Cop Killer (23 page)

They had spent Friday night and Saturday morning driving around in the car and had made an unsuccessful attempt to get into a villa just outside of town. In the end they had broken into a summer cottage that appeared to be closed up for the winter. They found a few tins of food and ate some of it, and then they had slept for a couple of hours. There was nothing of value in the house, but they took a couple of pictures and a plaster of Paris figurine on a pedestal.

They had driven back to Malmö, and Christer had stolen some LPs from a music shop. Christer, who knew the city, managed to sell the records right away, and they had bought beer and a bottle of wine with the money. They sat in the park and drove around in the car until it got dark.

'Tonight we'll drive down to a place where there's nothing but rich people,' Christer had said.

The place was called Ljunghusen, and they had been able to see from the houses that it was a wealthy neighbourhood. They broke into a couple of villas and took things that would be easy to sell. A TV set and a transistor radio and a couple of rugs that Christer had insisted were genuine orientals. In one of the houses they had broken open a bar and taken a few bottles of spirits. They had even found some cash - some thirty newly minted five-kronor pieces in a piggy bank that they shattered.

It had been a successful night's work right up until the patrol car appeared out of nowhere.

Caspar went over the chain of events in his mind, as he had done he didn't know how many times before. First the young cop, who had suddenly been standing there with a gun in his hand, then the older one who had grabbed Christer, and then the shots, which Caspar had first thought were coming from the young policeman's gun. Then he had seen the one policeman fall, and, right afterwards, the other, and he had realized it was Christer who was shooting.

After that, everything had happened very fast. Caspar had been scared and had driven away without finding out whether Christer was dead or only wounded.

He had driven back towards Malmö the way they had come, but when he came to the motorway he had taken a different road.

He had realized that the alarm must already have gone out and that police cars and ambulances would be on their way from the city.

And suddenly he had run out of petrol.

Christer and he had just been talking about finding a car to siphon some petrol from when the patrol car appeared. And then when he sped away in panic he completely forgot that the tank was as good as empty.

He had rolled the car down a short hill and parked it behind some dilapidated sheds. He left the things they'd stolen in the car.

Then he had walked down the side of the road until he came to a small community. He had heard the police sirens wailing in the distance, and the sound had made him desperate with fear. He had tried several cars before he found one he could take. It had been standing outside a large house, parked in an open carport,   and its doors had been unlocked.

Caspar had been aware of the risks. The car's owner might suddenly have come out of the house. But it was Sunday, and still early in the morning, and it had only taken him a couple of minutes to get the engine started.

Since then he had been driving north.

Home. Towards Stockholm.

Caspar had lived in Stockholm all of his nineteen years, although he had never actually lived in the city itself. He was born and raised in a suburb, where he had lived with his parents and where he had gone to school until three years ago. Since then he had been looking for a job, somewhat half-heartedly, he had to admit His parents had moved away two years before. They had bought a house outside Södertälje, and when he didn't want to move with them he had begun living a somewhat hand-to-mouth existence in the capital.

Getting a flat of his own had been out of the question. He lived on unemployment and welfare and stayed mostly with friends or temporary girlfriends, young divorced women with flats and bed space.

He had gradually come to move in circles that lived by the rule that crime does pay, so long as you run a small-scale operation and are clever enough not to get caught. He had taken part in burglaries, committed petty larcenies on his own, dabbled in car theft, and dealt a little in stolen goods, and for a couple of months he had lived on the income of a girl who frequented Malmskillnadsgatan and brought home customers while he sat in her kitchen drinking vodka and Pommac. He had two principles in regard to criminal activity - never deal in drugs and never carry a weapon. His childish appearance had often come to his aid, and he had been caught and convicted only once.

He stopped for petrol near Katrineholm. He paid with shiny five-kronor pieces, and the man at the filling station looked at them before putting them away in a special compartment in the cash register.

'Don't you hate to spend those things?'

Caspar shrugged his shoulders and thought about giving some sort of explanation, but he let it go.

He suddenly realized how hungry he was and went into the cafeteria next door. He had the special of the day, some kind of ground meat with a pasty, tasteless sauce, a dab of lingonberry jam, and four over-boiled potatoes. The food was bad and not even warm, but he was too starved to care.

After driving on for a while, he stopped at a kiosk and bought a packet of cigarettes, some gum, and a newspaper. On the way back to the car he saw the headlines on the front page.

He put it down on the seat beside him and drove into a side road, where he stopped the car and opened the paper over the wheel.

Christer was dead, but the three policemen were still alive. He himself was being sought by the police in a manhunt that covered the country. The newspaper article called him a 'gangster', a 'desperado', and a 'cop killer'. He re-read the beginning of the story, where it told about the condition of the policemen. A couple of them were apparently in critical condition, but as far as he could see, none of them was dead. So how could they put 'cop killer'? Besides, he hadn't even been armed.

He read through the story carefully. Neither he nor Christer was identified, and they had not found the car. For the time being, the police were still searching for the big green Chewy, but he hadn't been able to hide it very well, so they were sure to find it before very long.

When he had read the paper, he sat for a long time and tried to collect his thoughts. The fear that had started to go away took hold of him again. He tried to think clearly and calmly.

All he was guilty of was a couple of burglaries and a car theft. It wasn't he who had done the shooting. Even if they caught him, they would have to prove it, and the penalty for what he had done couldn't be so severe. But at the moment the odds were still on his side, and if he just stayed cool, he had a chance of getting away.

After a while he wadded up the paper, threw it in the ditch, and drove on. He had decided what he would do.

He stopped at a department store and bought the makings of two licence plates of the old type. He drove out of town, and on a little road through the woods he put together two plates, and then unscrewed the ones that were on the car and buried them in the trees. He screwed on the false plates and drove on towards Sodertalje.

