by Maj Sjowall
Martin Beck looked at him and bit his ball-point pen thoughtfully. They both had the same thought and Kollberg put it into words.
“One can’t communicate merely by telepathy.”
“No,” Martin Beck said. “Besides, the Teresa case is sixteen years old. And you had nothing to do with the investigation. The Stockholm police had charge of it from start to finish. I think Ek is the only one left here from that time.”
“So you’ve already gone through all the reports?”
“By no means. Only skimmed through them. There are several thousand pages. All the papers are out at Västberga. Shall we go out and have a look?”
“Yes, let’s. My memory needs refreshing.”
In the car Martin Beck said, “Perhaps you remember enough to realize why Stenström took on the Teresa case?”
Kollberg nodded.
“Yes, because it was the most difficult one he could tackle.”
“Exactly. The most impossible of all things impossible. He wanted to show what he was capable of, once and for all.”
“And then he went and got himself shot,” Kollberg said. “Christ, how stupid. And where’s the connection?”
Martin made no reply and nothing more was said until, after various difficulties and delays, they had threaded their way out to Västberga and parked in the sleet outside the southern police headquarters. Then Kollberg said, “Can the Teresa case be solved? Now?”
“Shouldn’t think so for a moment,” Martin Beck replied.
25
Kollberg sighed unhappily, as he listlessly and irrationally turned the pages of the reports piled in front of him.
“It will take a week to wade through all this,” he said.
“At least. Do you know the actual circumstances?”
“No, not even in broad outline.”
“There’s a résumé somewhere. Otherwise I can give you a rough idea.”
Kollberg nodded. Martin Beck picked out one or two sheets and said, “The facts are clear-cut. Very simple. Therein lies the difficulty.”
“Fire away,” Kollberg said.
“On the morning of June 10, 1951, that’s to say more than sixteen years ago, a man who was looking for his cat found a dead woman in some bushes near Stadshagen sportsground on Kungsholmen here in town. She was naked, lying on her stomach with her arms by her sides. The forensic medical examination showed that she had been strangled and that she had been dead for about five days. The body was well preserved and had evidently been lying in a cold-storage room or something similar. All available evidence pointed to a sex murder, but as such a long time had elapsed, the doctor who did the postmortem could not find any definite signs that she had been sexually assaulted.”
“Which on the whole means a sex murder,” Kollberg said.
“Yes. On the other hand, the examination of the scene of the crime showed that the body could not have been lying there for more than twelve hours at the most; this was also confirmed later by witnesses, who had passed the shrubbery the previous evening and who could not have helped seeing the body if it had been there then. Further, fibers and textile particles were found indicating that she had been transported there wrapped in a gray blanket. It was therefore quite clear that the crime had not been committed in the place where the body was found, and that the body had just been slung into the bushes. Little or no attempt had been made to hide it with the help of moss or branches. Well, that’s about all … No, I was forgetting. Two more things: She had not eaten for several hours before she died. And there was no trace of the murderer in the way of footprints or anything.”
Martin Beck turned over the pages and eyed through the typewritten text.
“The woman was identified the very same day as one Teresa Camarão. She was twenty-six years old and born in Portugal. She had come to Sweden in 1945 and the same year had married a fellow countryman called Henrique Camarão. He was two years older than she and had been a radio officer in the merchant marine but had gone ashore and got a job as radio technician. Teresa Camarão was born in Lisbon in 1925. According to the Portuguese police she came from a good home and a very respectable family. Upper middle class. She had come to study, rather belatedly because of the war. That’s as far as her studies got. She met this Henrique Camarão and married him. They had no children. Comfortably off. Lived on Torsgatan.”
“Who identified her?”
“The police. That’s to say the vice squad. She was well-known there and had been for the last two years. On May 15, 1949—circumstances were such that it was in fact possible to determine the exact date—she had completely changed her way of life. She had run away from home—so it says here—and since then she had circulated in the underworld. In short, Teresa Camarão had become a whore. She was a nymphomaniac and during these two years she had gone with hundreds of men.”
“Yes, I remember,” Kollberg said.
“Now comes the best part of it. Within the space of three days the police found no less than three witnesses who, at half-past eleven the evening before, had seen a car parked on Kungsholmsgatan by the approach to the path beside which the body was found. All three were men. Two of them had passed in a car, one of them on foot. The two witnesses who had been driving had also seen a man standing by the car. Beside him on the ground lay an object the size of a body, wrapped in something that seemed to be a gray blanket. The third witness walked past a few minutes later and saw only the car. The descriptions of the man were vague. It was raining and the person had stood in the shadow; all that could be said for sure was that it was a man and that he was fairly tall. Pressed for what they meant by tall, they varied between 5 feet 9 and 6 feet 1 inches, which includes ninety percent of the country’s male population. But …”
“Yes? But what?”
“But as regards the vehicle, all three witnesses were agreed. Each said that the car was French, a Renault model CV-4, which was put on the market in 1947 and which turned up year after year with no changes to speak of.”
“Renault CV-4,” Kollberg said. “Porsche designed it while the French kept him prisoner as a war criminal. They shut him up in the gatekeeper’s house at the factory. There he sat designing. Then, I think, he was acquitted. The French made millions out of that car.”
