Cop Killer

by Maj Sjowall

  Kvällsposten was not so restrained. The front page carried a two-column picture of a twenty-year-old Sigbrit Mård with a pony tail and big white earrings. There were additional pictures inside the paper—Sigbrit Mård’s house and the house of the Roseanna murderer, the bus stop where she was last seen, an eight-year-old shot of Folke Bengtsson in a police car looking frightened, and a picture of Martin Beck with his mouth open and his hair ruffled.

  The story made a great deal of the fact that Sigbrit Mård lived next door to a sex murderer, and there was a special article recounting the Roseanna case of nine years before. There were comments from a couple of Anderslöv residents, giving their opinions of the missing woman (“a bright, pleasant girl, who always had a smile and a friendly word for everyone”) and of Folke Bengtsson (“an odd one, a loner, he put people off”). Mrs. Signe Persson, “perhaps the next to the last person to see Mrs. Mård alive,” gave a lively description of how she had seen her standing at the bus stop and then “presumably” climb into Bengtsson’s car.

  There was also a special box about Martin Beck, “the well-known detective and Chief of the National Homicide Squad,” but when Martin Beck reached the words “Sweden’s Maigret,” he threw down the newspaper in the empty chair beside him.

  “Ugh,” he said with emphasis and looked around for the waitress.

  “You can say that again,” Kollberg said. “And now we’ll have Expressen and Aflonbladet and the whole lot, and they’re all going to pounce on you wanting statements.”

  “I’m not planning to make any statements,” said Martin Beck. “But eventually I suppose we’ll have to hold some kind of press conference.”

  The waitress came, and they ordered Skånsk beef stew with beets and pickles.

  They ate in silence. Kollberg finished first, as he always did. He wiped his mouth and looked around the room, which by now was almost empty.

  Besides himself and Martin Beck, there was only one other person left—a man sitting at a table by the door to the kitchen.

  There was a bottle of mineral water and a glass on the table in front of him. The man was smoking a pipe and flipping through a newspaper, and every now and then he threw a glance at the two detectives.

  Kollberg had a vague feeling that he recognized him and studied him surreptitiously.

  He looked to be in his forties and had lots of dark blond hair, so long in the back that it hung down over the collar of his light-brown suede jacket. He was wearing steel-rimmed glasses and was smooth-shaven, except for his thick, curly sideburns. His face was thin, with prominent cheekbones, and the lines around his mouth were bitter, or possibly cynical. He wrinkled his brow as he scraped out his pipe into the ashtray in front of him.

  He had long, sinewy fingers.

  All of a sudden he lifted his head and looked straight into Kollberg’s eyes. His gaze was calm and steady and very blue. Kollberg didn’t have time to look away, and for a moment they stared at each other.

  Martin Beck pushed away his plate and emptied his glass of beer.

  As he set down the glass, the man folded his newspaper, stood up, and walked over to their table.

  “I don’t know if you recognize me,” he said.

  Martin Beck looked at the man searchingly and shook his head.

  Kollberg waited.

  “Åke Gunnarsson. Although now my name is Boman.”

  They remembered him very well. Six years earlier he had killed a man in a fight—a fellow reporter his own age named Alf Matsson. They had both been drunk. Matsson had given him plenty of provocation, and the death could almost be characterized as accidental. When Gunnarsson recovered from the immediate shock, he had acted coldly and intelligently to cover the traces of what he had done. Martin Beck had been in charge of the investigation, and, among other things, had spent a week in Budapest before picking up Gunnarsson’s trail. Kollberg had also been present at the arrest, which had not seemed especially gratifying to either one of them. They had developed a certain sympathy for Gunnarsson, whom they regarded as the victim of unfortunate circumstances rather than as a cold-blooded murderer.

  Gunnarsson had had a beard and short hair in those days and had been rather fat.

  “Sit down,” said Martin Beck, moving the newspaper off the chair.

  “Thank you,” the man said, and sat down.

  “You’ve changed,” Kollberg said. “Lost weight, for one thing.”

  “It wasn’t intentional. But for that matter I’ve deliberately tried to alter my appearance, and I suppose I can congratulate myself on the fact that neither of you recognized me. Although maybe you wouldn’t have recognized me anyway.”

  “Why ‘Boman’?” Kollberg wondered.

  “It was my mother’s name before she married. It seemed the best thing to do. Now I’m used to it, and I’ve almost forgotten my old name. I’d be grateful if you’d forget it too.”

  “Okay, Boman,” Kollberg said.

  Martin Beck thought about the curious coincidence that had suddenly brought him and Kollberg and two people who were the cause of two of their most difficult cases together again after so many years, in a place like Anderslöv.

  “What are you doing in Anderslöv?” he asked. “Do you live here?”

  “No,” said Åke Boman. “As a matter of fact, I’m here to try and get an interview with you. I live in Trelleborg and I work for Trelleborgs Allehanda. I wrote that piece on the front page that you were reading a little while ago.”

  “Didn’t you write about cars?” Kollberg said.

  “Yes, but on a provincial paper you have to do a little of everything. I was lucky to get this job. It was my parole officer who fixed it up.”

