Cop Killer

by Maj Sjowall

  “I can well imagine. Because I happen to say what I mean. Where the hell did you get this concentration idea? This isn’t the Battle of Breitenfeld, you know. If you’d sent me and Lennart over here alone, we’d have Caspar and The Breadman now.”

  Malm sighed.

  “I wonder what the Chief will say about all this,” he said.

  “You could always take that damn attack dog with you,” said Gunvald Larsson. “If you don’t dare face him by yourself. It might bite his balls off. That would be something.”

  “Larsson, you’re vulgar,” Malm said. “That’s uncalled for.”

  “What is called for? Running over the specially trained livestock?”

  “The concentration strategy is a good idea.”

  Malm ran his hand through his curly hair.

  “Only numbers can annihilate,” he said.

  “Are you thinking of going to sea?”

  “Hardly,” Malm said. “I get so seasick.”

  “Do you know who coined that expression?”

  “No.”

  “Nelson. The guy on the column in Trafalgar Square.”

  “He was right,” Malm said. “And it’s equally true on land.”

  “I doubt it. Anyway, he wasn’t a policeman.”

  “We believe in it,” Malm said. “So it seems.”

  For a moment, Malm seemed almost human.

  “I wonder what the Chief is going to think about all this,” he said.

  “He probably won’t be too happy. Chew on the carpets a little.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Malm gloomily. “I’m the one he’ll yell at.”

  “You’ll get them next time.”

  “Maybe,” said Malm pessimistically.

  Kollberg hadn’t said anything for a long time. He was lost in thought.

  “What are you worrying about, Lennart?” Gunvald Larsson asked.

  “About Caspar. Can’t help it. He must feel like a hunted animal. He’s bound to be scared. And he probably hasn’t done anything especially criminal.”

  “We don’t know that, do we?”

  “It’s what they call an intuition.”

  “Ugh,” Malm said. “I’ve got to get over to headquarters. So long.”

  He climbed into the tactical command car and was driven away.

  He made one more comment before he disappeared.

  “Try to see to it that nothing gets out. Absolutely nothing must get out.”

  Kollberg shrugged his shoulders miserably.

  “Being Division Commander probably isn’t all that much fun when you get right down to it.”

  They stood in silence for a few moments.

  “How are you feeling, Lennart?”

  “Poorly. But I think I’ve discovered something. Maybe. Anyway, Christ! what a group we work with!”

  “And Christ! what a rotten job!” said Gunvald Larsson.

  27

  On Tuesday morning, Lennart Kollberg got up early, put on his bathrobe, shaved, and went out to the kitchen and brewed himself a cup of coffee. For once, he was up before the children. There wasn’t a sound to be heard from Bodil and Joakim’s room. Gun was still sleeping too. He had kept her awake half the night, and it was only an hour since she’d fallen asleep.

  When he had gone to bed the night before, following the abortive operation at Midsommarkransen, he had not been able to get to sleep. He had lain on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, stared up into the darkness, and thought. He could hear Gun’s steady breathing beside him, and now and then a subway train would roar into the nearby station and then slowly roll away again. He had lain like this many times this past year, going over the same problem, but tonight he definitely felt he’d had enough.

  At about three o’clock, he went out to the kitchen to get himself a beer and a sandwich, and pretty soon Gun came padding out to keep him company. Then they went back to bed, and he told her about his decision. It did not come as any great surprise to her. They had discussed it many times before, and Gun supported his plans wholeheartedly and energetically. He had been in a grim and restless mood ever since coming back from Skåne, and she had sensed that he was reaching a decision.

  They talked for a couple of hours and then they made love, and after a while Gun fell asleep in his arms.

  When Bodil and Joakim woke up, he made them breakfast, and when they had eaten, he sent them back to their room and urged them not to wake Gun. Not that they generally did what he told them—it was only Gun who could make them take notice—but he was hoping they would leave her in peace for at least a little while longer.

  He got two sticky kisses and drove to work.

  As he walked down the hall to his office, he passed the door to Martin Beck’s empty room, and it occurred to him, as it had so many times before, that working with Martin was the only thing he would really miss.

  He hung his jacket over the back of his chair, sat down, and pulled the typewriter over in front of him. He rolled in a sheet of paper and wrote:

  Stockholm

  November 27, 1973

  To: National Police Administration

  Subject: Resignation

  He rested his chin in his hand and stared out the window. As always at this hour, the expressway was crowded with cars, three lanes of them rolling in toward the center of town. Kollberg gazed out at the apparently inexhaustible flow of shiny private automobiles. There probably wasn’t another country in the world, he thought, where drivers were so particular about their vehicles as they were in Sweden. There was a constant washing and polishing, and a scratch in the paint or a dent in the coachwork was regarded as catastrophic and called for immediate repairs. The automobile was an important status symbol, and in order to keep up with the neighbors, a lot of people traded in their cars unnecessarily and more often than they could afford to.

  He suddenly thought of something, ripped the paper out of the typewriter, and tore it into little pieces which he dropped in the wastebasket. He wriggled into his jacket and walked quickly out to the elevator. He pressed the button for the garage where he’d left his car—seven years old, battered, covered with skånsk mud—but he changed his mind and stopped the elevator at the street level.

