by Maj Sjowall
“Were you driving so slowly that you actually stopped?”
“No, I didn’t stop.”
“Might it have looked as if you stopped?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that I didn’t stop.”
Martin Beck turned to Allwright.
“Didn’t he say a moment ago that he tried to drive faster when he was late?”
“Yes,” Allwright said. “That’s right.”
Martin Beck turned back to the murderer. Damn. He actually thought that word. Murderer.
“Wouldn’t your visit to the post office have made you late?” he said. “So that you’d be hurrying afterward?”
“I always go to the post office on Wednesdays,” said Folke Bengtsson calmly. “I always send a letter to my mother in Södertälje, for one thing, and there are usually other matters to attend to.”
“Sigbrit Mård did not get into the car?”
“No. She did not.”
It had been a leading question, but not quite in the right direction.
“Did Sigbrit Mård get into your car?”
“No. Absolutely not. I didn’t stop.”
“Another thing. Did Sigbrit Mård wave or signal to you in any other way?”
And then there was another of those painful, incomprehensible pauses.
Bengtsson didn’t answer. He looked Martin Beck in the eye but said nothing.
“Did Sigbrit Mård make any sort of signal when she saw your car?”
Another few moments of their lives elapsed in silence. Martin Beck thought about women, and how those few moments might have been spent.
Once again, Allwright broke the silence. He laughed.
“Why the heck don’t you answer him, Folke?” he said. “Did Sigbrit wave to you or didn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” Bengtsson said.
So softly it was almost inaudible.
“You don’t know?” said Martin Beck.
“No, I don’t know.”
Kollberg gave Martin Beck a resigned look.
He didn’t have to say it.
Give up, Martin.
But there were more questions.
Hard questions.
“I remember when we were sitting at Kristineberg nine years ago,” said Martin Beck.
“So do I.”
“We talked a lot about women. Certain viewpoints were aired. Some of them were rather peculiar.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“They seemed peculiar to me. Do you still have the same ideas about women, Mr. Bengtsson?”
A long silence.
“I try not to think about them.”
Them.
“You know Sigbrit Mård, don’t you, Mr. Bengtsson?”
“She’s one of my steady customers. She’s my closest neighbor. But I try not to think of her as a woman.”
“Try? What do you mean by ‘try,’ Mr. Bengtsson?”
Allwright shook himself. He looked more distressed and unhappy than ever before in their six-day acquaintance. Which was not to say that he looked distressed or unhappy. Just a little less cheerful.
“Why don’t you call him Folke? It sounds so damned formal.”
“I can’t,” said Martin Beck.
It was true. He couldn’t. At the same time, he was glad he could be honest about it.
“I see,” said Allwright. “Well then, there’s nothing to discuss. Truth can be blamed, but it can’t be shamed.”
Kollberg looked a bit startled.
“Local saying,” Allwright said, and laughed.
Folke Bengtsson didn’t laugh.
“In any case, you know Sigbrit Mård. And sometimes you must think of her as a woman. I want to ask you a question, Mr. Bengtsson, and I want an honest answer. What do you think of her? As a woman?”
Silence.
“Answer him,” Allwright said. “Folke, you have to answer him. Be honest.”
“Sometimes I see her as a woman. But not often.”
“And?” said Martin Beck.
“I think she’s …”
“She’s what?”
Folke Bengtsson and Martin Beck looked into each other’s eyes. Bengtsson’s were blue. Martin Beck’s were grayish blue. He remembered that from before.
“Disgusting,” said Folke Bengtsson. “Indecent. Like an animal. She smells. But I see her often, and I’ve only thought that two or three times.”
Insane, Kollberg thought.
“Lay off, Martin.”
“That’s what you wanted me to say,” said Folke Bengtsson. “Isn’t it?”
“Did you deliver the eggs?” said Martin Beck.
“No. I knew she was gone.”
Gone.
They sat in silence for a while.
“You’re tormenting me,” said Folke Bengtsson. “But I don’t dislike you. It’s just your job. My job is selling fish and eggs.”
“Yes,” said Kollberg gloomily. “We’ve tormented you before, and now we’re doing it again. I broke your shoulder once. Unnecessarily.”
“Oh, it mended quite fast. I’m completely recovered, really. Are you going to take me with you now?”
Martin Beck had one last idea.
“Have you ever seen Sigbrit Mård’s ex-husband?”
“Yes. Twice. He drove up in a beige Volvo.”
Allwright made a mysterious face but said nothing.
“Shall we call it a day?” Kollberg said.
Martin Beck stood up.
Allwright took off his shoes and put them back in the plastic bag. And put on his boots.
He was the only one of them with the sense to say, “So long, Folke. Sorry.”
“Goodbye,” Kollberg said.
Martin Beck said nothing.
“You’ll be back, I suppose,” said Folke Bengtsson.
“Depends,” said Allwright.
Outside the gate, the Nikon cameras started clicking like a hailstorm.
There was a voice coming from a car with a shortwave radio antenna.
