The Man on the Balcony

by Maj Sjowall

  Gunvald Larsson dialed a telephone number to an apartment near Vanadis Park. The following conversation ensued:

  “Jansson speaking.”

  “Good morning. This is the police, homicide squad, Detective Inspector Larsson.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “May I speak to your daughter, please? Majken Jansson.”

  “Certainly. Just a moment. We’re having breakfast. Majken!”

  “Hello. This is Majken Jansson speaking.”

  The voice was bright and cultured.

  “This is the police. Detective Inspector Larsson.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You have stated that you took a breath of air in Vanadis Park on the evening of the ninth of June.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you wearing when you took this breath of air?”

  “What was I … Well, let me see, I had on a black-and-white cocktail dress.”

  “What else?”

  “A pair of sandals.”

  “Aha. What else?”

  “Nothing. Quiet, Daddy, he’s only asking what I …”

  “Nothing? You had nothing else on?”

  “N-no.”

  “I mean, didn’t you by any chance have anything under your dress?”

  “Yes. Yes of course. Naturally I had underclothes.”

  “Aha. And what kind of underclothes?”

  “What kind of underclothes?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Well, naturally I had what … well, what one usually has. Oh, Daddy, it’s the police.”

  “And what do you usually have?”

  “Well, a bra naturally and … well, what do you think?”

  “I don’t think anything. I have no preconceived opinions. I am merely asking.”

  “Pants of course.”

  “I see. And what kind of pants?”

  “What kind? I don’t know what you mean. I had pants of course, underpants.”

  “Panties?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry but …”

  “And what did these panties look like? Were they red or black or blue or maybe patterned?”

  “A pair of …”

  “Yes?”

  “A pair of white lace panties. Yes, Daddy, I’ll ask him. Why on earth are you asking me all this?”

  “I am just checking the evidence of a witness.”

  “The evidence of a witness?”

  “Exactly. Good-bye.”

  Kollberg drove to an address in the Old Town, parked the car at Storkyrkobrinken and climbed a worn, winding stone staircase. He looked for a doorbell which wasn’t there and then, true to habit, he pounded deafeningly on the door.

  “Come in!” a woman’s voice called.

  Kollberg went in.

  “Good Lord,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Police,” he said lugubriously.

  “Well, let me say that the police have a helluva nice habit of …”

  “Is your name Lisbeth Hedvig Maria Karlström?” Kollberg asked, looking demonstratively at the piece of paper in his hand.

  “Yes. Is it about that business yesterday?”

  Kollberg nodded and looked about him. The room was untidy but pleasant. Lisbeth Hedvig Maria Karlström was wearing a blue-striped pajama jacket, which came down only far enough to show that she had not even lace panties on underneath. She had evidently just got up. She was making coffee, stirring it with a fork to make it drip more quickly through the filter bag.

  “I’ve just got up and am making coffee,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I thought it was the girl who lives next door. She’s the only one who ever thumps on the door like that. And at this hour. Like some?”

  “What?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Well …,” Kollberg said.

  “Do sit down.”

  “What on?”

  She pointed with the fork to a leather-covered ottoman beside the exceedingly unmade bed. He sat down dubiously. She put the coffeepot and two cups on a tray, pushed forward a small, low table with her left knee, put the tray down and sat on the bed, crossing her legs and thus revealing quite a lot of her anatomy, which was not altogether without its charms.

  She poured out the coffee and handed a cup to Kollberg.

  “Thank you,” he said, looking at her feet.

  He was a susceptible person and at the moment felt strangely disturbed. In some way she reminded him far too much of someone, probably his wife.

  She gave him a worried look and said:

  “Would you like me to put something more on?”

  “It might be just as well,” Kollberg said thickly.

  She got up at once, went over to the closet, took out a pair of brown corduroy slacks and pulled them on. Then she unbuttoned the pajama jacket and took it off. For a moment she stood with her upper body naked—with her back to him, to be sure, but that hardly improved matters. After a short hesitation she pulled a knitted sweater over her head.

  “It’s just that it makes me so damned hot,” she said.

  He drank some coffee.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  He drank some more.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “It’s just that I don’t know anything. Nothing at all. It was a lousy business, with that Simonsson, I mean.”

  “His name was Rolf Evert Lundgren,” Kollberg said.

  “Oh, that too. You must think I seem … that I don’t appear in a very good light. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Now.”

  She looked about her unhappily.

  “Perhaps you’d like to smoke?” she asked. “I’m afraid I haven’t any cigarettes. I don’t smoke myself.”

  “Nor do I,” Kollberg said.

  “Oh. Well, bad light or not, it can’t be helped. I met him at the Vanadis Baths at nine o’clock and then I went home with him. I know nothing at all.”

  “Presumably you do know one thing that interests us.”

  “What would that be?”

  “How was he? Sexually, I mean?”

  She shrugged awkwardly. Took a rusk and began nibbling it. At last she said:

  “No comments. I don’t as a rule …”

  “What don’t you as a rule?”

