The Abominable Man (6 page)

The widow looked in confusion first at her son, then at Rönn, and then back at Martin Beck.

“Not that I can recall. And I’d certainly remember if he’d said anything like that.”

“Papa didn’t talk much about his job,” Stefan said. “You’d better ask at the station.”

“We’ll ask there too,” said Martin Beck. “How long had he been sick?”

“A long time, I don’t remember exactly,” the boy said, and looked at his mother.

“Since June of last year,” she said. “He got sick just before Midsummer, an awful pain in his stomach, and he went to the doctor right after the holiday. The doctor thought it was an ulcer and had him go on sick leave. He’s been on sick leave ever since, and he’s been to several different doctors and they all say different things and prescribe different medicines. Then three weeks ago he went into Sabbath and they’ve been examining him and doing a lot of tests ever since, but they couldn’t find out what it was.”

Talking seemed to distract her attention and help her repress the shock.

“Papa thought it was cancer,” the boy said. “But the doctors said it wasn’t. But he was awful sick all the time.”

“What did he do all this time? Hasn’t he worked at all since last summer?”

“No,” Mrs. Nyman said. “He was really very ill. Had attacks of pain that lasted several days in a row when all he could do was lie in bed. He took a lot of pills, but they didn’t help much. He went down to the station a few times last fall to see how things were going, as he said, but he couldn’t work.”

“And Mrs. Nyman, you can’t remember anything he said or did that might have some connection with what’s happened?” asked Martin Beck.

She shook her head and started sobbing dryly. Her eyes glided on past Martin Beck and she stared straight ahead at nothing.

“Do you have any brothers and sisters?” Rönn asked the boy.

“Yes, a sister, but she’s married and lives in Malmö.”

Rönn glanced inquiringly at Martin Beck, who was rolling a cigarette thoughtfully back and forth between his fingers as he looked at the two people in front of him.

“We’ll be going now,” he said to the boy. “I’m sure you can take care of your mother, but I think the best thing would be if you could get a doctor to come over and give her something to make her sleep. Is there any doctor you can call at this time of night?”

The boy stood up and nodded.

“Doctor Blomberg,” he said. “He usually comes when someone in the family’s sick.”

He went out in the hall and they heard him dial a number and after a while someone seemed to answer.
The conversation was short and he came back and stood beside his mother. He looked more like an adult now than he had when they first saw him down in the doorway.

“He’s coming,” the boy said. “You don’t need to wait. It won’t take him long.”

They stood up and Rönn went over and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. She didn’t move, and when they said good-bye she didn’t respond.

The boy went with them to the door.

“We may have to come back,” said Martin Beck. “We’ll call you first to find out how your mother’s doing.”

When they were out on the street he turned to Rönn.

“I suppose you knew Nyman?” he said.

“Not especially well,” said Rönn evasively.

The blue-white light of a flashbulb lit the dirty yellow façade of the hospital pavilion for an instant as Martin Beck and Rönn returned to the scene of the crime. An additional couple of cars had arrived and stood parked in the turnaround with their headlights on.

“Apparently our photographer is here,” Rönn said.

The photographer came toward them as they got out of the car. He carried no camera bag but held his camera and flash in one hand, while his pockets bulged with rolls of film and flashbulbs and lenses. Martin Beck recognized him from the scenes of previous crimes.

“Wrong,” he said to Rönn. “It looks like the papers got here first.”

The photographer, who worked for one of the tabloids, greeted them and took a picture as they walked toward the door. A reporter from the same paper was standing at the foot of the stairs trying to talk to a patrolman.

“Good morning, Inspector,” he said when he caught sight of Martin Beck. “I don’t suppose I could follow you in?”

Martin Beck shook his head and walked up the steps with Rönn in his wake.

“But you’ll give me a little interview at least?” the reporter said.

“Later,” said Martin Beck and held the door open for Rönn before closing it right on the nose of the reporter, who made a face.