  The waitress came over and cleared the table.

  “Shall we have some coffee?” Kollberg said.

  “Okay,” said Åke Boman and Martin Beck together.

  “Maybe you’d like a cognac?”

  Åke Boman shook his head, and the waitress went out to the kitchen.

  “Don’t drink on the job?” said Kollberg.

  “I don’t drink at all,” said Åke Boman. “Not since …”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but took out a can of Capstan and started to fill his pipe.

  “How long have you been working on the paper?” asked Martin Beck.

  “A year and a half now. I was sentenced to six years, as you may know. Second-degree murder. I spent three years in prison and then I got an automatic reduction in sentence and a parole. Those first few months on the outside were God-awful. Almost worse than prison, and that was indescribable. I didn’t know where to go. All I knew for sure was that I had to stay away from Stockholm. Partly because so many people knew me up there, and partly because the whole merry-go-round would have started again, with the booze and the bars … well, you know. I eventually got a job in a garage in Trelleborg and a parole officer who was marvelous. She convinced me to start writing again, and then I got this job. There’s only the editor and a couple of other people in town who know … I’ve been damned lucky, as a matter of fact.”

  But he did not look particularly glad or happy.

  They drank their coffee in silence for a while.

  “Is that your Singer parked out there?” Kollberg asked.

  Åke Boman beamed with pride as he answered.

  “Yes, that was a piece of good luck too. It was standing in the barn on an estate up near Önnestad where I was on an assignment last summer. The man who owned it had been dead for a year, and his widow had just let it sit.”

  He puffed on his pipe.

  “It looked pretty scruffy, but that was easily fixed. I bought it on the spot. I do a little writing on the side now and then—special articles for sportscar magazines and a short story once in a while—so I had a little money put away.”

  “Are you still on parole?” asked Martin Beck.

  “No, not since September,” said Åke Boman. “But I still see my parole officer occasionally. And her family. She has me to din
ner every now and then. You know, I’m a bachelor, and she figures I can’t cook for myself.”

  Martin Beck remembered a photograph he had seen in Boman’s apartment six years before. A young, blond woman he had been planning to marry.

  Åke Boman puffed on his pipe and stared thoughtfully at Martin Beck.

  “The fact is, the paper sent me here to pump you about this disappearance,” he said apologetically. “And here I’ve been sitting talking about myself the whole time.”

  “We don’t have much to add to what you’ve already printed,” said Martin Beck. “You did speak to Herrgott Allwright, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but the very fact that you two are here at all must mean you suspect something,” said Åke Boman. “Seriously now, do you think Folke Bengtsson has murdered her?”

  “We don’t think anything yet,” said Martin Beck. “We haven’t even talked to Bengtsson. The only thing we know for sure is that Sigbrit Mård hasn’t been home since the seventeenth of October, and that no one seems to know where she is.”

  “You’ve read the evening papers,” said Åke Boman.

  “Yes, but they’ll have to be responsible for their own speculations,” Kollberg said. “You seem to work for a decent newspaper, in any case.”

  “We’re thinking of holding a press conference by and by,” said Martin Beck. “It would be pointless at the moment, because there still isn’t anything to say. But if you can take it easy for a while, I’ll call and let you know as soon as there’s anything new. Is that okay?”

  “Okay,” said Åke Boman.

  They both had the feeling they owed him something. What it was, and why, they didn’t know.

  9

  Martin Beck couldn’t stop thinking about Bertil Mård’s hands, and after lunch he decided to go down to Trelleborg and send a telex query on Mård to Interpol in Paris.

  Most people, even most policemen, are under the impression that Interpol is a rather ineffective international agency, unwieldy and bureaucratic, primarily a facade, behind which there is essentially nothing to be found.

  The case of Bertil Mård gave the lie to all such notions.

  Martin Beck had not been able to think up any clever questions. He merely asked if Mård had ever been booked anywhere, and if so, what for.

  He had his answer within six hours, a fairly detailed answer at that.

  They sat in Allwright’s apartment that same evening and pondered the document, not without a certain astonishment.

  They were having sandwiches and beer.

  At Allwright’s, they still had a chance of being left more or less in peace, since the police station was, as usual, closed at this time of day.

  An automatic answering device referred all telephone calls to the police in Trelleborg, where switchboard duty was no longer much of a pleasure.

  The inn was full of reporters.

  For safety’s sake, Allwright had pulled the jack on his private phone.

  They studied the telex tape.

  The police in Trinidad-Tobago reported that Bertil Mård had been arrested on February 6, 1965, for beating to death an oiler of Brazilian nationality. He was brought before a police court that same day and found guilty of disturbing the peace and of what the report called “justifiable homicide,” which was not a punishable offense in Trinidad-Tobago. For disturbing the peace, however, he was fined four pounds. The oiler had made advances to a woman in Mård’s company and was thus considered to have caused the incident himself. Mård had left the country the following day.

  “Fifty crowns,” Kollberg said. “That’s pretty cheap for killing a man.”

  “ ‘Justifiable homicide,’ ” Allwright said. “How do you say that in Swedish? Of course, we have the right of self-defense. That’s the same thing in principle. But it’s not a translation.”

