The Abominable Man (5 page)

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.

“Yes,” Rönn said. “It’s supposed to be vacated the day after tomorrow and modernized or turned into something else. The patients are going to be moved to new wards in the central building.”

Martin Beck’s thoughts moved promptly off in new directions.

“I wonder what he used,” he said a while later, mostly to himself. “Maybe a machete or a samurai sword.”

“Neither one,” said Rönn, who had just come into the room. “We’ve found the weapon. It’s lying outside, about twelve feet from the window.”

They went outside and looked.

In the cold white light of a spot lay a broad-bladed cutting tool.

“A bayonet,” said Martin Beck.

“Yes. Exactly. For a Mauser carbine.”

The six-millimeter carbine had been a common military weapon, used mostly by the artillery and cavalry. Martin Beck had one himself when he did his national service. The weapon had probably gone out of use by now and been stricken from the quartermaster’s rolls.

The blade was entirely covered with clotted blood.

“Can you get fingerprints from that grooved handle?”

Rönn shrugged his shoulders.

Every word had to be dragged from him, if not by force then anyway by verbal pressure.

“You’re letting it lie there until it gets light?”

“Yes,” Rönn said. “Seems like a good idea.”

“I’d very much like to talk to Nyman’s family as soon as possible. Do you think we could get his wife out of bed at this hour?”

“Yes, I guess so,” said Rönn without conviction.

“We have to start someplace. Are you coming along?”

Rönn mumbled something.

“What’d you say?” said Martin Beck and blew his nose.

“Got to get a photographer out here,” Rönn said. “Yeah.”

But he didn’t sound at all as if he cared.

Rönn walked out to the car and got into the driver’s seat to wait for Martin Beck, who’d taken upon himself the unpleasant task of calling the widow.

“How much did you tell her?” he asked when Martin Beck had climbed in beside him.

“Only that he’s dead. He was apparently seriously ill, so maybe it didn’t come as such a surprise. But of course now she’s wondering what we’ve got to do with it.”

“How did she sound? Shocked?”

“Yes, of course. She was going to jump in a taxi and come straight over to the hospital. There’s a doctor talking to her now. I hope he manages to convince her to wait at home.”

“Yes. If she saw him now she’d really get a shock. It’s bad enough having to tell her about it.”

Rönn drove north on Dalagatan toward Odengatan. Outside the Eastman Institute stood a black Volkswagen. Rönn nodded toward it.

“Not bad enough he parks in a no-parking zone, he’s halfway up on the sidewalk too. Lucky for him we’re not from Traffic.”

“On top of which he must have been drunk to park like that,” said Martin Beck.

“Or she,” Rönn said. “It must be a woman. Women and cars …”

“Typical stereotyped thinking,” said Martin Beck. “If my daughter could hear you now you’d get a real lecture.”

The car swung right on Odengatan and drove on past Gustav Vasa Church and Odenplan. At the taxi station there were two cabs with their
FREE
signs lit, and at the traffic signal outside the city library there was a yellow street-cleaning machine with a blinking orange light on its roof, waiting for the light to turn green.

Martin Beck and Rönn drove on in silence. They turned on to Sveavägen and passed the street-sweeper as it rumbled around the corner. At the School of Economics they took a left on to Kungstensgatan.

“Damn it to hell,” said Martin Beck suddenly with emphasis.

“Yeah,” said Rönn.

Then it was quiet again in the car. When they’d crossed Birger Jarlsgatan, Rönn slowed down and started hunting for the number. An apartment house door opened across from the Citizens School and a young man stuck out his head and looked in their direction. He held the door open while they parked the car and crossed the street.

When they reached the doorway they saw that the boy was younger than he’d looked from a distance. He was almost as tall as Martin Beck, but looked to be fifteen years old at the most.

“My name’s Stefan,” he said. “Mother’s waiting upstairs.”

They followed him up the stairs to the second floor,
where a door stood ajar. The boy showed them through the front hall and into the living room.

“I’ll get Mother,” he mumbled and disappeared into the hall.