The police photographer had also arrived and was standing outside the dead man’s room with his camera bag. Farther down the corridor was the doctor with the curious name and a plainclothes detective from the Fifth. Rönn went into the sickroom with the photographer and put him to work. Martin Beck walked over to the two men in the hall.

“How’s it going?” he said.

The same old question.

The plainclothesman, whose name was Hansson, scratched the back of his neck.

“We’ve talked to most of the patients in this corridor, and none of them saw or heard anything. I was just trying to ask Doctor … uh … this doctor here, when we can talk to the other ones.”

“Have you questioned the people in the adjoining rooms?” Martin Beck asked.

“Yes,” Hansson said. “And we’ve been in all the wards. No one heard anything, but then the walls are thick in a building this old.”

“We can wait with the others till breakfast,” said Martin Beck.

The doctor said nothing. He obviously didn’t understand Swedish, and after a while he pointed toward the office and said, “Have to go,” in English.

Hansson nodded, and the black curls hurried off in clattering wooden shoes.

“Did you know Nyman?” asked Martin Beck.

“Well, no, not really. I’ve never worked in his precinct, but of course we’ve met often enough. He’s been around a long time. He was already an inspector when I started, twelve years ago.”

“Do you know anyone who knew him well?”

“You can always ask down at Klara,” Hansson said. “That’s where he was before he got sick.”

Martin Beck nodded and looked at the electric wall clock over the door to the washroom. It said a quarter to five.

“I guess I’ll go on over there for a while,” he said. “There’s not much I can do here for the moment.”

“Go on,” said Hansson. “I’ll tell Rönn where you went.”

Martin Beck took a deep breath when he got outside. The chilly night air felt fresh and clean. The reporter and the photographer were nowhere to be seen, but the patrolman was still standing at the foot of the steps.

Martin Beck nodded to him and started walking toward the parking lot.

The center of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course of the last ten years. Entire districts had been leveled and new ones constructed. The structure of the city had been altered: streets had been broadened and freeways built. What was
behind all this activity was hardly an ambition to create a humane social environment but rather a desire to achieve the fullest possible exploitation of valuable land. In the heart of the city it had not been enough to tear down ninety percent of the buildings and completely obliterate the original street plan, violence had been visited on the natural topography itself.

Stockholm’s inhabitants looked on with sorrow and bitterness as serviceable and irreplaceable old apartment houses were razed to make way for sterile office buildings. Powerless, they let themselves be deported to distant suburbs while the pleasant, lively neighborhoods where they had lived and worked were reduced to rubble. The inner city became a clamorous, all but impassable construction site from which the new city slowly and relentlessly arose with its broad, noisy traffic arteries, its shining façades of glass and light metal, its dead surfaces of flat concrete, its bleakness and its desolation.

In this frenzy of modernization, the city’s police stations seemed to have been completely overlooked. All the station houses in the inner city were old-fashioned and the worse for wear, and in most cases, since the force had been enlarged over the years, crowded. In the Fourth Precinct, where Martin Beck was on his way, this lack of space was one of the primary problems.

By the time he stepped out of the taxi in front of the Klara police station on Regeringsgatan, it had begun to get light. The sun would come up, there was still not a cloud in the sky, and it promised to be a pretty though rather chilly day.

He walked up the stone steps and pushed open the door. To the right was the switchboard, for the moment unmanned, and a counter behind which stood an older, gray-haired policeman. He had spread out the morning paper and was resting on his elbows as he read. When
Martin Beck came in he straightened up and took off his glasses.

“Why it’s Inspector Beck, up and about at this time of the morning,” he said. “I was just looking to see if the morning papers had anything about Inspector Nyman. It sounds like a very nasty business.”

He put on his glasses again, licked his thumb and turned a page in the paper.

“It doesn’t look like they had time to get it in,” he went on.

“No,” said Martin Beck. “I don’t suppose they did.”

The Stockholm morning papers went to press early these days and had probably been ready for distribution even before Nyman was murdered.

