Murder at the Savoy

by Maj Sjowall

  “Various kinds of business matters. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand very much of it. I just wrote it down.”

  “Do you still have the shorthand notes?”

  “No. I transcribed all of them when I returned home on Thursday and left the minutes with Mr. Broberg. I threw the shorthand away.

  “I see,” Kollberg said. “How much did you get for this work?”

  “A fee of two hundred kronor—plus traveling and living expenses, of course.”

  “Oh. Was it a difficult job?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Not particularly.”

  Kollberg exchanged a glance with Åsa Torell, who as yet hadn’t opened her mouth.

  “That should be all for me,” Kollberg said.

  Helena Hansson lowered her eyes.

  “Just one more thing. When the police in Malmö questioned you immediately after the murder, you gave an address on Västeråsgatan here in the city.”

  “Did I?”

  “That was wrong, wasn’t it?”

  “I really hadn’t given it a thought. Don’t even remember it. But I was in a daze at the time. In fact, I used to live on Västeråsgatan. I must’ve simply made a mistake in the general commotion.”

  “Hmm,” said Kollberg. “Yeah, that can happen to anyone.”

  He stood up and said, “Thank you for the help. I’m through now. Good-bye.”

  He walked toward the door and left the apartment.

  Helena Hansson looked enquiringly at Åsa Torell, who was still sitting in her chair, silent and immobile.

  “Was there anything else?” Helena Hansson said uncertainly.

  Åsa Torell gazed at her for a long time. They were sitting across from each other. Both women were about the same age, but the similarities ended there.

  Åsa Torell let the silence deepen and take effect, then she crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and said slowly, “You’re no more a secretary than I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

  “How dare you say a thing like that?” Helena Hansson said with agitation.

  “My colleague, who just left, works for the Homicide Squad.” Helena Hansson looked at her in bewilderment.

  “However, I don’t,” said Åsa Torell. “I’m with the Vice Squad here in town.”

  “Oh,” the other woman said.

  Her shoulders collapsed.

  “We have a whole dossier on you,” said Åsa Torell in an unsparing monotone. “It covers ten years. You’ve already been picked up fifteen times. That’s quite a few.”

  “All right, but you can’t send me up for this, you old slut,” Helena Hansson said defiantly.

  “Careless of you not to have a typewriter at home. Or even a steno pad. Unless it’s in the briefcase over there.”

  “Don’t start poking around in my things without a warrant, you bitch. I know my rights.”

  “I’m not planning to touch anything here without a warrant,” Åsa Torell said.

  “What in hell are you doing here then? I can’t ever be pulled in for this.”

  Åsa Torell didn’t say anything.

  “Besides, dammit, I have the right to go where I want with who I want.”

  “And go to bed with who you want? Yes, that’s perfectly correct. But you don’t have the right to be paid for it. How big was that ‘fee,’ anyway?”

  “Do you think I’m so damned stupid I’d answer that question?”

  “It isn’t necessary. I know the going rate. You got a thousand kronor tax-free and all expenses paid.”

  “You know a helluva lot,” Helena Hansson said impertinently.

  “We know most everything about these things.”

  “Only don’t get the idea you can send me up, you goddamned, fucking …”

  “I probably can. Don’t worry. It’ll all work out.”

  Suddenly Helena Hansson sprang up and flung herself across the table, her fingers tensed like claws.

  Agile as a cat, Åsa Torell got to her feet and parried the attack with a simple blow that threw the other woman backwards, down into the chair.

  A vase of carnations had toppled onto the floor; neither of them bothered to pick it up.

  “No scratching,” said Åsa Torell. “Just take it easy.”

  The woman stared at her. It actually looked as though she had tears in her watery blue eyes. The wig had slipped to one side.

  “So you’re a fighter, too, you fucking whore?” she whined.

  She sat still for a while with a desperate look on her face. Then she worked herself up to a new counteroffensive and said hysterically, “Go away, dammit. Leave me alone. Come back when you really have something.”

