The Locked Room

by Maj Sjowall

  The security police were worried. They lived in a world of spooks, a world that swarmed with dangerous communists and bomb-throwing anarchists and hooligans who were trying to bring society to its senses by protesting against plastic milk bottles and the vandalization of the urban environment. The security police got most of their information from Ustasja and other fascist organizations, with whom they were delighted to collaborate in order to gain information about alleged left-wing activists.

  The National Police Commissioner, personally, was even more worried. For he knew something that even the security police still had not got wind of. Ronald Reagan was turning up. That hardly popular governor had already popped up in Denmark, where he had lunched with the Queen. It was not out of the question that he might drop in on Sweden, too, in which case his visit could hardly be kept a secret.

  This was why the Vietnam demonstration, planned for that evening, came at a most inopportune moment. Many thousands of people were indignant about the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes and wholly unprotected villages, which for reasons of prestige had to be blasted back into the Stone Age. Some of these people had gathered at Hakberget to adopt a resolution. Afterwards it was their intention to hand the document to some doorman at the United States Embassy.

  This must not be allowed to happen. The situation was delicate, the chief of the Stockholm Police was off duty, and the head of the riot police was away on vacation. Thousands of disturbers of the peace were threateningly close to the city’s most sacrosanct building: the glass palace of the United States. In this situation the National Commissioner of Police made a historic decision. He was going to see to it, in person, that the demonstration went off peacefully. He personally would lead the procession to some safe spot, far from the dangerous neighborhood. This safe place was Humlegården Park, in the center of Stockholm. There the goddam resolution was to be read aloud, after which the demonstration was to be dissolved. The demonstrators, for their part, were peaceful enough and agreed to everything. The procession got going along Karlavägen. Every able-bodied policeman within reach was mobilized to supervise the operation.

  For example, Gunvald Larsson suddenly found himself sitting in a helicopter, staring down at the long line of people with banners and Viet Cong flags proceeding at a snail’s pace northwards. He clearly saw what happened but could do little or nothing about it. Nor did he want to.

  At the junction of Karlavägen and Sturegatan the National Police Commissioner, in person, led the procession straight into a large and extremely disgruntled crowd of soccer fans who were pouring out of the civic stadium, greatly displeased at the poor showing of the home team. The melee that ensued was reminiscent of the rout after Waterloo or the Pope’s visit to Jerusalem. Within three minutes policemen of every kind were striking out right and left against everything and everyone: soccer fans, people taking a stroll in Humlegärden, and pacifists—all of whom suddenly found nightsticks raining down on them, and motorcycle police and mounted detachments brutally forcing their way among them. Demonstrators and fans began fighting without knowing why, and in the end the uniformed police were knocking down their plainclothes colleagues. The National Police Commissioner himself had to be evacuated by helicopter.

  Not, however, the one Gunvald Larsson was sitting in; for after a minute of this hullaballoo he said: “Fly off, dammit, anywhere you like, as long as it’s far away.”

  A hundred people were arrested and many more were injured. None of them knew why. Stockholm was in chaos. And the National Police Commissioner said, out of pure habit: “None of this must be allowed to come out.”

  26

  Martin Beck rode again—crouching low and at a gallop across a plain—surrounded by men in raglan coats. In front of him he saw the Russian artillery emplacement; the muzzle of a gun stuck out between the sandbags, staring at him. Death’s black eye. He saw the shell coming straight toward him. It grew. It became bigger and bigger until it filled his whole field of vision—and then the image blackened. This must be Balaklava. Then he was standing on the bridge of “H.M.S. Lion.” The “Indefatigable” and the “Queen Mary” had just blown up and been swallowed by the sea. A messenger rushed up and yelled: “ ‘Princess Royal’ has blown up!” Beatty bent forward and said in a loud, calm voice, above the roar of battle: “Beck, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. Steer two points closer to the enemy.”

  Then came the usual scene with Garfield and Guiteau. He jumped off his horse, rushed through the railroad station, and caught the bullet in his body. At the very moment when he was breathing his last, the National Police Commissioner came up and affixed a medal to his shattered chest, unrolled something resembling a scroll of parchment, and said, rolling his r’s: “You’ve been prromoted to the rrank of Commissioner, salarry grrade B-thrree.” The President lay in a heap on the platform, wearing his top hat. Then a wave of burning pain passed through him, and he opened his eyes.

  He was lying, soaked in sweat, in his own bed. The clichés were getting worse and worse. This time Guiteau had looked like ex-Patrolman Eriksson, President Garfield like an elegantly turned out elderly gentleman, the National Police Commissioner like the National Police Commissioner, and Beatty as he did on the 1919 Peace Mug—surrounded by a laurel wreath and exuding a faintly arrogant air.

  Otherwise his dream, this time too, had been full of absurdities and misquotations.

  David Beatty had never said: “Turn two points nearer to the enemy.” According to all available sources, his order had been: “Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. Turn two points to port.” In itself, of course, this made no difference. Two points to port, in this context, was the same as two points toward the enemy.

