The Fire Engine that Disappeared

by Maj Sjowall

  “Wouldn’t you like to—?”

  “At remembering things, I mean. Goodbye.”

  “Is it even possible that Olofsson speaks Swedish with a strong accent and says owze instead of house and zeven instead of seven?” asked Gunvald Larsson, when they were all together at the police station in Kungsholmsgatan the next day.

  The others stared inquiringly at him.

  “And ground floor instead of first floor?”

  No one replied and Gunvald Larsson also sat in silence for a moment. Then he turned to Martin Beck and said:

  “That Shacky guy you’ve got out there in Västberga …”

  “Skacke.”

  “Yes, him. Is he usable?”

  “It depends.”

  “Would he be capable of going around Sundbyberg looking in all the telephone booths?”

  “Can’t you get the police out there to do it themselves?”

  “Not on your life. No, send that kid out there. He can take a map and mark in all the public telephone booths where there are still the old-type notices with the Sundbyberg fire department alarm number on them.”

  “Could you explain a bit more?”

  Gunvald Larsson explained.

  Martin Beck thoughtfully held his chin.

  “Mysterious,” said Rönn.

  “What’s mysterious?” asked Hammar, who had just come thundering into the room, Kollberg at his heels.

  “Everything,” said Rönn gloomily.

  “Gunvald, you’ve been reported for dereliction of duty,” said Hammar, waving a paper at him.

  “Who by?”

  “A Sub-Inspector Ullholm in Solna. He says he has been informed that you’ve been spreading bolshie propaganda among the firemen out there. When on duty.”

  “Oh, Ullholm,” said Gunvald Larsson. “It’s not the first time.”

  “Was the charge the same then?”

  “No, I’d damaged the reputation of the force by saying a dirty word in the guard room in Klara.”

  “He’s reported me too,” said Rönn. “Last autumn, after the bus murder. Because I didn’t give my name and rank when I was trying to question a dying old man at Karolinska Hospital. Although he could see for himself that the guy wasn’t conscious for more than thirty seconds before he died.”

  “Well, how’re things going?” asked Hammar challengingly, sweeping a look round the room.

  No one replied and a few seconds later Hammar went out again, back to his endless deliberations with prosecutors, police staff officers and other senior staff, who also incessantly asked him how things were going. He had much to endure.

  Martin Beck looked gloomy and thoughtful. He had also caught his first cold of the spring and blew his nose about every fifth minute. At long last he said:

  “If Olofsson was the person who telephoned, then he might well have disguised his voice. Anyhow, it seems more than likely that he would do that, doesn’t it?”

  Kollberg shook his head and said:

  “But would Olofsson, a native of Stockholm, go and ring for the fire department in Sundbyberg?”

  “No. Exactly,” said Gunvald Larsson.

  That was approximately what happened on Tuesday, the twenty-third of April.

  Wednesday and Thursday were singularly uneventful, but when they met again on Friday, Gunvald Larsson said:

  “How’re things going for Tacky?”

  “Skacke,” said Martin Beck sneezing.

  “He’s very quiet,” said Kollberg.

  “I ought to have done it myself, of course,” said Gunvald Larsson sourly. “A job of that kind shouldn’t take longer than an afternoon.”

  “He had one or two other things to do, so he couldn’t get going with it properly until yesterday,” said Martin Beck apologetically.

  “What other things?”

  “Well, actually, we have got other things besides telephone booths in Sundbyberg to think about.”

  The search for Olofsson was making no progress and there was no means of intensifying it. Everything that could be sent out had been sent out, from descriptions and photographs to fingerprints and dental cards.

