The Locked Room (24 page)

Monita didn't hesitate long. She had long ago summed him up as honest, sober, and hard-working, a trifle eccentric but certainly not dangerous, even quite nice. Besides, this move of his had long been in the air, and she'd already made up her mind what she'd answer when he asked her. So she said: 'Oh well, why not?'

After passing that Friday evening in Mauritzon's company Monita only needed to revise her opinion in two respects. He was not a teetotaller, and presumably he wasn't very hard-working either; but neither of these facts made him any less nice. Indeed, she found him really interesting.

Several times that spring they went out to restaurants together. Each time Monita, in a friendly but firm manner, turned down Mauritzon's invitation to come home with him for a nightcap, nor did she allow him to see her home to Hökarängen.

In the early summer she saw nothing at all of him and for two weeks in July was herself away on holiday with her sister in Norway.

The first day after her return Mauritzon came in and sat down at his usual table. The same evening they met again. This time Monita went home with him to Armfeldtsgatan. It was the first time they went to bed together. Monita found he was as sociable in bed as elsewhere.

Their relationship developed to their mutual satisfaction. Mauritzon was not too demanding and did not insist on meeting her more often than she herself wished, namely a couple of times a week. He was considerate toward her, and each found the other's company agreeable.

For her part she showed him the same delicacy. He was extremely taciturn, for instance, about his occupation, about how he earned his living; but though she wondered a good deal about this she was never inquisitive. Neither did she want him interfering too much in her own life, least of all where Mona was concerned. So she took care not to poke her nose into his affairs. He didn't seem particularly jealous - no more than she was. Either he realized he was her only lover, or else he was indifferent to whether she went with other men. Nor did he ever ask her about her earlier affairs.

When autumn came they went out on the town together less frequently, preferring to stay at his place, where they had some¬thing nice to eat and passed the greater part of their evenings and nights together in bed.

Now and again Mauritzon vanished on some business trip, though he never said where or what sort of business it was. Monita was not stupid. She'd quite soon come to realize his activities must be criminal in some way, but having satisfied herself that he was basically decent and honest she assumed his criminality to be of an innocuous kind. She thought of him as a Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to the poor. That he was a white slaver or that he sold drugs to children was something that never occurred to her. As soon as the opportunity presented itself she tried in a veiled way to let him know that she was not disposed to moralize about crime aimed at the rich or against an exploitative society in general. She did this to get him, if possible, to reveal some of his secrets.

And indeed, around Christmas, Mauritzon found himself obliged to initiate Monita to some small extent into his affairs. Christmas was always a busy time in Mauritzon's line of work, and now, in his enthusiasm not to let slip any opportunity to make money, he had taken on many more jobs than he could handle. Indeed, it was a physical impossibility. A highly complicated trans¬action required his presence in Hamburg the day after Christmas, though he had also promised that same day to make a delivery at Fornebu Airport outside Oslo. Since Monita was to spend

Christmas in Oslo as usual, the temptation to ask her to act as his stand-in and courier was more than he could resist. No great risks were attached to the job, but the arrangements in connection with the delivery were so unusual and so involved that he could hardly fool her into thinking it was just an ordinary Christmas present. He gave her detailed instructions but, knowing she took a dim view of the drug business, told her that the package contained some forged forms to be used in a post office job.

Monita had nothing against acting as his assistant and carried out her task without complications. He paid for her journey and gave her a few hundred kronor by way of a fee.

Though this extra income, so easily earned but so sorely needed, should have whetted her appetite, Monita, after she'd had time to think the matter over, was very much of two minds about under¬taking anything similar in the future.

She had nothing against the money. But if it entailed a risk of ending up in jail, she at least wanted to know what it was all about. She regretted not having taken a look at the contents of the package and began to suspect Mauritzon had fooled her. Next time he asked her to act as his emissary she'd made up her mind to refuse. To run about with mysterious parcels containing anything from opium to time bombs was quite simply not up her alley.

Mauritzon must have understood this intuitively, for he asked no more services of her. Though his attitude remained the same, as time went by she began to become aware of aspects of his nature that she'd not perceived before. She discovered that he often told her lies - quite unnecessarily, since she never asked him what he was up to or tried to put him on the spot. She also began to suspect that he was not a gentleman thief - rather, a petty retailer in crime who would do virtually anything for money.

During the first months of the year they met less frequently, not so much because Monita was resisting him but because Mauritzon was unusually busy and was often away.

Monita did not think he'd grown tired of her; any evening he had to himself he was only too glad to spend with her. On one occasion when she was at his place he had some visitors. It was an evening in early March. His visitors, whose names were Malmström and Mohrén, were somewhat younger than Mauritzon and seemed to be business associates of his. She had taken a par¬ticular liking to one of them, but they'd not seen each other again.

For Monita the winter of 1971 was grim. The restaurant where she'd been working changed hands. Converted into a pub, it lost its former customers without managing to attract new ones, and in the end the staff had been fired and the place turned into a bingo hall. Now she was out of work again, and, with Mona in the day-care centre by day and out playing with her friends on weekends, she felt more lonely than ever.

She found it irritating not to be able to put an end to her affair with Mauritzon, an irritation that increased during his absences. When they were together she still enjoyed his company. Besides being the only person in the world apart from Mona who seemed to have any need for her, he was obviously in love with her - and this of course was flattering.

Sometimes, having nothing to do in the daytime, she'd go up to the Armfeldtsgatan flat at times when she knew he wouldn't be at home. She liked to sit there alone, reading, listening to records, or just being among his things, which still seemed strange to her though by now she should have got used to them. Apart from a couple of books and some records, there was nothing in his flat she would ever have dreamed of possessing in her own home. Nevertheless, in some strange way, she felt at home there.

