by Maj Sjowall
“No, I don’t remember. Mrs.… er … Mrs. something.”
“Didn’t you write it down anywhere?” Martin Beck asked. “You always make a note of things.”
Gunvald Larsson glared at him.
“Yes, I do. But I don’t keep all my notes. I mean, it wasn’t anything important. A crazy old girl calling up. Why should I remember it?”
Kollberg sighed.
“Well, where do we go from here?”
“When is Melander coming?” Martin Beck asked.
“Three o’clock, I think. He was working last night.”
“Call up and ask him to come here now,” Martin Beck said. “He can sleep some other time.”
23
Sure enough, when Kollberg called up, Melander was asleep in his apartment at the corner of Norr Mälarstrand and Polhemsgatan. Dressing at once, he drove the short distance to Kungsholmsgatan in his own car and only a quarter of an hour later he joined the other three.
He recalled the telephone conversation and when they had run the last part of the tape from the interrogation with Rolf Evert Lundgren, he confirmed that Martin Beck’s theory concerning the description was correct. Then he asked for a cup of coffee and began carefully filling his pipe.
He lighted up, leaned back in the chair and said:
“So you think there’s some connection?”
“It’s only supposition,” Martin Beck said. “A contribution to the guessing competition.”
“There may be something in it, of course,” Melander said. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Use that built-in computer you have instead of a brain,” Kollberg said.
Melander nodded and went on calmly sucking at his pipe. Kollberg called him “the living punch-card machine,” which was a fitting name. Melander’s memory had already become legendary within the force.
“Try and remember what Gunvald said and did when he got that phone call,” Martin Beck said.
“Wasn’t it the day before Lennart came here?” Melander said. “Let’s see now … the second of June it must have been. I had the office next door then, and when Lennart came I moved in here.”
“Exactly,” Martin Beck said. “And I went down to Motala that day. I was on the way to the train and only looked in to ask about that fence.”
“Larsson, the one who had died.”
Kollberg was perched on the window sill, listening. He had often been present when Melander recapitulated the course of events—sometimes they had been much farther back than this—and he always had the feeling that he was witnessing a séance.
Melander had taken up what Kollberg called “his thinker pose”: he was leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched full length but crossed, his eyes half shut, and drawing calmly at his pipe. Martin Beck, as usual, stood with one arm on the filing cabinet.
“When I came in you were standing exactly where you’re standing now and Gunvald sat where he’s sitting now. We were talking about that fence when the phone rang. Gunvald answered. He said his name and asked hers, I remember that.”
“Do you remember whether he wrote the name down?” Martin Beck asked.
“I think so. I remember he had a pen in his hand. Yes, he must have made a note of it.”
“Do you remember whether he asked for the address?”
“No, I don’t think he did. But she may have given both name and address all at once.”
Martin Beck looked inquiringly at Gunvald Larsson, who shrugged.
“I don’t recall any address at any rate,” he said.
“Then he said something about a cat,” Melander said.
“So I did,” Gunvald Larsson said. “I thought that’s what she said. That there was a cat on her balcony. Then she said it was a man and of course I thought she meant that he was standing on her balcony. Seeing she called up the police.”
“Then you asked her to describe the man and I remember plainly that you made notes at the same time as you repeated what she said.”
“Okay,” Gunvald Larsson said, “but if I made notes, which I’ve no doubt I did, then I wrote on the block here, and since it turned out that no action was needed, I probably tore the sheet off and threw it away.”
Martin Beck lighted a cigarette, walked over and put the match in Melander’s ashtray and returned to his place at the cabinet.
“Yes, I’m afraid you probably did,” he said. “Go on, Fredrik.”
“It wasn’t until after she’d given you the description that you realized he was standing on his own balcony, eh?”
“Yes,” Gunvald Larsson said. “I thought the old girl was nutty.”
“Then you asked how it was she could see that he had blue-gray eyes if he was on the other side of the street.”
“That was when the old girl said she had been watching him through binoculars.”
Melander looked up in surprise.
“Binoculars? Good Lord.”
“Yes, and I asked if he had molested her in any way, but he hadn’t. He just stood there, and she thought it was nasty, she said.”
“He evidently stood there at night too,” Melander said.
“Yes. That’s what she said anyway.”
“And you asked what he was looking at and she said that he kept looking down at the street. At cars and children playing. And then you asked if she thought you ought to send the dog van.”
Gunvald Larsson looked irritably at Martin Beck and said:
“Yes, Martin had been standing here nagging about it. It was a good chance for him to send out his goddam dog van.”
Martin Beck exchanged a glance with Kollberg but said nothing.
“That was the end of the conversation, I think,” Melander said. “The old girl thought you were insolent and put down the phone. And I went back to my room.”
Martin Beck sighed.
“Well, that’s not much to go on. Except that the description tallies.”
“Funny for a guy to stand on his balcony day and night,” Kollberg said. “Maybe he’d been pensioned off and had nothing else to do.”
