The Fire Engine That Disappeared

At Skärmarbrink, Martin Beck got out and took the metro. He did not know which he loathed more, the overcrowded underground or crawling along in traffic. But going by metro had one advantage. It was quicker. Not that he had anything to hurry home for.

But Lennart Kollberg had. He lived in Palandergatan and had a fine wife called Gun, and a daughter who was just six months old. His wife was lying on her stomach on the rug in the living room, studying a correspondence course of some kind. She had a yellow pencil in her mouth and alongside the open papers lay a red eraser. She was wearing an old pyjama top and was idly moving her long naked legs. She looked at him with her large brown eyes and said:

‘Jee-sus, you look gloomy.’

He took off his jacket and threw it into a chair.

‘Is Bodil asleep?’

She nodded.

‘It’s been a damned awful day,’ said Kollberg. ‘And everyone keeps jumping on me. First Rönn, of all people, and then two imbecile cops in Maria.’

Her eyes glittered.

‘And it wasn’t your fault at all?’

‘Anyhow, now I’m off duty until Monday.’

‘I’m not going to beat you,’ she said. ‘What d’you want to do?’

‘I want to go out and eat something hellish good and have five doubles.’

‘Can we afford that?’

‘Yes. Hell, it’s only the eighth: Can we fix a sitter?’

‘I expect Åsa will come.’

Åsa Torell was a policeman’s widow, although she was only twenty-five. She had lived with a colleague of Kollberg’s called Åke Stenström, who had been shot dead on a bus only four months earlier.

The woman on the floor drew down her strong dark eyebrows and rubbed energetically at her papers.

‘There’s an alternative,’ she said. ‘We can go to bed. It’s cheaper and more fun.’

‘Lobster Vanderbilt’s fun too,’ said Kollberg.

‘You think more about food than love,’ she complained. ‘Even though we’ve only been married two years.’

‘Not at all. Anyway, I’ve an even better idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and eat first and have five doubles and then go to bed. Call Åsa up now.’

The telephone had a twenty-foot extension cable and was already on the rug. She stretched out her hand and pulled it towards her, dialled a number and got a reply.

As she talked, she turned over on her back, drew up her knees and placed the soles of her feet on the floor. The pyjama top slid up a bit.

Kollberg looked at his wife, thoughtfully regarding the broad patch of thick raven-black hair which spread over the lower half of her abdomen and reluctantly thinned out between her legs. She was looking up at the ceiling as she listened. After a while she drew up her left leg and scratched her ankle.

‘Okay,’ she said, putting down the receiver. ‘She’s coming. It’ll take her an hour to get here, won’t it? Have you heard the latest, by the way?’

‘No, what?’

‘Åsa’s going to train to be a policewoman.’

‘Christ,’ he said absently. ‘Gun?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve thought of yet another solution, even better than the last one. First we go to bed and then we go and eat and have five doubles and then we go to bed again.’

‘But that’s almost brilliant,’ she said. ‘Here on the rug?’

‘Yes, call up Operakällaren and order a table.’

‘Look up the number, then.’

Kollberg riffled through the telephone directory as he unbuttoned his shirt and undid his belt; he found the number and heard her dialling it.

Then she sat up, pulled the pyjama top over her head and flung it away across the floor.

‘What are you after? My vanished chastity?’

‘Exactly.’

‘From behind?’

‘However you like.’

She giggled and began to turn, slowly and pliably, kneeling on all fours with her legs wide apart and her dark head down, her forehead pressed against her forearms.

Three hours later, over the ginger sherbet, she reminded Kollberg about something he had not thought about since he had seen Martin Beck disappearing in the direction of the metro station.

‘That awful fire,’ she said. ‘Do you think it was deliberate?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe that. There must be some limit.’

He had been a policeman for more than twenty years and should have known better.

6 (#ulink_6fce3007-18f4-53bf-aba7-167756b9bce9)

Saturday came with sun and bright clear light.

Martin Beck woke slowly, with an unusual feeling of contentment. He lay still, his face burrowed into the pillow, and he tried to hear whether it was late or early in the morning. He heard a blackbird in the trees outside the window and heavy drops falling with irregular splashes into the slush on the balcony. Cars driving past and an underground train braking at the station further away. His neighbour’s door slamming. Gurgling in the water pipes and suddenly, in the kitchen on the other side of the wall, a crash which made him open his eyes immediately. Rolf’s voice:

‘Oh hell!’

And Ingrid:

‘You’re so damned clumsy.’