The Terrorists

by Maj Sjowall

  “Morning, Benny,” said Martin Beck. “How’re things with you?”

  “Fine, I think.”

  “Do you still suspect that scrap-iron artist?”

  “No, that was only at first. He lived so close-by and his workshop was full of iron bars and pipes and things, I thought he seemed like a good bet. He knew Maud Lundin quite well and he would only have had to run across the road with one of his iron bars or lead pipes and kill the old man, after he’d seen Maud Lundin go off to work. It looked obvious.”

  “But he had an alibi, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, a girl was with him all night and went into town with him in the morning. Anyway, he’s a nice guy and had nothing to do with Petrus. His girl seems straight, too. She says she sleeps badly, so was reading after he’d fallen asleep, and she says he slept like a log until ten in the morning.”

  Martin Beck looked at Skacke’s eager face with amusement. “So what have you found now?”

  “Well, I’ve been out there quite a bit, walking and looking around and sitting talking to that sculptor. Yesterday I was out there and we were having a beer together, and I sat there looking at those big crates standing in Maud Lundin’s garage. They’re his crates—he uses them for packing his sculptures when he sends them to exhibitions. He hasn’t got room for them in his garage, so Maud Lundin let him put them in hers. They’ve been there since March and no one has touched them since. It occurred to me that whoever killed Petrus could have gone to the house that night, when there wasn’t any risk of being seen, and waited behind those crates until the old man was alone.”

  “But then he walked right across the field where everyone could see him,” said Martin Beck.

  “Yes, I know. But if he did hide behind the crates, it must have been because Walter Petrus used to leave the house shortly after Maud Lundin, so he had to make use of that brief period when the old man was alone in the house. And from his hiding place behind the crates, he could hear when she left.”

  Martin Beck rubbed his nose. “Sounds plausible,” he said. “Have you checked whether it’s actually possible to hide in there? Aren’t they right up against the wall?”

  Benny Skacke shook his head. “No. There’s a space just large enough. Kollberg might not be able to squeeze in there with his stomach, maybe, but a person of normal build could.”

  He fell silent. Negative statements about Kollberg didn’t go over too well with Martin Beck, but he didn’t seem offended, so Skacke went on.

  “I looked behind the crates. There’s quite a lot of sand, dust and loose earth on the floor. Couldn’t we do some lab work? Spray for footprints and sieve the soil and see if we can find anything?”

  “Not a bad idea,” said Martin Beck. “I’ll get somebody on it right away.”

  When Skacke had gone, Martin Beck phoned to request an immediate technical examination of Maud Lundin’s garage.

  As he put the receiver down, Åsa Torell came into his office without knocking. She was as breathless and eager as Skacke had been.

  “Take a seat and calm down,” said Martin Beck. “Have you been to another blue movie? What were the night nurse’s confessions like, anyhow?”

  “Awful. And her patients were really something. Surprisingly healthy, I must say.”

  Martin Beck laughed.

  “I hope that’s the last skin flick I ever have to watch,” said Åsa. “But now listen.”

  Martin put his elbows on the desk and adopted a listening attitude with his chin in his hands.

  “You know that list I told you about?” said Åsa. “The one I made of all the people who were in Petrus’s films?”

  Martin Beck nodded and Åsa went on.

  “In some of the worst films—I think you saw some of them yourself—black-and-white shorts of people screwing on an old sofa and that kind of thing—there was a girl called Kiki Hell. I tried to get hold of her, but it turned out she was no longer in Sweden. But I got hold of a friend of hers and learned quite a lot. Kiki Hell’s real name is Kristina Hellström and a few years ago she lived in Djursholm on the same street as Walter Petrus. What do you say to that?”

  Martin Beck sat up straight and struck his forehead. “Hellström,” he said. “The gardener.”

  “Exactly,” said Åsa. “Kiki Hellström is the daughter of Walter Petrus’s gardener. I haven’t managed to find out much about her yet. It seems she left Sweden a few years ago and no one knows where she is now.”

  “It does sound as if you’ve got something there, Åsa. Do you have your car here?”

  Åsa nodded. “It’s in the parking lot. Shall we go out to Djursholm?”

  “Right away,” said Martin Beck. “We can talk on the way.”

  In the car Åsa said, “Do you think it’s him?”

  “Well, he’s got plenty of reason to dislike Walter Petrus.” said Martin Beck. “If what I suspect is true. Petrus used the gardener’s daughter in his films and when her dad found out, he can’t have been all that pleased. How old is she?”

  “She’s nineteen now. But the films are four years old, so she was only fifteen when they were made.”

  After a spell of silence, Åsa said, “Suppose it was the other way around?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That her dad encouraged her to be in the films to get money out of Petrus.”

  “You mean he sold his own daughter? Åsa, watching all that filth has given you a dirty mind.”

  They parked the car at the edge of the road and walked through the gate to the house next door to the Petruses’. There were no photocells in the gateposts there. A wide gravel path led to the left along the hedge up to a garage and a yellow stucco bungalow. Between the bungalow and the garage was a smaller building which seemed to be some kind of workshop or toolshed.

