by Maj Sjowall
His father had died that year and he moved from his furnished room in the middle of the city back to the family home in southern Stockholm to take care of his mother. That summer he met his wife. She had rented a cottage with a friend out in the archipelago where he happened to be with his sailing canoe. He fell very much in love. Then, in the autumn, when they were expecting a child, they got married at City Hall and moved to her small apartment back in the city.
One year after the birth of their daughter, there wasn't much left of the happy and lively girl he had fallen in love with and their marriage had slipped into a fairly dull routine.
Martin Beck sat on the green bench in the subway car and looked out through the rain-blurred window. He thought about his marriage apathetically, but when he realized that he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself, he took his newspaper out of his trenchcoat pocket and tried to concentrate on the editorial page.
He looked tired and his sunburned skin seemed yellowish in the gray light. His face was lean with a broad forehead and a strong jaw. His mouth, under his short, straight nose, was thin and wide with two deep lines near the corners. When he smiled, you could see his healthy, white teeth. His dark hair was combed straight back from the even hairline and had not yet begun to gray. The look in his soft blue eyes was clear and calm. He was thin but not especially tall and somewhat round-shouldered. Some women would say he was good looking but most of them would see him as quite ordinary. He dressed in a way that would draw no attention. If anything, his clothes were a little too discreet.
The air in the train was close and stuffy and he felt slightly uncomfortable as he usually did when he was on the subway. When they arrived at Central Station, he was the first one at the door with his suitcase in his hand.
He disliked the subway. But since he cared even less for bumper-to-bumper automobile traffic, and that'dream apartment' in the center of the city was still only a dream, he had no choice at the moment.
The express to Gothenburg left the station at 7:30 p.m. Martin Beck thumbed through his newspaper but didn't see a line about the murder. He turned back to the cultural pages and began to read an article on the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner but fell asleep in a few minutes.
He awoke in good time to change trains at Hallsberg. The lead taste in his mouth had come back and stayed with him despite the three glasses of water that he drank.
He arrived in Motala at 10:30 p.m. and by then the rain had stopped. Since it was his first visit there, he asked at the kiosk in the station the way to the City Hotel and bought a pack of cigarettes and the Motala newspaper.
The hotel was on the main square only a few blocks from the railroad station. The short walk stimulated him. Up in his room he washed his hands, unpacked, and drank a bottle of mineral water which he got from the porter. He stood by the window for a moment and looked out over the square. It had a statue in the center which he guessed was of Baltzar von Platen. Then he left the room to go to the police station. Since he knew it was right across the street, he left his trenchcoat in the room.
He told the officer on duty who he was and was immediately shown to an office on the second floor. The name Ahlberg was on the door.
The man sitting behind the desk was broad and thick-set and slightly bald. His jacket was on the back of his chair and he was drinking coffee out of a container. A cigarette was burning on the corner of an ash tray which was already filled with butts.
Martin Beck had a way of slinking through a door which irritated a number of people. Someone once said that he was able to slip into a room and close the door behind him so quickly that it seemed as if he were still knocking on the outside.
The man behind the desk seemed slightly surprised. He pushed his coffee container away and got up.
'My name is Ahlberg," he said.
There was something expectant in his manner. Martin Beck had seen the same thing before and knew what this sprang from. He was the expert from Stockholm and the man behind the desk was a country policeman who had come to a standstill on an investigation. The next few minutes would be decisive for their cooperation.
'What's your first name?" said Martin Beck.
'Gunnar."
'What are Kollberg and Melander doing?"
'I have no idea. Something I've forgotten, I suspect."
'Did they have that we'll-settle-this-thing-in-a-flash look?"
The local policeman ran his fingers through his thin blond hair. Then he smiled wryly and took to his familiar chair.
'Just about," he said.
Martin Beck sat down opposite him, drew out a pack of cigarettes and laid it on the edge of the desk. "You look tired," Martin Beck stated.
'My vacation got shot to hell."
Ahlberg emptied the container of coffee, crumpled it and threw it into the wastebasket under the desk.
The disorder on his desk was remarkable. Martin Beck thought about his own desk in Stockholm. It was usually quite neat.
'Well," he said. "How goes it?"
'Not at all," said Ahlberg. "After more than a week we don't know anything more than what the doctor has told us."
Out of habit he went on to the routine procedures.
'Put to death by strangulation in conjunction with sexual assault. The culprit was brutal. Signs of perverse tendencies."
Martin Beck smiled. Ahlberg looked at him questioningly.
'You said 'put to death.' I say it myself sometimes. We've written too many reports."
'Yeah, isn't it hell?"
Ahlberg sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
'We brought her up eight days ago," he said. "We haven't learned a thing since then. We don't know who she is, we don't know the scene of the crime, and we have no suspects. We haven't found a single thing that could have any real connnection with her."
4
'Death by strangulation," thought Martin Beck.
He sat and thumbed through a bunch of photographs which Ahlberg had dug out of a basket on his desk. The pictures showed the locks, the dredger, its bucket in the foreground, the body lying on the embankment, and in the mortuary.
