by Maj Sjowall
PM: How long had you had the revolver?
BS: Oh, some time. I bought it about ten years ago, when I’d won a bit of money on the pools. I always liked the idea of shooting. When I was a kid, I always wanted an air rifle, but my parents were poor and probably couldn’t afford one, even if they’d wanted to. But they probably didn’t want to, either. The next best thing was going to the fairgrounds and shooting at those metal elks.
MB: Are you a good shot?
BS: Yeah, you could say that. I won a couple of contests.
MB: Well, when you’d finished shooting …
BS: When I’d done shooting I rode the bike back into town.
PM: What about the revolver?
BS: It was in the box on the carrier rack. I took the bicycle path along Limhamn’s Field, then around the Turbine and past the museum and the courthouse. When I got to the corner of Norra Vallgatan and Hamngatan, I had to stop for a red light, and that was where I caught sight of him.
PM: Of Viktor Palmgren?
BS: Yes. Through the windows at the Savoy. He was standing up, and a whole lot of people were sitting at the table.
PM: You said before that you’d never met Palmgren. How did you know it was him?
BS: I’ve seen his picture in the newspapers lots of times. And once when I was going past his house he came out of the gate and got into a taxi. Oh yeah, I knew it was him. MB: What did you do?
BS: In a way I didn’t think about what I was doing. At the same time, I knew what I was gonna do. It’s hard to explain. I rode past the entrance to the Savoy and left the bike in the rack. I remember I didn’t bother to lock it—like it didn’t make any difference any more. Then I, uh, took the revolver out of the box and stuck it inside my jacket. Oh, yeah, I loaded it first; nobody walked by, and I stood with my back to the street and sort of left the revolver in the box, while I put a couple cartridges in. Then I walked into the dining room and shot him in the head. He fell down onto the table. Then I noticed that the closest window was open, so I climbed through it and walked back to the bike.
PM: Weren’t you afraid of being caught? There were other people in the dining room.
BS: I didn’t think that far, only that I was gonna kill that bastard.
MB: Didn’t you see that the window was open when you went in?
BS: NO, I didn’t think about it. I guess I hadn’t counted on getting away like I did. It was only after I saw him fall and saw nobody was paying any attention to me that I started thinking about getting outa there.
PM: What did you do then?
BS: I put the revolver back in the box, and then I rode away over Petri Bridge and past the railroad station. I don’t know the schedule for the boats, but I did know that the hydrofoils leave every hour, on the hour. It was twenty to nine on the station clock, so I rode over to the Butter Inspection Station and left the bike there. Then I went to buy a ticket for the hydrofoil. I took the revolver box along. I thought it was kinda strange that nobody came after me. When the boat left I stayed out on deck, and the stewardess said I had to go in, but I paid no attention and stayed out there until we were about halfway over the Sound. Then I threw the box with the revolver and the cartridges into the sea and went in and sat down.
MB: Did you know what you were going to do when you got to Copenhagen?
BS: No, not really. I could only sort a think a bit at a time.
MB: What did you do in Copenhagen?
BS: I walked around. And I went some place and drank a beer. Then I got the idea of going up to Stockholm to see my wife.
MB: Did you have any money?
BS: I had a bit over a thousand kronor—my two months’ vacation pay.
MB: Okay, go on.
BS: I took the bus out to Kastrup and bought a one-way ticket to Stockholm. They said they’d tell me what plane I gotta fly on. Naturally, I didn’t give them my real name.
MB: What time was it then?
BS: It was close to midnight then. I sat there till morning, and then there was a flight—seven-twenty-five, I think it was. When I got to Stockholm I took the bus from Arlanda to Haga terminal and then I walked home to the wife and kids. They live on Norrtullsgatan.
PM: How long did you stay there?
BS: An hour. Maybe two.
PM: When did you come back here?
BS: Last Monday. I got to Malmö last Monday night.
PM: Where did you stay in Stockholm?
BS: At a kind of boardinghouse on Odengatan. I don’t remember what the name was.
MB: What did you do when you got back to Malmö?
BS: Nothing much. I couldn’t go shooting. I didn’t have a revolver any more.
MB: What about the bicycle? Was it still there?
BS: Yeah, I picked it up on the way back from the train.
PM: I’ve been wondering about something. Before you saw Viktor Palmgren through the window at the Savoy, had you ever thought about shooting him? Or was it an impulse?
BS: I guess I must’ve thought about it before, but it wasn’t like I planned to do it, exactly. But when I saw him standing there and I had the revolver with me, it hit me in a flash that it was the easiest thing in the world just to shoot him. From the moment I decided to do it I didn’t worry about what would happen later. Right then it felt like I’d gotten the idea for the first time. But deep down I must’ve wanted him dead all along.
MB: How did you feel when you read the newspaper? You must have read the newspapers the next day?
BS: Sure.
MB: How did you feel when you realized he might live?
BS: I was mad at myself for making a bad job of it. I thought maybe I should’ve fired more times, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, and it looked like he died right then, on the spot.
MB: What about now? How do you feel now?
BS: I’m glad he’s dead.
PM: Maybe we should take a break. You need something to eat.
Martin Beck turned off the tape recorder.
“You can hear the rest later, by yourself,” he told Skacke. “After I’m gone.”
30
Late on Saturday night, July 12 of this warm summer, Martin Beck was sitting alone at a table in the dining room at the Savoy.