  And in the previous dream, when Guiteau had looked like John Carradine, the pistol was a Hammerli International. Now, when he had resembled Eriksson, his gun had been a derringer. Furthermore, only Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, surely, had worn a raglan coat at Balaklava. There was neither rhyme nor reason to these dreams of his.

  He got up, shed his pajamas, and took a shower. As the cold water gave him gooseflesh he thought of Rhea.

  On his way to the subway he thought about his own odd behavior yesterday evening.

  At his desk out at Västberga, all of a sudden he felt unpleasantly alone.

  Kollberg came in and asked him how he was. It was a tricky question, and all he managed to reply was: “Oh, not too bad.”

  Kollberg left again, almost at once. He was sweating and was in a big rush. In the doorway he said: “That job on Hornsgatan seems to have been cleared up. What’s more, we’ve a fine chance to catch Malmström and Mohrén red-handed. How’s your locked room coming along, by the way?”

  “Not too bad. Anyway, better than I’d expected.”

  “Really?” said Kollberg. Lingering a couple of seconds longer, he said: “I think you’re looking a bit brighter today. So long.”

  “So long.”

  Then he was alone again. He began thinking about Svärd.

  At the same time he thought about Rhea. She had given him much more than he’d expected. From a policeman’s point of view, that is. Three lines of thought, maybe four. Svärd was pathologically miserly. Always, at least for years, he had barricaded himself inside his apartment even though it had contained nothing of any value. Svärd had been ill and not long before his death had been admitted to a radium clinic.

  Could Svärd have had some money stowed away somewhere? And if so, where?

  Had Svärd been frightened of something? And if so, what? The only thing of any putative value inside his lair, barred and bolted, had been his own life.

  What the devil had Svärd suffered from? The radium clinic suggested cancer. But if he had been a doomed man anyway, why had he been so concerned to protect himself against someone or something? Perhaps he’d been afraid of one particular person? In which case—of whom?

  And why had he moved to a more expensive and presu
mably inferior apartment if he was really as stingy as everyone made out?

  Questions—hard ones, but not altogether insoluble—questions hardly to be resolved in a couple of hours. More likely they’d take days. Why not weeks or months? Perhaps several years. Or maybe forever.

  And what about that ballistic investigation? That’s where he should make a start. Martin Beck reached for the phone. It was not in a helpful mood today. He had to dial six times, four of which ended with a “just a moment, please,” and then went dead. But finally he got hold of the girl who had opened up Svärd’s chest seventeen days earlier.

  “Sure,” she said. “Now I remember. There was a policeman who called me, grumbling about that bullet.”

  “Detective Inspector Rönn.”

  “I guess that was his name, yes. Don’t remember. Anyway, it wasn’t the same guy who had charge of the case earlier, Aldor Gustavsson, I mean. This one didn’t seem so experienced. He began all his sentences with ‘sure’ or ‘well.’ ”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, as I told you last time, the police didn’t seem all that interested to begin with. No one had asked for a ballistic investigation until that northerner called up. I didn’t really know what to do with the bullet. But …”

  “Yes?”

  “It seemed wrong to throw it away, so I stuffed it into an envelope and added my own comments, what it was all about, and so forth. Exactly as if it had been a real murder case. But I didn’t send it over to the lab since I happen to know how overwhelmed with work they are there.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Put the envelope aside. Then I couldn’t find it immediately. I’m new here, and I don’t have a filing cabinet of my own, and so forth. But anyway I found it and sent it in.”

  “To be examined?”

  “Well, it’s not my business to ask for that kind of thing. But I assume that if the ballistics people get hold of a bullet they examine it, even when it’s suicide.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Sure, I made a note of that. The police said at once it was suicide.”

  “Well, in that case I’ll have to call the lab,” Martin Beck said. “But there’s one more thing I wanted to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “During the autopsy, did you notice anything special?”

  “Sure, that he’d shot himself. That was in the police report.”

  “I was mostly thinking of something else. Did you find anything to suggest that Svärd had suffered from any serious illness?”

  “No. His organs seemed healthy. But …”

  “But?”

  “But I didn’t examine him all that closely. Just confirmed the cause of death. That was why I only looked at the thorax organs.”

  “Which means?”

  “Heart and lungs, mostly. Nothing wrong with them. Apart from the fact that he was dead, that is.”

  “Otherwise he could have suffered from almost anything?”

  “Certainly. Anything from gout to cancer of the liver. Say, why’re you asking me so much about this? It was just a routine case, wasn’t it?”

  “Questions are part of our routine,” Martin Beck said. He brought the conversation to an end and tried to contact one of the ballistics experts at the lab. He had no success and was finally obliged to call the head of the department himself. This was a man called Oskar Hjelm who, though he was an eminent criminologist, was above all a person disinclined to conversation.

  “Oh, so it’s you, is it?” Hjelm said sourly. “I thought you were going to be promoted to commissioner. But perhaps that was a vain hope.”

  “How so?”

  “Commissioners sit thinking about their own careers,” said Hjelm, “when they’re not out playing golf or talking nonsense on television. Above all they don’t ring me up and ask a lot of obvious questions. What is it now?”

  “Just a ballistic checkup.”

