The Abominable Man

‘Fine. Mama had a whole trunkload of stuff with her. Towels and napkins and that blue coffee service and I don't know what all. Oh, and we talked about Rolf's birthday. Mama wants us to come out and have dinner with them. If you can.’

Rolf was three years younger than Ingrid. They were as different as a brother and sister can be, but they'd always got along well.

The redhead came with the bill. Martin Beck paid and emptied his glass. He looked at his wristwatch. It was a couple of minutes to one.

‘Shall we go?’ said Ingrid, quickly downing the last few drops of her punsch.

They strolled north on Österlänggatan. The stars were out and the air was quite chilly. A couple of drunken teenagers came walking out of Drakens Gränd, shouting and hollering until the walls of the old buildings echoed with the din.

Ingrid put her hand under her father's arm and matched her stride to his. She was long-legged and slim, almost skinny, Martin Beck thought, but she herself was always saying she'd have to go on a diet.

‘Do you want to come up?’ he asked on the hill up towards Köpmantorget.

‘Yes, but only to call a taxi. It's late, and you have to sleep.’

Martin Beck yawned.

‘As a matter of fact I am rather tired,’ he said.

A man was squatting by the base of the statue of St George and the Dragon. He seemed to be sleeping, his forehead resting against his knees.

As Ingrid and Martin Beck passed, he lifted his head and said something inarticulate in a high thick voice, then stretched his legs out in front of him and fell asleep again with his chin on his chest.

‘Shouldn't he be sleeping it off at Nicolai?’ said Ingrid. ‘It's a bit cold to be sitting outside.’

‘He'll probably wind up there eventually,’ Martin Beck said. ‘If there's room. But it's a long time since it was my job to take care of drunks.’

They walked on into Köpmangatan in silence.

Martin Beck was thinking about the summer twenty-two years ago when he'd walked a beat in the Nicolai precinct. Stockholm was a different city then. The Old City had been an idyllic little town. More drunkenness and poverty and misery, of course, before they'd cleared out the slums and restored the buildings and raised the rents so the old tenants could no longer afford to stay. Living here had become fashionable, and he himself was now one of the privileged few.

They rode to the top floor in the lift, which had been installed when the building was renovated and was one of the few in the Old City. The flat was completely modernized and consisted of a hall, a small kitchen, a bathroom and two rooms whose windows opened on to a large open courtyard on the east. The rooms were snug and asymmetrical, with deep bay windows and low ceilings. The first of the two rooms was furnished with comfortable easy chairs and low tables and had a fireplace. The inner room contained a broad bed framed by deep built-in shelves and cupboards and, by the window, a huge desk with drawers beneath.

Without taking off her coat, Ingrid went in and sat down at the desk, lifted the receiver and dialled for a taxi.

‘Won't you stay for a minute?’ Martin called from the kitchen.

‘No, I have to go home and get to bed. I'm dead tired. So are you, for that matter.’

Martin Beck made no objection. All of a sudden he didn't feel a bit sleepy, but all evening long he'd been yawning, and at the cinema – they'd been to see Truffaut's The 400 Blows – he'd several times been on the verge of dozing off.

Ingrid finally got hold of a taxi, came out to the kitchen and kissed Martin Beck on the cheek.

‘Thanks for a good time. I'll see you at Rolf's birthday if not before. Sleep well.’

Martin Beck followed her out to the lift and whispered good night before closing the doors and going back into his flat.

He poured the beer he'd taken from the refrigerator into a big glass, walked in and set it on the desk. Then he went to the hi-fi by the fireplace, looked through his records and put one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos on the turntable. The building was well insulated and he knew he could turn the volume quite high without bothering the neighbours. He sat down at the desk and drank the beer, which was fresh and cold and washed away the sweet sticky taste of punsch. He pinched together the paper mouthpiece of a Florida, put the cigarette between his teeth and lit a match. Then he rested his chin in his hands and stared out through the window.

The spring sky arched deep blue and starry above the moonlit roof on the other side of the courtyard. Martin Beck listened to the music and let his thoughts wander freely. He felt utterly relaxed and content.