“No,” Gunvald Larsson said. “It wasn’t that … Now I remember she said, ‘And he’s a young man too. Couldn’t be over forty. Seems to have nothing better to do than stand there staring.’ Those were her very words. I’d quite forgotten.”
Martin Beck lowered his arm from the cabinet and said:
“In that case it also fits Lundgren’s description. About forty. If she examined him in the binoculars she should have seen him pretty plainly.”
“Didn’t she say how long she’d been looking at him before she called you up?” Kollberg asked.
Gunvald Larsson thought hard for a moment, then said:
“Wait now … Yes, she said she had been observing him for the last two months but that he might easily have been there earlier without her thinking anything of it. First she’d thought he stood debating whether to take his life or not. To jump, she said.”
“Are you sure you still haven’t your notes somewhere?” Martin Beck asked.
Gunvald Larsson pulled out a drawer, took out a thin bundle of papers of different sizes, laid them in front of him and started looking through them.
“These are all the notes about things that have to be followed up and reported on. When the matter has been dealt with I throw the notes away,” he said as he fingered through them.
Melander leaned forward and knocked out his pipe.
“Yes,” he said. “You had the pen in your hand and as you picked up the note pad you moved the telephone directory aside …”
Gunvald Larsson had looked through the bundle and put it back in the drawer.
“No, I know I haven’t kept any notes of that conversation. It’s a pity, but I haven’t.”
Melander raised his pipe and pointed at Gunvald Larsson with the stem.
“The telephone directory,” he said.
“What telephone directory?”
“A telephone directory was lying open on y
our desk. Didn’t you write in that?”
“It’s possible.”
Gunvald Larsson reached for his telephone directories and said:
“Hell of a job looking through all these.”
Putting down his pipe, Melander said:
“You don’t have to. If you wrote anything—and I think you did—it wasn’t in your directory.”
Martin Beck suddenly saw the scene in front of him. Melander had come into the room from next door with an open telephone directory in his hands, given it to him and shown him the name of the fence, Arvid Larsson. Then Martin Beck himself had put the directory down on the desk.
“Lennart,” he said. “Would you mind getting the first part of the telephone directory in your room?”
Martin Beck looked first for the page giving Larsson Arvid sec. hand furn. No notes there. Then he started at the beginning and looked through the directory carefully page by page. In several places he found illegible scrawls, most of them written in Melander’s unmistakable hand but also some in Kollberg’s clear and legible writing. The others stood round him in silence, waiting. Gunvald Larsson looked over his shoulder.
Not until he got to page 1082 did Gunvald Larsson exclaim:
“There!”
All four of them stared at the note in the margin.
A single word.
Andersson.
24
Andersson.
Gunvald Larsson put his head on one side and looked at the name.
“Yes, it looks like Andersson all right. Or maybe Andersen. Or Andresen. It might be damn anything. Though I think it’s meant to be Andersson.”
Andersson.
There are three hundred and ninety thousand people in Sweden called Andersson. The Stockholm telephone directory alone lists ten thousand two hundred subscribers with this name, plus another two thousand in the immediate environs.
Martin Beck thought this over. It might turn out to be very easy to get hold of the woman who had made the much-discussed phone call, provided they made use of press, radio and television. But it could also be very difficult. And up to now nothing had been easy during this investigation.
They did make use of press, radio and television.
Nothing happened.
It was understandable that nothing happened on Sunday.
By eleven o’clock on Monday morning there was still no developments and Martin Beck began to have his doubts.
To start door-to-door questioning and calling up thousands of subscribers meant that a very great part of the search squad must be freed from other work to follow up a clue which might very well turn out to be useless. But couldn’t the sphere of work be limited in some way? A rather wide street. It must be somewhere in the central part of the city.
“Must it?” Kollberg said doubtfully.
“Of course not, but …”
“But what? Is your intuition telling you something?”
Martin Beck gave him a harried look, then pulled himself together and said:
“The subway ticket, which was bought at Rådmansgatan.”
“And which is not proved to have any connection with either the murders or the murderer,” Kollberg said.
“It was bought at the station at Rådmansgatan and used only in one direction,” Martin Beck said obstinately. “The murderer kept it because he intended using it for the return journey. He took the subway from Rådmansgatan to Mariatorget or Zinkensdamm and walked the rest of the way to Tanto Park.”
“Mere speculation,” Kollberg said.
“He had to do something to get rid of the little boy who was with the girl. He had nothing else to hand but the ticket.”
“Speculation,” Kollberg said.
“But it sticks together logically.”
“Only just.”
“And besides, the first murder was committed in Vanadis Park. It’s all linked up with that part of the city. Vanadis Park, Rådmansgatan, the whole area north of Odengatan.”
“You’ve said that before,” Kollberg said drily. “It’s pure guesswork.”
“The theory of probability.”
“You can call it that too if you like.”