He'd never given her a key to his flat. It was she who had a copy made one time when he'd lent her his. This was the only liberty she'd ever taken with him, and at first it had given her a bad conscience.

She always made sure to leave no telltale traces and only went there when she was quite sure he was away. How would he react if he knew? Sometimes, of course, she snooped about his belongings but never found anything that seemed particularly incriminating. She'd had the extra key made not in order to pry, but just to be able to go there in privacy - not that anyone was looking for her or had any interest in her whereabouts. Even so, it gave her a feeling of inaccessibility, a sense of sovereignty remi¬niscent of what she had known when playing hide-and-seek as a child. She would always choose such a good hiding place that no one in the whole world could ever find her. If she'd asked him, he'd probably have given her a key of her own. But then there'd have been no fun in it

One day in mid-April Monita, feeling unusually restless and troubled, went to the flat in Armfeldtsgatan. She was going to sit in Mauritzon's ugliest and most comfortable armchair, play some Vivaldi on the gramophone, and hope that that wonderful feeling of peace and total indifference to everything would come over her.

Mauritzon was away in Spain, and wasn't due back until the next day.

She hung up her coat and shoulder bag on a hook in the hall and after taking out her cigarettes and matches went into the living room. It was its usual tidy self. Mauritzon did his own cleaning. When they had first become acquainted she'd asked him why he didn't hire a cleaning woman. He'd answered that he liked tidying up and had no desire to hand over that pleasure to someone else.

Putting down her cigarettes and matches on the broad arm of the armchair, she went into the other room and set the record player going. She put on The Four Seasons. Listening to the first notes of Vivaldi, she went out into the kitchen to get an ashtray from the closet, then went back with it into the living room. Curling up in the armchair, she placed the ashtray on its arm.

She thought about Mauritzon and their poverty-stricken relationship. Though they'd known each other for a year it had grown no deeper, nor had it matured. Rather the contrary. She could never remember what they talked about when they met, presum¬ably because they never talked about anything of importance.

Sitting there now in his favourite chair and looking at the book¬case with all its silly little pots and vases, she thought him an unusually absurd character. And for the hundredth time she asked herself why she even bothered with him, why she didn't get herself a proper man instead?

She lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out in a thin jet up at the ceiling, and reflected that she must stop thinking about that half¬wit before she fell into a really bad mood.

Making herself comfortable in the chair she closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking, slowly moving her hand meanwhile in time with the music. In the middle of the largo she knocked over the ash tray, which fell to the floor and smashed.

'Dammit,' she muttered. She got up, went out into the kitchen, and opened the closet under the sink - fumbling for the brush, which normally stood to the right of the rubbish bag. It wasn't there. So she bent down and looked inside. The brush was lying on the bottom, and as she reached for it she caught sight of a briefcase. The briefcase stood behind the rubbish bag. Old and worn; she'd never seen it before. He must have put it in there intending to take it down to the basement. It looked too bulky to go into the refuse chute.

At that moment she noticed that a thick piece of string was wound around it many times and that it had been tied in several efficient knots. Lifting out the briefcase, she put it down on the kitchen floor. It was heavy.

Now she was curious. Cautiously, she undid the knots, trying

to remember how they had been tied. Then she unwound the

string and opened the briefcase.

It was full of stones; flat pieces of black shale, which she recog¬nized. It seemed to her she'd recently seen them somewhere. She furrowed her brow, straightened her back, flung her cigarette butt into the sink, and stared thoughtfully at the briefcase. Why should he have packed an old briefcase with stones, tied it up with string, and put it under the sink?

Now she examined the briefcase more carefully. Genuine leather - it had certainly been elegant and rather expensive when new. She inspected the inside of the flap: no name. Then she noticed something peculiar: someone had cut off the four bottom corners with a sharp knife or razor blade. What was more, it had been done quite recently. The slashed surfaces of the leather were quite fresh.

All at once she realized what he'd intended to do with this briefcase: throw it into the sea. Why? Bending down, she began picking out the slabs of shale. As she laid them out in a heap on the floor she remembered where she'd seen such stones. Down in the hall, just inside the door to the backyard, there'd been a heap of these slabs. Presumably they were to be used for surfacing the yard at the rear of the building. That's where he must have gotten them.

Just as she was thinking there couldn't be many left in the briefcase, her fingertips touched something hard and polished. She took it out and stood there holding it in her hand, contemplating it. Slowly a thought that had long been gnawing away in the depths of her mind took shape.

In this black steel thing, perhaps, she had the solution - the freedom she'd been dreaming of.

The pistol was about seven and a half inches long, of big calibre, and had a heavy butt. On the blueish shining steel above the breach was engraved the name: Llama. She weighed the weapon in her hand. It was heavy.

Monita went out into the hall and put the pistol in her bag. Then she went back into the kitchen, replaced all the stones in the briefcase, rewound the string around it - trying to duplicate the original knots - and finally put the briefcase back where she'd found it.

She took the brush, swept up the fragments of the ashtray in the living room, went out into the hallway, and poured them down the refuse chute. When she came in again she turned off the record player, put the record back where it belonged, and went out into the kitchen. She took her cigarette butt out of the sink and flushed it down the toilet. Then she put on her coat, snapped her bag closed, and hung it over her shoulder. Before leaving the flat she made a quick tour of the rooms to make sure everything was in its place. She felt for the key in her pocket, slammed the door behind her, and went downstairs.

As soon as she got home she planned to do some serious thinking.

On Friday morning, 7th July, Gunvald Larsson got up very early. Not precisely at sunrise, that would have been excessive. The name of the day in the Swedish calendar was 'Klas', and the rim of the sun appeared over the Stockholm horizon as early as eleven minutes to three.