by Maj Sjowall
Then he turned the car around and drove away.
As he drove, it occurred to him that everything had gone well, and that she had got precisely what she deserved.
2
A car stood parked outside an apartment house on Råsundavägen in Solna. It was a black Chrysler with white fenders and the word POLICE in big, white, block letters on the doors, hood, and trunk. Someone who had wanted to describe the vehicle’s occupants even more exactly had used tape on the black-on-white license plate to cover the lower loop of the B in the first three letters, BIG.
The headlights and interior lights were turned off, but the glow from the streetlights glistened dully on shiny uniform buttons and white shoulder belts in the front seat.
Even though it was only 8:30 on a pretty, starlit, not especially chilly October evening, the long street was from time to time utterly deserted. There were lights in the windows of the apartment houses on either side, and from some of them came the cold blue glow of a TV screen.
An occasional passerby glanced curiously at the police car but lost interest quickly when its presence did not seem to be connected with any noticeable activity. The only thing to be seen was two ordinary policemen sitting lazily in their cruiser.
The men inside the car would not have objected to a little activity either. They had been sitting there over an hour, and all that time their attention had been fixed on a doorway across the street and on a lighted window on the first floor to the right of the doorway. But they knew how to wait. They had had lots of experience.
It might have occurred to anyone taking a closer look that these two men didn’t really look like ordinary police constables. There was nothing wrong with their uniforms, which were entirely regulation and included shoulder belts and night sticks and pistols in holsters. What was wrong was that the driver, a corpulent man with a jovial mien and alert eyes, and his companion, thinner and slouching a bit, with one shoulder against the side window, both looked to be about fifty years old. As a rule, patrol cars are manned by young men in good physical condition, and where exceptions to this rule occur, the older man is usually paired with a younger companion.
A patrol car crew whose combined ages exceeded 100 years, as in this case, had to be regarded as a unique phenomenon. But there was an explanation.
The men in the black-and-white Chrysler were merely masquerading as patrolmen. And concealed behind this clever disguise were none other than the chief of the National Homicide Squad, Martin Beck, and his closest colleague, Lennart Kollberg.
The disguise had been Kollberg’s idea, and was based on his knowledge of the man they were out to try and capture. The man’s name was Lindberg, known as The Breadman, and he was a thief. Burglary was his specialty, but he also committed an occasional armed robbery and had even tried his hand at fraud, with less fortunate results. He had spent many years of his life behind bars but was a free man at the moment, having completed his most recent sentence. A freedom that would be short-lived if Martin Beck and Kollberg were successful.
Three weeks earlier, The Breadman had stepped into a jewelry store in downtown Uppsala, drawn a revolver, and forced the owner to hand over gems, watches, and cash to a combined value of nearly 200,000 crowns. Up to this point, that was all comparatively well and good, and The Breadman could have taken his haul and vanished, except for the fact that a sales clerk suddenly appeared from the inner reaches of the store, and The Breadman panicked and let fly a bullet that struck the woman in the forehead and killed her on the spot. The Breadman managed to make his escape, and two hours later, when the Stockholm police went to look for him at his girlfriend’s apartment at Midsommarkransen, they found him in bed. His fiancée maintained that he had a cold and had not left the house in twenty-four hours, and a search produced nothing in the form of rings, jewels, watches, or money. The Breadman was taken in for questioning and confronted with the owner of the store, who was reluctant to make a positive identification because the robber had worn a mask. But the police felt no such reluctance. In the first place, they could assume that The Breadman was broke after his long stay in prison, in addition to which an informer had told them that The Breadman had mentioned a job he was planning “in another city,” and in the second place, there was a witness who, two days before the crime, had seen The Breadman strolling down the street where the jewelry store was located, presumably to reconnoiter. The Breadman denied ever having been in Uppsala and finally had to be released for lack of evidence.
For three weeks now, the police had had The Breadman under constant surveillance, convinced that sooner or later he would visit the place where he had hidden the loot from the holdup. But The Breadman seemed to realize he was being shadowed. On a couple of occasions he had even waved to the plainclothesmen who were watching him, and his single purpose seemed to be to keep them occupied. He clearly had no money. At least he spent none, since his girlfriend had a job and provided him with food and shelter over and above the routine assistance he picked up at the social welfare office once a week.
In the end, Martin Beck decided to attend to the matter himself, and Kollberg hit on the brilliant idea of dressing themselves up as patrolmen. Since The Breadman could spot the most plainly clothed plainclothesman at a great distance but had always taken a contemptuous and nonchalant attitude toward uniformed personnel, the uniform, in this case, ought to be the best disguise. Such was Kollberg’s reasoning, and Martin Beck, with some reservations, agreed with him.
Neither one of them had hoped for any immediate result of this new tactic, and they were pleasantly surprised when The Breadman jumped into a taxi as soon as he realized he was no longer being watched and had himself brought to this address on Råsundavagen. The very fact that he had taken a cab seemed to indicate a certain purposefulness, and they were convinced that something was up. If they could collar him with the stolen goods and maybe even the murder weapon in his possession, that would definitely link him to the crime, and the case would be closed as far as they were concerned.