When he'd turned the record, he walked over to the shelf above the bed and lifted down a half-completed model of the clipper ship Flying Cloud. He worked on masts and yards for almost an hour before putting the model back on its shelf.

While getting undressed, he admired his two completed models with a certain pride – the Cutty Sark and the training ship Danmark. Soon he'd have only the rigging left to do on the Flying Cloud, the most difficult and the most trying part.

He walked naked out to the kitchen and put the ashtray and the beer glass on the counter beside the sink. Then he turned out all the lights except the one above his pillow, closed the bedroom door to a crack and went to bed. He wound the clock, which said two thirty-five, and checked to see that the alarm button was pushed in. He had, he hoped, a free day in front of him and could sleep as long as he liked.

Kurt Bergengren's Archipelago Steamboats lay on the bedside table and he browsed through it, looking at pictures he'd studied carefully before and reading a passage here and a caption there with a strong feeling of nostalgia. The book was large and heavy and not particularly well suited for reading in bed, and his arms were soon tired from holding it. He put it aside and reached out to turn off the reading light.

Then the telephone rang.

4 (#u5e30c45d-08ae-50fd-af46-5ecc8877180e)

Einar Rönn really was dead tired.

He'd been at work for over seventeen hours at a single stretch. Right at the moment, he was standing in the Criminal Division orderly room in the police building on Kungsholmsgatan, looking at a sobbing male adult who had laid hands on one of his fellow men.

For that matter maybe ‘male adult’ was saying too much, since the prisoner was by and large only a child. An eighteen-year-old boy with shoulder-length blond hair, bright red Levi's and a brown suede jacket with a fringe and the word LOVE painted on the back. The letters were surrounded by ornamental flowers in flourishes of pink and violet and baby blue. There were also flowers and words on the legs of his boots; to be precise, the words PEACE and MAGGIE. Long fringes of soft wavy human hair were ingeniously sewn to the jacket's arms.

It was enough to make you wonder if someone hadn't been scalped.

Rönn felt like sobbing himself. Partly from exhaustion, but mostly, as was so often the case these days, because he felt sorrier for the criminal than for the victim.

The young man with the pretty hair had tried to kill a drug pusher. The attempt had not been particularly successful, yet successful enough that the police regarded him as a prime suspect for attempted murder in the second degree.

Rönn had been hunting him since five o'clock that afternoon, which meant he'd been forced to track down and search through no fewer than eighteen drug hangouts in different parts of his beautiful city, each one filthier and more repulsive than the one before.

All because some bastard who sold hash mixed with opium to school kids on Mariatorget had got a bump on the head. All right, caused by an iron pipe and motivated by the fact that the agent of the blow was broke. But after all. Rönn thought.

Plus: nine hours'overtime, which for that matter would be ten before he got home to his apartment in Vällingby.

But you had to take the bad with the good. In this case the good would be the salary.

Rönn was from Lapland, born in Arjeplog and married to a Lappish girl. He didn't particularly like Vällingby, but he liked the name of the street he lived on: Lapland Street.

He looked on while one of his younger colleagues, on night duty, wrote out a receipt for the transfer of the prisoner and delivered up the hair fetish to two guards, who in their turn shoved the prisoner into a lift for forwarding to the booking section three flights up.

A transfer receipt is a piece of paper bearing the name of the prisoner and binding on no one, on the back of which the duty officer writes appropriate remarks. For example: Very wild, threw himself again and again against the wall and was injured. Or: Uncontrollable, ran into a door and was injured. Maybe just: Fell down and hurt himself.

And so on.

The door from the yard opened and two constables ushered in an older man with a bushy grey beard. Just as they crossed the threshold one of the constables drove his fist into the prisoner's abdomen. The man doubled up and gave out a stifled cry, something like the howl of a dog. The two on-duty detectives shuffled their papers undisturbed.

Rönn threw a tired look at the constables but said nothing.

Then he yawned and looked at his watch.

Seventeen minutes after two.