  Midsommarkransen wasn’t far away. He could almost have watched yesterday’s fiasco from his window.

  It stood in the parking area behind the apartment house where Maggie lived. A beige Volvo, with a different license number from the one reported by Skacke and the gas station owner in Katrineholm. But they were the old kind of plates that were easy to put together by hand, and Kollberg had no doubt it was the right car. He jotted down the number and walked back to Södra Police Station.

  When he was seated at his desk again, he pushed aside the typewriter and pulled over the telephone.

  The Department of Motor Vehicle Registration gave him a prompt reply. The number did not exist, and never had existed. The county letter was AB, which meant the City of Stockholm, but the number that followed was higher than the registry had ever reached. For that matter, the number never would exist, because all of the vehicles in Stockholm had already been assigned one of the new national license numbers.

  “Thanks,” said Kollberg.

  He was a little surprised to be given such quick and definite confirmation of the fact that the Volvo had false plates. As a rule, he didn’t have much faith in computers.

  Spurred on by his success, he lifted the receiver again, dialed police headquarters in Malmö, and asked to speak to Benny Skacke.

  “Inspector Skacke,” said a self-assured voice.

  The title was still so new that he couldn’t disguise his pride.

  “Hi, Benny,” Kollberg said. “I expect you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs as usual, so I thought I’d give you an assignment.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m sitting here writing a report. But it can wait. What’s it about?”

  He was sounding a bit less cocky now.

  “Can you
get me the chassis and engine block numbers on that Volvo that was stolen in Vellinge? Quickly?”

  “Sure. Right away. Hold on a second.”

  Kollberg waited. He could hear Skacke rummaging through his desk—drawers slamming, papers rustling, Skacke mumbling—and finally Skacke’s voice back on the line.

  “Here they are. Shall I read them to you?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kollberg said. “Why do you think I asked?”

  He noted down the numbers as Skacke gave them to him.

  “Are you going to be there for another hour?” he said.

  “Yes. I’ve got to finish this report. It’ll probably take all morning. Why?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Kollberg said. “There’s a couple of other things I want to talk to you about, but I don’t have time right now. So long.”

  Kollberg didn’t hang up the phone, just broke the connection, waited for another dial tone and dialed another number.

  Everyone seemed to be at their jobs and on their toes this morning. The head of the State Crime Lab answered on the first ring.

  “Crime Lab. Hjelm.”

  “Kollberg. Hi.”

  “Hi. What do you want now?”

  Hjelm’s tone of voice was resigned. It implied that Kollberg did nothing but call him and disturb him and make his life miserable. As far as Kollberg could remember, he hadn’t spoken to the man for weeks. But Oskar Hjelm was a misanthrope who felt he was taken for granted by the ungrateful detectives who overwhelmed him with impossible problems. He almost always managed to solve these problems, however, and he was esteemed for the clever professional he was—scrupulous, persistent, and ingenious. But not everyone knew enough to show their appreciation, or to take the time to listen to his unnecessarily involved and, for the layman, incomprehensible descriptions of the fine points of laboratory analysis and technical investigation.

  Kollberg knew exactly how he ought to be handled—with gentle persuasion and flattery—but he lacked the patience for cajolery, and flattery wasn’t in his line.

  “Well, it’s about a car,” he said.

  “I see,” Hjelm sighed. “In what condition? Totaled? Incinerated? Submerged?”

  “No, none of those. It’s a perfectly ordinary car, parked at Midsommarkransen.”

  “And what do you want me to do with it?”

  “It’s a beige Volvo. I’ll give you the address and the license number, plus the chassis and engine block numbers. Have you got a pen?”

  “Yes, I have a pen,” said Hjelm impatiently. “And I also have a piece of paper. Well?”

  Kollberg gave him the information and waited for him to write it down before he went on.

  “Could you send over one of your boys to see if those numbers check? On the chassis and the engine block? If they do, have him take it out to Solna. And if they don’t, have him call me immediately.”

  Hjelm didn’t answer right away. And when he did he was annoyed.

  “Why don’t you go over there yourself and have a look? Or send somebody? This address you gave me is right across the street from you! If it isn’t the right car, then one of my people will have come all the way in from Solna for nothing. We’ve got a full load of work out here …”

  Kollberg interrupted his tirade.

  “In the first place, I’m quite sure it is the right car, and in the second place, I have no one to send, and in the third place, the car is your department because it’s going to have a complete lab examination.”

  He caught his breath and went on in a gentler tone of voice.

  “Besides, you and your people know how to handle things like this. We’d only mess it up and leave fingerprints all over the place and destroy important evidence. We’re all better off if you take charge of it right from the start. You people are experts.”

  He was sure he sounded false and insincere.

  “Yes, well, then I guess I’d better send someone,” Hjelm said. “What exactly is it you want us to find out? Any special tests you want performed?”

  “Just move it out there and let it stand for the time being,” Kollberg said. “Martin will call you later and tell you what he wants.”