  For Martin Beck, the holiday weekend proved extremely trying. He was feeling a gnawing anxiety about the case, which was clearly about to become totally entangled, and apart from his rapidly developing virus infection, he received yet another blow of an even more private nature. Ingrid, his daughter, informed him that she was thinking of moving away from home. There was nothing unnatural or surprising about this. She would soon be seventeen and she was grown-up in most respects. She was also sensible and mature. Naturally she had a right to live her own life and do as she thought best. It was true that for a long time he had seen this moment approaching, but what he had not been able to foresee was his own reaction. His mouth went dry and he felt slightly dizzy. He sneezed helplessly, but said nothing, for he knew her well and knew that she had not taken this decision without weighing the situation thoroughly and at length.

  As if to add to his burdens, his wife said coldly and practically:

  “We’d better go through what Ingrid is to take away with her from here. And you needn’t worry about her. That girl will manage. I ought to know, as I brought her up.”

  To add insult to injury, that was largely true.

  Their boy, who was thirteen, took the announcement even more laconically. He just shrugged his shoulders and said:

  “Good. Then I can have your room. The electrical outlets are in a better place in there.”

  Sometime on Sunday afternoon, Martin Beck happened to find himself alone with Ingrid in the kitchen. They were sitting opposite each other at the plastic-covered table at which they had so often drunk cocoa together on so many mornings for so many years. Suddenly she stretched out her hand and placed it over his. They sat in silence for a few seconds. Then she swallowed and said:

  “I know I shouldn’t really say this, but I’m going to all the same. Why don’t you do the same? Move out?”

  He looked at her in surprise.

  She did not look away.

  “Yes, but …” he said hesitantly, and then he stopped. He simply did not know what to say.

  But he already knew that he would think a great deal about this brief conversation for a long time.

  On Monday, the twenty-ninth, two events occurred practically simultaneously.

  One of them was not particularly remarkable. Skacke came into the office and put a report down in front of Martin Beck. It was well written and as detailed as one could wish. So far as he could make out, there were six telephone booths in Sundbyberg in which the old notices still remained. Also, two more possible ones, in other words those in which the notices might still have been up on the seventh of March, but had been taken away since then. In Solna, there were no telephone booths with such notices. No one had asked Skacke to find this out, but he had obviously done so all the same.

  Martin Beck was sitting hunched up at his desk, poking at the papers with his right forefinger. Skacke stood 6 feet away from him, strongly resembling a dog sitting up and begging for a sugar-lump.

  Perhaps he ought to say something in praise before Kollberg came in and started being sarcastic, thought Martin Beck indecisively.

  At that moment the problem was solved by the telephone ringing.

  “Yes. Beck.”

  “There’s some inspector who wants to speak to you. I didn’t really catch what his name was.”

  “Just put him through … yes, Beck here.”

  “Hi. It’s Per Månsson in Malmö.”

  “Hi. How are you?”

  “Not so bad. Always feel a bit off on Mondays. And then we’ve had all that hullabaloo over that tennis match. Against Rhodesia, you know.”

  Månsson paused for a long while, then said:

  “You’re looking for someone called Bertil Olofsson, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve found him.”

  “Down there?”

  “
Here in Malmö, yes. Dead. We found him three weeks ago, but I didn’t know who he was until today.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, ninety per cent certain, anyhow. The dental card for his upper jaw fits. And it’s quite special too.”

  “All the rest, then? Fingerprints, other teeth and—”

  “We haven’t found his lower jaw. And couldn’t check on fingerprints. He’d been in the water for a long time, I’m afraid.”

  Martin Beck straightened up.

  “How long?”

  “At least two months, the doc says.”

  “And when did you get him out?”

  “Monday the eighth. He was sitting in a car at the bottom of the harbor. A couple of little kids …”

  “That means he must’ve been dead on the seventh of March?” interrupted Martin Beck.

  “Seventh of March? Oh, yes. For at least a month, perhaps longer. When was he last seen up there where you are?”

  “Third of February. He was to go abroad then.”

  “Was he now? Good. That helps me fix a date. Then he must have been finished off between the fourth and the eighth of February, roughly.”