  “I don’t as a rule comment on men I go with. If you and I, for instance, got into bed together now, I wouldn’t go around afterwards giving people details about you.”

  Kollberg fidgeted. He felt hot and upset. He wanted to take off his coat. It was even possible that he wanted to take off his clothes altogether and have sex with this girl. True, he had very seldom done so while on duty and particularly not since he had got married, but it had happened.

  “I’d be very glad if you would answer this question,” he said. “Was he normal, sexually?”

  She did not answer.

  “It’s important,” he added.

  She looked him straight in the eyes and said gravely: “Why?”

  Kollberg looked at the girl doubtfully. It was a hard decision and he knew that many of his colleagues would consider his next words more blameworthy than if he had undressed and got into bed with her.

  “Lundgren is a professional criminal,” he said at last. “He has confessed to about a dozen violent assaults. Last Friday evening—a week ago, that is—he is known to have been in Vanadis Park at the same time as a little girl was murdered there.”

  She looked at him quickly and swallowed several times.

  “Oh,” she said softly. “I didn’t know that. I would never have thought that.”

  After a moment she looked at him again with her clear brown eyes and said:

  “That answers my question. Now I see that I must answer yours.”

  “Well?”

  “As far as I could judge he was completely normal. Almost too normal.” “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that I too am completely normal sexually but that … well, since I do it fairly seldom I want a littl
e more than … shall we say routine?”

  “I see,” Kollberg said, scratching behind his ear with embarrassment.

  He hesitated a few seconds. The girl regarded him gravely. At last he said:

  “Was it he who … approached you in the Vanadis Baths?”

  “No, the reverse, if anything.”

  She got up abruptly and went over to the window, which looked out onto the cathedral. Without turning her head she said:

  “Exactly. The reverse, if anything. I went out yesterday to pick up a man. I was prepared for it, had prepared myself, if you like.”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s the way I live,” she said. “I’ve done so for several years and if you like I’ll tell you why I live like that.”

  “It’s not necessary,” Kollberg said.

  “I don’t mind,” she said, fingering the curtain. “Telling you, I mean …”

  “It’s not necessary,” Kollberg repeated.

  “At any rate I can assure you that he behaved quite normally together with me. At first he didn’t even seem … particularly interested. But … I saw to it that he became so.”

  Kollberg drank up his coffee.

  “Well, that’s about all,” he said uncertainly.

  Still without turning around, she said:

  “I’ve had things happen before, but this really makes me think. It’s not at all nice.”

  Kollberg said nothing.

  “Nasty,” she said to herself, again fingering the curtain.

  Then she turned around and said:

  “I assure you it was I who took the initiative. In a very flagrant manner. If you like I’ll …”

  “No, you needn’t.”

  “And I can assure you that he was absolutely normal when he … when we were in bed together.”

  Kollberg got up.

  “I think you’re very nice,” she said spontaneously. “I like you too,” he said.

  He walked over to the door and opened it. Then to his own astonishment he said:

  “I’m married. Have been for over a year. My wife’s expecting a baby.”

  She nodded.

  “As regards the life I lead …”

  She broke off.

  “It’s not so good,” he said. “It can be dangerous.” “I know.”

  “So long,” Kollberg said.

  “So long,” said Lisbeth Hedvig Maria Karlström.

  He found a parking ticket on his car. Absentmindedly he folded up the yellow slip and put it in his pocket. Nice girl, he thought. Looks rather like Gun, I wonder why …

  As he settled down behind the wheel he reflected that the whole thing was verging on the perfect parody of a really bad novel.

  At headquarters Gunvald Larsson said heartily:

  “That settles it. He’s sexually normal and his reliability as a witness is confirmed. Waste of time, the whole thing.”

  Kollberg was not altogether sure that it had been a waste of time.

  “Where’s Martin?” he asked.

  “Out interrogating infants,” Gunvald Larsson said.

  “And otherwise?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Here’s something,” Melander said, looking up from his papers.

  “What?”

  “A summary from the psychologists. Their viewpoints.”

  “Humph,” Gunvald Larsson snorted. “Unrequited love for a wheelbarrow and all that rot.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” Melander mumbled.

  “Take the pipe out of your mouth so that we can hear what you say,” Kollberg said.

  “They have an explanation here, an explanation that seems very plausible. It’s rather worrying.”

  “Can things be more worrying than they are already?”

  “As regards the possibility that this man is not in our records,” Melander went on impassively. “They say that he might very well have a clean police record. That he might even have lived for a long time without giving any expression at all to his inclinations. That the satisfaction of sexual perversion in many ways resembles addiction to drugs. This is borne out by foreign examples. A person who is a sexual pervert can behave for year after year as an exhibitionist or a Peeping Tom and in that way find an outlet for his sex urge. But if that person, on a sudden impulse, commits a rape or a sex murder, the only way he can get satisfaction in future is to commit more rapes and more murders.”

