The Locked Room

by Maj Sjowall

  For Monita the winter of 1971 was grim. The restaurant where she’d been working changed hands. Converted into a pub, it lost its former customers without managing to attract new ones, and in the end the staff had been fired and the place turned into a bingo hall. Now she was out of work again, and, with Mona in the day care center by day and out playing with her friends on weekends, she felt more lonely than ever.

  She found it irritating not to be able to put an end to her affair with Mauritzon, an irritation that increased during his absences. When they were together she still enjoyed his company. Besides being the only person in the world apart from Mona who seemed to have any need for her, he was obviously in love with her—and this of course was flattering.

  Sometimes, having nothing to do in the daytime, she’d go up to the Armfeldtsgatan apartment at times when she knew he wouldn’t be at home. She liked to sit there alone, reading, listening to records, or just being among his things, which still seemed strange to her though by now she should have gotten used to them. Apart from a couple of books and some records, there was nothing in his flat she would ever have dreamed of possessing in her own home. Nevertheless, in some queer way, she felt at home there.

  He’d never given her a key to his apartment. It was she who had a copy made one time when he’d lent her his. This was the only liberty she’d ever taken with him, and at first it had given her a bad conscience.

  She always made sure to leave no telltale traces and only went there when she was quite sure he was away. How would he react if he knew? Sometimes, of course, she snooped about his belongings but never found anything that seemed particularly incriminating. She’d had the extra key made not in order to pry, but just to be able to go there in privacy—not that anyone was looking for her or had any interest in her whereabouts. Even so, it gave her a feeling of inaccessibility, a sense of sovereignty reminiscent of what she had known when playing hide-and-seek as a child. She would always choose such a good hiding place that no one in the whole world could ever find her. If she’d asked him, he’d probably have given her a key of her own. But then there’d have been no fun in it.

  One day in mid-April Monita, feeling unusually restless and troubled, went to the apartment in Armfeldtsgatan. She was going to sit in Mauritzon’s ugliest and most comfortable armchair, play some Vivaldi on the phonograph, and hope that that wonderful feeling of peace and total indifference to everything would come over her.

  Mauritzon was away in Spain, and wasn’t due back until the next day.

  She hung up her coat and shoulder bag on a hook in the hallway and after taking out her cigarettes and matches went into the living room. It was its usual tidy self. Mauritzon did his own cleaning up. When they had first become acquainted she’d asked him why he didn’t hire a cleaning woman. He’d answered that he liked tidying up and had no desire to hand over that pleasure to someone else.

  Putting down her cigarettes and matches on the broad arm of the armchair, she went into the other room and set the record player going. She put on The Four Seasons. Listening to the first notes of Vivaldi, she went out into the kitchen to get an ash tray from the closet, then went back with it into the living room. Curling up in the armchair, she placed the ash tray on its arm.

  She thought about Mauritzon and their poverty-stricken relationship. Though they’d known each other for a year it had grown no deeper, nor had it matured. Rather the contrary. She could never remember what they talked about when they met, presumably because they never talked about anything of importance. Sitting there now in his favorite chair and looking at the bookcase with all its silly little pots and vases, she thought him an unusually absurd character. And for the hundredth time she asked herself why she even bothered with him, why she didn’t get herself a proper man instead?

  She lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out in a thin jet up at the ceiling, and reflected that she must stop thinking about that half-wit before she fell into a really bad mood.

  Making herself comfortable in the chair she closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking, slowly moving her hand meanwhile in time with the music. In the middle of the largo she knocked over the ash tray, which fell to the floor and smashed.

  “Dammit,” she muttered. She got up, went out into the kitchen, and opened the closet under the sink—fumbling for the brush, which normally stood to the right of the garbage bag. It wasn’t there. So she bent down and looked inside. The brush was lying on the bottom, and as she reached for it she caught sight of a briefcase. The briefcase stood behind the garbage bag. Old and worn; she’d never seen it before. He must have put it in there intending to take it down to the basement. It looked too bulky to go into the garbage chute.

  At that moment she noticed that a thick piece of string was wound around it many times and that it had been tied in several efficient knots. Lifting out the briefcase, she put it down on the kitchen floor. It was heavy.

  Now she was curious. Cautiously, she undid the knots, trying to remember how they had been tied. Then she unwound the string and opened the briefcase.

  It was full of stones; flat pieces of black shale, which she recognized. It seemed to her she’d recently seen them somewhere. She furrowed her brow, straightened her back, flung her cigarette butt into the sink, and stared thoughtfully at the briefcase. Why should he have packed an old briefcase with stones, tied it up with string, and put it under the sink?

  Now she examined the briefcase more carefully. Genuine leather—it had certainly been elegant and rather expensive when new. She inspected the inside of the flap: no name. Then she noticed something peculiar: someone had cut off the four bottom corners with a sharp knife or razor blade. What was more, it had been done quite recently. The slashed surfaces of the leather were quite fresh.

