by Maj Sjowall
“It’s quite unpleasant enough as it is,” Kollberg sighed.
The superintendent regarded him gravely but said nothing.
“Anyway, I thought this was your district,” Kollberg said. But he stood up and continued:
“Okay, okay, I’ll go. Someone has to do it.”
In the doorway he turned and said:
“No wonder we’re short of men in the force. You have to be crazy to become a cop.”
As he had left his car by Stefan’s Church he decided to walk to Sveavägen. Besides, he wanted to take his time before meeting the girl’s parents.
The sun was shining and all traces of the night’s rain had already dried up. Kollberg felt slightly sick at the thought of the task ahead of him. It was disagreeable, to say the least. He had been forced into similar tasks before, but now, in the case of a child, the ordeal was worse than ever. If only Martin had been here, he thought; he’s much better at this sort of thing than I am. Then he remembered how depressed Martin Beck had always seemed in situations like this, and followed up the train of thought: hah, it’s just as hard for everyone, whoever has to do it.
The apartment house where the dead girl had lived was obliquely opposite Vanadis Park, in the block between Surbrunnsgatan and Frejgatan. The elevator was out of order and he had to walk up the five flights. He stood still for a moment and got his breath before ringing the doorbell.
The woman opened the door almost at once. She was dressed in a brown cotton housecoat and sandals. Her fair hair was tousled, as if she had been pushing her fingers through it over and over again. When she saw Kollberg her face fell with disappointment, then her expression hovered between hope and fear.
Kollberg showed his identity card and she gave him a desperate, inquiring look.
“May I come in?”
The woman opened the door wide and stepped back.
“Haven’t you found her?” she said.
Kollberg walked in without answering. The apartment seemed to consist of two rooms. The outer one contained a bed, bookshelves, desk, TV set, chest of drawers and two armchairs, one on each side of a low teak table. The bed was made, presumably no one had slept in it that night. On the blue bedspread was a suitcase, open, and beside it lay piles of neatly folded clothes. A couple of newly ironed cotton dresses hung over the lid of the suitcase. The door of the inner room was open; Kollberg caught sight of a blue-painted bookshelf with books and toys. On top sat a white teddy bear.
“Do you mind if we sit down?” Kollberg asked, and sat in one of the armchairs.
The woman remained standing and said:
“What has happened? Have you found her?”
Kollberg saw the dread and the panic in her eyes and tried to keep quite calm.
“Yes,” he said. “Please sit down, Mrs. Carlsson. Where is your husband?”
She sat in the armchair opposite Kollberg.
“I have no husband. We’re divorced. Where’s Eva? What has happened?”
“Mrs. Carlsson, I’m terribly sorry to tell you this. Your daughter is dead.”
The woman stared at him.
“No,” she said. “No.”
Kollberg got up and went over to her.
“Have you no one who can be with you? Your parents?”
The woman shook her head.
“It’s not true,” she said.
Kollberg put his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Carlsson,” he said lamely.
“But how? We were going to the country …”
“We’re not sure yet,” Kollberg replied. “We think that she … that she’s been the victim of …”
“Killed? Murdered?”
Kollberg nodded.
The woman shut her eyes and sat stiff and still. Then she opened her eyes and shook her head.
“Not Eva,” she said. “It’s not Eva. You haven’t … you’ve made a mistake.”
“No,” Kollberg said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Mrs. Carlsson. Isn’t there anyone I can call up? Someone I can ask to come here? Your parents or someone?”
“No, no, not them. I don’t want anyone here.”
“Your ex-husband?”
“He’s living in Malmö, I think.”
Her face was ashen and her eyes were hollow. Kollberg saw that she had not yet grasped what had happened, that she had put up a mental barrier which would not allow the truth past it. He had seen the same reaction before and knew that when she could no longer resist, she would collapse.
“Who is your doctor, Mrs. Carlsson?” Kollberg asked.
“Doctor Ström. We were there on Wednesday. Eva had had a tummy ache for several days and as we were going to the country I thought I’d better …”
She broke off and looked at the doorway into the other room.
“Eva’s never sick as a rule. And she soon got over this tummy ache. The doctor thought it was a touch of gastric influenza.”
She sat silent for a moment. Then she said, so softly that Kollberg could hardly catch the words:
“She’s all right again now.”
Kollberg looked at her, feeling desperate and idiotic. He did not know what to say or do. She was still sitting with her face turned towards the open door into her daughter’s room. He was trying frantically to think of something to say when she suddenly got up and called her daughter’s name in a loud, shrill voice. Then she ran into the other room. Kollberg followed her.
The room was bright and nicely furnished. In one corner stood a red-painted box full of toys and at the foot of the narrow bed was an old-fashioned dollhouse. A pile of schoolbooks lay on the desk.
The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, her elbows propped on her knees and face buried in her hands. She rocked to and fro and Kollberg could not hear whether she was crying or not.
