The Man on the Balcony

by Maj Sjowall

  Martin Beck shrugged, stretched out his right hand and pressed the button of the electric doorbell. Not a sound. The bell was evidently out of order. He tapped on the door. No result. Kollberg pounded with his fist. Nothing happened.

  They did not open the door themselves. They went downstairs half a flight and spoke in whispers. Then Kollberg went off to arrange the formalities and send for an expert. Martin Beck remained standing on the stairs and never took his eyes off the door.

  After only a quarter of an hour Kollberg returned with the expert, who sized up the door with a quick, trained glance, dropped to his knees and stuck a long but handy instrument like a pair of tongs through the mail slot. The lock had no antiburglar device over it on the inside and he needed only thirty seconds to grip it and work open the door a few inches. Martin Beck pushed past him and put his left index finger against the door. Opened it. The unoiled hinges creaked.

  They looked into a hall with two open doors. The left one led into the kitchen and the right one into what was apparently the only room in the apartment. A heap of mail lay on the doormat, so far as they could see chiefly newspapers, advertisements and brochures. The bathroom lay to the right of the hall, just inside the front door.

  The only sound was the muffled roar of traffic from Sveavägen.

  Martin Beck and Kollberg stepped carefully over the pile of mail and glanced into the kitchen. At the far end was a small dining area with a window on to the street.

  Kollberg pushed open the door of the bathroom while Martin Beck went into the living room. Straight in front of him was the balcony door and obliquely behind him to the right he saw another door, which he found led into a clothes closet. Kollberg said a few words to the lock expert, closed the front door and came into the room.

  “Obviously no one at home,” he said.

  “No,” Martin Beck said.

  They went through the apartment systematically but with great caution, taking care to touch as few objects as possible.

  The windows, one in the living room and one in the dining area, gave onto the street and were shut; so was the balcony door. The air was close and stale.

  The apartment was in no way dilapidated or neglected, yet somehow it seemed shabby. It was also very bare. The living room had only three pieces of furniture: an unmade bed with a torn, red quilt and grubby sheets, a kitchen chair at the head of the bed and, by the opposite wall, a low chest of drawers. No curtains and no rug on the linoleum floor. On the chair, which evidently served as a bedside table, lay a box of matches, a saucer and an issue of the Småland Gazette. The newspaper was folded up in a way that indicated it had been read, and on the saucer lay a little tobacco ash, seven dead matches and small, tight balls of cigarette paper.

  Above the chest of drawers hung a framed reproduction of an oil painting of two horses and a birch tree, and on the chest of drawers stood another ornament, a glazed blue ceramic dish. Empty. That was all.

  Kollberg regarded the objects on the chair and said:

  “Looks as if he saves the tobacco from the cigarette butts and smokes it in a pipe.”

  Martin Beck nodded.

  They didn’t go out onto the balcony but merely looked through the glass pane of the closed door. The balcony had an iron tube railing and the sides were of corrugated iron. It was furnished with a rickety varnished garden table and a folding chair. The chair looked old, with worn wooden arms and faded canvas seat.

  In the closet hung a reasonably good dark-blue suit, a threadbare winter overcoat and a pair of brown corduroy trousers. On the shelf lay a fur cap and a woolen scarf and on the floor one black shoe and a pair of worn-out brown boots. They looked about size 8.

  “Small feet,” Kollberg said. “Wonder where the other shoe is.”

  They found it a few minutes later in the broom cupboard. Beside it lay a cleaning rag and a shoe brush. The shoe looked to be smeared with something, but the light was bad and they didn’t want to touch it; they just stared into the dark cupboard.

  The kitchen offered several other things of interest. On the gas cooker was a large box of matches and a saucepan with remains of food. Looked like oatmeal, quite dried up. On the sink an enamel coffeepot and a dirty cup with a thin layer of dregs in the bottom. Dry as dust. Also a soup plate and a can of coarse-ground coffee. Along the other wall was a refrigerator and two kitchen cupboards with sliding doors. The men opened all three. The refrigerator contained an opened half-packet of margarine, two eggs and a bit of sausage, which was so old that it was covered with a thin layer of mold.