  All at once she realized what he’d intended to do with this briefcase: throw it into the sea. Why? Bending down, she began picking out the slabs of shale. As she laid them out in a heap on the floor she remembered where she’d seen such stones. Down in the hallway, just inside the door to the yard, there’d been a heap of these slabs. Presumably they were to be used for surfacing the yard at the rear of the building. That’s where he must have gotten them.

  Just as she was thinking there couldn’t be many left in the briefcase, her fingertips touched something hard and polished. She took it out and stood there holding it in her hand, contemplating it. Slowly a thought that had long been gnawing away in the depths of her mind took shape.

  In this black steel thing, perhaps, she had the solution—the freedom she’d been dreaming of.

  The pistol was about seven-and-a-half inches long, of big caliber, and had a heavy butt. On the blueish shining steel above the breach was engraved the name: Llama. She weighed the weapon in her hand. It was heavy.

  Monita went out into the foyer and put the pistol in her bag. Then she went back into the kitchen, replaced all the stones in the briefcase, rewound the string around it—trying to duplicate the original knots—and finally put the briefcase back where she’d found it.

  She took the brush, swept up the fragments of the ash tray in the living room, went out into the hallway, and poured them down the garbage chute. When she came in again she turned off the record player, put the record back where it belonged, and went out into the kitchen. She took her cigarette butt out of the sink and flushed it down the toilet. Then she put on her coat, snapped her bag closed, and hung it over her shoulder. Before leaving the apartment she made a quick tour of the rooms to make sure everything was in its place. She felt for the key in her pocket, slammed the door behind her, and went downstairs.

  As soon as she got home she planned to do some serious thinking.

  25

  On Friday morning, July 7, Gunvald Larsson got up very early. Not precisely at sunrise, that would have been excessive. The name of the day in the Swedish calendar was “Klas,” and the rim of the sun appeared over the Stockholm horizon as early as eleven minutes to three.

  By half past six he had taken a
shower, eaten his breakfast, and dressed, and half an hour later he was already on the front stoop of the little house on Sångarvägen, in Sollentuna, already visited by Einar Rönn four days before.

  This was the Friday when everything was going to happen. Once again Mauritzon was to be confronted by Bulldozer Olsson, it was to be hoped under less cordial circumstances than last time. Perhaps, too, the moment had arrived for them to lay their hands on Malmström and Mohrén and intervene in their big coup.

  But before the special squad went into action Gunvald Larsson had it in mind to solve a little problem that had been irritating him all week. Seen in a broader context, perhaps, it was a mere trifle, yet an annoying one. Now he wanted to dispose of it once and for all and also to prove to himself that his own thinking had been correct, and that he’d drawn the right conclusion.

  Sten Sjögren had not gotten up with the sun. Five minutes passed before, yawning and fumbling with the belt of his dressing gown, he came down and opened the door.

  Gunvald Larsson was not unfriendly, but he came straight to the point. “You’ve been lying to the police,” he said.

  “Have I?”

  “A week ago you twice described a bank robber, who at first glance appeared to be a woman. Further, you gave a detailed description of the car that person used in the getaway, and of two men who were also in the car, a Renault 16.”

  “Quite right.”

  “And on Monday you repeated the same story, word for word, to a detective inspector who came here and talked to you.”

  “That’s true, too.”

  “What is also true is that the whole thing was nothing but a pack of lies.”

  “But I described that blonde as best I could.”

  “Yes, because you knew several other people had seen the robber. You were also smart enough to figure out that a film had probably been taken inside the bank.”

  “But I’m certain it was a woman!”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ve got a kind of instinct where dames are concerned.”

  “This time, as it happens, your instinct has failed you. But that’s not what I’ve come here about. I want you to admit that your tale about the car and those two men was made up.”

  “Why do you want me to do that?”

  “My reasons have no bearing on the matter. Anyway, they’re of a purely private nature.”

  Sjögren was no longer half-asleep. With a curious look at Gunvald Larsson he said slowly: “As far as I know it’s not a crime to give incomplete or inaccurate information, as long as one isn’t under oath.”

  “Quite right.”

  “In which case this conversation is meaningless.”

  “Not to me. I very much want to check upon this matter. Let us say I’ve reached a certain conclusion, and I want to be sure it’s the right one.”

  “And what conclusion is that?”

  “That you conned the police with a bunch of lies for your own advantage.”

  “Plenty of people in this society think only of their own advantage.”

  “But not you?”

  “At least I try not to. Not many people understand. My wife, for instance. Which is why I haven’t got her any longer.”

  “So you think it’s right to break into banks? And regard the police as the natural enemy of the people?”

  “Something of that sort, yes. Though not quite so simple.”

  “To rob a bank and shoot the director of a gymnastics institute isn’t a political act.”

  “No, not here and now, it isn’t. But one can take an ideological view of the matter. Look at it in its historical perspective. Sometimes bank robberies have been politically motivated—during the Irish troubles, for instance. But the protest can also be unconscious.”

  “So—it’s your view that common criminals can be regarded as revolutionaries?”

  “That’s a thought,” Sjögren said, “though it’s one that most prominent so-called socialists reject. Ever read Artur Lundkvist?”

