by Maj Sjowall
“And when I say ‘Now’ I don’t mean tomorrow, by God. Move!”
“Take it easy,” Elofsson said.
“No tricks,” Hector said.
The people in the green car climbed out on opposite sides. Their faces were white patches in the fog.
“Just a little routine chat,” Elofsson said.
He was closer to them than the others but still hadn’t touched his revolver.
“Just take it easy,” he said.
Hector was standing behind him to one side, his revolver in his hand and his finger on the trigger.
“We haven’t done anything.”
The voice sounded young. It could have come from a girl or from a boy whose voice was breaking.
“That’s what they all say,” Hector said. “Unlawful lighting, for example. What about that? Have a look in their car, Emil.”
From where he was standing, only a few yards away, Elofsson could see that the suspects were two young men. They were both wearing leather jackets, jeans, and tennis shoes, but the similarity ended there. One of them was big and dark, with a crew cut. The other was below normal height and had billowing, shoulder-length blond hair. Neither one of them looked to be more than twenty years old.
Elofsson walked toward the taller of the two youths, fingering his holster but not opening it. Instead, he moved his hand, took out his flashlight, and shone it into the back seat. Then he put it away again.
“Mmm,” he said.
Then he turned abruptly to the tall youth, grabbed for his clothing, and got a grip on the lapels of his jacket.
“All right, you little bastards,” said Hector from behind him.
“What’s going on here?” Borglund said.
And that was apparently the remark that set things going.
Elofsson was following normal procedure. He had grabbed the boy’s jacket with both hands. The next step was to pull the victim closer and drive his right knee into the man’s groin. And that would take care of that. The same way he had done it so many times before. Without firearms.
But Emil Elofsson had kneed his last arrestee. The young man with the crew cut had other ideas. He had his right hand at his belt and his left hand in his pocket. There was a revolver stuck in the waistband of his jeans, and he obviously had no doubts about what it was for. He pulled it and started shooting.
The revolver was a weapon constructed for short range, a nickel plated Colt Cobra 32 caliber with six shots in the chambered cylinder. The first two shots struck Elofsson in the diaphragm, and the third and fourth passed under his left arm. Both of these bullets hit Hector in the left hip and sent him reeling backwards across the highway where he fell on his back with his head resting on a low wire fence that ran along the edge of the road.
Shots numbers five and six rang out. They were presumably meant for Borglund, but he had a very human fear of guns and at the very first shot had thrown himself headlong into the ditch on the north side of the highway. The ditch was deep and damp, and his large body bounced heavily to the bottom. He wound up on his stomach in the mud, not daring to lift his face, and almost at once he felt a cruel, stinging pain on the right side of his neck.
Elofsson had already pushed off with his foot, and his knee was an inch or so in the air when the bullets struck his body. He clung tightly to the leather jacket and only let go when the man with the gun took several steps back and opened the cylinder to reload.
He fell forward and landed on his side, where he lay with one cheek against the pavement and his right arm trapped helplessly under his body, along with his pistol, still buttoned in its holster.
In spite of the uncertain light, he could see the young man distinctly as he stepped back and loaded new cartridges, which he apparently had loose in his jacket pocket.
Elofsson was in great pain, and the front of his uniform was already soaked and smeared with blood. He could neither talk nor move, only observe. And still he was more dumbfounded than afraid. How could this have happened? For twenty years he’d been driving around shouting and swearing, pushing, kicking, hitting people with his billy club, or slapping them with the flat side of his saber. He had always been the stronger, had always had the advantage of arms and might and justice against people who were weaponless and powerless and had no rights.
And now here he lay on the pavement.
The man with the revolver was twenty steps away. It had grown lighter, and Elofsson saw him turn his head and heard five words.
“Get in the car, Caspar!”
Then the man raised his left elbow, rested the barrel on the crook of his arm, and sighted carefully. At what?
The question was superflous. A ricochet glanced off the pavement less than a foot from Elofsson’s face. At the same time, he heard a shot behind him. Was the other bastard shooting at him too? Or was it Borglund? He dismissed that idea. If Borglund wasn’t dead already, he was lying somewhere pretending to be.
The man with the revolver was standing still. Legs apart. Aiming.
Elofsson closed his eyes. He felt the blood pulsing out of his body. He didn’t see his life pass before his eyes. He merely thought: Now I’m going to die.
Hector hadn’t dropped his pistol when he fell. He was lying on his back with his head propped up on the fence, and he too could see the figure with the revolver and the short black hair, though less distinctly and from a greater distance. What’s more, Elofsson lay right in his line of fire, but pressed so tightly to the road that there was a free range above him.
In contrast to his colleague, Hector was not especially surprised. He was young, and this was roughly what his fervid imagination had always expected of this job. His right arm was still functioning, but there was something wrong with the left, and he had a hard time getting his hand on the housing of his pistol to cock it. And that had to be done, for in accordance with police regulations, he actually did not have a cartridge in the chamber. (Elofsson and Borglund did have, on the other hand, for all the good it did them.) He didn’t succeed until the other man had fired the first shot of his second series.
