Roseanna

‘Death by strangulation,’ thought Martin Beck.

He sat and thumbed through a bunch of photographs which Ahlberg had dug out of a basket on his desk. The pictures showed the locks, the dredger, its bucket in the foreground, the body lying on the embankment, and in the mortuary.

Martin Beck placed a photo in front of Ahlberg and said:

‘We can have this picture cropped and retouched so that she looks presentable. Then we can begin knocking on doors. If she comes from around here someone ought to recognize her. How many men can you put on the job?’

‘Three at most,’ said Ahlberg. ‘We're short of men right now. Three of the boys are on vacation and one of them is in the hospital with a broken leg. Other than the Superintendent, Larsson and myself, there are only eight men at the station.’

He counted on his fingers.

‘Yes, and one of them is a woman. Then too, someone has to take care of the other work.’

‘We'll have to help if worst comes to worst. It's going to take a hell of a lot of time. Have you had any trouble with sex criminals lately by the way?’

Ahlberg tapped his pen against his front teeth while he was thinking. Then he reached into his desk drawer and dug up a paper.

‘We had one in for examination. From Västra Ny, a rapist. He was caught in Linköping the day before yesterday but he had an alibi for the entire week, according to this report from Blomgren. He's checking out the institutions.’

Ahlberg placed the paper in a green file which lay on his desk.

They sat quietly for a minute. Martin Beck was hungry. He thought about his wife and her chatter about regular meals. He hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours.

The air in the room was thick with cigarette smoke. Ahlberg got up and opened the window. They could hear a time signal from a radio somewhere in the vicinity.

‘It's one o'clock,’ he said. ‘If you're hungry I can send out for something. I'm as hungry as a bear.’

Martin Beck nodded and Ahlberg picked up the telephone. After a while there was a knock at the door and a girl in a blue dress and a red apron came in with a basket.

After Martin Beck had eaten a ham sandwich and had a few swallows of coffee, he said:

‘How do you think she got there?’

‘I don't know. During the day there are always a lot of people at the locks so it could hardly have happened then. He could have thrown her in from the pier or the embankment and then later the backwash from the boats' propellers might have moved her further out. Or maybe she was thrown overboard from some vessel.’

‘What kind of boats go through the locks? Small boats and pleasure craft?’

‘Some. Not so terribly many. Most of them are freighters. And then there are the canal boats, of course, the Diana, the Juna and the Wilhelm Tham’

‘Can we drive down there and take a look?’ asked Martin Beck.

Ahlberg got up, took the photograph that Martin Beck had chosen, and said: ‘We can get going right away. I'll leave this at the lab on the way out.’

It was almost three o'clock when they returned from Borenshult. The traffic in the locks was lively and Martin Beck had wanted to stay there among the vacationers and the fishermen on the pier to watch the boats.

He had spoken with the crew of the dredger, been out on the embankment and looked at the system of locks. He had seen a sailing canoe cruising in the fresh breeze far out in the water and had begun to long for his own canoe which he had sold several years ago. During the trip back to town he sat thinking about sailing in the archipelago in summers past.

There were eight, fresh copies of the picture from the photo laboratory lying on Ahlberg's desk when they returned. One of the policemen, who was also a photographer, had retouched the picture and the girl's face looked almost as if she had been photographed alive.

Ahlberg looked through them, laid four of the copies in the green folder and said:

‘Fine. I'll pass these out to the boys so that they can get started immediately.’

When he came back after a few minutes Martin Beck was standing next to the desk rubbing his nose.

‘I'd like to make a few telephone calls,’ he said.

‘Use the office farthest down the corridor.’

The room was larger than Ahlberg's and had windows on two walls. It was furnished with two desks, five chairs, a filing cabinet and a typewriter table with a disgracefully old Remington.

Martin Beck sat down, placed his cigarettes and matches on the table, put down the green folder and began to go through the reports. They didn't tell him much more than he had already learned from Ahlberg.

An hour and a half later he ran out of cigarettes. He had placed a few telephone calls without result and had talked to the Commissioner and to Superintendent Larsson who seemed tired and pressed. Just as he had crumpled the empty cigarette package, Kollberg called.

Ten minutes later they met at the hotel.

‘God, you look dismal,’ Kollberg said. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

‘No thank you. What have you been doing?’

‘I've been talking to a guy from the Motala Times. A local editor in Borensberg. He thought he had found something. A girl from Linköping was to have started a new job in Borensberg ten days ago but she never arrived. She was thought to have left Linköping the day before and, since then, no one has heard from her. No one thought to report her missing since she was generally unreliable. This newspaperman knew her employer and started making his own inquiries but never bothered to get a description of her. But I did. And it isn't the same girl. This one was fat and blonde. She's still missing. It took me the entire day.’

He leaned back in his chair and picked his teeth with a match.

‘What do we do now?’

‘Ahlberg has sent out a few of his boys to knock on doors. You ought to give them a hand. When Melander gets here we'll have a run through with the Commissioner and Larsson. Go over to Ahlberg and he'll tell you what to do.’

Kollberg straightened his chair and got up.

‘Are you coming too?’ he asked.

‘No, not now. Tell Ahlberg that I'm in my room if he wants anything.’

When he got to his room Martin Beck took off his jacket, shoes, and tie and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The weather had cleared and white puffs of cloud moved across the sky. The afternoon sun shone into the room.

Martin Beck got up, opened the window a little, and closed the thin, yellow curtains. Then he lay down on the bed with his hands folded under his head.

He thought about the girl who had been pulled out of Boren's bottom mud.

When he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.

Who was she? What had she thought? How had she lived? Whom had she met?

She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no one to miss her when she disappears.