He parked the car in the garage of his parents' house. With luck, he could leave it there for several days. His father was a travelling salesman and was often gone, with his car, for days at a time.

He was in luck. His mother was at home, but his father wouldn't be back until the end of the week. He told his mother he'd borrowed the car from a friend.

She was happy to see him and still happier when he said he thought he'd stay for a few days.

For dinner she fixed his favourite foods - steak with onions, fried potatoes, and apple cake with vanilla sauce.

He went to bed early in his father's bed and, as he fell asleep, felt relatively safe.

On the morning of 21 November, Gustav Borglund died in the isolation ward at Malmö General Hospital. He had arrived at the hospital too late, and the doctors had about as much chance as a snowball in hell.

But Emil Elofsson and David Hector survived, thanks in great part to surgical acumen. They were given prompt, first-class medical attention and were treated as privileged patients.

They were both in bad shape, of course, especially Elofsson, who had taken a bullet through the liver and another in the vicinity of his pancreas. Surgery had made great strides, however, since the days of the ill-fated James Garfield, and the doctors really knew their business, even if they were overworked and chronically exhausted.

Elofsson and Hector were in no condition to be questioned on Monday or Tuesday, and Borglund didn't know anything, not even that he was dying.

The tactical command had made exactly as much headway as might have been expected. The getaway car had not been found, and the person who had been shot to death had not been identified.

Borglund crowned his long career of relatively good-natured fiascos with a last sigh at about four o'clock Wednesday morning.

He had not been a bad man. Once he had even encouraged Elofsson to give a Yugoslavian child a cough drop, in spite of the complications it might have caused.

In the course of a few hours, the news of his death made its way to the National Police Administration, where it produced a major paroxysm and provoked an immediate series of telephone conversations from Stig Malm to the Chief of Police in Malmö. The potentate himself stood behind Malm's back as he talked, and it was a wonder the wires didn't disintegrate from the vibrations.

What the National Police Administration wanted to see was activity.

What the National Police Administration meant by 'activity' was the movement of busloads of policemen wearing bulletproof vests and helmets with adjustable plexiglass facemasks.

What it also meant was sharpshooters and automatic weapons and tear gas bombs, all of which were now available on permanent loan from the military.

What Lennart Kollberg meant by 'activity' was talking to people.

He had spent Monday and Tuesday in passive observation of a stream of youths arbitrarily arrested by enthusiastic policemen either on the grounds that they were foreigners or because they were suspiciously dressed.

Kollberg was old enough at this game to know that you couldn't label someone a presumptive murderer simply because he hadn't been to the barber in six months. Besides, so for as he knew, no one had been murdered.

But there was so much excitement after Borglund's passing that someone was obliged to do something constructive.

And so Kollberg collected his car from the garage at the Hotel Sankt Jorgen, which is where upper echelon police officers were usually quartered, and drove to Malmö General Hospital.

He thought he would talk to Elofsson and Hector. The doctors had said it was okay, that both of them were as lucid as could possibly be expected.

Kollberg was a hardened man, but that didn't keep him from being slightly shocked when he stepped into the ward. He looked at the slip of paper Per Månsson had given him. Yes, he was in the right room, and of course he already knew he was in Sweden.

The building dated, from the nineteenth century, and the ward he was in held approximately thirty men. Many of them were obviously in serious condition, for the ward echoed with groans and whimpering cries for help. The stench was unspeakable, and the whole scene was strongly reminiscent of a first-aid post in the Crimean War. There were not even any screens or dividers between the beds.

A woman with a white coat and an absent expression turned out to be the cleaning woman. When he asked for the doctor, she stared at him with dreamy, clear blue eyes.

Oh, the doctor,' she said. 'He's not here yet'

There was no more information to be had from that source.

But there was, in fact, a doctor on duty - a swarthy man with his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel. He was sitting in the staff room drinking coffee. The only trouble with him was that he came from Afghanistan, had a name that was impossible to pronounce, and spoke an English that might possibly have done credit to a sheepherder in the People's Republic of Mongolia.

If there was a shortage of doctors - and no one could doubt that there was - then the lack of nurses was even more flagrant.

But he finally found her. Because of vacancies, she was looking after two whole wards and had been at work for fourteen hours at a stretch, though she didn't show it. She was a serene, blonde woman of about thirty-five, slim and strong, with clear eyes and muscular calves.

Kollberg, who was a sensualist, thought she was extremely alluring.

Had he been ten years younger, he would have found her terribly exciting. But it was only his wife who aroused him any more. She was a brunette, and he had chosen her with great care for her ability to satisfy him intellectually and - of no less importance - sexually. She was a fine woman and made him as happy as he was capable of being.

Gun was pretty. She reminded him a little of Tatyana Samoylova, who was his favourite movie actress. He seldom went to the cinema, but he never missed one of her pictures.

And yet he thought Gun was prettier than Tatyana Samoylova, which was saying a great deal.

He loved her. She was his whole life. She and the children. Bodil was just six and would soon start school. Joshua was only three. Good kids.

Earlier this morning he had looked at himself in the hotel-room mirror. Naked and full length.

If Gun was pretty, he himself was fat and flabby. He didn't like it

He looked at the ward nurse. How could she seem so fresh and healthy? With two wards to supervise?

She seemed cheerful enough. Clearly she must like her job.

More than fifty patients, many of them very ill, some of them dying.

In a disgraceful hospital.

He showed her his identification.

'You're in the wrong place,' she said. "They're not here in the ward, they're in one of the old private rooms. We've got four of them. Two people in each. The policemen are in Number Two.'