  One of the cupboards seemed to be used for china, the other as a pantry. A few plates, cups and glasses, a serving dish, salt, half a loaf of bread, a packet of lump sugar and a bag of rolled oats. In the drawers underneath were a carving knife and several odd knives, forks and spoons.

  Kollberg poked at the bread. It was hard as a stone.

  “He doesn’t seem to have been home for a while,” he said.

  “No,” Martin Beck agreed.

  In the cupboard under the draining board was a frying pan and saucepans and in the opening under the sink was a garbage bag. It was almost empty.

  By the window in the dining recess stood a red kitchen table with leaves and two kitchen chairs. On the table stood two bottles and a dirty glass. The bottles had contained ordinary sweet vermouth. One of them still had a little in the bottom.

  Both window sill and table top were covered with a film of greasy dirt, obviously exhaust fumes from the street, which had seeped in through the cracks of the window, although this was shut.

  Kollberg went into the bathroom and had a look, returned after half a minute and shook his head.

  “Nothing there.”

  The two top drawers of the chest of drawers contained shirts, a cardigan, socks, underclothes and two ties. They all seemed clean but threadbare. The bottom drawer was full of dirty linen. There was also an enrollment book from the army.

  They opened it and read: 2521-1-46 Fransson Ingemund Rudolf Växjö 5/2–26 Gardener Västergatan 22 Malmö.

  Martin Beck leafed through the enrollment book. It told him quite a lot about what Ingemund Rudolf Fransson had been doing up to and including the year 1947. He was born in Småland forty-one years ago. In 1946 he had had a job as a gardening laborer in Malmö and had lived in Västergatan there. In the same year he had been called up, had been graded as C3 and unfit for armed service, and had served twelve months with the antiaircraft regiment in Malmö. On being discharged from the army in 1947 someone with an illegible signature had given him the rating X-5-5, which lay well below average. The Roman figure was a mark of military conduct and showed that he had not been guilty of any breach of discipline, the two fives indicated that he was not much of a soldier, even within the C3 category. The officer with the illegible signature had given him the laconic utility code “kitchen hand,” which probably meant that he had performed his national service peeling potatoes.

  Otherwise their rapid and superficial search of the apartment revealed nothing about Ingemund Fransson’s present occupation or about his doings during the last twenty years.

  “The mail,” Kollberg said, going out into the hall.

  Martin Beck nodded. He was standing by the bed, looking down at it. The sheets were crumpled and grubby, the pillow squashed into a lump. Even so, it didn’t look as if anyone had slept in it for several days.

  Kollberg came back.

  “Only newspapers and advertisements,” he said. “What’s the date of the paper lying there?”

  Martin Beck put his head on one side, narrowed his eyes and said:

  “Thursday the eighth of June.”

  “It evidently comes the day after. He hasn’t touched his post since Saturday the tenth. Not after the murder in Vanadis Park.”

  “Yet he seems to have been home on Monday.”

  “Yes,” Kollberg agreed, then added:

  “But hardly since then.”

  Martin Beck stretched out his right arm, t
ook hold of one corner of the pillowcase with thumb and forefinger and lifted the pillow.

  Under it lay two pairs of little girls’ white pants.

  Seemed very small.

  Stained by spots in different shades.

  They stood quite still in the stale, bleak room, listening to the traffic and their own breathing. For perhaps twenty seconds. Then Martin Beck said swiftly and tonelessly:

  “Okay. That’s it. We’ll seal off the apartment and alert the technical squad.”

  “Pity there was no photograph,” Kollberg said.

  Martin Beck thought of the dead man in the condemned house in Västmannagatan who had not yet been identified. It could be the same one but it was far from certain. Not even likely.