The Breadman had now been in the building for an hour and a half. They had had a glimpse of him in the window to the right of the doorway an hour earlier, but nothing had happened since then.
Kollberg was starting to get hungry. He was often hungry, and he often talked about losing weight. Every now and then he would go on some new diet, but he generally gave up pretty quickly. He was at least forty pounds overweight, but he worked out regularly and was in good physical condition. When occasion demanded, he was astonishingly quick and lithe for the size of his body and his age, which was nearly fifty.
“It’s a hell of a long time since I had anything in my belly,” Kollberg said.
Martin Beck didn’t answer. He wasn’t hungry, but he had a sudden longing for a cigarette. He had pretty much stopped smoking two years before, after a serious gunshot wound in the chest.
“A man my size really needs a little more than one hard-boiled egg a day,” Kollberg went on.
If you didn’t eat so much you wouldn’t be that size and you wouldn’t need to eat so much, Martin Beck thought, but he said nothing. Kollberg was his best friend, and it was a touchy subject. He didn’t want to hurt his feelings and he knew Kollberg was in an especially bad mood whenever he was hungry. He also knew that Kollberg had urged his wife to keep him on a reducing diet that consisted exclusively of hard-boiled eggs. The diet was not a great success, however, since breakfast was the only meal he ate at home. He ate his other meals out, or at the police canteen, and they did not consist of hard-boiled eggs—Martin Beck could vouch for that.
Kollberg nodded in the direction of a brightly lit pastry shop half a block away.
“I don’t suppose you’d …”
Martin Beck opened the door on the curb side and put out one foot.
“Sure. What do you want? Danish?”
“Yes, and a mazarin,” Kollberg said.
Martin Beck came back with a bag of pastry, and they sat quietly and watched the building where
The Breadman was while Kollberg ate, dribbling crumbs all over his jump suit. When he was done eating, he pushed the seat back one more notch and loosened his shoulder belt.
“What have you got in that holster?” Martin Beck asked.
Kollberg unbuttoned the holster and handed him the weapon. It was a toy pistol of Italian manufacture, well-made and massive and almost as heavy as Martin Beck’s own Walther, but incapable of firing anything but caps.
“Nice,” said Martin Beck. “Wish I’d had one like that when I was a kid.”
It was common knowledge on the force that Lennart Kollberg refused to carry arms. Most people were under the impression that his refusal was based on some kind of pacifist principles and that he wanted to set a good example, since he was the police department’s most enthusiastic advocate of eliminating weapons altogether under normal circumstances.
And all of that was true, but it was only half the truth. Martin Beck was one of the few people who knew of the primary reason for Kollberg’s stand.
Lennart Kollberg had once shot and killed a man. It had happened more than twenty years before, but Kollberg had never been able to forget, and it was a good many years now since he had carried a weapon, even on critical and dangerous assignments.
The incident took place in August 1952, while Kollberg was attached to the second Söder precinct in Stockholm. Late one evening, there was an alarm from Långholm Prison, where three armed men had attempted to free a prisoner and had shot and wounded one of the guards. By the time the emergency squad with Kollberg reached the prison, the men had smashed their car into a railing up on Väster Bridge while trying to get away, and one of the men had been captured. The other two had managed to escape by running into Långholm Park on the other side of the bridge abutment. Both of them were thought to be armed, and since Kollberg was considered a good shot, he was included in the group that was sent into the park to try and surround the men.
With his pistol in hand, he had climbed down toward the water and then followed the shore away from the glow of the lights up on the bridge, listening and peering into the darkness. After a while, he stopped on a smooth granite outcropping that projected out into the bay and bent over and dipped one hand in the water, which felt warm and soft. When he straightened up again, a shot rang out, and he felt the bullet graze the sleeve of his coat before it hit the water several yards behind him. The man who fired it had been somewhere in the darkness among the bushes on the slope above him. Kollberg immediately threw himself flat on his face and squirmed into the protective vegetation along the shore. Then he started to crawl up toward a boulder that loomed over the spot where he thought the shot had come from. And sure enough, when he reached the huge rock he could see the man outlined against the light, open water of the bay. He was only fifty or sixty feet away. He was turned halfway toward Kollberg, holding his pistol ready in his raised hand and moving his head slowly from side to side. Beside him was the steep slope down into Riddar Bay.
Kollberg aimed carefully for the man’s right hand. Just as his finger squeezed off the shot, someone suddenly appeared behind his target and threw himself toward the man’s arm and Kollberg’s bullet and then just as suddenly vanished again down the hillside.
Kollberg did not immediately realize what had happened. The man started running, and Kollberg shot again and this time hit him in the knee. Then he walked over and looked down the hill.
Down at the edge of the water lay the man he had killed. A young policeman from his own precinct. They had often been on duty together and always got along unusually well.
