The Fire Engine that Disappeared

by Maj Sjowall

  Hammar just thought about his coming retirement and that nothing must happen before that.

  Martin Beck meditated on the fact that he was even indifferent to whether he had a vacation or not. He sat out in Västberga and filled his day with routine work, devoting his free time mainly to trying to think out how he could manage to avoid celebrating the Midsummer holiday with his wife and brother-in-law.

  Kollberg was Acting Chief Inspector and had been transferred to the Stockholm Homicide Squad and was enjoying both situations equally little. He hated the ovenlike office in Kungsholmsgatan and sweated and swore—in between times thinking about wanting to be at home with his wife and that that was the only thing he enjoyed nowadays.

  Melander was outside his summer cottage, chopping wood and thinking lovingly of his plain wife, who was lying naked sunbathing on a blanket behind the outhouse.

  In Euphoria on the Black Sea, Månsson was looking dully at the dove-gray Potemkin horizon and wondering how they had been able to achieve socialism and manage their five-year plan in three years in a country where it was 104 degrees in the shade and they did not have grape soda.

  Eighteen hundred miles farther north, Gunvald Larsson was putting on his boots and sports jacket and glancing sourly at Rönn’s machine-knitted woolen sweater, which was red and blue and green and awful and had elks on the front.

  Rönn did not notice, as he was occupied thinking about that fire engine at the time.

  Benny Skacke was sitting in his office checking a report he had just written. He was wondering how long it would take for him to become Chief of Police and where in that case he would be.

  Everyone was thinking his own thoughts.

  No one was thinking about Malm or Olofsson or the fourteen-year-old girl who had been roasted alive in the attic of the house in Sköldgatan.

  At least, it did not seem so.

  On this Midsummer Eve, Friday the twenty-first of June, Martin Beck did something which made him feel actually criminal for the first time since he was fifteen and had forged his mother’s signature on a sick-excuse note in order to be able to play truant from school and go to look at Hitler’s pocket-battleship which was on a visit to Stockholm.

  What he did was reasonably insignificant and would to most people have seemed wholly natural. In actual fact, it was not even criminal, as it is not a crime to tell a lie, as long as one does not first put one’s hand on the Bible and promise to tell the truth.

  He quite simply told his wife that he could not come with her and Rolf because he had been given an assignment which obliged him to be on duty over the holiday.

  This was an outright lie and he had told it in a loud and clear voice while looking his wife straight in the eye. In the summer sun, on the longest and most beautiful day of the year. On top of this, the lie was the result of conspiracy and plot, insofar as another person was involved and had promised to keep quiet if there were any awkward questions.

  This person was the Acting Chief Inspector.

  His name was Sten Lennart Kollberg and his role as instigator was too obvious even to be called ambiguous.

  The background to the plot could be said to be divided into two parts: First, Martin Beck’s profound distaste in face of the prospect of two or at worst three loathsome days with his wife and his tippling brother-in-law, days which seemed even more intolerable as his daughter Ingrid was in Leningrad on some kind of language course, and so would not be on hand to lighten his mood. Second, Kollberg had free access to his in-laws’ summer cottage in Sörmland and had already transported considerable quantities of food and life-giving drink out there.

  Although he thus had good, anyhow justifiable, reasons for his behavior, Martin Beck took his lie very much to heart. He realized that he did not usually behave badly and so was singularly unfamiliar with the situation. Long afterward he would also see that this moment contained the origins of a belated change in his whole life. This had nothing to do with the fact that he was a policeman, as there is nothing to indicate that policemen in general lie any less than anyone else, or Swedish police any less than foreign ones. Available data, in fact, point to the opposite being true.

  For Martin Beck it was entirely a question of personal ethics; he was taking a stand and justifying it to himself, and thus he had upset certain fundamental personal values. Whether that would entail a profit or loss in his own private balance sheet, only the future would tell.

  Anyhow, for the very first time for a very long time, he had an enjoyable and almost trouble-free holiday weekend. The only thing that troubled him was the lie, but without much difficulty he allowed it to fade into the background for the time being.