  “That must be where he lives,” said Åsa, and they began to walk toward the yellow house. The garden seemed enormous, and the house itself, which they had seen from the gateway, was here quite hidden by tall trees.

  Hellström must have heard their footsteps on the gravel through the open door of the toolshed. He came to the doorway and watched them guardedly as they approached.

  He looked about forty-five, tall and powerfully built, and was standing quite still, his feet apart, his back slightly bowed.

  His eyes were blue and half-closed, his features heavy and serious. His dark untidy hair was streaked with gray and his short sideburns were almost white. He was holding a plane in one hand and some curls of light wood clung to the dirty blue of his coverall.

  “Are we interrupting your work, Mr. Hellström?” said Åsa.

  The man shrugged his shoulders and glanced behind him. “No,” he said. “I was just planing some moldings. They can wait.”

  “We’d like to talk to you,” said Martin Beck. “We’re from the police.”

  “A policeman’s already been here,” said Hellström. “I don’t think I’ve got anything else to say.”

  Åsa got out her identification, but Hellström turned around without looking at it, went over and put the plane down on a workbench inside the door.

  “There’s very little to say about Mr. Petrus,” he said. “I hardly knew him, just worked for him.”

  “You have a daughter, haven’t you?” said Martin Beck.

  “Yes, but she doesn’t live here anymore. Has anything happened to her?” He was standing half-turned away from them, fiddling with the tools on the bench.

  “Not that we know of. We’d just like to talk with you about her,” said Martin Beck. “Is there anywhere we can go to talk in peace and quiet?”

  “We can go to my place,” said Hellström. “I’ll just get this thing off.”

  Åsa and Martin Beck waited while the man took off his coverall and hung it up on a nail. Under the coverall he was wearing blue jeans and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a wide leather belt round his hips, with a large brass buckle in the shape of a horseshoe.

  It had stopped raining, bu
t heavy drops were splashing through the branches of a large chestnut tree by the house.

  The outside door was not locked. Hellström opened it and waited on the steps while Åsa and Martin Beck stepped into the hall. Then he went ahead of them into the living room.

  The room was not large and they could see into the bedroom through a half-open door. Apart from the little kitchen, which they had seen from the hall, the house had no more rooms. A sofa and two unmatched armchairs filled almost the whole of the living room. An old-fashioned television set stood in the corner, and along one wall was a home-made bookcase, half-filled with books.

  While Åsa went over and sat on the sofa and Hellström vanished into the kitchen, Martin Beck looked at the titles of the books. There were a number of classics, among them Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Strindberg, as well as a surprising amount of poetry—several anthologies and poetry-club editions, but also hardback editions of authors like Nils Ferlin, Elmer Diktonius and Edith Södergran.

  Hellström turned on the taps in the kitchen and a few moments later appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dirty kitchen towel. “Shall I make some tea?” he said. “It’s all I have to offer. I don’t drink coffee myself, so there isn’t any here.”

  “Don’t put yourself to any trouble,” said Åsa.

  “I was going to have some myself,” said Hellström.

  “In that case, tea would be nice,” said Åsa.

  Hellström returned to the kitchen and Martin Beck sat down in one of the armchairs. An open book lay on the table. He turned it over and looked at the jacket. Sermon to the Dogs by Ralf Parland. Walter Petrus’s gardener obviously had rather good and advanced tastes in literature.

  Hellström brought mugs, a sugar bowl and a carton of milk out to the table, went back to the kitchen and returned with the teapot. He sat down in the other armchair and took a flattened pack of cigarettes and a book of matches out of his jeans pocket. When he had lit a cigarette, he poured out the tea and looked at Martin Beck. “You want to talk about my daughter, you said.”

  “Yes,” said Martin Beck. “Where is she?”

  “The last time I heard from her, she was in Copenhagen.”

  “What does she do there?” asked Åsa. “Does she work?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Hellström, looking at the cigarette between his sunburnt fingers.

  “When was it that you heard from her?” Martin Beck asked.

  Hellström did not answer at once. “I didn’t really hear from her at all,” he said finally. “But I was down to visit her a while back. In the spring.”

  “And what was she doing then?” asked Åsa. “Has she met a man there?”

  Hellström smiled bitterly. “You could say that. Not just one, either.”

  “Do you mean she’s …”

  “She’s a whore? Yes,” he interrupted, almost spitting out the words. “She walks the streets, in other words. That’s what she lives on. I got the social services down there to help me find her, and she was pretty down. She didn’t want anything to do with me. I tried to get her to come home with me, but she wouldn’t.”

  He paused and fingered his cigarette.

  “She’ll be twenty soon, so no one can stop her from living her own life,” he said.

  “You brought her up on your own, didn’t you?”

  Martin Beck sat in silence, letting Åsa handle the conversation.

  “Yes, my wife died when Kiki was only a month old. We didn’t live here then. We lived in town.”

  Åsa nodded and he went on.

  “Mona took her own life and the doctor said it was because of some sort of depression after the baby was born. I didn’t understand anything. Of course, I saw she was depressed and down, but I thought that was because of money worries and the future and all that, what with having a child.”

  “What sort of work did you do then?”