  Martin Beck sat in silence. It was, however, only too easy to see what this meant. Olofsson had been dead a month when the house in Sköldgatan had burned down. Melander had been right. They had been on the wrong track.

  Månsson did not say anything either.

  “What’s it like?” asked Martin Beck.

  “Peculiar. Damned peculiar. He was killed with a stone stuffed into a sock and given an old car wreck as a coffin. There wasn’t a thing in the car or among his clothes. Except the weapon and two-thirds of Olofsson, I mean.”

  “I’ll be coming down as soon as I can,” said Martin Beck. “Or Kollberg. Then you’ll have to come up here, I suppose.”

  “Must I?” said Månsson, with a sigh.

  To him, the Venice of the North was more or less equivalent to the Gates of Hell.

  “Well, this is a complicated story,” said Martin Beck. “Worse than you can imagine.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet,” said Månsson, with mild irony. “Then I’ll be seeing you.”

  Martin Beck put down the receiver, looked absently at Skacke and said:

  “That’s a good job you’ve done there.”

  23

  It was Walpurgis Eve and spring had come at last, at least to southern Sweden. The morning plane from Bromma landed on time, that is, at five to nine, at Bulltofta in Malmö and spewed out a handful of businessmen plus a pale and sweaty Chief Inspector. Martin Beck had a cold and a headache and did not like flying, and the liquid the Scandinavian Airlines System called coffee had not added to his sense of well-being. Månsson was standing at the gate, large, solid and round-shouldered, his hands in his overcoat pockets and the first toothpick of the day in his mouth.

  “Hi,” he said. “You look all in.”

  “I am,” said Martin Beck. “Is there a toilet around here?”

  Walpurgis Eve is an important day in Sweden, a day when people put on their spring clothes and get drunk and dance and are happy and eat good food and look forward to the summer. In Skåne, the roadsides are in bloom, and the leaves are coming out. And out on the plain, the cattle are grazing the spring grass, and the other crops are already sown. Students put on their white caps and trade union leaders get out their red flags from their moth-bags and try to remember the text of Sons of Labor. It will soon be May Day and time to pretend to be socialist for a short while again, and during the symbolic demonstration march even the police stand to attention when the brass bands play the Internationale. For the only tasks the police have are the redirection of traffic and ensuring that no one spits on the American flag, or that no one who really wants to say anything has got in among the demonstrators.

  The last day of April is a day of preparation; preparations for spring, for love and for political cults. It is a happy day, especially if it happens to be fine.

  Martin Beck and Månsson spent this happy day looking at what was left of Bertil Olofsson and wandering once or twice around the old car that was standing dismally in the police station lot. They also looked at the stone and the black sock, the cast of the teeth in Olofsson’s upper jaw, and they spent a long time leafing through the autopsy report. They did not say much, but then there was nothing special to say. On one occasion Månsson asked a question.

  “Is there anything that connects Olofsson with Malmö? Except that he was killed here?”

  Martin Beck shook his head. Then he said:

  “It looks as if Olofsson mainly dealt in stolen cars. Some drugs, of course. But mostly cars, which he resprayed and gave false numbers. Then they were given false registration certificates and taken out of the country, presumably to be sold abroad. It seems likely that he at least passed through the city quite often. Possibly he may even have stayed here now and again. And it would be strange if he hadn’t had a few acquaintances here.”

  Månsson nodded.

  “Obviously a pretty poor specimen,” he said, more or less to himself. “Physically in bad shape too. That’s why the doc misjudged his age. Miserable sort of wretch.”

  “That’s true of Malm too,” said Martin Beck. “But it doesn’t make things any better, does it?”

  “No, of course not,” said Månsson.

  Several hours later, they were sitting in Månsson’s office looking out at the asphalted yard, with its parked black-and-white cars and occasional policemen charging around.

  “Well,” said Månsson. “Our starting point isn’t quite so bad as it seems.”