Martin Beck placed a photo in front of Ahlberg and said:
'We can have this picture cropped and retouched so that she looks presentable. Then we can begin knocking on doors. If she comes from around here someone ought to recognize her. How many men can you put on the job?"
'Three at most," said Ahlberg. "We're short of men right now. Three of the boys are on vacation and one of them is in the hospital with a broken leg. Other than the Superintendent, Larsson and myself, there are only eight men at the station."
He counted on his fingers.
'Yes, and one of them is a woman. Then too, someone has to take care of the other work."
'We'll have to help if worst comes to worst. It's going to take a hell of a lot of time. Have you had any trouble with sex criminals lately by the way?"
Ahlberg tapped his pen against his front teeth while he was thinking. Then he reached into his desk drawer and dug up a paper.
'We had one in for examination. From Västra Ny, a rapist He was caught in Linköping the day before yesterday but he had an alibi for the entire week, according to this report from Blomgren. He's checking out the institutions."
Ahlberg placed the paper in a green file which lay on his desk.
They sat quietly for a minute. Martin Beck was hungry. He thought about his wife and her chatter about regular meals. He hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours.
The air in the room was thick with cigarette smoke.
Ahlberg got up and opened the window. They could hear a time signal from the radio somewhere in the vicinity.
'It's one o'clock," he said. "If you're hungry I can send out for something. I'm as hungry as a bear."
Martin Beck nodded and Ahlberg picked up the telephone. After a while there was a knock at the door and a girl in a blue dress and a red apron came in with a basket.
After Martin Beck had eaten a ham s
andwich and had a few swallows of coffee, he said:
'How do you think she got there?"
'I don't know. During the day there are always a lot of people at the locks so it could hardly have happened then. He could have thrown her in from the pier or the embankment and then later the backwash from the boats' propellers might have moved her further out. Or maybe she was thrown overboard from some vessel."
'What kind of boats go through the locks? Small boats and pleasure craft?"
'Some. Not so terribly many. Most of them are freighters. And then there are the canal boats, of course, the Diana, the Juno and the Wilhelm Tham."
'Can we drive down there and take a look?" asked Martin Beck.
Ahlberg got up, took the photograph that Martin Beck had chosen, and said: "We can get going right away. I'll leave this at the lab on the way out."
It was almost three o'clock when they returned from Borenshult. The traffic in the locks was lively and Martin Beck had wanted to stay there among the vacationers and the fishermen on the pier to watch the boats.
He had spoken with the crew of the dredger, been out on the embankment and looked at the system of locks. He had seen a sailing canoe cruising in the fresh breeze far out in the water and had begun to long for his own canoe which he had sold several years ago. During the trip back to town he sat thinking about sailing in the archipelago in summers past.
There were eight, fresh copies of the picture from the Photo laboratory lying on Ahlberg's desk when they returned. One of the policemen, who was also a photographer, had retouched the picture and the girl's face looked almost as if she had been photographed alive.
Ahlberg looked through them, laid four of the copies in the green folder and said:
'Fine. Ill pass these out to the boys so that they can get started immediately."
When he came back after a few minutes Martin Beck was standing next to the desk rubbing his nose.
'I'd like to make a few telephone calls," he said.
'Use the office farthest down the corridor."
The room was larger than Ahlberg's and had windows on two walls. It was furnished with two desks, five chairs, a filing cabinet and a typewriter table with a disgracefully old Remington.
Martin Beck sat down, placed his cigarettes and matches on the table, put down the green folder and began to go through the reports. They didn't tell him much more than he had already learned from Ahlberg.
An hour and a half later he ran out of cigarettes. He had placed a few telephone calls without result and had talked to the Commissioner and to Superintendent Larsson who seemed tired and pressed. Just as he had crumpled the empty cigarette package, Kollberg called.
Ten minutes later they met at the hotel.
'God, you look dismal," Kollberg said. "Do you want a cigarette?"
'No thank you. What have you been doing?"
'I've been talking to a guy from the Motala Times. A local editor in Borensberg. He thought he had found something. A girl from Linköping was to have started a new job in Borensborg ten days ago but she never arrived. She was thought to have left Linköping the day before and since then, no one has heard from her. No one thought to report her missing since she was generally unreliable. This newspaperman knew her employer and started making his own inquiries but never bothered to get a description of her. But I did. And it isn't the same girl. This one was fat and blond. She's still missing. It took me the entire day."
He leaned back in his chair and picked his teeth with a match.
'What do we do now?"
'Ahlberg has sent out a few of his boys to knock on doors. You ought to give them a hand. When Melander gets here we'll have a run through with the Commissioner and Larsson. Go over to Ahlberg and he'll tell you what to do."
Kollberg straightened his chair and got up.
'Are you coming too?" he asked.
'No, not now. Tell Ahlberg that I'm in my room if he wants anything."
When he got to his room Martin Beck took off his jacket, shoes, and tie and sat down on the edge of the bed.
The weather had cleared and white puffs of cloud moved across the sky. The afternoon sun shone into the room.
Martin Beck got up, opened the window a little, and closed the thin, yellow drapes. Then he lay down on the bed with his hands folded under his head.
He thought about the girl who had been pulled out of Boren's bottom mud.