  Åsa Torell dug around in her shoulder bag and took out a pencil and note pad.

  “What I’m really interested in is something else,” she said. “You’ve never worked free-lance and surely aren’t now, either. Who’s running the show?”

  “Are you so goddamned stupid you think I’ll tell you?”

  Åsa Torell walked over to the telephone, which was on the dressing table. It was a pale gray Dialogue model. She bent over and jotted down the number, which the telephone company had issued as a sort of small service. Then she picked up the receiver and dialed the number. She got a busy signal.

  “Wasn’t too clever of you to leave the slip on with the correct number,” she said. “You’ll get sent up for this telephone, no matter whose name the line’s registered under.”

  The woman slumped even lower in her chair and looked bitter but resigned.

  After a moment she looked at the clock and complained, “Can’t you get the hell out of here now? You’ve already shown how smart the cops can be.”

  “Not yet,” said Åsa Torell calmly. “Just hang on.”

  Helena Hansson now seemed totally confused. She clearly hadn’t counted on anything like this. It lay beyond the scope of her instructions and didn’t fit with the directions she’d followed earlier. Moreover, the fact that this policewoman had complete knowledge of her past was sufficient to make her drop all pretense.

  Still she seemed curiously nervous and kept looking at the clock.

  She realized that the other woman was waiting for something, but couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Are you going to stand there staring at me for much longer?” she said resentfully.

  “No. This won’t take long.”

  Said Åsa Torell and looked at the woman in the chair. She didn’t feel anything at all for her. Not even dislike and definitely not compassion.

  The telephone rang.

  Helena Hansson made no attempt to get up to answer, and Åsa Torell didn’t move from the spot.

  Six rings echoed in the room.

  Then everything returned to the status quo.

  Åsa Torell was standing beside the dressing table, her arms hanging loosely and her feet slightly apart.

  Helena Hansson was huddled up in the armchair, staring ahead with expressionless eyes.

  Once she mumbled, “Well, you can give me a break, can’t you?”

  And immediately after, “How in the hell can a chick be a cop …?”

  Åsa Torell could have asked a question in return but refrained.

  The deadlock was broken ten minutes later by heavy pounding on the outer door.

  Åsa Torell answered, and Kollberg came in with a piece of paper in his hand. He was flushed and sweaty. It was evident that he’d been hurrying.

  He stopped in the middle of the floor, breathed in the sinister atmosphere, glanced at the overturned vase of flowers and said, “Have you ladies been scuffing?”

  Helena Hansson looked up at him. There was neither hope nor surprise now; all her professional polish had vanished.

  “What the hell do you want now?” she said.

  Kollberg held out the piece of paper and said, “This is a warrant to search this apartment. Complete with stamp and signature. I requested it myself, and the prosecuting attorney has given his approval.”

  �
�Go to hell,” Helena Hansson said thickly.

  “No thanks,” Kollberg said amiably. “We’re going to look around a little.”

  Åsa Torell nodded toward the closet door.

  “I think it’s in there,” she said.

  She took Helena Hansson’s purse from the dressing table and opened it.

  The woman in the chair didn’t react.

  Kollberg opened the closet door and pulled out a suitcase.

  “Not so big, but incredibly heavy,” he mumbled.

  He put it on the bed and unbuckled the straps.

  “Found anything interesting?” he asked Åsa Torell.

  “A round-trip ticket to Zurich and a hotel voucher. She’s booked on a flight at a quarter to ten tomorrow morning from Arlanda. Return flight from Zurich at seven-forty the day after tomorrow. The hotel room is reserved for one night.”

  Kollberg pushed aside a top layer of clothing and various other rubbish and began to rummage around in the bundles of paper lining the bottom of the suitcase.

  “Stocks,” he said. “A helluva lot of them!”

  “They aren’t mine,” Helena Hansson said tonelessly.

  “I didn’t think so,” Kollberg said.

  He walked over and opened the black briefcase.