“You have a staggering knowledge of the most widely differing subjects,” Martin Beck said drily. “Can you tell me now what connection there is between the Teresa case and the fact that Stenström was shot dead by a mass murderer on a bus four weeks ago?”
“Wait a bit,” Kollberg said. “What happened then?”
“The police here in Stockholm carried out the most extensive murder investigation ever known in this country. It swelled to gigantic proportions. Well, you can see for yourself. Hundreds of persons were questioned who had known and been in touch with Teresa Camarão, but it could not be established who had last seen her alive. All trace of her came to an abrupt end exactly one week before she was found dead. She had spent the night with a guy in a hotel room on Nybrogatan and parted from him at twelve thirty next day outside a wine restaurant on Mäster Samuelsgatan. Period. After that every single Renault CV-4 was tracked down. First in Stockholm, since the witnesses said that the car had an A license plate. Then every car in the whole country of that make and model was checked, with the idea that it might have had a false license plate. It took almost a year. And at last it could be proved, actually proved, that not one of all those cars could have stood at Stadshagen at eleven thirty on the evening of June 9, 1951.”
“Hm. And at that moment …” Kollberg said.
“Precisely. At that moment the entire investigation was as dead as a doornail. It was completed. Wound up. The only thing wrong with it was that Teresa Camarão had been murdered and it was not known who had done it. The last twitch of life in the Teresa investigation was in 1952, when the Danish, Norwegian and Finnish police informed us that the goddam car could not have come from any of those countries. At the same time the Swedish customs con
firmed that it could not have come from anywhere else abroad. As you probably remember, there were not so many cars at that time, and it involved an awful lot of red tape if you wanted to get a motor vehicle across a frontier.”
“Yes, I remember. And these witnesses …”
“The two in the car were friends from work. One was foreman at a garage and the other a car mechanic. The third witness was also very well informed in the matter of cars. By profession he was—guess.”
“Manager of the Renault factories?”
“No. Police sergeant. Specialist in traffic questions. Carlberg, his name was—he’s dead now. But not even this point was overlooked—we had started trying out witness psychology even then. These three men were made to undergo a series of tests. One at a time they were asked to identify silhouettes of different types of cars, projected on slides. All three recognized every current model, and the foreman guy even knew the most exotic makes, like Hispano-Suiza and Pegaso. They couldn’t even trick him when they drew a car that didn’t exist. He said ‘the front is a Fiat 500, and the back is from a Dyna Panhard.’ ”
“What did the guys in charge of the investigation think? Privately?” Kollberg asked.
“The inside talk was something like this: The murderer is to be found among all the papers, it’s one of the countless men who have slept with Teresa Camarão and who, in a fit of whatever it is that comes over sex maniacs, has strangled her. The investigation has collapsed because someone has bungled over the checkup of all these Renault cars. So let’s check them once again. And once again. Then they thought, quite rightly, that after all that time the scent had grown cold. They still thought that at some point or other the run-down of the cars had slipped up and that it was too late to do anything about it. I’m sure that Ek, for instance, who was in on it, thinks so to this day. And on the whole I agree. I can’t see any explanation.”
Kollberg sat silent for a while. Then he said, “What happened to Teresa on that day you mentioned? In May, 1949?”
Martin Beck studied the papers and said, “She received a kind of shock, which led to a psychological phenomenon and a mental and physical state which is comparatively rare but by no means unique. Teresa Camarão had grown up in an upper-middle-class family. Her parents were Catholics like herself. She was a virgin when she married at the age of twenty. She lived for four years together with her husband in a typical Swedish manner, although both were foreigners, and in the environment that was, and is, typical of the comfortable upper middle class. She was reserved, sensible and had a quiet disposition. Her husband considered the marriage a happy one. She was, a doctor says here, a pure product of these two environments, strict Catholic upper class and strict Swedish bourgeoisie, with all the moral taboos inherent in each, to say nothing of the combined result. On May 15, 1949, her husband was away on a job in the north. She went to a lecture with a woman friend. There they met a man whom the friend had known for years. He accompanied them back to the Camarãos’ apartment on Torsgatan, where the friend was to spend the night, as she too was a grass widow. They had tea and then sat talking about the lecture over a glass of wine. This guy was feeling a bit down because he had fallen out with a girl—whom incidentally he married not long afterward. He was at a loose end. He thought Teresa was attractive, which she was, and started making a pass at her. The woman friend, who knew that Teresa was the most moral person imaginable, went off to bed—she slept on a sofa in the hall, within earshot. The guy said about a dozen times to Teresa that they should go to bed, but she kept saying no. At last he simply lifted her out of the chair, carried her into the bedroom, undressed her and made love to her. As far as is known, Teresa Camarão had never before shown herself naked to anybody, not even to women. Teresa Camarão had never had an orgasm. That night she had about twenty. Next morning the guy said ‘so long,’ and off he went. She kept calling him up ten times a day for the next week, and after that he never heard from her again. He made it up with his girl and married her, and got on very well. There are a dozen different interrogations with him in this pile. He was really grilled, but he had an alibi and did not have a car; moreover, he was a good, decent guy who was happily married and was never unfaithful to his wife.”
