Cop Killer

by Maj Sjowall

  He put the papers on the tabletop and unfolded them one by one. They were mostly receipts, plus a few unpaid bills, all of quite recent date.

  At the bottom of the pile were two pieces of paper of an entirely different nature. A couple of short letters or messages, handwritten on thin, lined, light-blue paper.

  The first one read as follows.

  Dearest, don’t wait for me. Sissy’s brother is in town, and I can’t possibly get away. Call you later this evening if I can. Love and kisses, Clark.

  Martin Beck read the brief message twice. The handwriting slanted slightly forward, but was smooth and easy to read, almost like printing.

  Then he looked at the other slip of paper.

  Dearest Sigge, Can you ever forgive me? I wasn’t myself, and I didn’t mean what I said. You must come on Thursday so I can make amends. I long for you, I love you, Clark.

  He took the two sheets of paper and went in to Kollberg, who was standing by the secretary studying a couple of bank books.

  “She didn’t have much money in the bank,” he said without turning around. “Made deposits and withdrawals one right after the other. Like when you’re trying to save money but can’t. Before the divorce, she was in much better shape, financially. What have you got there?”

  Martin Beck put the two sheets of paper on the secretary in front of Kollberg.

  “Love letters, I think.”

  Kollberg read them.

  “It sure looks that way. Maybe she’s run off with this fellow Clark.”

  Martin Beck brought out the pocket almanac and showed it to Kollberg, who whistled.

  “A lover with regular habits. I wonder why Thursday especially.”

  “Maybe he’s got a job where he can only get away on Thursdays,” said Martin Beck.

  “Drives a beer truck,” Kollberg said. “He delivers beer to the pub every Thursday—something like that.”

  “Funny Herrgott didn’t know about it.”

  Martin Beck took an empty envelope from the drawer in the sewing table, put the almanac and the two letters into it, and put the envelope in his back pocket.

  “Are you finished here?” he said.

  Kollberg looked around.

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s nothing of much interest. Tax forms, birth certificate, some uninteresting letters, receipts, and so on.”

  He put everything back where it belonged.

  “Shall we go?” he said.

  As they drove down the road they saw a long line of cars parked outside Folke Bengtsson’s place. It was 9:30, and apparently the reporters were up and about.

  Kollberg stepped on the gas and drove quickly past the crowd of journalists and out onto the highway. They had time to notice that another couple of police cars were parked in the yard beside the house and that the yard had been roped off.

  On the way in to Anderslöv, they sat for a long time without saying anything.

  Finally Martin Beck broke the silence.

  “It said, ‘You must come’ in one of those letters,” he said. “That must mean they didn’t meet at her place.”

  “We’ll talk to Herrgott,” said Kollberg confidently. “Maybe he’ll know something.”

  Herrgott Allwright was very surprised at Martin Beck’s discovery.

  He knew of no one named Clark.

  There was no one by that name in all of Anderslöv. Wait. There was one, but he was seven years old and had just started school.

  And as far as he knew, Sigbrit worked at the pastry shop in Trelleborg on Thursday evenings.

  She didn’t usually get home before eleven o’clock or so when she worked evenings.

  “He calls her Sigge,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone call her that. Sigge. It sounds silly. Anyway, it’s a boy’s name and doesn’t fit a woman like Sigbrit at all.”

  He stared at the light-blue sheets of paper and scratched the back of his neck. Then he chuckled.

  “What if she’s run off with her lover?” he said. “In that case, they can dig to their hearts’ content, and Folke can turn his garden into a potato patch.”

  14

  There was a gentle, southerly wind, and the little bay lay smooth and shiny in the shelter of the land, but farther out in the lake, quick breezes drew dark veins across the calm surface of the water. A raw chill rose from the marshy ground wherever the slanting rays of the afternoon sun did not reach, and a light mist hung over the reeds along the shore.

  It was November 11, a Sunday, and the sky continued blue and cloudless. The time was 1:30. The sun would warm for another couple of hours before dusk and the chill of evening took over.

  A group of people came walking along the path that followed the southwest shore of the lake. Six women, five men, and two boys about eight to ten years old. They were all wearing rubber boots with their pants tucked into the tops, and most of them were carrying knapsacks or shoulder bags. They walked quickly and in single file, for the path forced its way between tall clumps of yellow reeds and a thicket of alder and hazel, and there was no room to walk two abreast. They all kept their eyes on the ground, which was a churned up mess of slippery black mud.

  When they had walked this way for some distance, the thicket came to an end, and the path continued on along a fence of rotting posts and rusty barbed wire. On the other side of the fence was a fallow field, and beyond the field was a dense spruce forest.

  The man at the head of the line stopped and surveyed the landscape with a squint. He was slim and wiry and fairly short and looked more like a boy than a fifty-year-old man. His face was tanned, and his brown hair was ruffled.

  It took a while for the others to gather around him.

  A tall man with a salt-and-pepper beard brought up the rear with long, leisurely strides. He had his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, and he looked at the smaller man with a calm, jocular gaze.