  “Like the old story about the bear,” Gunvald Larsson said. “A bear that has once killed a cow, and so on.”

  “It’s the same with a junkie who wants stronger and stronger drugs the whole time,” Melander said, riffling through the report. “A junkie who starts off with hashish and then changes to heroin can’t go back to hashish because he gets no kick out of it any more. It may be the same sort of thing with a sexual pervert.”

  “It sounds sensible,” Kollberg said. “But elementary.”

  “I think it sounds damned unpleasant,” Gunvald Larsson said.

  “It’s much more unpleasant than that,” Melander said. “It says here that a person can have lived for many years without giving any noticeable expression to his perverted sex urge, he needn’t even have masturbated or looked at dirty pictures, still less have behaved as an exhibitionist or a Peeping Tom. He can simply have sat thinking of different forms of perversion, without actually knowing about it himself, until suddenly a chance impulse triggers off an act of violence. Then he just can’t help repeating it, over and over again, with growing ruthlessness and presumably increasing bestiality.”

  “Rather like Jack the Ripper,” Gunvald Larsson said.

  “What about the impulse?” Kollberg asked.

  “It can be triggered off by all kinds of things—a chance situation, a state of mental weakness, illness, liquor, drugs. If this view of crime is admissible, then there are no clues to the criminal in his own past. The police registers are useless, the same as the case histories of hospitals and doctors. The person in question just isn’t there. And once he has started raping or killing, he can’t stop. He’s also incapable of giving himself up or of controlling his own actions.”

  Melander sat in silence for a moment. Then he tapped with his knuckles on the xeroxed report and said:

  “There’s something in this that fits our case horribly well.”

  “I imagine there are dozens of other explanations,” Gunvald Larsson said irritably. “It might be a stranger, for instance, a foreigner just passing through. It might even be two different murderers; what happened in Tanto Park was perhaps a murder done on the spur of the moment—an impulse caused by the publicity around the first one.”

  “There’s a lot against that line of reasoning,” Melander said. “Knowledge of the locality, the somnambulant certainty with which the murder was carried out, the choice of time and place, the absurd fact that after two murders and seven days of search we haven’t found a single suspect worth mentioning. Unless we count that man Eriksson. And there’s a detail that rather discounts the theory of an impulse murder: in both cases the girl’s pants were missing. That information has not been given out to the press.”

  “I imagine there are other explanations all the same,” Gunvald Larsson said surlily.

  “I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking,” Melander said, lighting his pipe.

  “Yes,” Kollberg said, rousing himself. “It may be wishful thinking, Gunvald, but I do hope you’re right. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise,” Melander said, “we have nothing at all. The only thing that can lead us to the murderer is to catch him red-handed next time. Or …”

  Kollberg and Larsson each completed the thought and arrived at the same unpleasant conclusion.

  “Or for him to repeat the murder over and over again with the same sleepwalking certainty until his luck gives out and we catch him,” Melander said.

  “What else does it say there?” Kollberg asked.

  “The usual rigmarole. A whole lot of contradictory speculations. He can be ov
ersexed or undersexed—the latter seems to be the most probable. But there are also examples of the reverse.”

  Putting down the report Melander said:

  “Has it occurred to you that even if we saw him standing here in front of us we have no proof that he committed these two murders. The only material we have is some very dubious footprints in Tanto Park. And the only thing actually proving that the person we’re after is a man, is a few spermatozoa on the ground near the girl’s body, again in Tanto Park.”

  “And if he’s not in our records we wouldn’t even be helped by a full set of fingerprints,” Kollberg said.

  “Exactly,” Melander said.

  “But we have a witness,” Gunvald Larsson said. “The mugger saw him.”

  “If only we could rely on that,” Melander said.

  “Couldn’t you say one little tiny thing to cheer us up?” Kollberg asked.

  Melander made no answer and they lapsed into silence. In the room next door they heard the telephones ring and Rönn and someone else answer.

  “What did you think of that girl?” Gunvald Larsson asked suddenly.

  “I liked her,” Kollberg said.

  At the same instant yet another unpleasant thought occurred to him. He knew whom Lisbeth Hedvig Maria Karlström had reminded him of. Not his wife, far from it. She reminded him in an ominous way of a person whom he had never met during her lifetime but who had governed his thoughts and actions long after she was dead. He had seen her only once, in the mortuary at Motala on a summer’s day three years ago.

  He shook himself, ill at ease.

  A quarter of an hour later Martin Beck walked in with the ticket.

  19

  “What’s that?” Kollberg asked.

  “A ticket,” Martin Beck replied.

  Kollberg looked at the crumpled ticket lying in front of him on the desk.

  “A subway ticket,” he said. “So what? If you want your traveling expenses reimbursed you must go to the cashier’s office.”

  “Bosse, our three-year-old witness, got it from a man that he and Annika met in Tanto Park just before she died,” Martin Beck said.

  Melander shut the door of the filing cabinet and came up to them. Kollberg turned his head and stared at Martin Beck.