  Martin Beck looked at him with a certain surprise.

  “We know he was in Stockholm on the third of February and the doctor swears he must have been dead at the latest on the seventh. The actual time has shrunk to three or four days. I’ll probably find someone who has met him. Whatever that entails.”

  “How can you be so certain of that?”

  “This city isn’t that big and the circles Olofsson moved in are even smaller. I have certain contacts. That they’ve not been much help to me hitherto is because they didn’t know who I was looking for. And I’m thinking of letting the press have this story.”

  “We can’t have anything published. And anyhow, that’s the public prosecutor’s business.”

  “That’s not the way I do things.”

  “But you’re not going to involve us?”

  “What happens in Stockholm doesn’t interest me in the slightest,” said Månsson with feeling. “And all that about the prosecutor is just a matter of form. Down here, at least.”

  Martin Beck flew back home that evening. He got into Stockholm at about ten, and two hours later was lying in his sofa-bed in the living room in Bagarmossen, the light already out.

  But he was not asleep.

  His wife, on the other hand, was, and her light, even snores could be clearly heard through the closed bedroom door. The children were out. Ingrid was painting posters for the youth demonstration the next day and Rolf was probably at some parentless party, with beer and phonograph music.

  He felt lonely. Missing something. For instance, the desire to get up and go into the bedroom and tear off his wife’s nightgown. He thought that he at least ought to feel a desire to do that to someone else, someone else’s wife, for instance. In which case, whose?

  He was still awake when Ingrid came in at two o’clock. Presumably his wife had told her not to be back any later. Rolf, on the other hand, did not have to keep any special time, although he was four years younger than his sister and only half as intelligent and had not even a hundredth of his sister’s instinct for self-preservation and ability to look after herself. He was a boy, of course.

  Ingrid padded into the living room, bent down and kissed him lightly on the forehead. She smelled of sweat and paint.

  Ridiculous, he thought.

  Another hour elapsed before he fell asleep.

  Martin Beck arrived at the police stat
ion in Kungsholm on the morning of the second of May and stepped straight into a conversation between Kollberg and Melander.

  “Ridiculous,” said Kollberg, thumping his fist on the desk so that everything except Melander jumped.

  “Yes, it’s peculiar,” said Melander gravely.

  Kollberg was in his shirtsleeves and had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. He leaned over the desk and said:

  “Peculiar! Perhaps we’re the peculiar ones. Someone puts a time bomb in Malm’s mattress. We think it’s Olofsson. But Olofsson’s already been dead a month, because someone’s cracked open his skull and crammed his body into an old scrap car and driven the whole kit and caboodle into the sea. And now here we sit like birds in the wilderness.”

  He fell silent, to get his breath back. Melander said nothing. Both nodded at Martin Beck, but in passing, as if he had not been there at all.

  “If we presume that there’s a connection between the attempted murder of Malm and the murder of Olofsson …”

  “Then it’s just a guess, despite everything,” said Melander. “We’ve no evidence whatsoever to show that any such connection exists. Though it seems unlikely that the two events should be wholly independent of each other.”

  “Perfectly correct. Such coincidences are highly unlikely. So there is reason to assume that the third component in this story has a natural connection with both of the other two.”

  “You mean the suicide. That Malm killed himself.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes,” said Melander. “He may have done it because he knew the game was up.”

  “Exactly. And because he thought it was pleasant to turn on the gas taps in comparison with what he was in for otherwise.”

  “He was scared, in fact.”

  “And he’d darned good reason to be so, too.”

  “The conclusion then would be that he did not count on being allowed to stay alive,” said Melander. “That he was scared of being killed. But in that case, by whom?”

  Kollberg thought. Then he made a sudden leap forward in his thoughts and said:

  “Perhaps Malm killed Olofsson?”

  Melander took half an apple out of his desk drawer, cut a bit off it with a letter opener and put the piece into his tobacco-pouch.