  Kollberg was outstanding as an organizer and conspirator and the company was extremely well chosen. The word police was not mentioned many times and their daily work, the detestable and all-overshadowing Service, was largely banished from the festive scene.

  Except on one occasion when Martin Beck was sitting in the grass in the slow soft dusk, together with Åsa Torell and Kollberg and some others, looking at the maypole which they had erected and even danced around. They were somewhat exhausted and thoroughly bitten by midges by this time and Martin Beck’s thoughts wandered.

  “Do you think we’ll ever find out who that guy in Sundbyberg really was?” he said.

  And Kollberg said, very definitely: “Nix.”

  And Åsa Torell: “Which guy in Sundbyberg?”

  She was an alert young lady, with varying qualities and inquisitive about most things.

  And Kollberg said suddenly:

  “Yeah—you know what I think? I think this whole case will explode in our faces. Just as it began.”

  He drank deeply from his wine glass, threw out his arms and said:

  “Like that. Boom! Just as it began and then everything’ll be over.”

  And Åsa Torell said:

  “Oh, that. Now I know what you’re talking about. Right in the face of whom?”

  “Me, of course,” said Kollberg. “I’m the only one who is totally uninterested in it. Anyhow, I’ll shoot you dead if you begin talking about policemen.”

  She was in fact going to join the police.

  On another occasion, she and Martin Beck exchanged a few remarks on that particular subject.

  He asked: “This business of joining the force, was it an idea you had because Åke was killed?”

  She twirled her cigarette thoughtfully between her fingers and said:

  “Well, not exactly. I just want to get a different job. A new kind of life. And I also think they’re needed.”

  “What? Girls who join the police force?”

  “Sensible people who want to do so,” she said. “Think of all the fools there are in the force.”

  Then she shrugged her shoulders, smiled swiftly and went away, padding barefoot through the grass.

  She was a slenderly built woman with large brown eyes and short dark hair.

  Nothing else of interest happened, and on Sunday Martin Beck went home, still with a slight hangover, but contented and without too much on his conscience.

  The plane which dispatched Per Månsson from the roasting-hot airport in Constanta to the considerably more airy Bulltofta in Malmö was a shining silver Ilyushin 18 turbo-prop plane from Tarom. As the wind was in the southeast and quite strong, the plane flew in a wide circle out over Öresund before it began to descend, finally to flatten out over Swedish country. It was a lovely summer’s day and from his window seat he could see Saltholm and Copenhagen quite clearly, and no fewer than five passenger steamers which appeared to be standing still with their white bow waves petrified along the busy route between Malmö and Denmark. A little later he saw Industrihamnen, out of which he had been involved in hauling an old car and a corpse nearly three months earlier, but as he was not yet on duty, he stopped thinking about that.

  That he was looking so fixedly out of the window was mainly due to the fact that he did not want to look at his wife. He had in fact fa
llen in love with her again after the first rollicking days, but now, after three weeks of being together daily, they were sick of each other and he felt the strong draw of his bachelor apartment in Regementsgatan, of lone evenings with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and a frosty Gripenberger within reach. Neither was it untrue that he was looking forward to the dismal view out over the asphalt lot of the police station.

  Malmö was not in any way so idyllic and quiet as it may have appeared from the air. On the contrary, it seemed to Månsson that even in his first week on duty he was being drawn into a veritable whirlpool of crime, every imaginable offense from political disturbances and knife-fights to a formidable bank raid, which had been planned in Malmö and had the police forces of half the country up to their ears until it had been tied up.

  He had a great deal to do, and so it was not until the third Monday in July that he seriously came to think about Olofsson again. Late in the evening on that day, he drew on the consequences of what he had seen during his landing in Malmö and completed a chain of thought which obscurely and unconsciously had already begun on the plane.

  It was very simple and appeared almost self-evident now that he had at last succeeded in linking it together.