  They still knew very little about the man called Ingemund Fransson.

  Three hours later the time was two o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, the twentieth of June, and they knew considerably more.

  For one thing, the dead man in Västmannagatan was not identical with Ingemund Fransson. Several nauseated witnesses had confirmed this.

  The police had at last got hold of a loose end of thread, and with the aid of the well-oiled and ruthlessly efficient investigation machinery they soon unraveled the relatively simple tangle concerning Ingemund Fransson’s past. They had already been in touch with about a hundred persons: neighbors, shopkeepers, social workers, doctors, army officers, clergymen, temperance administrators and many others. The picture cleared up very quickly.

  Ingemund Fransson had moved to Malmö in 1943 and had got a job with the parks branch of the municipal council. His change of domicile was probably due to the fact that he had lost his parents. His father, who had been a laborer in Växjö, had died in the spring and his mother had already been dead for five years. He had no other relations. As soon as he had done his national service he had moved to Stockholm. He had lived in the apartment in Sveavägen since 1948 and had been employed as a gardening laborer until 1956. He then gave up his job, was sick-listed first by a doctor in private practice, then gradually examined by various psychiatrists in social welfare and was finally pensioned off two years later as unfit to work. The official report had the somewhat mystifying wording: “mentally incapable of physical work.”

  The doctors concerned said that he had more than average talent but was seized by a kind of chronic fear of work which simply prevented him from going off to work. Attempts at rehabilitation had failed. When he was supposed to be working in a machine shop he went to the factory gates every morning for four weeks but could not bring himself to go in. It was said that this type of inability to work was rare but by no means unique. Fransson was not mentally ill in any way or in need of care. There was nothing wrong with his intelligence and he had no physical defects to speak of. (The army doctor had given him a low rating because of flat feet.) But he was very unsociable, had no need of human contact, no friends and no interests, apart from what a doctor called “a vague interest in his native Småland countryside.” He had a quiet, friendly manner, did not drink, was extremely economical and could be considered orderly, although he “didn’t bother much about his appearance.” He smoked. No sexual abnormalities had been apparent; Fransson had answered very vaguely when asked whether he was in the habit of masturbating, but the doctor presumed that he did so and that in any case he had an unusually weak sex urge. He suffered from agoraphobia.

  Most of this dated from doctors’ reports of the years 1957 and 1958. Since then none of the authorities had had reason to concern themselves with Fransson other than as a matter of routine. He had drawn his national pension and had kept to himself. He had subscribed to the Småland Gazette since the early 1950s.

  “What’s agoraphobia?” Gunvald Larsson asked.

  “Morbid dread of public places,” Melander said.

  Investigation headquarters were buzzing with activity. Every available man had been put on to the job. Most of them had forgotten their tiredness. Hope of a quick solution had been kindled.

  Outside, the weather grew slowly colder. A light rain had begun to fall.

  Information poured in as though on a teleprinter. The police as yet had no photograph, but they did have a complete description, the missing details having been filled in by doctors, neighbors, former workmates and the assistants in the shops where he bought his food.

  Fransson was 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighed about 176 pounds and, sure enough, took size 8 in shoes.

  The neighbors said that he spoke little but was a gentle and friendly man who always passed the time of day. He had a Småland accent. Seemed the sort of person you could trust. No one had seen him for eight days.

  The technicians in the apartment at Sveavägen had by this time checked and examined everything possible. There seemed no doubt that Fransson had committed both murders. They had even found blood on the black shoe in the closet.

  “So he lay low for more than ten years,” Kollberg said.

  “And now he’s got the itch and wanders about raping and murdering little girls,” Gunvald Larsson said.

  A telephone rang. Rönn answered.

  Martin Beck paced up and down, biting his knuckles.

  “We know practically everything that’s worth knowing about him,” he said. “We have everything except his photograph. And I expect that will turn up too. The only thing we don’t know is—where is he now?”