  “What are you up to now? Is it time to change course?”

  “I thought we might cut across the field to those woods over there,” said the man who seemed to be leading the expedition.

  “But that takes us away from the lake,” said one of the women.

  She had thrown herself down on a rock, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette.

  “I mean, the whole idea is to walk around the lake,” she went on. “But you’re always trying to head us off in the wrong direction. Anyway, I’m hungry. Aren’t we going to eat pretty soon?”

  The others agreed. They were all hungry and wanted to lighten the loads in their knapsacks.

  “We’ll rest when we get across the field,” said their leader.

  He picked up the smaller of the two boys and put him down again on the other side of the fence. Then he climbed over it himself and set off across the grassy clumps with long strides.

  When they reached the spruce woods they found the trees so close together that not even the children could get through easily. There followed a period of discussion, but since they couldn’t agree on which way to go, the leader took the children and two of the women and headed off to the right along the woods, while the others, with the tall man in the lead, set off to the left in the direction of the lake.

  Fifteen minutes later, the two groups met on the other side of the woods and started looking around for a good place to stop and eat.

  This time they were all in agreement. They relieved themselves of their knapsacks and shoulder bags in a sunny little glade between a windfall and a stack of beech logs, and when one of the men, who was considered to be an expert on campfires, had selected a likely spot for the purpose, everyone began gathering fuel.

  There were plenty of dry twigs and branches in the windfall, and before long they were making themselves comfortable around a lively, crackling blaze. The rest was well-earned, for they had been walking over rather difficult terrain for three hours, almost without a break.

  Thermos bottles, packets of sandwiches, and small flasks appeared, and they didn’t permit the food to silence them. The conve
rsation glided from one subject to another, and the mood was cheerful and relaxed.

  A man in a green jacket and a knit cap stood warming his feet at the fire.

  “This lake is too big,” he said. “Let’s take a smaller one next Sunday. Where there aren’t quite so many muddy fields.”

  He paused to empty a little silver cup of rowanberry aquavit. Then he looked at the sky.

  “Lord knows if we’ll make it around before it gets dark,” he said.

  The fire began to die down and they speared sausages on sharp sticks and grilled them over the coals.

  The two boys chased each other around the woodpile.

  The botanist in the group had wandered off toward the woods looking for mushrooms. He had already gathered several handfuls of Marasmius scorodonius in the pocket of his parka, and he had a plastic bag full of muskmadder which, when dry, would spread its pleasant odor through his house.

  The spruce woods were thinner on this side, and he peered in among the tree trunks and over the needle-strewn ground with a practiced eye.

  He was not really expecting to find anything. It was late in the season, and the fall, like the summer, had been dry and warm.

  Several yards into the woods he caught sight of what appeared to be a large and beautiful specimen of a parasol mushroom. He put down his bag of muskmadder on a mossy stone at the edge of the woods and started to push his way through the trees. He bent the sprawling branches aside and tried to keep his eye on the place where the mushroom stood.

  Suddenly he stepped on soft moss that gave way beneath his weight, and his right foot sank up to the bootleg in what felt like a quagmire.

  That’s odd, he thought.

  There shouldn’t be any quagmire here.

  He moved his other foot to a broken spruce branch on what he thought was solid ground. But the branch broke, and his boot slid down into the mud, though it sank only a few inches before striking solid support.

  He pulled his right foot out of the ooze, which sucked at his boot and almost pulled it off. Then keeping his weight on his left foot, he took a giant step up onto solid ground.

  He had forgotten the mushroom, and he turned around to look at this curious, moss-covered mudhole.

  He saw black mud bubbling up into the holes left by his feet.

  And then he noticed something else, rising slowly out of the mire and moss and spruce twigs about a yard from the depression where his left boot had been.

  He stood very still and wondered what it might be.

  The object took shape before his eyes, and it took a fraction of a second for his brain to register the fact that what he saw was a human hand.

  And then he screamed.

  15

  By Monday, November 12, everything had changed.

  Sigbrit Mård was no longer missing. She was a rather badly decomposed corpse in a mud puddle in the woods. Everyone knew where she was, and she had been found roughly where a lot of people had expected to find her. She was beyond all good and evil, and had been so for almost four weeks.

  Folke Bengtsson was arraigned that morning. He had not confessed to anything, but his own attitude and the vague testimony of the witnesses carried a lot of weight, and when his lawyer objected to the arraignment it was more of a gesture than a serious protest.

  Martin Beck and the lawyer had even met and exchanged a few remarks. It was not a very profound conversation, but the lawyer did make one comment with which Martin Beck could agree wholeheartedly.

  “I don’t understand him,” he said.

  Folke Bengtsson was certainly not easy to understand. Martin Beck had talked to him on Friday—three hours in the morning and the same after lunch. It had not been a fruitful exchange. Both parties sank back in their chairs for long periods and repeated phrases they had already used only minutes earlier.