When he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.
Who was she? What had she thought? How had she lived? Whom had she met?
She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no one to miss her when she disappears.
Martin Beck thought about this for a long time. No one had inquired about her. He felt sorry for the girl whom no one missed. He couldn't understand why. Maybe she had said that she was going away? If so, it might be a long time before someone wondered where she was.
The question was: how long?
5
It was eleven-thirty in the morning and Martin Beck's third day in Motala. He had gotten up early but accomplished nothing by it. Now he was sitting at the small desk thumbing through his notebook. He had reached for the telephone a few times, thinking that he really ought to call home, but nothing had come of the idea.
Just like so many other things.
He put on his hat, locked the door to his room, and walked down the stairs. The easy chairs in the hotel lobby were occupied by several journalists and two camera cases with folded tripods, bound by straps, lay on the floor. One of the press photographers stood leaning against the wall near the entrance smoking a cigarette. He was a very young man and he moved his cigarette to the corner of his mouth and raised his Leica to look through the viewer.
When Martin Beck went past the group he drew his hat down over his face, ducked his head against his shoulder and walked straight ahead. This was merely a reflex action but always seemed to irritate someone because one of the repor ers said, surprisingly sourly:
'Say, will there be a dinner with the leaders of the search this evening?"
Martin Beck mumbled something without even knowing what he had said himself and continued toward the door. The second before he had opened the door, he heard the little click which indicated that the photographer had taken a picture.
He walked quickly down the street, but only until he thought he was out of the range of the camera. Then he stopped and stood there indecisively for about ten seconds. He threw a half-smoked cigarette into the gutter, shrugged his shoulders and walked over to a taxi stand. He slumped into the back seat, rubbed the tip of his nose with his right index finger, and peered over toward the hotel. From under his hat brim he saw the man who had spoken to him in the lobby. The journalist stood directly in front of the hotel and stared after the taxi. But only for a moment. Then he, too, shrugged his shoulders and went back into the hotel.
Press people and personnel from the Homicide Division of the National Police often stayed at the same hotel. After a speedy and successful solution to a crime, they often spent the last evening eating and drinking together. Over the years this had become a custom. Martin Beck didn't like it but several of his colleagues thought otherwise.
Even though he hadn't been on his own very much, he had still learned a little about Motala during the forty-eight hours he had been there. At least he knew the names of the streets. He watched the street signs as the taxi drove by them. He told the driver to stop at the bridge, paid him, and stepped out. He stood with his hands on the railing and looked along the canal. While he stood there he realized that he had forgotten to ask the driver to give him a receipt for the fare and that there would probab
ly be some kind of idiotic nonsense back at the office if he were to make one out himself. It would be best to type out the information, it would give more substance to his request.
He was still thinking about that as he walked along the path on the north side of the canal.
During the morning hours there had been a few rain showers and the air was fresh and light. He stopped, right in the middle of the path, and felt how fresh it was. He drank in the cool, clean odor of wild flowers and wet grass. It reminded him of his childhood, but that was before tobacco smoke, gasoline odors and mucus had robbed his senses of their sharpness. Nowadays it wasn't often he had this pleasure.
Martin Beck had passed the five locks and continued along the sea wall. Several small boats were moored near the locks and by the breakwater, and a few small sailboats could be seen out in the open water. One hundred and fifty feet beyond the jetty, the dredger's bucket clanged and clattered under the watchful eye of some seagulls who were flying in wide, low circles. Their heads moved from one side to the other as they waited for whatever the bucket might bring up from the bottom. Their powers of observation and their patience were admirable, as was their staying power and optimism. They reminded Martin Beck of Kollberg and Melander.
He walked to the end of the breakwater and stood there for a while. She had been lying here, or more accurately, her violated body had been lying here, on a crumpled tarpaulin practically on view to anyone for public inspection. After a few hours it had been carried away by two businesslike, uniformed men with a stretcher and, in time, an elderly gentleman whose profession it was to do so, had opened it up, examined it in detail, and then sewed it together again before it was sent to the mortuary. He hadn't seen it himself. There was always something to be thankful for.
Martin Beck became conscious of the fact that he was standing with his hands clasped behind his back as he shifted his weight from the sole of one foot to another, a habit from his years as a patrolman which was totally unconscious and almost unbreakable. He was standing and staring at a gray and uninteresting piece of ground from where the chalk marks from the first, routine investigation had long since been washed away by the rain. He must have occupied himself with this for a long time because the surroundings had gone through a number of changes. When he looked up he observed a small, white passenger boat entering one of the locks at a good speed. When it passed the dredger, some twenty cameras pointed at it, and, as if to underscore the situation, the dredging foreman climbed out of his cabin and also photographed the passenger boat. Martin Beck followed the boat with his eyes as it passed the jetty and noted certain ugly details. The hull had clean lines but the mast was cut off and the original smokestack, which had surely been high and straight and beautiful, had been replaced by a strange, streamlined little tin hood. From inside the ship growled something that must have been a diesel engine. The deck was full of tourists. Nearly all of them seemed to be elderly or middle-aged and several of them wore straw hats with flowered bands.