Cop Killer (28 page)

There was a lavatory on the right side of the hall, with a shelf above the sink for toiletries. Two toothbrushes in the same glass, a packet of tampons, lipstick, pancake make-up, nail file, eye shadow. There was a diaphragm in a round plastic box. Sigbrit Mård had apparently not been one to take chances.

There was also a bar of soap, a shaving brush, and a razor, which did not necessarily mean that the place had been used by a man. Sigbrit had shaved her armpits.

The single room contained two chairs and a table. There was an ordinary foam rubber mattress against one wall, dressed up with a colourful spread from some bargain basement.

On the mattress was a pillow with a sky-blue pillow case.

Beside the table stood an electric heater. It was unplugged, and probably had been for some time.

They opened the drawers in the table without touching the knobs. Empty, except for some blank sheets of paper and a pad of thin, blue, lined stationery.

Martin Beck thought he recognized the quality.

In the kitchen they found the following: a coffee pot, two cups, two glasses, a jar of Nescafe, an unopened bottle of white wine, a half-empty bottle of good whisky (Chivas Regal), four cans of beer (Carlsberg), and a tankard of indeterminate origin.

There was an ashtray in the kitchen and one in the main room. Both were clean.

'Not much of a love nest,' said Herrgott Allwright

Martin Beck said nothing. Allwright knew a great deal about the most disparate things. The one subject about which he knew very little was love.

There were no lampshades, only naked bulbs. It was all very clean and neat. There were a broom, dustpan, and rag in a cubbyhole in the kitchen.

Martin Beck crouched down and looked at the pillow. There were two kinds of hairs on it

Long blonde ones, and others that were much shorter and almost white.

He studied the mattress. There were stains that could undoubtedly be analysed, and frizzy hairs.

‘We're going to want a lab report on this place. And it had better be damn thorough.'

Allwright nodded.

'This is the place all right,' said Martin Beck. 'That's for sure. My congratulations to the Trelleborg police.' He looked at Allwright.

'Have you got the stuff to put a new seal on the door?' 'Yes, indeed,' said Allwright slowly. They left.

A little while later they found the constable who had discovered the flat. He was walking a beat on the main street. He had red hair and did not speak the local dialect.

'Well done,' said Martin Beck.

'Thanks.'

'Did you talk to the neighbours?'

'Yes, but they didn't know anything. Mostly old folks. They'd noticed that there were people there in the evenings sometimes, but they were mostly the kind who go to bed at seven o'clock. They'd never seen any men there, just a woman. The old lady who'd seen her suddenly decided it might have been one of the girls from the pastry shop, but that was only when I gave her a hint On the other hand, several of them had seen a beige car parked on the street now and then. A Volvo, they thought.'

Martin Beck nodded. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place.

'Good work,' he said, with a feeling of repeating himself. 'Oh, it was my pleasure,' the policeman said. 'Too bad we couldn't get a lead on this fellow Clark.' 'If he exists,' said Allwright

'He exists,' said Martin Beck as they walked towards the police building. 'Rest assured.' 'If you say so.'

It was a bitterly cold day, even though the sky was still clear. An East German ferry lay at the slip. It was called the Rügen.

Uncommonly ugly, thought Martin Beck.

Boats had been getting uglier and uglier for years.

Clark, he thought Rags. Nickel shavings. Beige Volvo. And the impossible Folke Bengtsson.

His view of all these things was more optimistic now.

Karl Kristiansson and Kenneth Kvastmo did not make a good team. Although they had manned the same patrol car for a year and a half, they had little to talk about and even less use for one another.

Kvastmo was from Värmland, a big haystack of a man, with a blond mane, the neck of a bull, and a forehead like a washboard above a broad, meaty nose. As a policeman, he was thorough and persistent, eager and aggressive. In short, a stickler for duty. Besides which, he was very curious.

Kristiansson had always been lazy, and the years had made him more and more so. He almost never thought about duty, but rather about the football pools and food and sometimes about the pain from an old gunshot wound. Another policeman had shot him in the knee a couple of years before, on 3 April 1971, to be exact. That had been the most calamitous day of his life, and there were many unfortunate ones to choose among. He had lost his best friend on that chilly Saturday and had been shot himself. To top it all off, he had had a minimal four right on his infallible football pools system.