Hector was in agony. The pain in his left arm and his whole left side was excruciating, and his vision was blurred. He fired his first shot carelessly and mechanically, and it went high.
This was not the time for wild shots, he could see that. Hector was generally a decent marksman on the range, but at the moment it would take more than decent marksmanship to save his life. The figure standing in the mist eighty feet away had all the advantages, and his behavior indicated that he wasn’t about to go home until every policeman in sight was guaranteed stone dead.
Hector took a deep breath. The pain was so great he nearly lost consciousness. A bullet hit the fence, and the steel wires reverberated. The vibration passed on through the back of his head, and for one instant, his vision became amazingly clear and concentrated. He raised the pistol and forced himself to hold his arm straight and his hand still. The target was indistinct, but he could see it.
Hector squeezed off the shot. Then he lost consciousness, and the automatic fell from his hand.
Elofsson, however, was still conscious. Ten seconds earlier, he had opened his eyes again, and nothing had changed. The man with the revolver hadn’t moved. Legs apart, the pistol barrel resting on his elbow, he was carefully and calmly taking aim.
He heard another shot from behind.
And, wonder of wonders, the man with the revolver gave a jerk and threw his arms up over his head. The weapon flew from his hand. And then, in a continuation of the same motion, he collapsed on the pavement and went utterly limp, as if there had been no skeleton in his body. He lay there in a heap. Not a sound crossed his lips.
It would be wrong to call it pure chance, for Hector had aimed carefully and done his very best. But it was an almost incredibly lucky shot. The bullet struck the man’s shoulder and followed his collarbone directly to his spinal cord. The youth with the revolver died instantly, probably while he was still on his feet. He didn’t even have a chance
to lie down and draw his final breath.
Elofsson heard a car peel out and speed away.
And that was followed by total silence, abstract and unnatural.
After what seemed like a very long time, someone moved nearby.
After another long wait, though it could not have been more than minutes or even seconds, Borglund came crawling over on all fours. He was moaning and looking about aimlessly with his flashlight. He stuck his hand in under Elofsson, flinched, and pulled it back. And stared at the blood.
“Jesus Christ, Emil,” he said.
And:
“For God’s sake, what did you do?”
Elofsson felt all the strength leave his body, and he could not talk or move.
Borglund got to his feet with gasps and groans.
Elofsson heard him clump over to the patrol car and switch the radio to the emergency frequency.
“Emergency! Come in! Highway 100 at Östersjövägen in Ljunghusen. Two men shot. I’m hurt myself. Gunfire. Shooting. Help!”
From a great distance, Elofsson heard metallic voices responding over the radio. First the nearby districts.
“Trelleborg here. We’re coming.”
“Lund district. We’re on our way.”
Finally the despatcher in Malmö.
“Good morning. Help on its way. It’ll take about fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.”
After a while, Borglund was back, fumbling with the first aid kit. He turned Elofsson over on his back, cut open his uniform, and started stuffing compresses in at random between his stomach and his blood-drenched underclothes. He kept up a steady, monotonous, thick-tongued babble.
“Jesus Christ, Emil. Jesus Christ.”
Elofsson lay there in the damp. His blood mixed with the dew. He was cold. It hurt even more than it had. He was still dumbfounded.
A little later he heard other voices. The people in the house behind the wire fence had woken up and ventured out.
A young woman knelt down beside Elofsson and took his hand.
“There, there,” she said. “There, there. They’ll be here soon.”
He was more dumbfounded than ever. A person was holding his hand. A member of the general public. After a while she put his head on her lap, and put her hand on his forehead.
They were still in that position when the scream of many sirens began to reach them, first very soft but soon shrill and piercing.
Just then the sun broke through the mist and spread a shallow, pale-yellow light over the absurd scene.
All of this took place on the morning of November 18, 1973, in the farthest corner of the Malmö Police District. For that matter, in the farthest corner of Sweden. Several hundred yards away, long shiny waves surged in against a curving sand beach that seemed to be endless in the fog. The sea.
On the other side was the European continent.
19
Monday, November 19.
Clear, cold, and windy.
The day was called Elizabeth in the Swedish almanac, and it was Kollberg’s turn to talk to Folke Bengtsson.
But a great many things were different this Monday morning. It was as if Anderslöv had suddenly vanished from the map. The mass media were interested in other things.
What was a strangled divorcee compared with two bullet-riddled cops? And a third one injured, no one knew exactly how or why. One criminal was dead, and another was on a wild flight from justice.
Martin Beck and Kollberg both knew that being a policeman wasn’t especially dangerous, even if the higher echelons and a lot of individual policemen did like to overdramatize their profession.
Of course, policemen did get shot. In fact, it happened a lot more often than the so-called general public knew. Because the accident rate at police firing ranges was alarmingly high, even though such accidental shootings were always hushed up. The trouble was that many policemen were trigger-happy young men who lacked the experience and caution in the company of weapons which usually characterizes civilian marksmen. They were simply careless, with the result that they often shot themselves or one another, though seldom fatally.
