The Laughing Policeman

by Maj Sjowall

  “Well, that’s that,” Kollberg said. “So far.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “What Stenström didn’t have time for. Go down to Eksjö.”

  “The pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fit together,” Martin Beck said.

  “Yes,” Kollberg agreed. “By the way, where’s Månsson?”

  “At Hallstahammar, I think, looking for that piece of paper. At Stenström’s mother’s place.”

  “He’s not one to give up easily,” Kollberg said. “Pity. I was going to borrow his car. Mine has something wrong with the ignition.”

  Kollberg arrived in Eksjö on the morning of January 8. He had driven down during the night, 208 miles in a snowstorm and on icy roads, but did not feel particularly tired even so. The City Hotel was in the main square and was a handsome, old-fashioned building which blended perfectly into the idyllic setting of this little Swedish country town. The waiter called Sverker Johnsson had died ten years ago, but a copy of Nils Erik Göransson’s hotel bill still existed. It took several hours to fish it out of a dusty cardboard box in the loft.

  The bill seemed to confirm that Göransson had stayed at the hotel for eleven days. He had had all his meals and done all his drinking in the hotel dining room, and signed the bills, after which the amounts had been transferred to his hotel bill. There were also a number of other expenses, including telephone calls, but the numbers Göransson had called up were not recorded. Another item, however, caught Kollberg’s eye.

  On June 6, 1951, the hotel had paid out 52 kronor and 25 öre to a garage on the guest’s behalf. The amount was for “towing and repairs.”

  “Does this garage still exist?” Kollberg asked the hotel owner.

  “Oh, sure it does, and the same owner the last twenty-five years. Just follow the road out toward Långanäs and …”

  Actually the man had had the garage for twenty-seven years. He stared incredulously at Kollberg and said, “Sixteen and a half years ago? How the hell can I remember that?”

  “Don’t you keep books?”

  “You bet I do,” the man said indignantly. “This is a properly run place.”

  It took him an hour and a half to find the old ledger. He wouldn’t let it out of his hands but turned the pages slowly and carefully until he came to the day in question.

  “The sixth of June,” he murmured. “Here it is. Picked up from hotel, that’s right. The throttle cable had gone haywire. It cost 52:25, the whole business. With towing and all.”

  Kollberg waited.

  “Towing,” muttered the man. “What an idiot. Why didn’t he hook up the throttle cable with something and drive here himself?”

  “Have you any particulars about the car?” Kollberg asked.

  “Yes. Registration number A … A … something. I can’t read it. Someone’s put an oily thumb over the figures. Evidently a Stockholmer, anyway.”

  “You don’t know what sort of car it was?”

  “Sure I do. A Ford Vedette.”

  “Not a Morris Minor?”

  “If it says Ford Vedette here, then a Ford Vedette it damn well was,” the garage owner said testily. “Morris Minor? There’s a slight difference, isn’t there.”

  Kollberg took the ledger with him, after a good half hour’s threats and persuasions. When finally he was on his way, the workshop owner said, “Well, anyway, that explains why he wasted money on towing.”

  “Really. Why?”

  “He was a Stockholmer, wasn’t he?”

  When Kollberg got back to the City Hotel in Eksjö it was already evening. He was hungry, cold and tired, and instead of starting the long drive north he took a room at the hotel. Had a bath and ordered dinner. While he was waiting for the food to be prepared he made two phone calls. First to Melander.

  “Will you please find out which of the guys on the list had a car in June, 1951? And what makes?”

  “Sure. Tomorrow morning.”

  “And the color of Göransson’s Morris?”

  “Yes.”

  Then Martin Beck.

  “Göransson didn’t bring his Morris here. He was driving another car.”

  “So Stenström was right.”

  “Can you put someone on to finding out who owned that firm in Holländaregatan where Göransson was employed, and what it did?”

  “Sure.”

  “I should be back in town about midday tomorrow.”

  He went down into the dining room and had dinner. As he sat there it suddenly dawned on him that he had in fact stayed at this hotel exactly sixteen years ago. He had been working on a taxi murder. They had cleared it up in three or four days. If he had known then what he knew now he could probably have solved the Teresa case in ten minutes.