  “I was a church caretaker. I was twenty-three then, but I didn’t have any kind of education. My father was a garbage man, and my mother did cleaning jobs now and then. There was nothing for me to do but start work as soon as I finished school. I was an errand boy and worked in a warehouse and that sort of thing. Things were tight at home and I had several younger brothers and sisters, so we needed the money.”

  “How did you come to be a gardener?”

  “I worked in a truck farm in Svartsjöland. The old boy who owned it was all right and took me on as an apprentice. He paid for me to learn to drive and get my license, too. He had a truck and I drove vegetables and fruit to Klara market.”

  Hellström took a last draw on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  “How did you manage to take care of the child and work at the same time?” asked Åsa, while Martin Beck drank his tea and listened.

  “I had to,” said Hellström. “When she was little, I took her with me everywhere. Later, when she went to school, she had to manage alone in the afternoons. It wasn’t the best way to bring up a child, but I had no choice.”

  He sipped his tea and added bitterly, “You can see the result.”

  “When did you come here to Djursholm?” Åsa asked.

  “I got this job ten years ago. A free house if I looked after the garden here. And then I got gardening jobs at several other places, so we managed pretty well. I thought this neighborhood would be good for Kiki—a good school and fine friends. But I guess it wasn’t all that easy for her. All her school friends had rich parents who lived in big houses and she was ashamed of the way we lived. She never brought anyone home here.”

  “The Petrus family has a daughter about the same age. Did the girls get along? They were neighbors, after all.”

  Hellström shrugged. “They were in the same class, but they never played outside school. Petrus’s daughter looked down on Kiki. The whole family did, in fact.”

  “You were chauffeur to Petrus, too.”

  “It wasn’t really my job, but I often drove him places. When the Petrus family moved here, they hired me as gardener and they never mentioned chauffeuring. But I got some extra pay for taking care of the cars.”

  “Where did you drive Mr. Petrus?”

  “To his office, and other places when he had other things to do in town. And sometimes when he and his wife went to a party.”

  “Did you ever drive him to Rotebro?”

  “A few times. Three or four, maybe.”

  “What did you think of Mr. Petrus?”

  “I didn’t think anything about him. He was just one of the people I worked for.”

  Åsa thought for a while and then said, “You worked for him for six years, didn’t you?”

  Hellström nodded.

  “Yes, just about. Since they built the house here.”

  “Then you must have talked to him quite a bit, in the car for instance.”

  Hellström shook his head. “We almost never talked in the car. And when we did, it was mostly about what had to be done in the garden and that kind of thing.”

  “Did you know what kind of films Mr. Petrus made?”

  “I’ve never seen any of them. I hardly ever go to the movies.”

  “Did you know your daughter was in one of his films?”

  Hellström shook his head again. “No,” he said curtly.

  Åsa looked at him, but he did not meet her eyes. After a while he said, “As an extra?”

  “She was in a pornographic film,” said Åsa.

  Hellström glanced swiftly at her. “I didn’t know that.”

  Åsa looked at him for a moment and said, “You must have been very fond of your daughter. Perhaps more than most fathers. And she of you. You only had each other.”

  Hellström nodded. “Yes, we only had each other. When she was little she was the only thing I lived for.”

  He straightened up and lit another cigarette. “But she’s grown up now and does as she pleases. I’m not going to try to interfere with her life anymore.”

  “What were you doing that mor
ning when Mr. Petrus was murdered?”

  “I was here, I suppose.”

  “You know which day I’m talking about—Thursday the sixth of June?”

  “I’m usually here and usually start work pretty early. So that day was probably like any other.”

  “Can anyone vouch for that? Any of your employers, for instance?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a fairly independent job. As long as I do what has to be done, no one bothers about when I do it. I usually start work about eight.” He paused, then added, “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t have any reason to.”

  “Maybe you didn’t,” said Martin Beck, speaking up for the first time, “but it’d be nice if someone could confirm that you were here on the morning of June sixth.”

  “I don’t know if anyone can. I live alone, and if I’m not out in the garden, then I’m usually in the workshop. There’s always something that needs fixing.”

  “We may have to talk to the people you work for, and anyone else who might have seen you,” said Martin. “Just to be sure.”

  Hellström shrugged. “It was so long ago,” he said. “I can’t remember what I was doing on that particular morning.”

  “No, maybe not,” said Martin Beck.

  “What happened in Copenhagen when you saw your daughter?” asked Åsa.

  “Nothing special,” Hellström replied. “She was living in a little apartment where she met her customers. She told me that straight out. She went on about some movie she was supposed to be in, and said that this other thing was just temporary, but she didn’t have anything against being a whore, since it paid well, but she was going to stop soon, she said, as soon as she got this movie job. She promised to write, but I haven’t heard from her yet. That was all. She got rid of me after an hour, said she didn’t want to come back home with me, and there wasn’t any point in me going to see her again. And I’m not going to either. As far as I am concerned, she’s lost for good. I just have to accept it.”

  “How long is it since she left home?”

  “Oh, she left as soon as she finished school. Lived with some friends in town. She came here sometimes to see me. Not very often. Then she disappeared completely, and after a while I found out she was in Copenhagen.”