier, and six electric shavers, all brand new and still sealed in their orig¬inal packages.

'Smuggled,' said Gunvald Larsson. 'Or else stolen goods.'

'They're certainly stuff he's been given in exchange,' Kollberg said. 'I wouldn't mind seizing the vodka, but I suppose we'd better leave it all where it is.'

He shut the chest and locked it, and they went out again into the passage.

'Well, that was something, at least,' Kollberg said. 'But not much to bring home to Bulldozer. I suppose we'd better put the keys back where we found them and beat it. Nothing more to be done here.'

'Cautious bastard, that Mauritzon,' said Gunvald Larsson. 'Maybe he's even got a third flat.' He stopped, nodding towards a door at the far end of the passage. Across the door the words AIR RAID SHELTER were stencilled in red paint. 'Let's see if it's open,' he said. ‘While we're at it.'

The door was open. The air raid shelter seemed to be used as a bicycle storage room and general rubbish heap. Besides the bikes and a dismantled motor scooter there were a couple of prams, a sled, and an old-fashioned toboggan with a steering wheel. Against one wall was a carpenter's workbench, and on the floor beneath it lay a couple of window frames without any glass in them. In one corner stood an iron spike, a couple of brooms, a snow shovel, and two pitchforks.

'I always get claustrophobic in places like this,' Kollberg said. 'During the war, when we had air-raid practice, I always sat trying to imagine what I’d feel like to sit there underneath a bombed building and never be able to get out. Damned awful.'

He looked around. In the corner behind the bench stood an old wooden box with the hardly visible word SAND painted on its front On the lid was a galvanized bucket 'Look,' he said 'There's one of those old sand boxes from the war.'

He went over, lifted off the bucket, and opened the lid of the sand box. 'There's still some sand in it,' he said.

‘We never needed it,' said Gunvald Larsson, 'anyway not to put out incendiary bombs with. What's that?'

Kollberg had bent down over the box. Shoving his hand into ' it he picked something out and placed it on the bench. It was a green American army-type shoulder bag.

Kollberg opened the satchel and laid out its contents on the workbench:

A crumpled pale-blue shirt.

A blonde wig.

A blue denim hat, wide-brimmed. A pair of sunglasses.

And a pistol: a forty-five-calibre Llama Auto.

The girl who called herself Monita had not met Filip Faithful Mauritzon on that summer day three years ago when she was photographed on a jetty on Möja - an island in the Stockholm Archipelago.

That summer had been the last in her six years of marriage to Peter; in the autumn he met another woman, and just after Christmas had left Monita and their five-year-old daughter Mona. She did what he asked and applied for a quick divorce on grounds of his infidelity: he was in a hurry to marry his new woman, who was already in the fifth month of pregnancy when the divorce went through. Monita kept the two-room flat in Hökarängen, out in the suburbs, and there had never been any question that the child remain in her care. Peter relinquished his rights to have regular contacts with his daughter; later it was to turn out that he also defaulted on his duty to contribute to the child's support.

The divorce not only led to a sharp deterioration in Monita's finances, it also forced her to break off her studies, which she had only recently begun. And this depressed her more than anything else in the whole wretched story.