The Abominable Man

Martin Beck threw him a quick glance.

‘Have you got some sort of timetable?’

‘Yes,’ Rönn said.

He pulled out a small notebook where he'd made some industrious jottings in a tiny, stingy hand. Put on his glasses and rattled it off in a monotone.

‘An assistant nurse opened those doors at ten minutes after two. Hadn't heard or seen anything unusual. Making a routine check on the patients. Nyman was dead then. She dialled 90-000 at two eleven. The officers in the radio car got the alarm at two twelve. They were at Odenplan and made it here in between three and four minutes. They reported to Criminal at two seventeen. I got here at two twenty-two. Called you at two twenty-nine. You got here at sixteen minutes to three.’

Rönn looked at his watch.

‘It's now eight minutes to three. When I arrived he'd been dead at the most half an hour.’

‘Is that what the doctor said?’

‘No, that's my own conclusion, so to speak. The warmth of the body, coagulation –’

He stopped, as if it had been presumptuous to mention his own observations.

Martin Beck rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

‘So then everything happened very fast,’ he said.

Rönn didn't answer. He seemed to be thinking about something else.

‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘you understand why it was I called you. Not because –’

He stopped, seeming somehow distracted.

‘Not because?’

‘Not because Nyman was a chief inspector, but because … well, because of this.’

Rönn gestured vaguely towards the body.

‘He was butchered.’

He paused for a second and then came up with a new conclusion.

‘I mean, whoever did this must be raving mad.’

Martin Beck nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It looks that way.’

7 (#ulink_a02fd31f-3fb3-5a10-ab91-36efa5411772)

Martin Beck was beginning to feel ill at ease. The sensation was vague and hard to trace, somewhat like the sneaking fatigue when you're falling asleep over a book and go on reading without turning any pages.

He'd have to make an effort to gather his wits and get a grip on these slippery apprehensions.

Closely related to this lurking sensation of impotence, there was another feeling he couldn't seem to get rid of.

A sense of danger.

That something was about to happen. Something that had to be warded off at any price. But he didn't know what, and still less how.

He'd had such feelings before, if only at long intervals. His colleagues tended to laugh off this phenomenon and call it intuition.

Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system. It's true that a lot of difficult cases are cleared up by coincidence, but it's equally true that coincidence is an elastic concept that mustn't be confused with luck or accident. In a criminal investigation, it's a question of weaving the net of coincidence as fine as possible. And experience and industry play a larger role there than brilliant inspiration. A good memory and ordinary common sense are more valuable qualities than intellectual brilliance.

Intuition has no place in practical police work.

Intuition is not even a quality, any more than astrology and phrenology are sciences.

And still it was there, however reluctant he was to admit it, and there had been times when it seemed to have put him on the right track.

And yet his ambivalence might also depend on simpler, more tangible and immediate things.

On Rönn, for example.

Martin Beck expected a great deal of the people he worked with. The blame for that fell on Lennart Kollberg, for many years his right-hand man, first when he was a city detective in Stockholm and then later at the old National Criminal Division in Västberga. Kollberg had always been his surest complement, the man who played the best shots, asked the right leading questions and gave the proper cues.

But Kollberg wasn't available. He was at home asleep, presumably, and there was no acceptable reason for waking him. It would be against the rules, and an insult to Rönn what's more.

Martin Beck expected Rönn to do something or at least say something that showed he too sensed the danger. That he would come up with some assertion or supposition that Martin Beck could refute or pursue.

But Rönn said nothing.

Instead he did his job calmly and capably. The investigation was for the moment his, and he was doing everything that could reasonably be expected.

The area outside the window had been cordoned off with ropes and sawhorses, patrol cars had been driven up and headlights lit. Spotlights swept the terrain and small white patches of light from police flashlights wandered jerkily across the ground like frightened sand crabs across a beach in unorganized flight from approaching intruders.

Rönn had gone through what there was on and in the night table without finding anything but ordinary personal belongings and a few trivial letters of the insensitively hearty type that healthy people write to individuals who are suspected of being seriously ill. Civilian personnel from the Fifth Precinct had gone through the adjoining rooms and wards without finding anything of note.

If Martin Beck wanted to know anything in particular, he would have to ask, and furthermore would have to formulate his question clearly, in phrases that could not be misunderstood.

The truth of the matter was simply that they worked together badly. Both of them had discovered this years before, and they therefore generally avoided situations where they had only one another to fall back on.

Martin Beck's opinion of Rönn was none too high, a circumstance the latter was well aware of and which gave him an inferiority complex. Martin Beck, for his part, recognized as his own failing a difficulty in establishing contact and thus became inhibited himself.

Rönn had produced the beloved old murder kit, secured a number of fingerprints, and had plastic covers placed over several pieces of evidence in the room and on the ground outside, thereby ensuring that details that might prove valuable later on would not be effaced by natural causes or destroyed by carelessness. These pieces of evidence were mostly footprints.

Martin Beck had a cold, as usual at this time of year. He snuffled and blew his nose and coughed and hacked and Rönn didn't react. He did not, as a matter of fact, even say ‘Bless you.’ This small civility was apparently not a part of his upbringing, nor of his vocabulary. And if he thought anything, he kept it to himself.

There was no tacit communication between them and Martin Beck felt himself called upon to break the silence.

‘Doesn't this whole ward seem a little old-fashioned?’ he asked.