  It was half-past eleven at night and he had just mixed himself a drink. Without thinking about what he was doing, he drank it down in one draft, got up out of his armchair and went to bed.

  He was certain that within a short time he would find the answer to the question which had irritated him most in the whole Olofsson case.

  27

  The first half of July was cool and wet. Many vacationers, encouraged by the lovely hot June weather, decided to enjoy the fine Swedish summer instead of traveling to southern Europe, and then had sat dismally swearing and staring out at the rain through dripping tent-flaps and trailer doors, while dreaming of sundrenched Mediterranean beaches. But when in the middle of the second week of the holidays, the sun rose quiveringly hot into the clear blue sky and the moisture from the rain steamed from the fragrant soil and vegetation, curses ceased raining down on the fatherland and proud Swedes put on their bright leisure clothes and prepared to conquer the countryside. Shining bright vehicles bowled along the roads, at the sides of which families with camping gear and picnic cases, thermos bottles and packs of food had moved out of their cars for a brief spell to settle among the roadside refuse. Smothered in dust and fumes, they listened to the unending wail of their transistors while commenting on the cars driving by, looking at the dusty and languishing vegetation on the other side of the road and sympathizing with the poor people who had to remain in town.

  Martin Beck did not need anyone’s sympathy. At least, not because he had been forced to remain in Stockholm and work in July. On the contrary, this was the time he liked being in the city most. He usually avoided taking his vacation just then, for despite everything he loved his native city and liked being able to move around it without being hustled, or having to hurry, or being pushed about, or feeling threatened by the increasingly dominating traffic and half-suffocated by its poisonous fumes. He liked strolling around empty streets in the center of the city on a hot July Sunday or walking along the quays on a cool evening, feeling the evening breeze bringing with it the smell of freshly cut hay from some meadow by the Mälar or a breath of the sea and seaweed from the islands.

  On Tuesday, the sixteenth of July, however, he was doing neither of these things, but was sitting in his shirtsleeves at his desk in Västberga feeling bored. During the morning he had completed a case of homicide that was as clear and unmistakable as it was sad and meaningless. A Yugoslav and a Finn had been drinking together on a camping-site; they had quarreled and the Finn had stabbed the Yugoslav with a sheath knife in front of a dozen or so bewildered witnesses. The Finn had managed to get away from the site of the crime, but had been caught the same evening in an empty railway car at Central Station. He had a long list of crimes behind him, both in Finland and in Sweden, and had also entered the country illegally, as only a month before he had been deported for two years.

  After that, Martin Beck had cleared up a lot of routine work and was now sitting staring listlessly out of the window. Kollberg was still Acting Chief Inspector and had his temporary office in Kungsholmen. Skacke was out somewhere; Martin Beck himself had sent him on some errand, but he could not remember what. He heard steps out in the corridor, doors slamming, the clatter of typewriters and voices from adjoining rooms and wondered for a moment whether to go and ask if anyone would like to come out for a cup of coffee, but then he didn’t, as he really had no desire to.

  Martin Beck lifted his blotter and picked up the list of things to remember that he kept there. He had in fact a very good memory, but some time ago he had thought he noticed that it had begun to deteriorate and decided to note down anything that he was not able to tackle immediately, but which would have to be done later. The doubtful part of this method was that he kept forgetting the list existed and for long stretches of time it lay in its hiding-place without his giving it a thought.

  All the items on the list except two had already been dealt with without his having to look. He picked up his ballpoint pen and crossed them out, while he tried to remember what the name placed at the top of the list meant. Ernst Sigurd Karlsson. At the bottom stood Zachrisson. Zachrisson anyway, was a policeman, whom he had thought of asking for a more thorough description of what Malm had done when he was being shadowed. The other man who had shared the job of tailing Malm had already reported in detail, but Zachrisson had only been questioned in passing soon after the fire. And now he was on leave.

  Martin Beck lit a Florida, leaned back and blew smoke straight up at the ceiling.

  “Ernst Sigurd Karlsson,” he said half-aloud to himself.