  Rönn was thinking about Olsson and about the restaurant bill he had found among the rubbish in Göransson’s paper shopping bag. On Tuesday morning he got an idea and as usual when something was weighing on his mind he went to Gunvald Larsson. Despite the far from cordial attitude they adopted toward each other at work, Rönn and Gunvald Larsson were friends. Very few outsiders knew this, and they would have been even more surprised had they known that the two had in fact spent both Christmas and New Year’s Eve together.

  “I’ve been thinking about the bit of paper with the initials B.F.,” Rönn said. “On that list that Melander and Kollberg are messing about with are three persons with those initials. Bo Frostensson, Bengt Fredriksson and Björn Forsberg.”

  “Well?”

  “We could take a cautious look at them and see if any of them resembles Olsson.”

  “Can you track them down?”

  “I expect Melander can.”

  Melander could. It took him only twenty minutes to find out that Forsberg was at home and would be at his office downtown after lunch. At twelve o’clock he was to have lunch with a client at the Ambassadör. Frostensson was in a film studio out at Solna, playing a small part in a film by Arne Mattsson.

  “And Fredriksson is presumably drinking beer at the Café Ten Spot. He’s usually to be found there at this hour of day.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Martin Beck said surprisingly. “We’ll take Månsson’s car. I’ve given him one of ours instead.”

  Sure enough Bengt Fredriksson, artist and brawler, was hard at it drinking beer in the beer hall in the Old Town. He was very fat, had a bushy, unkempt red beard and lank gray hair. He was already drunk.

  Out at Solna the production manager piloted them through long, winding corridors to a corner of the big film studio.

  “Frostensson is to play a scene in five minutes,” he said. “It’s the only line he has in the film.”

  They stood at a safe distance but in the mercilessly strong spotlights they clearly saw the set behind a jumble of cables and shifted scenery. It was evidently meant to be the interior of a little grocery store.

  “Stand by!” the director shouted. “Silence! Camera! Action!”

  A man in a white cap and coat came into the stream of light and said, “Good morning, madam. May I help you?”

  “Cut!”

  There was a retake, and another. Frostensson had to say the line five times. He was a lean, bald little man with a stammer and a nervous twitch around his mouth and the corners of his eyes.

  Half an hour later Gunvald Larsson braked the car twenty-five yards from the gates of Björn Forsberg’s house at Stocksund. Martin Beck and Rönn crouched in the back. Through the open garage doors they could see a black Mercedes of the largest type.

  “He should be leaving now,” Gunvald Larsson said. “If he doesn’t want to be late for his lunch appointment.”

  They had to wait fifteen minutes before the front door opened and a man appeared on the steps together with a blonde woman, a dog and a little girl of about seven. He kissed the woman on the cheek, lifted the child up and kissed her. Then he strode down to the garage, got into the car and drove off. The little girl blew him a kiss, laughed and shouted something.

&n
bsp; Björn Forsberg was tall and slim. His face, with regular features and candid expression, was strikingly handsome, as though drawn from the illustration for a short story in a woman’s magazine. He was suntanned and his bearing was relaxed and sporty. He was bareheaded and was wearing a loose-fitting, gray overcoat. His hair was wavy and brushed back. He looked younger than his forty-eight years.

  “Like Olsson,” Rönn said. “Especially his build and clothes. The overcoat, that is.”

  “Hm,” Gunvald Larsson murmured. “The difference being that Olsson paid 300 kronor for his coat at a sale three years ago. This guy has probably shelled out 5,000 for his. But someone like Schwerin wouldn’t notice that.”

  “Nor would I, to tell the truth,” Rönn said.

  “But I notice it,” Gunvald Larsson said. “Luckily there are people who have an eye for quality. Otherwise they might as well build whorehouses all along Savile Row.”

  “Where?” Rönn asked in astonishment.

  Kollberg’s schedule broke down completely. Not only did he oversleep, but the weather was worse than ever. By one thirty he had still only got as far as a motel just north of Linköping. He had a cup of coffee and called up Stockholm.