  “No.” Gunvald Larsson mostly read Jules Régis and similar authors. At the moment he was ploughing through S. A. Duse’s output. However, this had nothing to do with the matter. His literary habits were dictated by a need for amusement; he had no longing for a literary education.

  “Lundkvist got the Lenin Prize,” said Sten Sjögren. “In an anthology called A Socialist Man, he writes like this—and I quote from memory: ‘Sometimes it goes so far that simple criminals are made to look as if they were consciously protesting against the miserable state of affairs as if they were almost revolutionaries … something that would least of all be tolerated in a socialist country.’ ”

  “Go on,” said Gunvald Larsson.

  “End of quote,” said Sjögren. “Lundkvist is a jerk. His whole line of reasoning is imbecilic. In the first place, people can be driven to protest against their state of affairs without being ideologically awake. And secondly, that bit about the socialist countries … there’s not an ounce of logic to it. Why the devil should people rob themselves?”

  Gunvald Larsson said nothing for a long while. Finally he said: “So—there was no beige-colored Renault?”

  “No.”

  “Nor any unnaturally pale driver in a white T-shirt, nor any guy in black who looked like Harpo Marx?”

  “No.”

  Gunvald Larsson nodded to himself. Then he said: “The fact of the matter is that the man who broke into that bank seems to be done for. And so far from being some kind of an unconscious revolutionary, he was a bloody rat who was hitchhiking on the capitalist bandwagon and lived by peddling dope and pornography—without a thought to anything except his own profit. Self-interest, that is. Furthermore, he has squealed on his pals in an attempt to save his own skin.”

  Sjögren shrugged his shoulders. “There’s plenty of that kind about, too,” he said. “Put it whichever way you like, but the guy who robbed that bank was some kind of underdog—if you see what I mean.”

  “I see exactly what you mean.”

  “How could you figure all this out?”

  “Try it yourself,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Put yourself in my shoes.”

  “Why the devil did you ever become a policeman?” asked Sjögren.

  “Sheer chance. Actually I’m a seaman. Anyway, all that was so long ago, and many things looked quite different in those days. But that’s neither here nor there. Now I have what I wanted.”

  “And that was all?”

  “Exactly. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” said Sjögren. He looked utterly astounded. But Gunvald Larsson didn’t notice. He was already on his way to his car. Nor did he hear Sjögren’s parting shot:

  “Anyway, I’m dead sure it was a girl.”

  At that same early hour of the morning Mrs. Svea Mauritzon was standing baking in her kitchen on Pilgatan, in Jönköping. Her prodigal son had come home and was to be regaled with fresh cinnamon buns with his morning coffee. She was blissfully unaware of the terms in which her son was at that moment being described by a policeman a hundred and eighty miles away; if she had ever heard anyone call the apple of her eye a rat she would instantly have given that person a taste of her rolling pin.

  A sharp ring on the front doorbell broke the morning silence. Laying aside her tray of freshly iced cinnamon twirls on the sink, she dried her hands on her apron and shuffled hurriedly out to the front door in her down-at-the-heels slippers. She noticed that the clock only showed 7:30 and threw an anxious glance toward the closed bedroom door.

  In there her boy was sleeping. She had made up a bed for him on the sofa in the living room, but the clock had disturbed him and in the middle of the night he’d woken her up and asked her to switch beds with him. Poor child, he was working himself to death. What he needed was a real good sleep! For her part, being almost stone deaf, she did not hear the ticking of the clock.

  Outside her front door stood two big men.

  She didn’t quite hear all they said, but they we
re extremely insistent. They must be allowed to speak to her son. In vain she tried to explain it was too early and that they could come back a little later when he’d finished sleeping.

  They were implacable, maintaining that their errand was of the very greatest importance. Finally, very reluctantly, she went in to her son and gently awakened him. Raising himself on his elbow, he looked at the clock.

  “Are you out of your mind? What do you want to wake me up like this for in the middle of the night? Didn’t I say I wanted to have a good sleep?”

  She gave him an unhappy look. “There are two gentlemen who want to see you,” she said.

  “What!” he yelled, jumping out of bed. “You haven’t let them in, have you?”

  Mauritzon knew it must be Malmström and Mohrén. They had realized he’d betrayed them, figured out where he was hiding, and were here seeking revenge.

  His mother shook her head and stared at him in amazement as he flung on his clothes without even taking off his pajamas. At the same time he rushed around the room, collecting his scattered belongings and flinging them into his bag.

  “What’s it all about?” she asked, anxiously.

  He snapped shut the bag, grabbed her by the arm, and hissed: “You must get rid of them! Tell ’em I’m not here. Say I’ve gone to Australia, anything!”

  Not hearing what he’d said, she noticed her hearing aid was lying on the bedside table and put it on. Mauritzon tiptoed over to the door, pressed his ear against it, and listened. Not a sound. They were standing out there waiting for him, probably with a whole arsenal of guns ready to fire.

  His mother came up to him and whispered: “What is it, Filip? What kind of men are they?”

  “Just you get rid of them,” he whispered back. “Tell ’em I’ve gone abroad.”

  “But I’ve already told them you’re here. How could I know you didn’t want to see them?”