“The chief of the National Homicide Squad and his right-hand man are just leaving the house of the Roseanna murderer. Local police and dog-handlers are guarding the building. It doesn’t look as if the Roseanna murderer has been arrested yet.”
Boman walked over to Kollberg.
“Well?” he said.
Kollberg shook his head.
“Gunnarsson,” came a sudden, harsh voice. “If you brown-nose the cops we’ll spread your ass all over the front pages. And then you can call yourself Boman till you’re blue in the face. Just wanted you to know.”
“You’ll do it anyway, I imagine,” Boman said.
Martin Beck threw a glance at the reporter who had spoken. A heavy-bellied man with a bushy gray beard and a patronizing manner. His name was Molin, and, of course, he worked for one of the evening tabloids. He seemed to have aged fifteen years since Martin Beck last saw him in 1966. Too much beer, probably.
“He was a buddy of Alf’s,” said Boman impassively.
Allwright cleared his throat.
“The press conference will be postponed for half an hour. We’ll have it in the village hall. I think the library is our best bet.”
11
They had half an hour before the press conference was supposed to begin and they used the time to try and analyze what Folke Bengtsson had actually said. And not said.
“He’s behaving exactly the way he did before,” said Martin Beck. “Gives clear, unambiguous answers to questions he knows we can check.”
“He’s nuts,” said Kollberg dejectedly. “It’s as simple as that.”
“And then sometimes he doesn’t answer at all,” Allwright said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, by and large. He turns funny and evasive whenever you get to a really key question.”
“As an amateur in this area …”
Allwright began, and then burst out laughing.
“What are you howling at?” said Kollberg, slightly i
rritated.
“Well, I don’t mean that I love murder and that sort of thing,” Allwright said. “And your true amateur, after all, is a person who loves something, right? From the Latin amator …”
“If we could skip the philology,” said Kollberg, “it might be worthwhile to compare our impressions.”
“Yes,” said Martin Beck. “I think you’re right. What do you think yourself?”
“Well, if we disregard Bengtsson’s attitude toward women, which as far as I’m concerned shows that he’s demented …”
“Sexually abnormal,” Allwright said.
“Exactly. But if we disregard that …”
“Which can’t be disregarded,” Martin Beck interrupted.
“No. In any case, there were two questions where he really hesitated. First, what was actually said at the post office? And second, did Sigbrit Mård try to thumb a ride with him as he drove past the bus stop?”
“And both of those questions involve the same thing,” said Martin Beck. “Did he give her a ride or didn’t he? If she spoke to him in the post office about anything more than eggs, the obvious thing would have been for her to ask him for a ride home. Or does that sound farfetched?”
“Not at all,” Allwright said. “They are next-door neighbors, after all.”
“But would she really do that?” said Martin Beck. “Sigbrit Mård knew as well as most other people in the village that Bengtsson had been in prison and what it was they convicted him of, namely a sex murder.”
“Well, yes,” Kollberg said. “That’s true enough. But in a way it’s a logical somersault. After all, she was one of his so-called steady customers. Now that must mean that Bengtsson came over to her house every week to deliver whatever it was he delivered.”
“Fish, mostly,” Allwright said. “The prices are low, and the quality’s high. That egg business is mostly just a sideline. He doesn’t have all that many chickens.”
“If she’d really been afraid of him, she never would have had him come to the house like that,” Kollberg said.
“No,” said Allwright. “I don’t think Sigbrit’s afraid of Folke. I’ve never noticed that anyone was afraid of him. On the other hand, everyone does know he’s a little odd and prefers to be left alone.”
“From my experience of Bengtsson, the way he’s acting now is typical,” said Martin Beck. “He’s very wary about the conversation in the post office and what happened at the bus stop. He knows there are people who may have overheard what they were talking about and he also knows there may be witnesses who saw her try to hitch a ride.”
“But he has no reason to lie if she didn’t ask him for a ride,” Allwright said. “And especially not if he didn’t stop at the bus stop.”
“You’ve got to remember that his experience of the police and the courts is pretty damn negative,” Kollberg said.
Martin Beck rubbed the bridge of his nose with the thumb and index finger of his right hand.
“Let’s try to imagine the situation,” he said. “They just happen to find themselves at the post office at the same time. And it just happens that Sigbrit Mård doesn’t have her car. And so she asks him for a ride home, and he says no and makes some kind of excuse. He’s got something else to do, for example. She winds up her business and walks to the bus stop. When she sees Bengtsson coming along in his car, she waves at him to get a ride. He slows down but he doesn’t stop.”
“Or else he does stop and he picks her up,” said Kollberg sadly.
“Right.”
“But as long as we don’t have a body, we don’t have a murder, much less anything to accuse Bengtsson of.”
“But you can’t escape the fact that he’s behaving oddly,” said Martin Beck. “A third thing that struck me was that he didn’t go over there with that dozen eggs. It was only two days later, and since Sigbrit Mård had such irregular working hours, it wouldn’t be so terribly strange for him to assume she was home on Friday even if he didn’t see her on Thursday.”