“I want to get hold of that Andersson woman,” Martin Beck said, “and we can’t just sit twiddling our thumbs and wait for her to come to us of her own accord. She may not have a TV, she may not read the papers. But she must have a telephone at any rate.”
“Must she?”
“Without a doubt. You don’t make a call like that from a call box or a tobacconist’s. Besides, it seemed as if she was watching the man while she talked.”
“Okay, I give in on that point.”
“And if we’re going to start ringing around and go from door to door, we must begin somewhere, within a certain area. Seeing that we haven’t enough men in the force to contact every single person by the name of Andersson.”
Kollberg sat in silence for a while. Then he said:
“Let’s leave this Andersson woman for a moment and ask ourselves instead what we know of the murderer.”
“We have a sort of description.”
“Sort of, yes, that just sums it up. And we don’t know if it was the murderer Lundgren saw, if indeed he saw anyone.”
“We know it’s a man.”
“Yes. What else do we know?”
“We know that he’s not in the vice squad’s records.”
“Yes. Provided no one has been careless or forgotten something. That has happened before.”
“We know the approximate times the murders were committed—soon after seven in the evening in Vanadis Park and between two and three in the afternoon in Tanto. So he wasn’t at work then.”
“Which implies?”
Martin Beck said nothing. Kollberg answered his own question:
“That he’s out of work, is on vacation, is on sick leave, is only visiting Stockholm, has irregular working hours, is pensioned off, is a vagrant or … in short, it implies nothing at all.”
“True enough,” Martin Beck said. “But we do have some idea of his behavior pattern.”
“You mean the psychologists’ rigmarole?”
“Yes.”
“That’s only guesswork too, but …”
Kollberg was silent for a moment before going on:
“But I must admit that Melander made a very plausible extract from all that stuff.”
“Yes.”
“As for this woman and her phone call, let’s try and find her. And since we must start somewhere, as you so aptly pointed out, and since we’re only guessing our way along anyway, we might just as well presume that you are right. How do you want it done?”
“We’ll start in the fifth and ninth districts,” Martin Beck said. “Put a couple of men onto calling up everyone by the name of Andersson and a couple more onto door knocking. We’ll ask the entire personnel in those districts to focus their attention on this particular question. Especially along wide streets where there are balconies—Odengatan, Karlbergsvägen, Tegnérgatan, Sveavägen and so on.”
“Okay,” Kollberg said.
They set to work.
It was an awful Monday. The Great Detective (the general public), who had seemed less busy during Sunday, partly because so many people had gone to the country for the weekend, partly because of the reassuring appeals in press and television, were fully active once more. The central office for tips was swamped with calls from people who thought they knew something, from lunatics who wanted to confess and from scoundrels who called up just to be cussed. Parks and wooded areas swarmed with plainclothes police, as far as a hundred men can be said to swarm, and on top of all this came the search for someone called Andersson.
And the whole time fear was lurking in the background. Many parents called the police about children who had not been away from home for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Everything had to be noted down and checked. The material grew and grew. And in all cases was utterly useless.
In the middle of all
this Hansson in fifth district called up.
“Have you found another body?” Martin Beck said.
“No, but I’m worried about that Eriksson we were to keep an eye on. The exhibitionist you had in custody.”
“What about him?”
“He hasn’t been out since last Wednesday, when he brought home a lot of drink, mostly wine. He went from one liquor store to another.”
“And then?”
“We caught a glimpse of him now and again in the window. He looked like a ghost, the boys said. But there hasn’t been a sign of him since yesterday morning.”
“Have you rung the doorbell?”
“Yes. He won’t open the door.”
Martin Beck had almost forgotten the man. Now he remembered the furtive, miserable eyes, the trembling, emaciated hands. He felt a chill spread over his body.
“Break in,” he said.
“How?”
“Any way you like.”
Putting down the phone, he sat with his head in his hands. No, he thought, not this on top of everything else.
Half an hour later Hansson called up again.
“He had turned the gas on.”
“And?”
“He’s on the way to hospital now. Alive.”
Martin Beck sighed. With relief, as they say.
“Though only just,” Hansson said. “He had done it very neatly. Sealed up the cracks around the doors and stuffed up the keyholes of both front door and kitchen door.”
“But he’ll be all right?”
“Yes, thanks to the usual. The slugs in the meter gave out. But if he’d been left to lie there any longer …” Hansson left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
“Had he written anything?”
“Yes. ‘I can’t go on.’ He had scrawled it on the edge of an old girlie magazine. I’ve notified the temperance board.”
“It should have been done before.”
“Well, he did his job all right,” Hansson replied.
After a moment or two he added:
“Until you picked him up.”
Several hours of this horrible Monday still remained. At about eleven in the evening Martin Beck and Kollberg went home. Gunvald Larsson too. Melander stayed on. Everyone knew that he loathed having to be up all night and that the mere thought of giving up his ten hours’ sleep was a nightmare to him, but he himself said nothing and his expression was as stoical as ever.