He’d packed his suitcase an hour or two earlier and had carried it down himself to the reception desk. Now there was no immediate hurry, and he was considering taking the night train to Stockholm.
He’d talked on the phone to Malm, who’d seemed very pleased and repeated time after time, “No complications, in other words? That’s excellent, just excellent.”
Just excellent, Martin Beck thought.
The restaurant was comfortable and intimate, but rather splendid at the same time. Flickering candles on the tables were mirrored in the enormous silver tureens. The fitting complement of diners, conversing at a fittingly low level. Not so many as to be intrusive, nor so few as to make one feel lonely.
Waiters in white jackets. The little headwaiter, bowing and eagerly tugging at his cuffs.
Martin Beck had started off with a whisky in the bar and followed it with Sole Walewska in the dining room. With his meal he drank the house akvavit, which was flavored with secret ingredients and very good.
Now he was lingering over coffee and a shot of Sève Fournier.
It was all quite superb. Good food, good drink and attentive service. The summer evening outside of the open windows was dense and warm and pleasant.
Moreover, a case had been wound up.
He should have felt good, but it didn’t look like it.
As it was, he noticed very little of what was going on around him. It was doubtful, in fact, if he was even aware of what he ate and drank.
Viktor Palmgren was dead.
Gone forever and missed by no one, save for a handful of international swindlers and representatives of suspect regimes in countries far away. They would soon learn to do business with Mats Linder instead, and so things would be, to all intents and purposes, unch
anged.
Charlotte Palmgren was now very rich and practically independent, and as far as one could see, Linder and Hoff-Jensen had a brilliant future in store.
Hampus Broberg would probably be able to avoid another arrest, and a staff of well-paid lawyers would show that he hadn’t misappropriated or tried to smuggle stocks out of the country or done anything else illegal. His wife and daughter were already in safety in Switzerland or Liechtenstein with fat bank accounts at their disposal. Helena Hansson would presumably receive some sort of sentence, but certainly not so severe that she couldn’t set herself up in her former profession within the fairly near future.
There remained a shipyard janitor, who in the course of time would be tried for second-degree, maybe first-degree, murder, and then have to rot away the best years of hrs life in a prison cell.
Chief Inspector Martin Beck didn’t feel good at all.
He paid his bill, picked up his suitcase and walked over Mälar Bridge toward the railway station.
He wondered if he’d be able to sleep on the train.
ALSO BY MAJ SJÖWALL AND
PER WAHLÖÖ
ROSEANNA
On a July afternoon, a young woman’s body is dredged from Sweden’s beautiful Lake Vättern. With no clues, Beck begins an investigation not only to uncover a murderer but also to discover who the victim was. Three months later, all Beck knows is that her name was Roseanna and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people on a cruise. As the melancholic Beck narrows the list of suspects, he is drawn increasingly to the enigma of the victim, a free-spirited traveler with a penchant for casual sex, and to the psychopathology of a murderer with a distinctive—indeed, terrifying—sense of propriety.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39046-2
THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE
Inspector Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad has his summer vacation abruptly terminated when the top brass at the foreign office pack him off to Budapest to search for Alf Matsson, who has vanished. Beck investigates viperous Eastern European underworld figures and—at the risk of his life—stumbles upon the international racket in which Matsson was involved. With the coolly efficient local police on his side and a predatory nymphet on his tail, Beck pursues a case whose international implications grow with each new clue.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39048-6
THE MAN ON THE BALCONY
In the once peaceful parks of Stockholm, a killer is stalking young girls and disposing of their bodies. The city is on edge, and an undercurrent of fear has gripped its residents. Martin Beck, now a superintendent, has two possible witnesses: a silent, stone-cold mugger and a mute three-year-old boy. With the likelihood of another murder growing as each day passes, the police force works night and day. But their efforts have offered little insight into the methodology of the killer. Then a distant memory resurfaces in Beck’s mind, and he may just have the break he needs.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39047-9
THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN
On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by a mysterious assassin. The press portrays it as a freak attack and dubs the killer a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck thinks otherwise—one of his most ambitious young detectives was among those killed—and he suspects it was more than coincidence. Working on a hunch, Beck seeks out the girlfriend of the murdered detective, and with her help Beck reconstructs the steps that led to his murder. The police comb the country for the killer, only to find that this attack may be connected to a much older cold-case murder.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39050-9
THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED
The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment building not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck’s colleagues hadn’t been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe since—for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain—a regulation fire truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a forty-six-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: “Martin Beck”?
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39092-9
Forthcoming from Vintage Crime/Black Lizard in fall 2009 …
THE ABOMINABLE MAN
The bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room exposes the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing a horrible blend of strong-arm police work and sheer brutality. Nonetheless, Martin Beck and his colleagues scour Stockholm for the murderer, a demented and deadly rifleman. As the tension builds and a feeling of impending danger grips Beck, his investigation unearths evidence of police corruption. That’s when an even stronger sense of responsibility and something like shame urge him into taking a series of drastic steps, which lead to a shocking disaster.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39090-5
THE LOCKED ROOM
A woman robs a bank. A corpse is found shot through the heart in a room locked from within—no firearm in sight. To the eerily intuitive Inspector Martin Beck, these seemingly disparate cases are facets of the same puzzle, and solving it is of vital importance. Only by finding out what happened in the locked room can Beck—haunted by a near-fatal bullet wound and the demise of a soulless marriage—escape from an airtight prison of his own.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-39049-3
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
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