  On Saturday, it had been Kollberg’s turn. He had set to work with even less enthusiasm than Martin Beck, with commensurate results.

  That is, none at all.

  Virtually the whole interrogation was hung up on the same points. First and foremost, what had taken place in the post office.

  “You did speak to each other in the post office, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, she accosted me.”

  “Accosted you?”

  “She came over to me and asked me if I would have any eggs on Friday?”

  “Would you really call that ‘accosting’ someone?”

  “What else would you call it?”

  “Didn’t she ask about anything else?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Didn’t she want a ride home?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  And then, of course, there was the famous moment at the bus stop.

  “Did Sigbrit Mård make any sort of sign? Did she wave or anything?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And she didn’t get into your car?”

  “No. She did not.”

  Personally, Martin Beck was inclined to think that Herrgott was right. She had probably asked him for a ride home, and he had been evasive. It also seemed likely that she actually had made some sort of hitchhiking gesture as he drove by the bus stop a few minutes later.

  The trouble was that the witnesses were so poor.

  Allwright had now spoken to everyone who had been in the post office at the time in question. Four people could attest to the fact that Sigbrit Mård and Folke Bengtsson had spoken to one another, but no one had heard what they said.

  But, of course, Folke Bengtsson couldn’t know that.

  The situation was similar with regard to the infamous Signe Persson and what she had seen or not seen at the bus stop.

  Only one thing was absolutely certain. Sigbrit Mård was dead, and whoever killed her had done their very best to hide the body.

  “She could have been here all winter without ever being found,” Allwright said. “If it hadn’t been for those oddballs who hike around lakes.”

  They were standing at the scene of the crime—if, in fact, it was the scene of the crime—watching some policemen who were trying to secure clues within the roped-off area.

  Another certain fact was that Folke Bengtsson’s yard had been dug up to no purpose, unless it might make his garden grow better next spring. They had also ripped up some floorboards in his house, and in the nearly deserted chicken coop.

  And now they had seized his station wagon for a laboratory examination.

  Martin Beck heaved a deep sigh, and Allwright looked at him with clever, questioning brown eyes.

  It was Kollberg’s turn to continue the one-sided dialogue with Folke Bengtsson, and Martin Beck had forgotten that he was in Trelleborg. When Martin Beck sighed, Kollberg generally knew what he meant. They had worked together for such a long time that they thought the same way. Usually. They communicated thoughts and conclusions without words. Of course, it didn’t always work that way.

  And it seemed very unlikely that Allwright would understand why Martin Beck had sighed.

  “What’s the sigh for?” Allwright said.

  Martin Beck didn’t answer.

  “God-awful place for a murder, isn’t it? Assuming this is where it happened. But it probably is.”

  “We’ll know after the post-mortem, if not before,” said Martin Beck.

  The lake hikers who found the body had been nature lovers. They hadn’t littered, or damaged the terrain as such, but, of course, it was inescapable that the ground near the spot where the body was found had been trampled by a lot of feet. Policemen moving over the area had not made things any better, and on top of that, the find was almost four weeks old. The weather had been changeable, with rain and storms and frost.

  From the laboratory point of view, the scene of the crime did not inspire optimism. There was a sort of road that led to the spot, at least as far as the windfall, but heavy forestry machinery had moved over it recently. In addition, they had information indicating that its present terrible condition was
due to the fact that the army had churned it up with cross-country vehicles only about a week earlier when the road was wet and muddy.

  In its present state, the road was not passable for any ordinary passenger car. But it might very well have been so four weeks earlier.

  As for the question of whether or not this spot had been selected by chance, the answer had to be no.

  By and large, it was only the owner and the people who worked here occasionally who knew the area in detail. The nearest building was a summer cottage, where no one had been since the end of September.

  It was an inaccessible and difficult piece of terrain. No one would go there by car without knowing in advance that the car could get out again.

  On the other hand, it was reasonable to suppose that anyone living in the vicinity had a good chance of knowing the place.

  Folke Bengtsson and Sigbrit Mård lived not far away, and if you assumed that Bengtsson was guilty, which many people did and which no one at the moment could refute, the location of the body was an additional point against him. If the road were in good condition, he could get here from Anderslöv in ten minutes. Furthermore, it lay in the same general direction he said he had taken. He would only have had to turn off a little sooner and then gradually wind his way up to this path through the woods.

  Martin Beck leaned back against a pile of logs and looked across the windfall toward the spruce trees.

  “What do you think, Herrgott? Do you think someone could have driven in here in an ordinary car on October seventeenth?”

  Allwright scratched the back of his head, pushing his hat askew.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think so. Someone could probably have driven as far as this stack of beech. You couldn’t drive through that windfall even in a tank. Not now, and not then either. Sit, Timmy! Down, for heaven’s sake! Yes, that’s right. Good dog.”

  The men examining the scene of the crime had a German shepherd with them, a trained police dog, and Timmy was much too interested in the doings of this animal to stay calmly on his leash.