“The story that she was missing spread awfully fast,” Allwright said. “When she didn’t go to work on Thursday and didn’t answer the phone, there were quite a few people who started wondering where she might be. I heard on Thursday that she was gone, but of course I figured what the hell, a person’s got the right to disappear for a day or two. But still, they wondered at the garage why she didn’t come pick up her car Thursday morning like she’d said. And that was a good question.”
He took out his pocket watch and snapped it open.
“Is it time?” Kollberg asked.
“Pretty close,” Allwright said. “There’s just one little detail I’d like to point out—something you could hardly have noticed.”
“What would that be?” said Kollberg, hanging his head dejectedly.
“Well,” said Allwright, “Folke said that he knew Bertil Mård by sight and that he’d seen him there twice, in a beige Volvo. That doesn’t jibe with what I know. Mård hasn’t been around for a long time. He stopped coming out to see Sigbrit before Folke ever moved into that old house.”
“Yes,” said Martin Beck. “I did notice that. Because Mård told me that he used to come out here to lay her every now and then, but he said it was at least a year and a half since the last time he was here.”
“Which might mean that your ship’s captain is lying,” Kollberg said.
“There were a lot of things in that conversation I didn’t know whether or not to believe.”
“We have to go downstairs now,” Allwright said. “Shall we say anything about Mård?”
“Let’s not,” said Martin Beck.
The press conference was very impromptu and for Martin Beck and Kollberg it was very unpleasant, because they had so little to say.
But it was a necessity. It represented their only chance of being left alone to do their work in peace and quiet.
Allwright was more phlegmatic and good-natured about it all. He still looked almost as if he thought it was fun.
The very first question, with its simple brutality, set the tone.
“Do you think Sigbrit Mård has been murdered?”
Martin Beck felt obliged to answer, “We don’t know.”
“Isn’t your very presence here—you and your colleague—sufficient indication of the fact that you suspect Sigbrit Mård has been murdered?”
“Yes. That’s correct. That suspicion cannot be ruled out.”
“Would it be accurate to say that you have a suspect but no body?”
“I wouldn’t want to put it that way.”
“How would the police like to put it?”
“We don’t know where Mrs. Mård is, and we don’t know what can have happened to her.”
“One person has already been questioned. Is that correct?”
“We have spoken to a number of people in an attempt to determine Mrs. Mård’s whereabouts.”
Martin Beck detested press conferences. The questions were often infuriating and inconsiderate. They were hard to answer, and almost everything was open to misinterpretation.
“Is an arrest imminent?”
“No.”
“But an arrest has been contemplated, is that right?”
“I wouldn’t say that. We don’t even know if any crime has been committed.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that personnel from the National Homicide Squad are here at all?”
“A woman has disappeared. We are trying to find out what’s become of her.”
“I have the impression the police are beating about the proverbial bush.”
“In that case, the press certainly is not,” said Kollberg, to ease the atmosphere a little.
“Our duty as journalists is to supply the public with facts. If the police won’t provide us with information, then we have to get it for ourselves. Why not put your cards on the table?”
“There aren’t any cards to put,” Kollberg said. “We’re looking for Sigbrit Mård. If you want to help us find her, why, be my gu
est.”
“Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that she’s fallen victim to a sex crime?”
“No,” said Kollberg. “It isn’t reasonable to suppose anything as long as we don’t know where she is.”
“I would like to know how the police sum up the situation. Would you mind?”
Kollberg didn’t answer. He looked at the woman who had asked the question, a fair-haired girl of about twenty-five.
“Well?”
Neither Kollberg nor Martin Beck said anything.
Allwright threw them a look and then broke the silence.
“What we know is very simple,” he said. “Mrs. Mård left the post office in Anderslöv around noon on Wednesday, October seventeenth. Since then no one has seen her. There is one witness who believes she saw her at, or on her way to, the bus stop. Period. That’s all we know.”
The reporter who had threatened Boman out at Domme cleared his throat.
“Beck?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Molin.”
“We’ve had about enough of this little farce.”
“What farce?”
“This press conference is a travesty. You’re the chief of National Homicide, but instead of giving us proper answers to our questions, you keep hiding behind your staff and the local police. Now are you planning to arrest Folke Bengtsson or aren’t you?”
“We’ve talked to him. That’s all.”
“And what came out of that conversation? You were in there shooting the breeze for almost two hours.”
“For the time being, we have no suspects.”
Martin Beck was lying, and he didn’t like it. But what was he supposed to say?
He liked the next question even less.
“How does it feel to be a policeman in a society where you have to arrest the same man twice in less than ten years for the same kind of heinous crime?”
Yes, how did it feel? Martin Beck had enough trouble analyzing his relationship to society without the newspapers asking him about it.
His only answer was to shake his head.
Kollberg fielded the rest of the questions, which were uninteresting and farfetched and to which he gave uninteresting and farfetched answers.
The wind was going out of the press conference. Everyone could see that, with the possible exception of Herrgott Allwright.
“Now that you’re all here,” he said suddenly, “from all the major newspapers and the radio and so forth, why don’t you take the opportunity to write a little something about Anderslöv?”