  “Just? And which one, if I may ask? Any lunatic can send us something. We’ve heaps of objects under study here and no one to study them. The other day we received a toilet bucket from Melander. He wanted to know how many different individuals had shat in it. It was full to the brim, certainly hadn’t been emptied for a couple of years.”

  “Not very nice.”

  Fredrik Melander was a detective working on the homicide squad who for many years had been one of Martin Beck’s most valuable assistants. Some time back, however, he’d been transferred to the burglary squad, presumably in hopes that he might be able to do something about the total confusion prevailing there.

  “No,” said Hjelm. “Our work isn’t nice. But no one seems to understand that. The National Police Commissioner hasn’t so much as set foot in this place for several years, and when I asked to speak to him last spring he sent a message saying he was occupied for the foreseeable future.”

  “I know your life’s hell,” said Martin Beck.

  “To say the least,” said Hjelm, a trifle conciliatory now. “You can hardly imagine how things are here, but we’re always grateful for the least little bit of encouragement or understanding. Though we never get any, of course.”

  The fellow was an incurable grumbler, but clever and susceptible to flattery.

  “It’s a wonder you get by at all,” Martin Beck said.

  “More than that,” said Hjelm, thoroughly amiable now. “It’s a miracle. And now, what was this ballistic question?”

  “It was about a bullet from a guy who was killed. A man called Svärd. Karl Edvin Svärd.”

  “Sure,” said Hjelm. “I know that one. Typical story. Suicide, so it was alleged. The autopsy people sent it here without telling us what to do with it. Shall we have it gold-plated and sent to the police museum, or what? Or was it just a polite hint that we can just as well give up and shoot ourselves?”

  “What sort of bullet was it?”

  “A pistol bullet. Used. Haven’t you got the weapon?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can it be suicide?”

  A good question. Martin Beck made a note on his pad. “Any special characteristics?”

  “Well, one might suppose it came from a forty-five automatic. There are so many makes of them. But if you’ll send us the empty cartridge we can tell you more about it.”

  “I haven’t found the cartridge.”

  “Haven’t you? What did this Svärd guy do after he’d shot himself, may I ask?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “People who have that kind of a bullet in their guts aren’t usually so nimble,” said Hjelm. “They don’t have much choice, just lie down and die, for the most part.”

  “Yes,” said Martin Beck. “Thanks very much.”

  “For what?”

  “For your help. And good luck.”

  “No macabre jokes, if you please,” Hjelm said. He put down the phone.

  So that was that. Whether Svärd himself or someone else had fired the lethal shot, he hadn’t taken any risks. With a forty-five one can be pretty sure of obtaining the desired results, even if one doesn’t quite hit the heart.

  But what had this conversation yielded, really? A bullet isn’t much in the way of evidence as long as one hasn’t got the weapon or at least the cartridge. But there was one positive detail. Hjelm had said it was a forty-five automatic, and he was known for never making statements he couldn’t substantiate. Therefore Svärd had been shot with an automatic.

  All the rest was just as incomprehensible as before. Svärd didn’t seem to have committed suicide and no one else could have shot him.

  Martin Beck went on with his work. He began with the banks, since experience had taught him this always took a lot of time. Though it’s true bank secrecy in Sweden isn’t what it should be, there were still hundreds of financial institutions to check. And with interest rates being so wretchedly low, many small savers preferred to place their funds in some other Scandinavian country, usually Denmark.

  He went on phoning: It was the
police. It was about a person called so-and-so and with one or another of these addresses and the following social-security number. Had this person any kind of account or perhaps a safe deposit box?

  Simple though this question was, there were many people it had to be put to. Besides which it was Friday, and the hour was approaching for all banks to close. To count on getting any answer before the beginning of next week at the earliest seemed unrealistic.

  He would also like to know what the hospital Svärd had been admitted to had to say. But that would have to wait until Monday.

  Now Friday was over as far as his duties were concerned. By this time Stockholm was in utter chaos. The police were hysterical, and large parts of the public were panic-stricken. Martin Beck didn’t even know. That segment of the landscape he could see from his window consisted of a stinking highway and an industrial park, and—as a view—it was no more confused or repulsive than usual.

  By seven o’clock he still hadn’t gone home, even though his working day had ended two hours ago and there was nothing more he could do to further his investigations. The day’s efforts had yielded only scanty results. The most tangible consequence was a slight pain in his right forefinger, from all his dialing.

  His last official action of the day was to look up Rhea Nielsen in the telephone directory. Sure enough, her name was there. But there was no indication of a profession. His hand was already hovering over the dial when he realized there was nothing he could ask her about, at least not concerning the Svärd case.

  As an official act, this call was sheer self-deception. The simple truth was, he wanted to hear whether she was at home; and the only question he really wanted to ask her was equally simple: Can I come over for a while?

  Martin Beck removed his hand from the phone and stacked up the telephone directories in their usual place. Then he tidied up his desk, threw away pieces of paper bearing superfluous jottings, and put his pencils where they belonged, namely in their tray.

  All this he did slowly and carefully, and in fact managed to take an astoundingly long time at it. He devoted the best part of half an hour to a ball-point pen whose retracting mechanism was broken before deciding it was useless and flinging it into the wastepaper basket.