He looked at her for a moment, then went out into the hall where he had seen the telephone. An address book lay beside it and in it, sure enough, he found Doctor Ström’s number.
The doctor listened while Kollberg explained the situation and promised to come within five minutes.
Kollberg went back to the woman, who was sitting as he had left her. She was making no sound. He sat down beside her and waited. At first he wondered whether he dared touch her, but after a while he put his arm cautiously around her shoulders. She seemed unaware of his presence.
They sat like this until the silence was broken by the doctor’s ring at the door.
8
Kollberg was sweating as he walked back through Vanadis Park. The cause was neither the steep incline, the humid heat after the rain, nor his tendency to corpulence. At any rate not entirely.
Like most of those who were to deal with this case, he was jaded before the investigation started. He thought of the repulsiveness of the crime itself and he thought of the people who had been so hard hit by its blind meaninglessness. He had been through all this before, how many times he couldn’t even say offhand, and he knew exactly how horrible it could turn out to be. And how difficult.
He thought too of the swift gangsterization of this society, which in the last resort must be a product of himself and of the other people who lived in it and had a share in its creation. He thought of the rapid technical expansion that the police force had undergone merely during the last year; despite this, crime always seemed to be one step ahead. He thought of the new investigation methods and the computers, which could mean that this particular criminal might be caught within a few hours, and also what little consolation these excellent technical inventions had to offer the women he had just left, for example. Or himself. Or the set-faced men who had now gathered around the little body in the bushes between the rocks and the red paling.
He had only seen the body for a few moments, and at a distance, and he didn’t want to see it again if he could help it. This he knew to be an impossibility. The mental image of the child in the blue skirt and striped T-shirt was etched into his mind and would always remain there, to
gether with all the others he could never get rid of. He thought of the wooden-soled sandals on the slope and of his own child, as yet unborn; of how this child would look in nine years’ time; of the horror and disgust that this crime would arouse, and what the front pages of the evening papers would look like.
The entire area around the gloomy, fortress-like water tower was roped off now, as well as the steep slope behind it, right down to the steps leading to Ingemarsgatan. He walked past the cars, stopped at the cordon and looked out over the empty playground with its sandpits and swings.
The knowledge that all this had happened before and was certain to happen again, was a crushing burden. Since the last time they had gotten computers and more men and more cars. Since the last time the lighting in the parks had been improved and most of the bushes had been cleared away. Next time there would be still more cars and computers and even less shrubbery. Kollberg wiped his brow at the thought and the handkerchief was wet through.
The journalists and photographers were already there, but fortunately only a few of the inquisitive had as yet found their way here. The journalists and photographers, oddly enough, had become better with the years, partly thanks to the police. The inquisitive would never be any better.
The area around the water tower was strangely quiet, despite all the people. From afar, perhaps from the swimming pool or the playground at Sveavägen, cheerful shouts could be heard and children laughing.
Kollberg remained standing by the cordon. He said nothing, nor did anyone speak to him.
He knew that the homicide squad had been alerted, that the search was being stabilized, that men from the technical division were examining the scene of the crime, that the vice squad had been called in, that a central office was being organized to receive tips from the public, that a special inquiry squad was being prepared to go from door to door, that the coroner was ready and waiting, that every radio patrol car was on the watch, and that no resources would be spared, even his own.
Yet he allowed himself this moment of reflection. It was summer. People were swimming. Tourists were wandering about, map in hand. And in the shrubbery between the rocks and the red paling lay a dead child. It was horrible. And it might get worse.
Still another car, perhaps the ninth or tenth, hummed up the hill from Stefan’s Church and stopped. Without actually turning his head, Kollberg saw Gunvald Larsson get out and come up to him.
“How is it going?”
“Don’t know.”
“The rain. It poured with rain all night. Probably …”
For once, Gunvald Larsson interrupted himself. After a moment he went on:
“If they take any footprints they’re probably mine. I was here last evening. Soon after ten.”
“Oh.”
“The mugger. He struck down an old woman. Not fifty yards from here.”
“So I heard.”
“She had just shut up her fruit and candy stand and was on her way home. With the entire day’s takings in her handbag.”
“Oh?”
“Every single cent of it. People are crazy,” Gunvald Larsson said.
He paused again. Nodded towards the rocks and the shrubbery and the red paling and said:
“She must have been lying there then.”
“Presumably.”
“It had already started raining when we got here. And the civil patrol, ninth district, had been here three quarters of an hour before the robbery. They didn’t see anything either. She must have been lying here then too.”
“They were looking for the mugger,” Kollberg said.
“Yes. And when he got here they were in Lill-Jans Wood. This was the ninth time.”
“What about the old woman?”
“Ambulance case. Rushed to hospital. Shock, fractured jaw, four teeth knocked out, broken nose. All she saw of the man was that he had a red bandanna handkerchief over his face. God awful description.”
Gunvald Larsson paused again and then said:
“If I’d had the dog van …”
“What?”