In Kristiansson's opinion, Kvastmo was an incurable blockhead, who did nothing but whine and complain about everything and everyone, and who complicated the job by constantly taking action. For his own part, Kristiansson never took action any more without a direct order, or unless he was very strongly provoked. And as long as he stayed inside the patrol car and contented himself with staring out through the windscreen with unseeing blue eyes, he was not easily accessible, not even for the most notorious provocateurs.

But Kvastmo did everything he could to make life difficult. He fought an unending battle with gangsters. In spite of the fact that the Swedish police had a system of automatic promotions such that accumulating merits paid no appreciable dividends, he was constantly on the lookout for activities that called for police intervention. And given the society he lived in, he seldom had to look far. His dream was to be transferred to the notorious Östermalm Division, where, for no good reason, the police always arrested five times as many people as in all of the other Stockholm divisions put together. The new law gave over-zealous policemen a great opportunity to harass people, particularly young people who were, say, sitting on park benches talking to each other because they had nowhere else to go. People of this type were automatically regarded as suspect and could be apprehended immediately. The police could hold them for six hours, work them over at the police station, and release them again, only to make another military-style raid and drag the same people back into the Black Maria. This was a good way to run things, Kvastmo thought, but unfortunately he was stuck in a division where the officers were not quite so bloodthirsty.

During their many months in the patrol car, Kristiansson had learned at least two things. One bad thing: it was impossible to borrow so much as five kronor from Kvastmo. But also one good thing: Kvastmo was addicted to coffee, and when the man got too insufferable he could always suggest a coffee break.

The brown liquid had an amazingly positive effect. Kvastmo could sit quietly for at least half an hour, often longer, slurping and smacking his lips and stuffing himself with Danish pastry and almond cake.

But as soon as they were back in the car again, the good effects

were all undone. He returned at once to his incessant pursuit of

suspects and his nagging complaints about the society of thieves

they lived in.       

Kristiansson did not like coffee, but he knew it was the price he had to pay for a few moments of relaxation.

At the moment, they had just finished a lengthy coffee session and found themselves back in the patrol car, a black-and-white Plymouth with a spotlight and flashers and a short-wave radio and every other technical refinement

The patrol car, in turn, found itself on Essingeleden, an elevated section of motorway that sliced across bays and islands into the centre of Stockholm from the south.

Kristiansson was driving at his usual phlegmatic pace, and Kvastmo was repeating one of his standard lines.

'Why don't you answer me, Karl?'

'What?'

'I'm talking to you about important things, and you're not even listening.'

'Sure I'm listening.'

'Are you? The hell you are. You're thinking about something else.' 'I am?'

'What are you thinking about?' 'Oh...'

'Women, I'll bet' 'Well...'

What Kristiansson had actually been thinking about was oat flakes with strawberry jam and cold milk, but, in order to control his hunger, he had trammelled up the vision of an uncommonly disgusting corpse that thanks to Kvastmo's zeal, they had succeeded in discovering the previous summer. But not wanting to reveal his innermost thoughts, he made up another answer. Which he found an immediate use for.

'Well, what were you thinking about? And why don't you answer me?'

'I was thinking about how Leeds have played twenty-eight league matches in a row-without a loss, and how Millwall have already been beaten five times at home. It doesn't make sense.'

'You idiot,' said Kvastmo. 'How can a full-grown policeman think about crap like that? Those teams aren't even Swedish.'

Kristiansson took this very badly. He was from Skåne, and in southern Sweden the word 'idiot’ is very bad. It is very nearly the worst thing a person can be called.

Kvastmo had no feeling for this at all and continued heedlessly.

'What I'm trying to say is that we don't have enough legal protection, and the police officials are a bunch of namby-pambies. A lot of our fellow officers don't dress properly, and no one does anything about it Do you remember that motorcycle cop last summer? The one who didn't even have his cap on? And had his jacket strapped on behind?'

'But it was ninety-five degrees.'

'What difference does that make? A policeman is a policeman in any weather. I read in the paper that in New York the cops often get stuck in the asphalt when there's a heat wave. They stay at their posts, by God, and they have to pry them loose when they're relieved. If they ever get relieved.'