  “Well?”

  “Only nine of them had a car in the summer of ’51,” Melander replied. “Ingvar Bengtsson a new Volkswagen, Rune Bengtsson a ’49 Packard, Kent Carlsson a ’38 DKW, Ove Eriksson an old Opel Kapitän, prewar model, Björn Forsberg a ’49 Ford Vedette and—”

  “Stop. Did anyone else have one?”

  “A Vedette? No.”

  “Then that’ll do.”

  “The original paintwork on Göransson’s Morris was pale green. The car can of course have been repainted while he had it.”

  “Fine. Can you switch me over to Martin?”

  “One more detail. Göransson sent his car to the scrapyard in the summer of ’51. It was removed from the car registry on August 15, only one week after Göransson had been questioned by the police.”

  Kollberg put another krona piece into the phone and thought impatiently of the 127 miles still ahead of him. In this weather the drive would take several hours. He regretted not having sent the ledger up by train the evening before.

  “Hello, this is Superintendent Beck.”

  “Hi. What did that firm do?”

  “Sold stolen goods, I should think. But it could never be proved. They had a couple of traveling salesmen who went around the provinces peddling clothes and the like.”

  “And who owned it?”

  “Björn Forsberg.”

  Kollberg thought for a moment, and then said, “Tell Melander to concentrate entirely on Forsberg. And ask Hjelm if either he himself or someone else will stay at the lab until I get up to town. I’ve something that must be analyzed.”

  At five o’clock Kollberg had still not returned. Melander tapped at Martin Beck’s door and went in, pipe in one hand and some papers in the other. He began speaking at once.

  “Björn Forsberg was married on June 17, 1951, to a woman called Elsa Beatrice Håkansson. She was the only child of a businessman called Magnus Håkansson. He dealt in building materials and was the sole owner of his firm. He was considered very wealthy. Forsberg immediately wound up all his former commitments like the firm on Holländaregatan. He worked hard, studied economics and developed into an energetic businessman. When Håkansson died nine years ago his daughter inherited both his fortune and his firm, but Forsberg had already become its managing director in the middle of the fifties. He bought the house at Stocksund in ’59. It probably cost about half a million then.”

  Martin Beck blew his nose.

  “How long had he known the girl before he married her?”

  “They seem to have met up at Are in March, ’51,” Melander replied. “Forsberg was a winter sports enthusiast. Still is, for that matter. His wife too. It seems to have been so-called love at first sight. They kept on meeting right up to the wedding, and he was a frequent guest in her parents’ home. He was then thirty-two and Eisa Håkansson, twenty-five.”

  Melander changed papers.

  “The marriage seems to have been a happy one. They have three children, two boys who are thirteen and twelve and a girl of seven. He sold his Ford Vedette soon after the wedding and bought a Lincoln. He’s had dozens of cars since then.”

  Melander was silent and lighted his pipe.

  “Is this what you have found out?”

  “One more thing. Important, I should think. Björn Forsberg was a volunteer in the Finnish Winter War in 1940. He was twenty-one and went off to the front straight after he’d done his military service here at home. His father was a warrant officer in the Wende artillery regiment in Kristianstad. He came from a respectable, middle-class family and was considered promising until things started to go wrong for him soon after the war.”

  “O.K., it seems to be him.”

  “Looks like it,” Melander said.

  “Which men are still here?”

  “Gunvald, Rönn, Nordin and Ek. Shall we look at his alibis?”

  “Exactly,” Martin Beck said.

  Kollberg didn’t reach Stockholm until seven o’clock. He drove first to the laboratory and handed in the garage ledger.

  “We have regular working hours,” Hjelm said sourly. “Finish at five.”

  “Then it would be awfully good of you to—”

  “O.K., O.K. I’ll call you before long. Is it only the car number you want?”

  “Yes. I’ll be at Kungsholmsgatan.”

  Kollberg and Martin Beck hardly had time to begin talking when the call came through.

  “A 6708,” Hjelm said laconically.

  “Excellent.”

  “Easy. You should almost have been able to see it yourself.”