“And Teresa started running about like a bitch in heat?”
“Yes. Literally. She left home, her husband would have nothing more to do with her, and she was dropped by all her friends and acquaintances. For two years she lived for short periods with a score of different men and had sexual relations with ten times as many. She was a nymphomaniac, ready for anything. At first she did it for nothing, but toward the last she did accept money occasionally. Of course, she never met anyone who could put up with her for any length of time. She had no women friends. She tumbled right down the social ladder. Within less than six months the only people she mixed with were those who belonged to what we then called the underworld. She also started drinking. The vice squad knew of her but could never quite keep up with her. They were going to pick her up for vagrancy, but before they could do anything she was dead.”
Pointing to the bundle of reports, Martin Beck went on.
“Among all these papers are a lot of interrogations with men who fell prey to her. They say she never left them alone and was impossible to satisfy. Most of them got scared to death the very first time, especially those who were married and were just out for a bit of fun on the side. She knew a large number of shady characters and semi-gangsters, thieves and con men and black market swindlers and the like. Well, you remember the clientele from that time.”
“What happened to her husband?”
“Not unnaturally, he considered himself scandalized. He changed his name and became a Swedish citizen. Met a girl of good family from Stocksund, remarried, had two children and lived happily ever after in a house of his own on Lidingö. His alibi was as watertight as Captain Cassel’s raft.”
“As what?”
“The only thing you know nothing about is boats,” Martin Beck said. “If you look through that folder you’ll understand where Stenström got some of his ideas.”
Kollberg looked inside it.
“Jesus Christ! That’s the hairiest little broad I’ve ever seen. Who took these pictures?”
“A man interested in photography who had a perfect alibi and who had nothing to do with a Renault car. But unlike Stenström, he sold his pictures at a fat profit. As you remember, we didn’t have the same profusion of advanced pornography then as we have now.”
They sat silent for a while. At last Kollberg said, “What possible connection can this have with the fact that Stenström and eight other people are shot dead on a bus sixteen years later?”
“None at all,” Martin Beck replied. “We’re simply on our way back to the mentally deranged sensation murderer.”
“Why did he say nothing—” Kollberg began, and broke off.
“Exactly,” Martin Beck said. “All that is explained now. Stenström was going through unsolved cases. As he was very ambitious and still rather naïve he picked the most hopeless one he could find. If he solved the Teresa murder it would be a fantastic detective feat. And he said nothing to us because he knew that some of us would laugh at him. When he told Hammar he didn’t want to tackle anything too old, he had already decided on this. When Teresa Camarão lay in the morgue Stenström was twelve and probably didn’t even read the newspapers. He considered he could look at it in quite an unbiased way. He combed right through this investigation.”
“And what did he find?”
“Nothing. Because there’s nothing to find. There’s not one loose thread.”
“How do you know?”
Martin Beck looked gravely at Kollberg and said, “I know because I did exactly the same thing eleven years ago. I didn’t find anything either. And I didn’t have any Åsa Torell to carry out sexual-psychological experiments on. The minute you told me that about her, I knew what he had been working on. But I forgot that you didn’t know as much about Teresa
Camarão as I did. Come to that, I should have realized it when we found those pictures in his drawer.”
“So he was trying out a kind of psychological method?”
“Yes. That’s all there is left. Find a person who resembles Teresa in some respect and see how she reacts. There’s a certain amount of sense in it, especially if you already happen to have such a person at home. The investigation as such has no gaps. Otherwise …”
“What?”
“I was going to say that otherwise we’d have to turn to a clairvoyant. But some bright guy has already done that. It’s there somewhere in the file.”
“But this doesn’t tell us what he was doing on the bus.”
“No. It doesn’t tell us a damn thing.”
“I’ll check a couple of things anyway,” Kollberg said.
“Yes, do,” Martin Beck said.
Kollberg searched out Henrique Camarão, who now called himself Hendrik Caam, a corpulent, middle-aged man who sighed and stole an unhappy glance at his blonde upper-class wife and a thirteen-year-old son with velvet jacket and Beatles hair-do, and said, “Am I never to be left in peace? Only last summer there was a young detective here and …”
Kollberg also checked Caam’s alibi for the evening of November 13. It was faultless.
He also tracked down the man who had taken the pictures of Teresa eighteen years earlier, and found a toothless old alcoholic in a cell in the long-term pavilion of the central prison. The man, who had been a burglar, screwed up his mouth and said, “Teresie. I’ll say I remember her. She had nipples the size of beer-bottle tops. Funny thing, there was another cop here a few months ago and …”
Kollberg read every word of the report. It took him exactly a week. On the evening of Tuesday, December 18, 1967, he read the last page. Then he looked at his wife, who had been asleep for some hours; her head, with its dark ruffled hair, was burrowed into the pillow. She was lying on her stomach with her right knee drawn up and the quilt had slipped down to her waist. He heard the sofa creak in the living room as Åsa Torell got up and tiptoed out to the kitchen for a drink of water. She still slept badly.