By'paper' Kvastmo meant their magazine, Swedish Police which often reported curious facts to its readers.

Kristiansson didn't respond. He'd seen a lot of American riot police in training films and he was wondering what it would look like if several hundred men were stuck to the street when the order came to charge.

'Are you listening, Karl?'

He was also wondering what clothes had to do with legal protection.

'Why don't you answer me, Karl?' 'I'm thinking.' 'What about?' 'Oh...'

'It's really a waste of time talking to you. The fight against crime needs every man every minute of every day, and you just sit there thinking about football and all you can say is "Oh..." and "Well...", and when something happens, the most you can say is "Jesus". Can't you get it through your head what a tough spot we policemen are in? The Minister of Justice is the biggest namby-pamby of them all. That's why we don't have any decent legal protection. We've hardly got any protection at all. Like this shit about not having a cartridge in the chamber. Now suppose you're suddenly face to face with some armed gangster, what are you going to do? You don't have any cartridge in the chamber.'

'Yes, I do.'

'Well, that's insane,' said Kvastmo indignantly. 'That's against police regulations. Well anyway, you're not supposed to have. So there you stand, helpless. Done for. And whose fault is that? Whose responsibility? The Minister of Justice, that's who. How are we supposed to clean things up if we're not even allowed to have a cartridge in the chamber?'

'I fired my pistol once,' said Kristiansson suddenly. 'In a bus.'

'Did you hit anyone?'

'Well, there wasn't anyone there. But I hit the bus, of course.' 'What happened?'

'There was hell to pay. That tall, ugly guy from Violent Crimes gave me a real telling off.'

'There, you see? No support from above. So it's no wonder. Look at those three guys down in Skåne. Cut down. What do you suppose their wives and children think of the Minister of Justice? And they haven't even caught the killer yet You know what? I think he's hiding out somewhere here in town. Dammit, if we could collar him. I hate those bastards. I wouldn't hesitate a second if I got the drop on him.' 'Oh...'

'What do you mean, "Oh..."? Two of our fellow officers are in the hospital, right? And one of them is dead. That guy Borglund. Dead. Murdered.'

'Well...'

'What the hell do you mean, "Well..."?'

'I heard he got bitten by some poison animal, a frog or something.'

'How can you believe anything as stupid as that? Didn't you hear that lecture about the perversive forces in society? No, I mean subversive. Communists and that kind of vermin. They spread lies like that to damage and weaken the police force. So they can destroy the very foundations, the very basis, of society. But I didn't really think we had anyone on the force who would fall for it Sometimes you scare me, Karl.'

'I do?'

Kristiansson had started thinking about something else. He had a constructive plan. Several days earlier, he had seen a gigantic loaf of marzipan in the supermarket. It was probably meant to be used in a bakery. But the next time he picked up any money on the football pools, he was going to buy it and put it down in the front seat between them. Kvastmo was exceptionally fond of marzipan and wouldn't be able to resist it. But there were two things that worried him. First, how long would the marzipan last? It was enough to last Kristiansson a lifetime, but maybe Kvastmo would wolf it down in half an hour. The second was equally serious. What if Kvastmo was such a great talker that he could rattle on uninterruptedly through a mouthful of almond paste?

He suddenly glanced at Kvastmo and said, 'What goes oink-oink and never gets to the door?'

'A pig.'

'Wrong. A cat with a speech impediment'

'You scare me, Karl,' said Kvastmo, shaking his head. 'Why doesn't it get to the door?' 'Oh...'

'There's a limit,' Kvastmo said. "There's a limit to what a simple, ordinary policeman should have to put up with. Norman Hansson, for example. He's the limit Last week when you were out sick I had to go check out this domestic disturbance and arrest this jerk who started resisting violently when I collared him. So I worked him over a little with the old truncheon on the way down the stairs and then out in the car, you know, just to calm him down. Next morning Norman Hansson calls me in and wants to know if I've mistreated this editor what's-his-name. Well, I tell him, I used my truncheon to calm him down a little, but there was no question of brutality. And you know what Norman Hansson said?'