Martin Beck and Rönn remained standing in the middle of the room and looked around. It was very neat. One side was taken up by a suite of furniture that seemed to date from the 1940’s and consisted of a sofa, three matching easy chairs in varnished blond wood and flowered cretonne upholstery, and an oval table of the same light wood. A white lace cloth lay on the table, and in the middle of the cloth was a large crystal vase of red tulips. The two windows looked out on the street, and behind the white lace curtains stood rows of well-tended potted plants. The wall at one end of the room was covered by a bookcase in gleaming mahogany, half filled with leather-bound books, half with souvenirs and small knickknacks. Small polished tables with pieces of silver and crystal stood here and there against the walls. A black piano with the lid closed over the keyboard completed the list of furniture. Framed portraits of the family stood lined up on the piano. Several still lifes and landscapes in wide ornate gold frames hung on the walls. A crystal chandelier burned in the middle of the room, and a wine-red Oriental rug lay beneath their feet.

Martin Beck took in the various details of the room as he listened to the footsteps approaching in the hall. Rönn had walked up to the bookcase and was suspiciously eying a brass reindeer-bell, one side of which was adorned with a brightly colored picture of a mountain birch, a reindeer and a Lapp, plus the word
ARJEPLOG
in ornate red letters.

Mrs. Nyman came into the room with her son. She was wearing a black wool dress, black shoes and stockings,
and held a small white handkerchief clenched in one hand. She had been crying.

Martin Beck and Rönn introduced themselves. She didn’t look as if she’d ever heard of them.

“But please sit down,” she said, and took a seat in one of the flowered chairs.

When the two policemen had seated themselves she looked at them with despair in her eyes.

“What is it that’s happened actually?” she asked in a voice that was much too shrill.

Rönn took out his handkerchief and began to polish his florid nose, thoroughly and at length. But Martin Beck hadn’t expected any help from that quarter.

“If you have anything to calm your nerves, Mrs. Nyman—pills I mean—I think it would be wise to take a couple now,” he said.

The boy, who had taken a seat on the piano stool, stood up.

“Papa has … There’s a bottle of Restenil in the cabinet in the bathroom,” he said. “Shall I get it?”

Martin Beck nodded and the boy went out to the bathroom and came back with the tablets and a glass of water. Martin Beck looked at the label, shook out two tablets into the lid of the bottle and handed them to Mrs. Nyman, who obediently swallowed them with a gulp of water.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now please tell me what it is you want. Stig is dead, and neither you nor I can do anything about that.”

She pressed the handkerchief to her mouth, and her voice was stifled when she spoke.

“Why wasn’t I allowed to go to him? He’s my husband after all. What have they done to him there at the hospital? That doctor … he sounded so odd …”

Her son went over and sat on the arm of her chair. He put his arm around her shoulders.

Martin Beck twisted in his chair so that he sat directly facing her, then he threw a glance at Rönn, sitting silently on the sofa.

“Mrs. Nyman,” he said, “your husband did not die of his illness. Someone entered his room and killed him.”

The woman stared at him and he could see in her eyes that several seconds passed before she understood the significance of what he’d said. She lowered the hand with the handkerchief and pressed it to her breast. She was very pale.

“Killed? Someone killed him? I don’t understand …”

The son had gone white around the nostrils and his grip around his mother’s shoulders tightened. “Who?” he said.

“We don’t know. A nurse found him on the floor of his room just after two o’clock. Someone had come in through the window and killed him with a bayonet. It must have happened in the course of a few seconds, I don’t think he had time to realize what was happening.”

Said Martin Beck. The giver of comfort.

“Everything indicates he was taken by surprise,” Rönn said. “If he’d had time to react he would have tried to protect himself or ward off the blows, but there’s no sign that he did.”

The woman now stared at Rönn.

“But why?” she said.

“We don’t know,” Rönn said.

That was all he said.

“Mrs. Nyman, maybe you can help us find out,” said Martin Beck. “We don’t want to cause you unnecessary pain, but we have to ask you a few questions. First of all, can you think of anyone who might have done it?”

The woman shook her head hopelessly.

“Do you know if your husband had ever received any threats? Or if there was anyone who thought he had reason to want to see him dead? Anyone who threatened him?”

She went on shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “Why should anyone threaten him?”

“Anyone who hated him?”

“Why should anyone hate him?”

“Think carefully,” Martin Beck said. “Wasn’t there anyone who thought your husband had treated him badly? He was a policeman after all, and making enemies is part of the job. Did he ever say someone was out to get him or had threatened him?”