  “It’s untranslatable,” said Martin Beck.

  “There is no such concept,” Kollberg said.

  “You’re wrong about that,” Allwright said, and laughed. “They’ve got it in the States, believe you me. Just let a policeman shoot somebody, and it’s always ‘justifiable homicide.’ Legitimate murder, or whatever we’d call it in Swedish. It happens every day.”

  There was a dead silence in the room.

  Kollberg pushed away the plate with his half-eaten sandwich in distaste.

  His eyes were vacant, and he sank down on his chair with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands hanging between his knees.

  “What happened?” Allwright said.

  “You laughed in the wrong place,” said Martin Beck.

  Allwright didn’t understand what he had done wrong, but he did realize that he shouldn’t say anything more. Not right away, in any case.

  Martin Beck kept a close and anxious eye on his old friend, but he too was silent.

  Allwright finished his cigarette. He lit another one and smoked it too. Then he did nothing at all for a while.

  Martin Beck continued to look at Kollberg.

  At long last, Kollberg shrugged his fleshy shoulders and straightened up.

  “Sorry, Herrgott,” he said. “I get like that sometimes. It’s a little bit like epilepsy. I just can’t help it.”

  He took a big drink from his glass of beer and wiped away the foam with the back of his hand.

  “Now where were we?” he said. “Mård’s got a rotten alibi, or, rather, no alibi at all. And he has a history of violence. But does he have a motive?”

  “Jealousy,” said Martin Beck.

  “Of whom?”

  “Bertil Mård could be jealous of the cat,” Allwright said, and laughed experimentally. “And so, sure enough, they didn’t have a cat.”

  “Not much to go on,” Kollberg said.

  “Whoops,” said Allwright, as Timmy took the ham sandwich out of his hand and gulped it down.

  Martin Beck burst out laughing.

  “Down, Timmy!” Allwright said. “What a police dog! It’s a world’s record. Did you see that? He just walked up and swiped my sandwich. Are you a soccer fan, Lennart?”

  “No,” said Kollberg, laughing so hard his stomach was bouncing up and down.

  “Well, then I’ll skip that story,” Allwright said. “And so that brings us to Folke.”

  “Folke Bengtsson has no alibi at all and has a history of violence. But does he have a motive?”

  “The motive would be that he’s not all there,” Allwright said.

  “In the case of the murder of Roseanna McGraw, the motive was very deep-rooted and complex,” said Martin Beck.

  “Nonsense, Martin,” Kollberg said. “There’s something you and I have never discussed, but I’ve thought about a lot. You’re convinced that Folke Bengtsson was guilty. I’m convinced of it too. But what sort of proof did we have? He confessed to you, of course, after I’d broken his arm, and after we’d enticed him like mad and trapped him. In the courtroom, he denied it. The only thing we could really prove was that he tried to rape, or possibly—but remember, possibly—strangle an undercover policewoman we had instructed to entice and seduce him, and who was practically naked when he entered her apartment. I’ve always thought that in a society of laws, Folke Bengtsson would never have been convicted of the Roseanna murder. The evidence just wasn’t good enough. Moreover, he was a mental case, but they didn’t send him to a hospital, they put him in prison.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Don’t you see? You and I and several other people, the judge who convicted him for one, were convinced that he was a murderer, but we didn’t have any real proof. There’s one hell of a difference.”

  “He had her sunglasses, among other things.”

  “A good defense lawyer would have made hash out of our evidence. And a real court would have dismissed the case. In a society of laws …”

  Kollberg stopped.

  “Maybe Trinidad-Tobago is a society of laws,” Allwright said.

  “No doubt,” Kollberg said.

  “In any eve
nt, tomorrow we have to talk to Folke Bengtsson,” said Martin Beck, as if to change the subject to something more pleasant.

  “Yes,” Allwright said. “I guess it’s about time.”

  “I think we’ll have to hold some kind of press conference too,” Kollberg said. “However dreadful that may sound.”

  Martin Beck nodded gloomily.

  “Press conference,” Allwright said. “I’ve never held one of those before. And how are we going to handle Folke? Shall I ask him to come in here?”

  “I’d rather talk to him in his own home,” said Martin Beck.

  “And drive out there with a trail of reporters behind us?” Kollberg said.

  “Yes, well, I guess it can’t be avoided,” said Martin Beck.

  “Do we hold the press conference before or after?”

  “After, I’d say.”

  “And how do we know when Bengtsson will decide to be at home?” Kollberg said.

  “I can tell you that,” said Allwright. “He leaves home at six in the morning and comes back at one in the afternoon. Then he goes out in the evening again and sets out his nets. He sticks to a schedule.”

  “Okay, then we’ll drive out there at one-fifteen,” Kollberg said. “And we’ll talk to the papers at three o’clock.”

  Allwright appeared to be looking forward to an interesting and downright exciting day.

  Martin Beck and Kollberg thought they knew better.

  “You think we dare sneak over and go to bed?” said Kollberg, yawning.

  “The restaurant’s been closed for hours,” said Martin Beck optimistically. “The ones who are still awake are probably having a card game somewhere.”