The story was hushed up, and Kollberg’s name was never even mentioned in connection with it. Officially, the young policeman died of an accidental bullet wound, a wild shot from nowhere, while pursuing a dangerous criminal. Kollberg’s chief gave him a little lecture in which he warned him against brooding and self-reproach and closed by pointing out that Charles XII himself had once shot to death his head groom and close friend through carelessness and inadvertence and that consequently it was the sort of accident that could happen to the best of men. And that was supposed to be the end of it. But Kollberg never really recovered from the shock, and for many years now, as a result, he always carried a cap pistol whenever he needed to appear to be armed.
Neither Kollberg nor Martin Beck thought about any of this as they sat in the squad car waiting for The Breadman to show himself.
Kollberg yawned and squirmed in his seat. It was uncomfortable sitting behind the wheel, and the uniform he had on was too tight. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn one, but it was definitely a long time ago. He had borrowed the one he was wearing, and even though it was small, it was not nearly as tight as his own old uniform would have been, which was hanging on a hook in a closet at home.
He glanced at Martin Beck, who had sunk deeper into the seat and was staring out through the windshield.
Neither one of them said anything. They had known each other for a long time; they had been together on the job and off for many years and had no need to talk just for the sake of talking. They had spent innumerable evenings this same way—in a car on some dark street, waiting.
Since he became chief of the National Homicide Squad, Martin Beck did not actually need to do much trailing and surveillance—he had a staff to attend to that. But he often did it anyway, even though that kind of assignment was usually deadly dull. He didn’t want to lose touch with this side of the job simply because he’d been made chief and had to spend more and more of his time dealing with all the troublesome demands made by a growing bureaucracy. Even if the one did not, unfortunately, preclude the other, he preferred sitting and yawning in a squad car with Kollberg to sitting and trying not to yawn in a meeting with the National Police Commissioner.
Martin Beck liked neither the bureaucracy, the meetings, nor the National Chief. But he liked Kollberg very much and had a hard time picturing this job without him. For a long time now, Kollberg had been expressing an occasional desire to leave the police force, but recently he had seemed more and more determined to carry out this impulse. Martin Beck wanted neither to encourage nor discourage him. He knew that Kollberg’s feeling of solidarity with the police force had come to be virtually nonexistent and that his conscience bothered him more and more. He also knew it would be very hard for him to get a satisfying and roughly equivalent job. In a time of high unemployment, when young people in particular, but even university graduates and well-trained professionals of every description, were going without work, the prospects for a fifty-year-old former policeman were not especially bright. For purely selfish reasons, he wanted Kollberg to stay on, of course, but Martin Beck was not a particularly selfish person, and the thought of trying to influence Kollberg’s decision had never crossed his mind.
Kollberg yawned again.
“Lack of oxygen,” he said and rolled down the window. “We were lucky to have been patrolmen back in the days when cops still used their feet to walk on and not just to kick people with. You can get claustrophobia sitting in here like this.”
Martin Beck nodded. He too disliked the feeling of being shut in.
Both Martin Beck and Kollberg had begun their careers as policemen in Stockholm in the mid-Forties. Martin Beck had worn down the pavements in Norrmalm, and Kollberg had trudged the narrow alleyways of the Old City. They hadn’t known one another in those days, but their memories from that time were by and large the same.
It got to be 9:30. The pastry shop closed, and the lights started going out in many of the windows down the street. The lights were still on in the apartment where The Breadman was visiting.
Suddenly the door opened across the street, and The Breadman stepped out onto the sidewalk. He had his hands in the pockets of his coat and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
Kollberg put his hands on the steering wheel and Martin Beck sat up in his seat.
The Breadman stood quietly outside the doorway, calmly smoking his cigarette.
“He doesn’t have any bag with him,” Kollberg said.
“He might have it in his pockets,” Martin Beck said.
“Or else he’s sold it. We’ll have to check on who he was visiting.”
Several minutes passed. Nothing happened. The Breadman gazed up at the starry sky and seemed to be enjoying the evening air.
“He’s waiting for a taxi,” said Martin Beck.
“Seems to be taking a hell of a long time,” Kollberg said.
The Breadman took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it out into the street. Then he turned up his coat collar, stuck his hands back into his pockets, and started across the street toward the police car.
“He’s coming over here,” Martin Beck said. “Damn. What do we do? Take him in?”
“Yes,” Kollberg said.
The Breadman walked slowly over to the car, leaned down, looked at Kollberg through the side window and started to laugh. Then he walked around behind the trunk and up onto the sidewalk. He opened the door to the front seat where Martin Beck was sitting, leaned over, and burst into a roar of laughter.
Martin Beck and Kollberg sat quietly and let him laugh, for the simple reason that they didn’t know what else to do.
The Breadman finally recovered somewhat from his paroxysms.
“Well, now,” he said, “have you finally been demoted? Or is this some kind of a costume party?”
Martin Beck sighed and climbed out of the car. He opened the door to the back seat.
“In you go, Lindberg,” he said. “We’ll give you a lift to Västberga.”
“Good enough,” said The Breadman good-naturedly. “That’s closer to home.”
On the way in to Södra police station, The Breadman told them he’d been visiting his brother in Råsunda, which was quickly confirmed by a squad car despatched to the spot. There were no weapons, money, or stolen goods in the apartment. The Breadman himself was carrying twenty-seven crowns.