“Your admirable pal Beck said that I should send out the dog van, when he was up last week. Maybe a dog would have found
He nodded again in the direction of the rocks, as though unwilling to put what he meant into words.
Kollberg didn’t like Gunvald Larsson particularly, but this time he sympathized with him.
“It’s possible,” Kollberg said.
“Is it sex?” Gunvald Larsson asked with some hesitation. “Presumably.”
“In that case I don’t suppose there’s any connection.”
“No, I don’t suppose there is.”
Rönn came up to them from inside the cordon and Larsson said at once:
“Is it sex?”
“Yes,” Rönn said. “Looks like it. Pretty certain.”
“Then there’s no connection.”
“What with?”
“The mugger.”
“How are things going?” Kollberg asked.
“Badly,” Rönn said. “Everything must have been washed away by the rain. She’s soaked to the skin.”
“Christ, it’s sickening,” Larsson said. “Two maniacs prowling around the same place at the same time, one worse than the other.”
He turned on his heel and went back to the car. The last they heard him say was:
“Christ, what a goddam awful job. Who’d be a cop …”
Rönn watched him for a moment. Then he turned to Kollberg and said:
“Would you mind coming for a moment, sir?”
Kollberg sighed heavily and swung his legs over the rope.
Martin Beck did not go back to Stockholm until Saturday afternoon, the day before he was due back on duty. Ahlberg saw him off at the station.
He changed trains at Hallsberg and bought the evening papers at the station book stall. Folded them and tucked them into his raincoat pocket and didn’t open them until he had settled down on the express from Gothenburg.
He glanced at the banner headlines and gave a start. The nightmare had begun.
A few hours later for him than for the others. But that was about all.
9
There are moments and situations that one would like to avoid at all costs but which cannot be put off. Police are probably faced with such situations more often than other people, and without a doubt they occur more often for some policemen than for others.
One of these situations is to question a woman called Karin Carlsson less than twenty-four hours after she has learned that her eight-year-old daughter has been strangled by a sex maniac. A lone woman who, despite injections and pills, is still suffering from shock and is so apathetic that she is still wearing the same brown cotton housecoat and the same sandals she had on when a corpulent policeman she had never seen before and would never see again had rung her doorbell the day before. Moments such as that immediately before the questioning begins.
A detective superintendent in the homicide squad knows that this questioning cannot be put off, still less avoided, because apart from this one witness there is not a single clue to go on. Because there is not yet a report on the autopsy and because the contents of that report are more or less already known.
Twenty-four hours earlier Martin Beck had been sitting in the stern of a rowboat taking up the nets that he and Ahlberg had put down early the same morning. Now he was standing in a room at investigation headquarters at Kungsholmsgatan with his right elbow propped on a filing cabinet, far too ill at ease even to sit down.
It had been thought suitable for this questioning to be conducted by a woman, a detective inspector of the vice squad. She was about forty-five and her name was Sylvia Granberg. In some ways the choice was a very good one. Sitting at the desk opposite the woman in the brown housecoat she looked as unmoved as the tape recorder she had just started.
When she switched off the apparatus forty minutes later she had undergone no apparent change, nor had she once faltered. Martin Beck noticed this again
when, a little later, he played back the tape together with Kollberg and a couple of others.
GRANBERG: I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Carlsson, but unfortunately there are certain questions we must put to you.
WITNESS: Yes.
G: Your name is Karin Elisabet Carlsson?
W: Yes.
G: When were you born?
W: Sev … nineteenthir …
G: Can you try and keep your head turned towards the microphone when you answer?
W: Seventh of April nineteen thirty-seven.
G: And your civil status?
W: What … I …
G: I mean are you single, married or divorced?
W: Divorced.
G: Since when?
W: Six years. Nearly seven.
G: And what is your ex-husband’s name?
W: Sigvard Erik Bertil Carlsson.
G: Where does he live?
W: In Malmö … I mean he’s registered there … I think.
G: Think? Don’t you know?
MARTIN BECK: He’s a seaman. We haven’t been able to locate him yet.
G: Wasn’t the husband liable for support of his daughter?
MB: Yes, of course, but he doesn’t seem to have paid up for several years.
W: He … never really cared for Eva.
G: And your daughter’s name was Eva Carlsson? No other first name?
W: No.
G: And she was born on the fifth of February nineteen fifty-nine?
W: Yes.
G: Would you be good enough to tell us as exactly as possible
what happened on Friday evening?
W: Happened … nothing happened. Eva … went out.
G: At what time?
W: Soon after seven. She’d been watching TV and we’d had our dinner.
G: What time was that?
W: At six o’clock. We always had dinner at six, when I got home. I work at a factory that makes lampshades … and I call for Eva at the afternoon nursery on the way home. She goes there herself after school … then we do the shopping on our way …
G: What did she have for dinner?
W: Meatballs … could I have a little water?
G: Of course. Here you are.