  It contained exactly what his wife had said.

  A nightgown, several pairs of panties, cosmetics, a toothbrush and bottles of pills.

  It was almost laughable.

  He looked at the clock. It was already five-thirty, and he hoped that Gunvald Larsson had kept his promise and was on his toes.

  “That’s all for now,” he said. “You can come with us now.”

  “Why?” Helena Hansson said.

  “Off the cuff I can inform you that you’re suspected of intent to engage in illegal traffic in currency,” Kollberg said. “You can count on being taken into custody, but that’s not my business.”

  Kollberg looked around, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Åsa, will you see that she gets what they usually take along at a time like this.”

  Åsa Torell nodded.

  “Pigs,” said Miss Hansson.

  16

  Everything happened on that Monday.

  Gunvald Larsson stood by the window in his office, looking out over his city. On the surface it didn’t look so bad, but he was too aware of the hotbed of crime that smoldered all around him. True, he came into contact only with assault and battery cases, but they were more than enough. Moreover, they were usually the most unpleasant to deal with. Six new robberies, each one more brutal than the other, and no clues for the time being. Four cases of wife-beating, all rather severe. And one case of the reverse: A woman had attacked her husband with an iron. Larsson had had to go there himself, to an address on Bastugatan on the South Side. The shabby apartment looked like a slaughterhouse. Everything was covered with blood, and he even got bloodstains on his new pants.

  In Gamla Stan an unwed mother had thrown her one-year-old child out of a window on the third floor. The child was seriously injured, though the doctors said it would survive. The mother was seventeen years old and hysterical. Her only reason had been that the baby was screaming and wouldn’t listen to her.

  At least twenty fairly bloody fights in the city center alone. He didn’t even want to think what the reports from the modern slum areas in the suburbs would look like.

  The telephone rang.

  He let it ring for a while before answering.

  “Larsson.”

  Grunting fiercely.

  The Turk who’d had his stomach ripped open had died at South Hospital.

  “Uh-hmm,” he said indifferently.

  He wondered if the man’s death had really been necessary. The hospitals were filled to overflowing; whole sections were closed because of vacations and a general personnel shortage. There was also a shortage of blood donors.

  The assailant had already been caught. A patrol car had picked him up in a junkie hangout in a condemned house in Birkastaden. He was completely dazed and couldn’t answer at all when he was addressed. He’d had the bloody stiletto on him, in any case. Gunvald Larsson had looked at him for half a minute and sent for the police doctor.

  Apart from the robberies, which seemed well planned, these were all what are called unpremeditated crimes, almost comparable to accidents. Unhappy people, nervous wrecks, were driven into desperate situations against their wills. In almost all the cases, alcohol or drugs were of decisive importance. It may have been partly due to the heat, but more basic was the system itself, the relentless logic of the big city, which wore down the weak-willed and the maladjusted and drove them to senseless actions.

  And the lonely. He wondered how many suicides had been committed during the last twenty-four hours and felt almost relieved that it would still be a while before he found out. Those reports were still out in the various police stations where the material was processed and the reports compiled.

  It was now twenty minutes to five, time for him to be relieved.

  He should’ve been able to drive home to his bachelor den in Bollmora, shower, put on slippers and a clean bathrobe, drink a cold bottle of ginger ale (Gunvald Larsson came near to being a teetotaler), take the telephone off the hook and spend the evening with a piece of escapist literature.

  But now he’d assumed responsibility for something that had nothing to do with him at all. This thing with Broberg, an undertaking he alternately regretted and looked forward to with a certain vindictive delight. If Broberg was a criminal—and Gunvald Larsson was convinced he was—then he was exactly the type of criminal Gunvald Larsson took pure pleasure in sending to jail. A slumlord. A loan shark. Unfortunately, they were usually untouchable, although everyone knew they existed and lived in the best of health, within the formal limits of the inflexible law.