  At that moment he remembered who the man was. A man quite unknown to him who had written his name on a pad before shooting himself. Martin Beck still did not know why. In itself it was not all that remarkable that people he did not know knew him. As a Chief Inspector and investigator into murders, he was often mentioned in the papers and he had several times been forced to appear on television.

  He put the list back under his blotter. Then he got up and walked across to the door. A cup of tea would go down well after all, he thought.

  On Monday, the twenty-second of July, Zachrisson came back from his vacation and Martin Beck had contacted him at once in the morning.

  Now he was sitting in Martin Beck’s room in Västberga, clearing his throat and reading aloud in a monotonous voice from a notebook. Times and places followed a somewhat tedious pattern. Now and again the man looked up and filled in with what he could remember seeing.

  Göran Malm’s last ten days were imprinted with melancholy and monotony. Most of the day he had spent in two beer cafés in Hornsgatan. He had nearly always gone home alone, half-drunk, and at about eight o’clock. On two occasions he had bought liquor and had taken a prostitute with him. It was obvious that he had been very short of money. Olofsson’s death must have left him in a difficult situation. The day before Malm died, Zachrisson had seen him standing outside one of his regular haunts for nearly an hour, begging money to be able to go in and have a beer.

  “So he was quite broke?” mumbled Martin Beck.

  “He tried to borrow some money the same day he died,” said Zachrisson. “I think so anyhow. He went to someone in …”

  He turned a page in his notebook.

  “At nine-forty on the seventh of March he left Sköldgatan and went to number 4 Karlviksgatan.”

  “Karlviksgatan,” said Martin Beck to himself.

  “Yes, in Kungsholmen. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and after a few minutes came out again. He looked nervous and peculiar, which was why I thought he’d been trying to borrow money from someone, who had either been out or had refused him.”

  Zachrisson looked at Martin Beck as if expecting praise for this effort of deduction. But Martin Beck was staring past him, and said:<
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  “Number 4 Karlviksgatan. Where have I heard that before?”

  Then he looked at Zachrisson and said:

  “You’ve probably been through this before, haven’t you?”

  Zachrisson nodded.

  “For Chief Inspector Kollberg at least,” he said. “Because he told me to check the names of everyone who lived in the building.”

  “Yes?”

  Zachrisson looked in his book.

  “There weren’t many,” he said. “Seved Blom, A. Svensson, Ernst Sigurd Karlsson …”

  Karlviksgatan is a short and not very well-known street running from Norr Mälarstrand to Hantverkargatan, quite near Fridhemsplan. It took Martin Beck ten minutes to get there by car.

  He did not know what to expect, as Ernst Sigurd Karlsson had been dead for four and a half months.

  Three flights up there was indeed SEVED BLOM and A. SVENSSON on two of the doors, but on the third was a new plate, with the name SKOG. Martin Beck rang the bell, but no one came to the door. He rang the bell next door.

  As soon as Martin Beck had got rid of Zachrisson, he had called up the policemen who had been to Ernst Sigurd Karlsson’s apartment on the morning after his suicide. From them he had, among other things, found out who had called the police.

  Captain Seved Blom let Martin Beck in immediately and began to tell him how he had been sitting playing solitaire when he had heard the shot. He was clearly delighted to be able to relate his dramatic story all over again and described in detail everything that had happened. Martin Beck heard him out and then finally asked:

  “What do you know about the dead man? Did you usually talk to him?”

  “No. We greeted each other when we happened to meet, but nothing more. He appeared to be a withdrawn person.”

  “Did you ever see any of his friends?”

  Captain Blom shook his head.

  “He didn’t seem to have any. It was always quiet in there and no one ever came to visit him. Yet, strangely enough, someone he knew came to see him the same morning. That morning. A seedy little man. I was just taking the garbage out, the ambulance had gone and all the policemen had left too. Well, then, there was that man standing there, ringing the bell. I asked him who he was looking for and all that, and when I realized he was a close acquaintance of his, I told him what had happened. And that he could go to see the police if he wanted to know anything more.”