But otherwise it was not a dangerous job, not physically. In fact, a man’s greatest risk was of ruining his back with too much riding around in automobiles. A great many other professions had infinitely more casualties on the job.
And this was true not only in Sweden.
To take an obvious example: In Britain, 7,768 mine workers have been killed since 1947, while in that same period only a dozen policemen have lost their lives.
This was perhaps an extreme example, but Lennart Kollberg was in the habit of using it whenever he got into a discussion of whether or not policemen should be armed. In England, Scotland, and Wales, as everyone knows, policemen are not armed. And there must be some explanation for the fact that policemen are injured so much more often in a little country like Sweden.
Martin Beck had to take the first phone call of the day, and it came from someone he would rather have avoided.
Stig Malm.
As a matter of fact, there was probably only one person he had a greater aversion to talking to.
“Your case is all wrapped up,” Malm said.
“Well …”
“Isn’t it? As far as I can see, it’s solved. You’ve got the murderer under lock and key. And you had him even before you found the body. Though that was hardly your own doing.”
Martin Beck thought about the excavations in Folke Bengtsson’s garden, but he restrained himself from saying anything. The subject was possibly a little delicate.
“Isn’t that right?” Malm said.
“I wouldn’t exactly say the case is closed,” said Martin Beck.
“What do you mean by that?”
“There are other possibilities. Some details that still haven’t been cleared up.”
“But you have arrested the murderer?”
“I’m not at all sure of that,” said Martin Beck. “Although it is possible of course.”
“Possible? Could it be any simpler?”
“Oh yes,” said Martin Beck with conviction. “Much simpler.”
Kollberg looked at him inquisitively.
They were sitting in Allwright’s office.
Allwright himself was out taking the dog for its morning walk.
Martin Beck shook his head.
“Well, that’s not actually why I called,” Malm said. “You’re welcome to keep your little mystifications to yourself. We’ve got more important things to do.”
“What things?”
“Do you have to ask? Three policemen mowed down by gangsters, and one of the desperadoes still at large.”
“I’m not familiar with it.”
“That seems very odd. Don’t you read the papers?”
Martin Beck couldn’t resist.
“Yes, I do, but I don’t base my judgments as a policeman on them. And I don’t necessarily believe all the nonsense I read.”
Malm didn’t react. Every time Martin Beck stopped to think that this man was actually his boss, he felt the same mixture of distaste and amazement.
“The whole matter is very distressing by its very nature,” Malm said. “The Commissioner is terribly upset, of course. You know how strongly he feels when something happens to any of our men.”
This time, apparently, the National Commissioner was not there in his office.
“I know,” said Martin Beck.
And, of course, the whole business really was as awful as it was significant. It was just that Malm’s way of talking about it made it look like one of the pseudo-events used so often in recent years to make propaganda for the force.
“We’re anticipating a nationwide manhunt,” Malm said. “So far, not even the car has been found.”
“Does this really concern the National Homicide Squad?”
“That is something which time and the next act in this ghastly drama will reveal.”
Said Malm, with the stilted solemnity that so often ma
rked his conversation.
“What sort of shape are those men in?” Martin Beck asked.
“At least two of them are still in critical condition. The doctors say the third one has a good chance of making it, although he’ll have to figure on a good long convalescence, of course.”
“I see.”
“We can’t ignore the possibility that this manhunt will spread over the whole country,” Malm said. “We’ve got to catch this desperado at any price, and we’ve got to catch him soon.”
“As I said, I’m not familiar with what happened,” said Martin Beck.
“You can learn. Quicker than you suppose,” said Malm with a short, self-satisfied laugh. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“I see.”
“It has been decided that I will direct the manhunt personally,” Malm said. “I will take charge of the tactical command.”
Martin Beck smiled. That was very good news for him—and for the man being hunted.
He was going to escape an assignment where the National Commissioner would be breathing down his neck. The criminal, in turn, could now reckon on an excellent chance of getting away.
Putting Martin Beck on some sort of manhunt staff with Malm as the so-called tactical commander would presumably be going too far. In that respect, Martin Beck was privileged.
And so he wondered what Malm really wanted. But he didn’t have to wonder long. Malm cleared his throat and assumed his most portentous tone of voice.
“Of course, it goes without saying that you will complete the assignment you’re already working on. But we’re just in the process of setting up a task force in Malmö. The Chief down there knows all about it. And we’ve just had a meeting here early this morning.”
Martin Beck looked at his watch.
It was not yet eight o’clock.
Apparently the high command had been up early.
“And?”
“We’ve decided to transfer Lennart Kollberg to the task force effective at once. He’s an exceptionally good man, and there’s no good reason why you should need him on a case that’s practically complete.”
“Wait a moment,” said Martin Beck. “You can speak to him yourself.”
“That’s not necessary,” said Malm evasively. “You can give him the message. He’s to proceed immediately to Malmö. Coordinator for Task Force Malmö is Inspector Månsson.”