  Kollberg put down the phone. Martin Beck gave him an inquiring look.

  “Yes. It was Forsberg’s car that Göransson used at Eksjö. No doubt of that. What are Forsberg’s alibis like?”

  “Weak. In June, ’51, he had a bachelor apartment on Holländaregatan, in the same building as that mysterious firm. At the interrogation he said that he had been in Norrtälje on the evening of the tenth. Evidently he had been, too. Met some person there at seven o’clock. Then, still according to his own statement, he took the last train back to Stockholm, arriving at eleven thirty in the evening. He also said that he had lent his car to one of his salesmen, who confirmed this.”

  “But he was goddam careful not to say that he had exchanged cars with Göransson.”

  “Yes,” Martin Beck said. “So he had Göransson’s Morris, and this puts a different complexion on things. He made his way comfortably back to Stockholm by car in an hour and a half. The cars were parked in the rear courtyard at Holländaregatan, and no one could see in from the street. There was, however, a cold-storage room in the yard. It was used for fur coats, which officially had been left for storage over the summer but which in all probability were stolen. Why do you think they exchanged cars?”

  “I expect the explanation is very simple,” Kollberg said. “Göransson was a salesman and had a lot of clothes and junk with him. He could pack three times as much into Forsberg’s Vedette as into his own Morris.”

  He sat in silence for half a minute, then said, “I don’t suppose Göransson was aware of it until afterward. When he got back he realized what had happened and that the car might be dangerous. That’s why he had it scrapped immediately after the interrogation.”

  “What did Forsberg say about his relations with Teresa?” Martin Beck asked.

  “That he met her at a dance hall in the fall of 1950 and slept with her several times, how often he didn’t remember. Then he met his future wife in the winter and lost interest in nymphomaniacs.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “More or less in those words. Why do you think he killed her? To get rid of the victim, as Stenström wrote in the margin of Wendel’s book?”

  “Presumably. They all said they couldn’t shake
her off. And of course it wasn’t a sex murder.”

  “No, but he wanted it to look like one. And then he had the unbelievable stroke of luck that the witnesses got the cars mixed up. He must have been tickled pink. That meant he could feel pretty well safe. Göransson was the only worry.”

  “Göransson and Forsberg were pals,” Martin Beck said.

  “And then nothing happened until Stenström started rooting in the Teresa case and got that strange tip from Birgersson. He found out that Göransson was the only one who had had a Morris Minor. The right color, what’s more. He questioned a lot of people of his own accord and started shadowing Göransson. He soon noticed, of course, that Göransson was getting money from someone and assumed that it came from whoever had murdered Teresa Camarão. Göransson got more and more jittery … By the way, do we know where he was between October 8 and November 13?”

  “Yes. In a boat down at Klara Strand. Nordin found the spot this morning.”

  Kollberg nodded.

  “Stenström figured out that sooner or later Göransson would lead him to the murderer, and so he went on shadowing him day after day, and presumably quite openly. It turned out that he was right. Though the result for his own part was not a success. If he had hurried up with that trip to Småland instead …”

  Kollberg was silent. Martin Beck thoughtfully rubbed the root of his nose between thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  “Yes, it seems to fit,” he said. “Psychologically as well. There were still nine years before the Teresa murder would have lapsed and the period of prosecution expired. And a murder is the only crime which is sufficiently grave for a more or less normal person to go to such lengths in order to avoid discovery. Besides, Forsberg has unusually much to lose.”

  “Do we know what he did on the evening of November 13?”

  “Yes. He butchered all those people in the bus, including Stenström and Göransson, both of whom were extremely dangerous for him by this time. But the only thing we know at present is that he had an opportunity of committing the murders.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “Gunvald managed to kidnap Forsberg’s German maid. She has the evening off every Monday. And according to a pocket diary she had in her handbag, she spent the night with her boyfriend between the thirteenth and fourteenth. We also know, still from the same source, that Mrs. Forsberg was out at a ladies’ dinner that evening. Consequently, Forsberg himself was presumed to be at home. On principle, they never leave the children alone.”