  “Okay,” Hjelm said. “I’ll send a man over right away. Although I don’t really have anyone I can do without. And Lord knows where we’ll find a place to put it. We’ve got five cars out here now that we have to work on. And there’s all sorts of trash piled up in the lab that we’ve got to analyze. Do you know what we got in yesterday, for example?”

  “No,” said Kollberg feebly.

  “Two barrels of herring in brine. Someone had split the fish open and sewed them up again, and every little herring stomach contained a plastic bag of morphine. Do you know what a person smells like when he’s been up to his elbows in herring brine all night?”

  “No, but I can imagine,” said Kollberg laughing. “What did you do with the fish? I can give you a terrific recipe for fried herring with onion sauce.”

  “Yes, very funny I’m sure,” said Hjelm in an injured tone. “We manage to control our laughter in this job.”

  He hung up the phone in Kollberg’s ear, but Kollberg was still chuckling as he put down the receiver.

  The thought of fried herring made him hungry, in spite of the fact that he had just had breakfast.

  He sat and drew curlicues on the pad in front of him while he thought about his next call. Then he picked up the phone again.

  “Inspector Skacke.”

  “Hi, Benny, it’s me again. Finish your report?”

  “No, not quite. What was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “That Volvo that Casparsson stole in Vellinge,” Kollberg said. “Have you got the theft report handy?”

  “I’ve got it right here in my drawer,” Skacke said. “Wait a minute.”

  He didn’t put the receiver down this time, and it took him only thirty seconds to find the form.

  “Yes,” he said. “Here it is.”

  “Good,” Kollberg said. “What’s the owner’s name?”

  It seemed like an eternity before Benny Skacke answered.

  “Clark Evert Sundström.”

  That’s the right answer, Kollberg thought.

  He was not the least bit surprised, but felt the familiar thrill of satisfaction at having figured things out correctly.

  Plus, maybe, a quiver of something that was more deeply rooted in human nature—the hunting instinct, the smell of prey.

  That is something of the red fox still within you—and something of the hare, he thought. Ekelöf. Later, when I’ve got the time, I’ll try to remember the whole thing. It’s a marvelous poem.

  “Lennart?”

  “Yes, I heard you. Clark Evert Sundström. But he wasn’t the one who reported it missing, was he?”

  “No, that was his wife. Her name is Cecilia Sundström.”

  “Weren’t you out at their place in Vellinge?”

  “Yes, they’ve got a house out there. The car was in the garage, which is open toward the front yard. And there aren’t any doors, so Caspar could see it from the road.”

  “Did you meet both of the Sundströms when you were there?” Kollberg asked.

  “Yes, but I mostly talked to her. He didn’t say much.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “In his fifties. Five feet seven, I’d guess. Thin—not wiry, but rather as if he’d been sick. Blond hair, starting to go gray. Or white, almost. He was wearing glasses with dark rims.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Manufacturer.”

  “What kind of manufacturer?”

  “I don’t know,” Skacke said. “That’s what his wife listed as his occupation when she made the report.”

  “Did he give you any reason why he hadn’t reported it earlier?”

  “No, but his wife told me she wanted to go to the police on Monday morning, but that he’d said the car would turn up and they should wait and see.”

  “Can you remember anything else
that was said? Did they talk to each other at all?”

  “Well, it was mostly about the car. I asked them if they’d seen or heard anything that Sunday morning, but they hadn’t. I really only talked to the wife. She let me in, and then we stood in the hall. He just came out for a minute and said all he knew was that the car was gone when he went outside sometime around noon.”

  Kollberg looked at the curlicues on his scratch pad. He had tried to draw some sort of a map of Skåne, with little dots for Vellinge, Anderslöv, Malmö, and Trelleborg.

  “I got the impression he worked in Trelleborg,” said Skacke uncertainly. “I think his wife said something about it.”

  Kollberg drew a line between Anderslöv and Trelleborg, and another from Trelleborg to Vellinge.

  He made a triangle, with its apex at Trelleborg, and its long base the line from Vellinge to Anderslöv in the north.

  “Good, Benny,” Kollberg said. “Excellent.”

  “Have you found the car?” Skacke said. “I heard he got away. Caspar, I mean.”

  “Yes, he did,” said Kollberg dryly. “And I think we’ve found the car. Have you spoken to Martin lately?”

  “No,” said Skacke. “It’s been a while. But he’s still in Anderslöv, isn’t he?”

  “Right,” said Kollberg. “And as soon as I hang up, I want you to call Martin and tell him everything you’ve just told me. About this Clark Evert Sundström and what he looked like and all that. And then tell him he can call Hjelm at the Crime Lab and find out if he’s got the car yet. Do it now, right away.”

  “Okay,” Skacke said. “What’s the story on this guy Sundström? Has he done something?”

  “We’ll see,” Kollberg said. “You just talk to Martin. He’ll make the decisions. Got it? And then finish your report. And if anything comes up, I’ll be right here in my office. I’ve got a kind of report to write myself, as it happens. Say hello to Martin for me. So long.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Kollberg made no further calls. He pushed the phone to one side and put away the scratch pad with the inverted triangle and the wavy lines depicting Skåne.

  Then he pulled over the typewriter, rolled in a piece of paper, and wrote:

  Stockholm