  “I know where he was fifteen minutes ago,” Rönn said. “A dead girl is lying in St. Erik’s Park.”

  28

  St. Erik’s Park is one of the smallest in the city; in fact it is so insignificant that most Stockholmers don’t even know of its existence. Few people go there and still fewer have any thought of guarding it.

  It lies in the north part of the city, forming a kind of unnatural end to the long street of Västmannagatan. A small tree-covered, rocky outcrop with gravel paths and steps, pitching down rather steeply towards the surrounding streets. The greater part of the area is, moreover, occupied by a school, which of course is closed in the summer.

  The body lay in the northwest part of the park, fully visible and right out on the edge of the rock. It was a macabre corroboration of the theory that the murders would get more and more horrible. The man called Ingemund Fransson had been in a great hurry this time. He had bashed the girl’s head against a stone and strangled her. Then he had ripped open her red plastic coat and her dress, torn her pants off and rammed something resembling the shaft of an old hammer up between her legs.

  To make matters worse, it was the girl’s mother who had found her. The girl, whose name was Solveig, was older than the previous victims, having already turned eleven. She lived in Dannemoragatan, less than five minutes’ walk from the scene of the crime, and, as far as anyone knew, she had had no reason to be in the park at all. She had gone out to buy some chocolate at a candy stand almost on the corner of Dannemoragatan and Norra Stationsgatan, outside the actual park and at its northeast end. The errand should not have taken more than ten minutes and the girl had been told several times previously not to play in the park, which in any case she was not in the habit of doing. When she had been gone only a quarter of an hour her mother had gone out to look for her. She would have gone with her at the outset if she had not had another daughter, who was only eighteen months old and had to be looked after. She had found the body almost at once, had broken down completely and was already in the hospital.

  They stood in the bleak drizzle gazing down at the dead child, feeling far more guilty than the murderer of this death, so hideous and pointless. The pants could not be found, nor the chocolate. Perhaps Ingemund Fransson was hungry and had taken it with him.

  No doubt that it was his work. There was even a witness, who had seen him standing and talking to the girl. But they had seemed on such familiar terms that the witness was convinced that he saw a father who was out with his daughter. Ingemund Fransson was, as they knew, gentle and friendly and seemed the sort of person you could trust. He had been
dressed in a beige-colored corduroy jacket, brown trousers, white shirt open at the neck, and neat black shoes.

  The missing underpants were light-blue.

  “He must be somewhere close by,” Kollberg said.

  Below them, the heavy traffic rumbled past on the main thoroughfare along St. Eriksgatan and Norra Stationsgatan. Martin Beck gazed out over the sprawling freightyard of the railroad and said quietly:

  “Comb every railroad car, every warehouse, every cellar, every attic in this area. Now. Immediately.”

  Then he turned and walked away. The time was three o’clock on Tuesday the twentieth of June. It was raining.

  29

  The hunt began about five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon; it was still going on at midnight and was intensified during the early morning hours.

  Every single man who could be spared for the search was on the go, every dog was out and every car in movement. The hunt was concentrated at first on the northern parts of the city but spread by degrees to the center and then out to the suburbs.

  Stockholm is a city in which many thousands of people sleep out of doors in the summer. Not only tramps, junkies and alcoholics but also a large number of visitors who cannot get hotel rooms and just as many homeless people who, though fit for work and for the most part capable of holding down a job, cannot find anywhere to live, since bungled community planning has resulted in an acute housing shortage. They sleep on park benches and on old newspapers spread out on the ground, under bridges, on quaysides and in back yards. An equal number find temporary lodging in condemned houses, in buildings under construction, in air-raid shelters, garages, railroad cars, staircases, cellars, attics and sheds. Or in coastal vessels and motorboats and old wrecks. Many drift about in the subway stations and at the railroad station or climb into some athletic field, and those who are smart have no great difficulty in getting down into the subterranean communications system beneath the big city buildings with its labyrinth of corridors and connecting shafts.