  He’d decided not to do this alone. On the one hand, because he’d operated on his own and in his own way many times during his years on the force and had been criticized many times for it. For that matter, so often that his prospects of ever being promoted, as things stood now, seemed negligible. On the other, because he didn’t want to take any risks and because this ought to look neat.

  For once he was following the rule book, and precisely for that reason he should, of course, be prepared for everything to go haywire.

  But where would he find a partner?

  There was no one available in his own section, and Kollberg had said that the situation was identical out in Västberga.

  In desperation he called the fourth precinct and managed after many if’s and but’s to get a positive answer.

  “If it’s all that important,” the Superintendent said, “maybe I can let you have a man.”

  “That’s generous of you.”

  “Do you think it’s easy, keeping you supplied with people too? When it should be the other way around?”

  “No, no,” Gunvald Larsson said. “I know.”

  A large part of the uniform force stood glowering outside of various embassies and tourist agencies. Doing no good at all, furthermore, since they couldn’t accomplish anything constructive if sabotage or demonstrations were in the offing. Now the National Chief of Police had even forbidden the men to play with their batons, which had been the only bit of entertainment this senseless, deadly dull work had to offer.

  “Well,” Gunvald Larsson said, “who is this guy?”

  “His name’s Zachrisson. Comes originally from Maria. Usually works as a plainclothesman.”

  Gunvald Larsson furrowed his blond eyebrows sternly.

  “I know him,” he said, without a trace of enthusiasm.

  “I see. Well, that ought to be an advan—”

  “Just make damned sure he doesn’t have a uniform on,” said Gunvald Larsson. “And that he’s outside the building at five minutes to five.”

  He thought for a moment and added, “And when I say outside, I don’t mean for him to stand right outside the door with his arms crossed like some old bounce
r.”

  “I understand.”

  “Fine,” said Gunvald Larsson and hung up.

  He arrived at the building on Kungsgatan at exactly five to five and immediately discovered Zachrisson standing with a sheepish look on his face, staring at a store window with a display of women’s underwear.

  Gunvald Larsson inspected him grimly. His plainclothes attire was limited to a sport coat. Otherwise he was dressed in regulation pants and shirt with the matching police tie. Any idiot could see he was an officer of the law at a hundred yards. Moreover, he was standing with his feet apart, hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. The only thing needed to complete the picture was a paper bag containing his cap and baton.

  When he caught sight of Gunvald Larsson he straightened up, and it almost looked as though he was going to stand at attention. Zachrisson had unpleasant memories of their previous work together.

  “Just take it nice and easy,” said Gunvald Larsson. “What’s that in your right coat pocket?”

  “My pistol.”

  “Couldn’t you have had the sense to wear a shoulder holster?”

  “I couldn’t find one,” Zachrisson said lamely.

  “Christ, then put the hardware inside your waistband.”

  The man promptly stuck his hand into his pocket.

  “Not here, for chrissake,” Gunvald Larsson said. “Go and do it in the doorway. Discreetly.”

  Zachrisson obeyed.

  When he returned his appearance was somewhat improved. But not much.

  “Now listen here,” Gunvald Larsson said. “We can expect a guy to show up here and walk into the building sometime after five. He looks something like this.”

  He showed him a picture, which was dwarfed by his enormous right hand. It was poor, but the only one he’d been able to get hold of.

  Zachrisson nodded.

  “He’s going to walk into the building and, if I’m not mistaken, he’ll be coming out again in a matter of minutes. He’ll probably then be carrying a black pigskin suitcase with two straps around it.”

  “Is he a robber?”

  “Yeah, something like that. I want you to stay outside of the building near the door.”

  Zachrisson nodded once more.

  “I’m going up the stairs. I may grab him there, but I may prefer not to. It’s very likely that he’ll come in a car and park right in front of the door. He’ll be in a hurry, and he may leave the engine running while he’s inside. The car ought to be a black Mercedes, but that’s not definite. If by any chance he comes out on the sidewalk with the suitcase in his hand without me, then you must stop him, at any cost, from driving away until I can make it out here.”