He walked past the desk and into the duty room. It was empty. The morning papers lay on a table along with a couple of overflowing ashtrays and some coffee mugs. Through a window into one of the interrogation rooms he could see the officer in charge sitting talking to a young woman with long blond hair. When he caught sight of Martin Beck he stood up, said something to the woman and came out of the glass cubicle. He closed the door behind him.

“Hi,” he said. “Is it me you’re looking for?”

Martin Beck sat down at the short end of the table, pulled an ashtray toward him and lit a cigarette.

“I’m not looking for anyone in particular,” he said. “But have you got a minute?”

“Can you wait just a moment?” the other man said. “I just want to get this woman sent over to Criminal.”

He disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a radio patrolman, picked up an envelope from the desk and handed it to him. The woman stood up, hung her purse on her shoulder and walked quickly toward the door.

“Come on, big boy,” she said without turning her head. “Let’s go for a ride.”

The patrolman looked at the officer, who shrugged his shoulders, amused. Then he put on his cap and followed her out.

“She seemed right at home,” said Martin Beck.

“Oh yeah, this isn’t the first time. And certainly not the last.”

He sat down at the table and started cleaning his pipe into an ashtray.

“That was nasty, that business with Nyman,” he said. “How did it happen, actually?”

Martin Beck told him briefly what had happened.

“Ugh,” the officer said. “Whoever did it must be a raving lunatic. But why Nyman?”

“You knew Nyman, didn’t you?” Martin Beck asked him.

“Not very well. He wasn’t the sort of person you knew well.”

“He was here on special assignment of course. When did he come here to the Fourth?”

“They gave him an office here three years ago. February ’68.”

“What sort of a person was he?” Martin Beck asked.

The officer filled his pipe and lit it before answering.

“I don’t really know how to describe him. You knew him too, I suppose? Ambitious you could certainly call him, stubborn, not much of a sense of humor. Pretty conservative in his views. The younger fellows were a little afraid of him, in spite of the fact they didn’t really have anything to do with him. He could be pretty stern. But like I said, I didn’t know him at all well.”

“Did he have any particular friends on the force?”

“Not here anyway. I don’t think he and our inspector got along very well. But otherwise I don’t know.”

The man thought for a moment and then looked at Martin Beck oddly—appealingly and conspiratorially.

“Well …” he said.

“What?”

“I mean I guess he still had friends at headquarters, didn’t he?”

Martin Beck didn’t answer. Instead he put another question.

“What about enemies?”

“Don’t know. He probably had enemies, but hardly here, and certainly not to the point that …”

“Do you know if he’d been threatened?”

“No, he didn’t exactly confide in me. Although for that matter …”

“Yes, what?”

“Well, for that matter, Nyman wasn’t the kind of man who let himself be threatened.”

The telephone rang inside the glass cubicle and the officer went in and answered it. Martin Beck walked over and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets. The station house was quiet. The only sounds to be heard were the voice of the man on the telephone and the dry coughing of the old policeman at the switchboard. Presumably things were not so quiet in the arrest section on the floor below.

Martin Beck suddenly realized how tired he was. His eyes ached from lack of sleep, and his throat from way too many cigarettes.

The phone call looked like it was going to be a long one. Martin Beck yawned and leafed through the morning paper, read the headlines and an occasional picture caption but without really seeing what he read. Finally he folded up the paper, walked over and knocked on the window to the cubicle, and when the man on the phone looked up he made signs indicating he was about to
leave. The officer waved and went on talking into the receiver.

Martin Beck lit another cigarette and thought distractedly that it must be his fiftieth since that first cigarette of the morning almost twenty-four hours ago.

If you really want to be sure of getting caught, the thing to do is kill a policeman.

This truth applies in most places and especially in Sweden. There are plenty of unsolved murders in Swedish criminal history, but not one of them involves the murder of a policeman.

When a member of their own troop meets with misfortune, the police seem to acquire many times their usual energy. All the complaints about lack of manpower and resources stop, and suddenly it’s possible to mobilize several hundred men for an investigation that would normally have occupied no more than three or four.